David Fromm wrote an article in the Atlantic magazine dealing with the truth about the origins of the Corona virus, and the writer, who worked between 2001-2002 as a speechwriter for former US President George W. Humans, and the theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, which the media underestimated during Trump's presidency.

The political scene during the coronavirus pandemic has been dominated by two questions. Democrats and public health experts have asked: What should we do?

As for former President Donald Trump, he minimized the need for action, and preferred to talk constantly about another completely different question: Who is to blame for the spread of the virus in the first place?

“In recent months, a pandemic has struck our nation and the entire world twice in a century, and it is China that allowed it to spread around the world, and it could have prevented the pandemic,” Trump spoke in August 2020 in his Republican Party nomination speech for the presidential election. As he said in the presidential debate to Joe Biden in September 2020, "This is China's fault, and it should never have happened."

In November 2020, a majority of American voters decided that the first question - what should we do? - was the most pressing, and that it was Biden and his party that gave him the best answer.

But now, as the Biden administration is achieving success in controlling the pandemic in the United States, the alternative question that Trump preferred - who is to blame? - is beginning to gain more attention. Trump's question from the beginning was politically motivated. He and his supporters looked at the possibility that enough Americans would gather to hold China responsible for sparking the crisis, and that this would somehow absolve him of responsibility for his recklessness and mismanagement of the crisis. As Gabriel Sherman reported in Vanity Fair in May 2020: "One of those who interviewed Trump last week said he was 'in a rage'. Trump reportedly stated that 'what's happening to me is not fair!' Something was going great, and we were on our way to being re-elected!"

The question did not go unheeded, despite the public's rejection of Trump's attempt to blame and excuse China. It became clear early on that the Chinese authorities had already lied about the number of deaths caused by the disease. According to a report by journalist Nick Patton for CNN and published in December 2020, internal Chinese government documents suggest that local authorities in Wuhan have massively underreported COVID-19 infections in the country. The first weeks of the outbreak. In January 2021, HBO also aired a documentary by director Nanfu Wang detailing China's deliberate understatement.

Many suspected from the start that the Chinese authorities were keeping a secret about the outbreak;

A secret darker than China's count of infected and deaths, as they suspected that the Chinese also lied about the beginning of the virus outbreak;

They are skeptical of the official version that the spread occurred through transmission from bats to humans, and that this is just a cover to hide another fact: the origin of the virus is a Chinese laboratory.

If you follow the balanced American press, you have most likely heard of these speculations only through reports denouncing and refuting them.

On January 29, 2020, the Washington Post published a report entitled “Experts refute an extreme theory linking the Corona virus in China to weapons research.”

When Senator Tom Cotton voiced the speculation in February;

The New York Times titled a report on it, "Senator Tom Cotton echoes the extremist theory about the origin of the Corona virus."

Over time, skeptics softened the tone a bit. In the spring of 2020, Trump and those around him were arguing that the virus was not a big deal, and that there was no good reason to shut down the US economy, and he and his supporters went on to say that wearing masks is nothing but foolishness and that public health officials are hysteria. However, one cannot argue with both arguments: that the issue of the virus was absurdly exaggerated, and that it arose at the same time to be a deadly Chinese weapon. Once Secretary of State Mike Pompeo endorsed the theory that the virus was laboratory-origin in May 2020, suspicions about the virus' origin dropped from a "lethal weapon" to a "mistake during a clinical trial".

Despite this soft tone, most of the medical community has continued to categorically reject the theory of the laboratory origin of the virus. Previous pandemics started when a virus was transmitted from animals or birds to humans, so why would it be different in the case of the new Corona virus? US scientists may have been influenced by the respect of their Chinese counterparts. While Chinese officials have tried to clamp down on the flow of information to the world, Chinese scientists have generally shown great cooperation with their Western counterparts. When Chinese scientists came up with the genetic code of the virus in early January 2020, they quickly published the full results for the public to see, and this did not seem to most scientists in the West the behavior of conspirators.

