A damning new report found that the COVID-19 virus most likely leaked from a Chinese lab — and that the US bears responsibility for pumping tens of millions of dollars into high-risk research on extremely infectious viruses at a facility with weak safety protocols.
The analysis by Alina Chan, a Harvard and MIT molecular biologist, was published Sunday as a New York Times guest essay.
It comes as Dr. Anthony Fauci faces a grilling before a House panel on Monday over his backing for the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Chan — who has long advocated more study of the “lab leak theory” — said that until recently, “reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for truth” in getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s origin.
If the theory is correct, the global pandemic — which claimed 1 million lives in the US and at lest 25 million around the world — is “the most costly accident in the history of science,” Chan, the co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” wrote.
Her findings paint an alarming picture of how the virus was sourced in China, supercharged for maximum infectiousness with US government support, and ultimately allowed to escape under inadequate containment conditions.
