I could probably go ahead and write a whole other thing specifically on the lab leak stuff (I've been meaning to...) but the crux of my argument would be: Trying to suppress a belief doesn't mean that belief is de facto true.

I've followed all that EcoHealth/Daszak stuff pretty closely (and have spoken to some of the players involved) and I'm pretty confident that, whatever theory is true, they weren't trying to cover anything up, they were trying to defend against these bad faith actors who came for them very quickly, without any real evidence.

And in the process, yes, they wound up doing a bunch of things that tamped down on open debate, and tried to shut down questioning of the official narrative. That absolutely drove distrust. But I think they were doing it in hopes that it would guard against those efforts — and I think it backfired.

If we accept the zoonotic origins theory (which I do, and would put the odds more like 95/5 in favor of it) then Daszak, for whatever misdeeds he did after COVID emerged, helped drive some of the only serious coronavirus research happening in the world in the years prior to 2019. We can point to the research he was contributing to at the WIV for why we got testing done so quickly, why the Moderna vaccine was ready to go so quickly, and why we had a head start on understanding the virus' behavior. (This, largely because they recognized MERS had pandemic potential, but that it was just sliiiightly maladapted.)

Anyway, I could rant about this for ages. I actually just penned a recent column for the Star on this: thestar.com/opinion/con…