Will We Get to the Bottom of COVID-19's Origin?

WILL THE INCOMING Trump administration and Republican Congress get to the bottom of how the COVID-19 pandemic began? There's every indication that they'll at least try.

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The idea that the pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China-and that U.S. government-funded research contributed to the virus's creationhas gone from a derided conspiracy theory to a credible hypothesis with some mainstream acceptance in the past few years.

Thanks to information obtained through congressional probes and investigative journalism, we already know that U.S. government-funded researchers were engaged in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV.

We know the same researchers proposed using federal grants to create viruses with many of the unique features of the virus that caused the pandemic; they even cited the cost-effectiveness of doing so under the Chinese lab's lower biosecurity protocols.

We also know that researchers and their funders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tried to evade scrutiny of this work through various dirty tricks aimed at avoiding public records requests and indulging in word games about the definition of "gain-of-function" research.

Two U.S. federal agencies, the Department of Energy and the FBI, rank a lab accident as the most likely explanation of the origin point for the pandemic. The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded the same in its final report released in December 2024.

Nevertheless, none of these assessments are definitive. There's still a lot we don't know.