NIH SENT THE INTERCEPT 292 FULLY REDACTED PAGES RELATED TO VIRUS RESEARCH IN WUHAN – By Sharon Lerner (The Intercept) / February 20, 2022
The NIH continues to withhold critical documents that could shed light on the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
WITH THE GLOBAL death toll from Covid-19 approaching 6 million, the need to understand the origins of the pandemic is both pressing and grave. But the National Institutes of Health continues to withhold critical documents that could shed light on this question. This week, in response to ongoing litigation over public records related to coronavirus research funded by the federal agency, the NIH sent The Intercept 292 fully redacted pages rather than substantive material that could help us understand how the virus first came to infect humans.
At this point, no one can say for sure how SARS-CoV-2 set off the pandemic. It may have emerged naturally, jumping from a host animal to people, as many other deadly pathogens have. Or the coronavirus could have first spread to humans as the result of a research mishap — through bat capture and collection, risky experiments, or a host of other more mundane lab activities. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed both theories as possible. But knowing exactly what led to the worst disease outbreak in recent history requires more information.
The “lab-leak” hypothesis is bolstered by a long history of accidents at facilities that study pathogens and the fact that one such laboratory that specializes in coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, is located in the very city where the pandemic first began. As many have noted, China has not been forthcoming with information that could help us understand the origins of the pandemic, blocking access to a cave that may hold important clues, taking a database of information about coronaviruses offline, and refusing requests for records from the World Health Organization.
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