It has become virtually impossible to find an issue on which Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can agree — but when it comes to seeking information regarding the origins of COVID-19, there is some rare evidence of bipartisanship.
After years of hearing supposed experts denounce any suggestion that the virus might have been released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, recent evidence indicates that such theories were probably right all along.
This week, members of the House of Representatives voted unanimously to compel the Biden administration to release all evidence related to the source of the viral outbreak. The Democratic-led Senate similarly passed a bipartisan version of the same resolution.
Biden runs away after a reporter tries to ask about the Wuhan lab pic.twitter.com/VS5d58juAN
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 3, 2023
Republican critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other bureaucrats who attempted to define the narrative during the early days of the pandemic used the opportunity to castigate their behavior.
“In January of 2020, Dr. Fauci received emails that promulgated that COVID-19 looked engineered and not from the wild,” asserted Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC). “Yet three weeks later, to save his own skin, he commissioned a scientific paper which ‘debunked’ the lab theory. He was academically and intellectually dishonest.”
As for his alleged motivation for dismissing the lab leak theory, Murphy said: “The truth is that Dr. Fauci and his institution funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to promote dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology without proper guardrails.”
While the rhetoric on the Democratic side of the aisle is notably less accusatory, the bipartisan support for declassifying these documents shows an apparent willingness to expose the truth.
“We don’t know the origins of the COVID pandemic,” acknowledged Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT). “So whatever is ultimately declassified, I would hope my colleagues and the American people would approach that information with the humility, the intellectual humility that we need to approach something as serious as a pandemic and how we behave as citizens in a democracy.”
Meanwhile, officials and public figures who dared to mention the possibility that COVID-19 was released from the Wuhan lab are now speaking out about the treatment they endured.
Left-wing comedian Jon Stewart shocked some of his fans last year when he expressed a willingness to consider the possibility that the virus was created in a lab. In light of the latest revelations, he lamented “the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that.”
