The Wuhan Lab
By
Leonard Zwelling
It’s more than the elephant in the room. It’s the whale in the stadium.
Like all popular conspiracy theories, until they are officially and conclusively debunked, they linger. Such is the case with the Kennedy Assassination in 1963. Such is the case with the origins of the coronavirus that has caused a worldwide pandemic. Did it really have its origins in an unfortunate jump of a virus from bats to pangolins to humans? Was it really from the wet market in Wuhan? Or, did it somehow escape, perhaps from an asymptomatic lab worker, from the Wuhan virology lab and contaminate the world? How will we ever know if the Chinese will not allow outside investigators to pursue all leads on the ground in China as they did not do with the WHO team?
The countries of the United Nations and certainly those of the western alliance must insist that China allow a free and independent audit of the records of the lab and the various clinical specimens acquired by the Chinese in the first wave of sickness in Wuhan. This pandemic no more wafted into China on frozen food from Europe than Lyndon Johnson plotted to kill his boss in Dallas. That’s bunk. But what really did happen in Dallas? I asked Nell Connolly who told me she heard three shots from behind tending to substantiate the Warren Commission’s version that had Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman. The problem is that no one of my generation believes that. It’s too banal.
The same banality infuses the theory that the coronavirus pandemic had its origins in bad luck or a wet market. Those ideas might be plausible if there wasn’t a better explanation so obviously there. There’s the Level Four viral containment institute playing around with bat viruses like coronavirus and the full knowledge now that covid can be contracted from an asymptomatic carrier. It’s pretty hard to dismiss the lab as the likely source of the contagion until its records and its samples are thoroughly audited by independent examiners.
Why does this even matter?
First, it would serve as a warning that all Level Four facilities must beef up their security and safety measures Second, it should lead to the outlawing of genetic manipulation of potential human pathogens as they clearly have nefarious purposes and the risk of untoward accidents. Third, if it turns out that this investigation does lead to the wet market, markets such as these need to be ended. Fourth, if this pandemic was the result of a virus jumping from animals to man, we better get ready for more of it.
In other words, we are in the midst of a terrible pandemic and have been in its grips for a year yet we still do not know where or how it started or whether another such event is inevitable. By now, we should know. If the Chinese serve as a roadblock to that knowledge, a boycott and severe sanctions on the country are in order. We have got to stop handling the Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans and Saudis as normal human actors. They are not. The sooner we stop pandering to these enemies, the sooner we all will be safer. And the sooner we find the origin of the current pandemic, the sooner we take the steps to prevent its recurrence.
The Chinese continue to be opaque in dealing with the reality of what they likely started. They cannot be allowed to get away with this because some countries fear the diplomatic repercussions. Covid is bad enough. We don’t need another wave of illness from the Chinese in an effort to cripple the western world. Wake up. We need to get into that lab and kick the tires. Then and only then might the conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus subside. Until then, China is guilty of a cover-up. If the current audit is the best the WHO can do, get a different international team in there under the auspices of the UN. What happened a year ago in China is important to every human on this planet. This is no time for a cover-up. If the UN is good for anything, it ought to be good for this.
