Two and a half years after a coronavirus pandemic began just a few miles from a US-funded, Chinese Communist Party-backed coronavirus lab in Wuhan, we still don't have any firm answers as to how the whole crisis truly got started.
All of that may be about to change, however:
Sens. Rand Paul and Maggie Hassan are set to lead the first congressional hearing on gain-of-function research as part of his ongoing efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hearing, scheduled for Aug. 3, comes amid intensifying Republican scrutiny on whether a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) caused the pandemic, as well as possible U.S. funding ties to the gain-of-function research at the facility. Gain-of-function involves enhancing a virus to make it more potent or transmissible.
"Making a virus more potent or transmissible" is of course exactly what was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years. They were taking coronaviruses and making them potentially more infectious among human beings, thus driving up the chance that — via the shoddy biosecurity protocols at the WIV — a virus might escape and launch a deadly global pandemic.
So it's good to see we're having an actual congressional hearing on this!
And man, it looks like this hearing will be comprehensive:
"Gain-of-function research has historically been supported by tax dollars both domestically and internationally; as such, this hearing lies at the intersection of the subcommittee's two primary jurisdictional responsibilities – monitoring emerging threats and conducting oversight of federal spending," said an emailed statement from Paul's office. ...
"However, serious questions remain about whether that protocol is sufficient to protect the U.S. and the world from the potential negative consequences of this research," the statement continued.
"Moreover, the debate over what gain-of-function research is and what it is not, is not settled."
Time to pop that popcorn, folks, it's going to be a wild ride!
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