The lab leak hypothesis: Stick a fork in it

I have never really understood why this is so important to the wingnuts. Oh well, I suppose I do. It was a way to gin up a narrative to smear Anthony Fauci. That is the claim that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan which had indirect funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which Fauci heads. The non-insane version of this was that it was an accidental release, which would be worth knowing. The insane version was that Fauci was the mastermind of a plot to foist the virus on the world in order to bring about a One World Socialist Dictatorship. On the other hand, the pandemic is a hoax and it ' s not worse than the flu, but if you can ' t hold at least three contradictory ideas at once, you ain ' t a Republican.Anyway, the retiring director of NIH, Francis Collins, exits with the following conclusion: Statement on Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 OriginsAnalysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false. The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. I won ' t crowd the plate with all of the data, but here ' s a fairly easy ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs