Jim Geraghty of National Review Online reports a significant development in the search for truth about COVID-19.
Interviews on the Sunday morning news talk shows don’t generate as much buzz as they used to, but the comments of Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator and former dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, probably deserve more attention than they’ve received so far. Jha, speaking with CNN’s Dana Bash (emphasis added):
BASH: And, before I let you go, you reshared a tweet that said, among other things, the available evidence overwhelmingly does not show that it — well, let me say it this way. You said that the available evidence points towards research-related incidents in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted. You agreed with that.
JHA: I did.
This is going to surprise some people. When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak. Here’s the bottom line. No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are people — officials in China, and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I’m not suggesting I know for sure, but I’m saying my best assessment is that it probably was a lab leak.
BASH: That is definitely news to hear that from you, for sure, and shows that we’re just — we’re still learning, which is really important.
The lab leak hypothesis should never have been a partisan phenomenon; now, prominent Democrats are willing to say publicly that they deem a lab leak the more likely explanation.