When the Trump administration ended in January, the Pompeo-led State Department was forced to acknowledge its uncertainty in its final official statement about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic: “The U.S. government does not know exactly how, where, and when the COVID-19 virus was transmitted to humans for the first time. First.

We have not determined whether the outbreak started through contact with infected animals or as a result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China.”

Perhaps the virus appeared naturally as a result of human contact with infected animals, and then spread according to a pattern consistent with the patterns of natural epidemics.

In contrast, a laboratory accident might have triggered a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included a small number of individuals that were rapidly multiplied by asymptomatic infection.

Scientists in China conducted research on different types of zoonotic coronavirus under conditions that inadvertently increased the risk of exposure.

Scientists can live with uncertainty, but politicians loathe it very much. During 2021, defenders of the theory of the virus leaking from the laboratory became more and more assertive. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Trump administration, supported the theory of the virus outbreak due to a laboratory error last March, saying, In a television interview on CNN: “I am still of the opinion that the highly likely origin of this disease in Wuhan was inside a laboratory.” The fever of interest in the theory of the laboratory origin of the virus has moved over the past months from the world of "Fox News" to a number of more moderate media outlets.

Earlier in May, science editor Nicholas Wade published an analysis that takes seriously the hypothesis of the virus's laboratory origins. Wade's argument is backed up by elaborate scientific detail and an imposing definition beside his name on the article: he worked for many years as a respected science editor for Nature and The New York Times. Not only that, but the article contained another, more interesting addition. The article accused not only the Chinese government, but also the American scientific community of colluding in order to hide the facts.

If the hypothesis of the laboratory origin of "Covid-19" is true and is corroborated by evidence that cannot be ignored, why has it not been more widely known? As it now turns out, many seem to have their reasons not to talk about it. Chinese authorities are at the top of this list, but virologists in the United States and Europe also have no interest in igniting the controversy over the transformative experiments they have funded for years (experiments that modify an organism or disease, increasing its susceptibility to infection or disease transmissibility, or extending the range of its host organisms).

In this regard, the US government and Chinese authorities share a strange common interest: Neither side wants to draw attention to the fact that Chinese virologist Shi Chengli is conducting experiments on the coronavirus with funding from the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes dialogue in which the Chinese government says: “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and why on our lands as well?” The expected US response would be: “It looks like you are the ones who allowed the virus to leak out. But do we have to go into it?” Is this a public debate?"

Wade extended his criticism to major media organizations, saying: "As far as I know, no major newspaper or television network has provided its readers with in-depth news reports about the scenario of the virus leaking from the lab, as I gave you in my article, however, some of them have published editorials or articles A short opinion. How do we explain this apparent lack of curiosity in the media?

One explanation is the silence of virologists. Science editors, unlike political editors, are less skeptical of the original motives of their sources, as most see their role primarily as exporting the wisdom of scientists to an uneducated public. So, when they don't get help from their sources, these journalists get lost. Perhaps another reason is that so much of the media has migrated to the left of the political spectrum. Since it was Trump who said the virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, editors in turn gave that idea little credibility. So these editors and virologists agreed that the laboratory origin theory of the virus was a conspiracy theory that should be rejected.

If there is one group that Trump supporters hate more than the Chinese Communists, it is the American scientific community.

Trump supporters have fed up with scientists for months, simply because they haven't lined up with the voice that the virus issue has been blown out of proportion and that it's not a big deal.

In particular, Anthony Fauci has become a hater among Trump supporters, and though strange and difficult to explain, it has become a reality in the reality of American politics today: Fauci is a symbol of everything Trumpists hate, even more than Biden and Democrats in Congress.

There were also calls against Fauci from crowds calling for his dismissal, and even veiled calls were launched to incite violence against him.

In the minds of Trump loyalists, Fauci is the real culprit in defeating Trump.

@RandPaul: “Dr. Fauci, do you still support…NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?”

Dr.

Anthony Fauci: "Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect..."

Full video: https://t.co/ILTKlTSQdC pic.twitter.com/t0HxwsWXmm

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 11, 2021

So, when Fauci testified in the Senate a few days after Wade's article was published, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) made the most of it, and Paul directed his question to Fauci: "Do you still support funding the US National Institutes of Health? For the (mentioned) lab in Wuhan?"

