It's been called the "largest liable case in the history of the world," but Joe Biden doesn't seem to care if we get to the bottom of it. Finding out who's responsible for COVID might upset his cozy relationship with China -- and surely no one on the Left wants to admit what conservatives have known all along: the real conspiracy isn't the speculation that the killer came from a Wuhan lab, it's that some Democrats, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the communist regime were so desperate to cover it up what they say didn't happen.
It's the typical Biden two-face. On one hand, the administration shut down former Secretary Mike Pompeo's State Department investigation into what or who caused the coronavirus pandemic. On the other, he's holding a press conference, promising to follow the evidence where it leads. Why the sudden interest in origins of COVID? Because new reports on not-so-new information are pointing -- at least in part -- to a leak from the Wuhan lab, not a random explosion from bat-infested markets. Now, suddenly, the Biden administration is asking the intelligence community to dig deeper, "to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion."
At the heart of this "new report" are three Chinese scientists -- all who worked at the Wuhan lab, all who contracted an illness with symptoms like COVID. One, Li Wenliang, died a hero trying to warn his people that the killer was loose. Two others did their best to also sound the alarm -- one going so far as to risk his life by giving the West the COVID genetic code, information that, Dr. Martin Makary says, American researchers used to create the Moderna vaccine two days later.
Naturally, the question on everyone's minds is: did these men get the virus from the lab -- and does that prove it escaped? To be honest, Makary says, we may never know. For starters, he writes in a compelling article about these three men, it would require "cooperation from the Chinese Communist Party," among other things that a leader as weak as Biden -- and a co-conspirator like WHO -- cannot or will not demand. To be honest, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said, "This is too little, too late." And yet the Arkansas Republican, who blew the whistle before February of 2020, can't help but laugh at the irony. He was demanding the U.S. investigate the lab only to be roundly mocked as a conspiracy theorist.
So if the information hasn't changed (the Trump administration knew all of this in 2020), the WHO's position hasn't changed, and China's posture hasn't changed, what has? "The biggest change," Cotton explained on "Washington Watch," "is that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and Joe Biden is. And early last year, when I was pointing out -- not on the basis of some kind of secret intelligence or other information, but just plain old common sense -- 'Guys, this virus didn't emerge from some mountain village next to a cave full of bats. It emerged in a city larger than New York, right down the street from the labs where they research dangerous coronaviruses. How about we ask two questions about that?' ..The media was going to do nothing if it... was going to help Donald Trump's reelection." Now, he supposes, with Biden in the White House, the blue media thinks okay to start asking questions again.
Obviously, Cotton agrees, our intelligence community should keep trying to get to the bottom of this. But at the end of the day, the Chinese Community Party is the only one with answers -- and Joe Biden should have been demanding them from day one. Instead, he's been too busy coddling China to hold anyone accountable for a pandemic that could have been stopped before any Americans died. "If China had acted in a civilized fashion and told the world, told the WHO, told America and Japan and South Korea and Germany and other countries that could provide experts, perhaps we could have kept this a local outbreak. It wouldn't have become the worst pandemic in a century." But China Is malevolent, Cotton warns. They have complete disregard for their own people and the people around the world. "And they have to be held responsible for that. It's time for the civilized world to lower the boom for what China has done to the world these last 18 months."
Meanwhile, if grilling Anthony Fauci were an Olympic sport, almost every Senate Republican would medal. Earlier this week, the GOP leaders took turns pointing out his conflicting statements, his misguided advice, and his blind trust for the bad actors at WHO. The hot seat only got hotter when the topic turned to $600,000 in taxpayer dollars that NIH earmarked for the Wuhan lab for a supposed bat-to-human coronavirus transmission study. "You have no way of knowing whether they did or not, except you trust them. Is that right?" Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) asked. Fauci admitted that no, he had no way to guarantee they wouldn't lie. He went on to defend the "integrity" of WHO, prompting Kennedy -- one of the most colorful senators -- to say, "If you turn President Xi upside down and shake, WHO would fall out of his pocket."
For now, most of the senators suspect, the only reason Biden is looking at this is because the country is forcing him to. "We need to find out what happened, so it never happens again," Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) agreed. "As you know," Cotton said, "China isn't terribly popular with the American people. Imagine how China will be viewed," Cotton said, "not just in the United States, but around the world, if it turns out that Chinese communist incompetence and deceitfulness was responsible for all the loss of lives, for all the illness, for all the destroyed businesses, for all the lost livelihoods..."
And the more information the American public has, the more pressure they'll apply to political leaders -- even a party like Joe Biden's, who's reluctant to take on China. But someone has to, and if Democrats won't, then voters will just elect people who will.