One of the primary reasons why the lab leak theory is being so heavily disputed is because acknowledging it as true would force Congress to rein in the research industry.

Story at a glance:

In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence.

The emails reveal there was great concern among NIH leadership, as SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

The emails show they were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and that they were determined to suppress questions about its origin.

A group of scientists convened by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, published a paper in which they claimed the virus was decidedly not the result of intentional engineering. They did admit accidental creation in a lab could not be ruled out, but that natural evolution was the most likely scenario. Some of these same scientists had previously shared details indicative of genetic engineering in emails to Fauci.

The “Proximal Origin” paper, which was edited by Fauci and “debunked” the lab leak theory without any evidence, became the most-read published paper in history. More than 2,000 media outlets have cited it to support their propaganda.