The Wuhan Lab Leak: Three Years of "Conspiracy", Then a U.S. Department of Energy Reclassification
In 2020 anyone suggesting COVID-19 originated in a lab was banned from social media. In 2023 the DOE and FBI both concluded it likely did. The platforms have not apologized.
February 2020: a group of 27 prominent virologists published a letter in The Lancet calling the lab-leak hypothesis a "conspiracy theory." It was organized behind the scenes by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that had received NIH funding to do gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He failed to disclose his conflict of interest.
For two years social media platforms removed posts, suspended accounts, and "fact-checked" any suggestion of a laboratory origin.
In February 2023 the U.S. Department of Energy reported, with low confidence, that COVID-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan. The FBI had reached the same conclusion with moderate confidence. In 2024 a CIA review reached the same conclusion.
Anthony Fauci, who had personally approved NIH funding for gain-of-function research at WIV in 2014 and again after a 2017 moratorium, testified before Congress that "I had nothing to do with funding gain-of-function research." The internal NIH emails (FOIA, 2024) prove that statement is false.
The cost: 7+ million dead globally, the largest civil-liberties contraction in modern history, and a generation that learned the people who run public health will lie about everything that matters.