Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

Among the other proponents of gain-of-function research was one Anthony Fauci. In December 2011, he was the lead author—along with Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH—of a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking.”

Scientists later came to suspect that this initial move by the virus might have happened at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, because many of the first recorded patients were vendors or visitors there. But the picture was confusing. Huanan is known as a wet market because, as at many other markets throughout the world, one can buy fresh

The COVID vaccines, especially in the rapidity of their creation and testing, have been one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. And yet in some ways we seem little better off than we were in the Middle Ages, seeking medicines (including COVID antivirals) largely by trial and error, and having to hope that, if we’re infected, our god or blin

at their end there might be another pandemic, even worse than the one we are experiencing today; and because their origin, as remote as it may

No matter that it drew its world-changing conclusions on the thinnest possible evidence. It quickly went viral.

The plan failed to answer a basic question: If vaccines were failing within months, why had the government decided to push them harder? Wouldn’t pausing to consider whether using them at all make more sense?