Fauci denied that the National Institutes of Health supported so-called transformational research in Wuhan, but that didn't change anything.

Paul relied on an authority more respected in Trump's world than scholars: the article, closest to the monologue, that Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson published the night before the testimony.

Wade presented a wealth of evidence that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and his evidence makes sense. While the outbreak began last fall, the Wuhan Institute was experimenting with ways to transmit the virus from bats to humans, and these experiments were funded by US tax money, and Fauci was the one who approved them and managed their funding from Washington. It's hard to believe, but it's one of Wade's facts. Republicans in the House and Senate are now calling for official investigations, not only into the origin of the Corona virus, but also into the role of the American scientific community.

What is happening now reminds us in many ways of the anti-communist battles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, the United States faced a serious external challenge from Soviet communism. And Republicans who support American isolationism have not bothered to meet this challenge, as it will cost money and bring foreign commitments. They also opposed the Marshall Plan (or the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after the end of World War II) and the formation of NATO, everything that could make a difference on the ground. Instead, the isolationists used the foreign threat as an excuse to launch a purge against an internal enemy: their ideological opponents in the United States.

Today, the United States faces the risk of repeating this unfortunate history, as supporters of "Trumpism" want to use Chinese misconduct - both real and invented - as a weapon in a culture war within the United States.

They do not have the slightest interest in weighing the evidence and looking at it, but only seek revenge for the political and cultural wounds inflicted on them by the scholars they believe, especially Fauci.

As for us, what we must do is seek the truth.

Everple Haines

Although the Biden administration should defend US scientists from partisan defamation, it has no reason to protect China from the truth, whatever that fact may be. In April, Avril Haines, the Biden administration's director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate, making clear that the intelligence community remained open to both possibilities. That the virus “emerged naturally as a result of human contact with infected animals, or appeared as a result of a laboratory accident.” This was agreed by "William Burns", the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, adding that "the Chinese leadership did not show full cooperation and transparency." The only certainty now is that these leaders are beginning to discredit the Chinese narrative that the virus originated in Wuhan markets where live animals are sold.

By diligently searching for the truth, the Biden administration will cut off Trump supporters' quest for a culture war weapon against scientists. On the path to truth, the Biden administration could recruit scientists to be its allies after Trump supporters turned them into enemies. For their part, 18 veteran academics published an open letter in the journal "Science", on May 14, in which they stated that the theories of natural origin and laboratory genesis are equally relevant, and urged an objective and impartial investigation.

Getting to the truth may require more than scientific expertise. The truth may depend less on analysis of the virus itself, and more on intelligence from within the Chinese government. It is very possible - and this theory is often echoed by intelligence officials - that the Chinese authorities themselves do not know exactly how the virus originated. If there was a lab error, the offenders might be in awe of their own government, and might have arranged appropriate coverage to protect themselves from it. It should be noted that one of the important discoveries during the initial phase of the coronavirus disaster is that relevant local Chinese officials used to effectively mislead and frustrate their national government.

What we can learn is this: Trump wasted critical time in December 2019 and January 2020 by naively accepting Chinese assurances that all was well. Trump started a trade war, and was already losing it, wanted a face-saving deal that would give the stock market a boost in an election year. According to Politico, Trump praised China and its president, Xi Jinping, at least 15 times during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Trump supporters pay little attention to the truth of the virus's origin, whatever that fact may ultimately be. They only care about the battles that draw attention to their American opponents, and not pay attention to the real problems. If China bears the responsibility for the epidemic to a greater extent than has been known so far, this is a real and severe dilemma.

The Biden administration can defeat this dirty scheme, which is turning a concrete problem into a culture war, by moving quickly and decisively to get to the truth of the virus.

And if the current knowledge of the facts of the virus is still ambiguous and ambiguous, it is okay to say this publicly and clearly, and even to repeat it constantly.

The more quickly this problem passes from the hands of the charged culture-war merchants of their interests to the hands of rational actors who can actually act on it, the better for the United States and the world.

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This report has been translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.