COVID Lab Leak 'Pretty Close To Certain,' Linked To Creation Of Lockdowns, Mask Mandates

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the world. Not just in the obvious ways, with lockdowns, the introduction of permanent masking, the development of mRNA vaccines, and that schools were closed for years, in some cases. But in ways that we haven't even begun to deal with as a society. 

Financially, lockdowns were one of the greatest mistakes in human history. Trillions of dollars were spent or printed, all to paper over the fact that it's impossible to shut down a globalized economy. Violent crime exploded, leading to thousands more people dying across the United States and the world, as the breakdown of societal order and a moral crusade of "social justice" led to declining cities and urban areas. 

While crime has declined, schools are back, and the endless series of mRNA boosters have seen their importance diminish, there are long-standing consequences that will take decades to recover from, if ever. 

With all that in mind, it's vitally important to understand and communicate how the pandemic started. Who was behind it, how did it happen? And just as importantly, how those in charge responded. All to ensure that we never make these same mistakes again moving forward. That's exactly what one of the country's top public health experts just did.

Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Jayanta Bhattacharya. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Jay Bhattacharya Confirms COVID Lab Leak A Near Certainty

In a new interview with Ross Douthat from The New York Times, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya explained that he believes it's "pretty close to certain" that the pandemic originated with an accidental lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that NIH funding may have been a significant part of that. 

When asked by Douthat why scientists and experts "closed ranks" at the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya explained that it starts as far back as medical school. Patients will look to anyone wearing a white coat for advice, he said, and as a 24-year-old student, you don't have all the answers. But putting on that coat makes it tempting to act as though you do.

"All of public health found itself in that position," he said about the start of the pandemic. "They’re facing an uncertain threat. There’s no real science yet about it. It’s a brand-new disease. The entirety of society is looking at them, saying: ‘What should we do about this? What’s the wise, right thing to do about this?’ And you don’t know the answer."

Instead of giving answers, which may be inaccurate, Bhattacharya said he learned, and students must learn, to say, "I don't know." But "public health failed at that" during the pandemic. Instead, they went to Anthony Fauci to "guide them," only to have those leaders also fail to honestly communicate uncertainty.

But it wasn't just that, he said. Their involvement in the origins of the pandemic also contributed.

"The second element is what happened to potentially cause the pandemic," Bhattacharya said about the lab leak. "I believe — and I think a lot of scientists agree with me — that the best available evidence suggests that the pandemic was the result of a lab accident that happened in Wuhan, China."

Douthat asked him directly to put a percentage on it, to which he answered, "My view is it’s pretty close to certain."

That's a level of confidence that's been virtually unheard of in most national discussion about the lab leak. But he reiterated, adding, "I think if you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain."

As NIH was "committed" to using absurd, Utopian "gain of function" research to hunt down all potential viruses and develop advanced treatments that may or may not work, it's possible that their work directly led to the accidental release of the coronavirus. Douthat wondered why that might get them to be "overcommitted" to school closures, mask mandates, and so on. 

"OK, so what if you opened Pandora’s box? What would you do? You’ve unleashed hell on the world," Bhattacharya responded. "And you’ve done it. You’re responsible for it. What would you do?"

The answer, of course, is to "shut it down." By any means necessary. As he explained, "Powerful people in public health have a lot of means, it turns out — we learned in 2020 — to try to do that."

So, why did nobody acknowledge that the lockdowns and other measures weren't working, a truth that became obvious almost immediately? Well, Bhattacharya has an explanation for that too. 

"So, imagine that you’ve done this. You’ve recommended the lockdowns, you’ve recommended the school closures, you’ve recommended a set of measures that are going to harm the poor, you know they are going to harm the children, but you’re doing it because you want to suppress the spread of this deadly disease that, in the back of your mind, maybe you think you might have been responsible for. Maybe you can’t admit that to yourself.

"You do it, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s summer of 2020 and it’s very, very clear the disease is still there. The Chinese claim that they got rid of the disease, but that result is not replicated anywhere on earth other than there."

These incentives and the commitment to a failed policy have a predictable outcome: "Well, what went wrong? We just didn’t do it hard enough."

That snowballs, creating the endless need for more lockdowns, restrictive policies, and the suppression of debate and outside opinions.

"The problem is a lot of people have been hurt," he continued. There are people in the scientific community, pesky ‘fringe epidemiologists,’ who are saying: 'Look, this is a really bad idea. And you can’t get the political will to do this unless for something so extraordinary.' In the scientific community, you need absolute unanimity. And if there’s debate, it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to have another lockdown.

"And so what you do is you suppress speech, you suppress dissent, and you make sure that anyone who dissents, that their reputation is destroyed so that other people won’t speak up."

Those lockdowns, he believes, "ended up killing more people than would’ve been killed had those lockdowns not happened."

What a disaster. And one that was preventable at every single level. NIH could have avoided funding gain-of-function on the laughable belief they could stop and prevent all viruses. Experts and public health authorities could have admitted they didn't have all the answers, then backed down on insane policies that immediately proved useless with clear, obvious harms. Instead, they doubled and tripled down, shredding their credibility and public trust in the process. 

Douthat brought up that the development of COVID vaccines may have justified the lockdowns in some people's eyes. But Bhattacharya wasn't buying that explanation either. Lockdowns on the vague hope of an effective vaccine, he said, is the "end of civilization."

"That was not a certainty," he said. "And the idea that when there’s this kind of uncertainty, you must do this extraordinary draconian measure, and you take away basic civil liberties at scale for nine months or however long until you get the vaccine, that, I think, is the end of civilization.

"If that is our paradigm for managing these kinds of risks, we can’t have at least a free civilization. Because you can’t make plans. You don’t know if your kids are going to be able to go to school. You can’t make basic plans."

He also highlighted how allowing lockdowns to become standard practice is unacceptable and effectively eliminates the thought of a "free country" moving forward.

"If all of the basic promises that we have about our civil liberties are premised on there not being uncertainty over the spread of an infectious disease, then you just don’t have a free country."

The scary thing is, that's exactly the future public health authorities, many in the media, and those who still refuse to reckon with COVID policy failures, want. They want to return to lockdowns as soon as possible, believing that authoritarian controls over civilization and free movement are now essential tools in the pandemic playbook. They want masks to return, think school closures were justifiable and effective, and have little problem with continuous mandates in healthcare settings with no end in sight. 

That's the problem with never taking accountability, never admitting mistakes or never acknowledging uncertainty. That's also why it's such a tremendous win for America that Jay Bhattacharya is in his office, to ensure it doesn't happen on his watch.