Pun Salad

For a long time, there was a large and seemingly ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that a lab leak or accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. But there wasn’t a smoking gun, something akin to a confession or a contemporaneous internal communication indicating there had indeed been some sort accident.

Today ProPublica and Vanity Fair report on Toy Reid, a China specialist for the RAND Corporation and a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department, who reviewed hundreds of dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Reid worked as part of a team assembled by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Republican members of Congress have failed to persuade the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM) to expel one of its members, conservation biologist Peter Daszak. In an email to its members, NAM concluded there “was no evidence” that Daszak had violated its code of conduct, as the representatives had alleged in a complaint to NAM.

The complaint suggests Daszak is somehow linked to the mysterious origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daszak runs a research nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, that has collaborated with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The Chinese institute has received intense scrutiny because the first cases of the pandemic surfaced where it is located. Although no direct evidence ties WIV to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, some believe the virus leaked from the lab or may even have been engineered by scientists there.