You didn't read the Vanity Fair article I posted about the investigation into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus then, did you? Click any of the links contained within that article? There are government officials, the Intelligence Community, scientists of all levels (Nobel Laureates to students), and every day people who have an interest in digging for the facts themselves that have been looking into this. As with media and journalists, there are good people who care about the truth in all kinds of organizations.
Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.
As they posted their findings, the DRASTIC researchers attracted new allies. Among the most prominent was Jamie Metzl, who launched a blog on April 16 that became a go-to site for government researchers and journalists examining the lab-leak hypothesis. A former executive vice president of the Asia Society, Metzl sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and served in the Clinton administration as the NSC’s director for multilateral affairs.
Metzl, in turn, was in touch with the Paris Group, a collective of more than 30 skeptical scientific experts who met by Zoom once a month for hours-long meetings to hash out emerging clues. Before joining the Paris Group, Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London
...Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
Christopher Park, a Trump-appointee who "had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research in 2017" squashed inquiry into the origins.
Source
A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started.
As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.
Hmmm, lifting the moratorium Obama had put into place didn't help, did it?
In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium.
As I've mentioned before regarding media organizations, government organizations are not monoliths either. Individuals matter, and in this case, it was the WHO Director who stepped up and contradicted the findings by the WHO team that went into China.
The report’s most surprising critic was the WHO’s director himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. With the credibility of the World Health Organization on the line, he appeared to acknowledge the report’s shortcomings at a press event the day of its release. “As far as WHO is concerned all hypotheses remain on the table,” he said. “We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do.”
His statement reflected “monumental courage,” said Metzl. “Tedros risked his entire career to defend the integrity of the WHO.” (The WHO declined to make Tedros available for an interview.)
So yes, those who were intimately involved in virology, and those who weren't, and government officials at the highest levels both worked to learn the truth and to stifle investigations. If all one does is look through things with a partisan lens, or blanket condemn entire organizations without looking in the gray, then the truth will never be found or accepted. I've listed before tons of resources that I've found credible that challenge my beliefs, I stand by my recommendations to start reading them.
One question you should be asking is why did Biden order the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day investigation into the origins of SARS_CoV-2? There's a troubling reason behind it which saddens me greatly, and points to deeper issues we have ignored for far too long.
