Most people are aware by now that the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of Covid-19 pandemic-related information, especially between late 2019 and early 2020, delayed governments worldwide from taking appropriate interventions that would have prevented many deaths and much suffering. But a recent congressional hearing revealed that the CCP wasn’t the only one guilty. A few key public health officials and scientists in the West served as the party’s useful idiots by shutting down debates about the origin of the pandemic early on.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing in mid-July to "examine the potential conflicts of interest and suppression of scientific discourse by the National Institutes of Health surrounding the drafting, publication, and critical reception of the infamous ’The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ (Proximal Origin) correspondence."
The infamous paper, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," was published in the influential journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. Its five authors wrote with unequivocal confidence: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
Joao Monteiro, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, tweeted on the same day: "Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop the spread of misinformation—great work from @K_G_Andersen #covid19." The prestige of the authors and the magazine turned this paper into one of the most potent weapons to suppress the debate over the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin.
According to the House subcommittee’s report, since the commentary’s publication, it has been regarded as "the single most impactful and influential scientific paper in history" and "has been accessed 5.84 million times." Government officials, the media, scientists, and many others referred to it as indisputable evidence that the lab-leak theory was a conspiracy and that anyone who brought it up was a conspiracist and a racist. The Chinese Communist Party welcomed the commentary as scientific backing to insist that Covid-19 originated in nature; thus, the CCP was not responsible for the 15 million Covid-related deaths and millions more suffering during the pandemic.