Two Reasons Why We Will Never Know What Caused COVID

Amid a report from the U.S. Department of Energy in which it concluded it had "low confidence" that COVID was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China rather than through bats at a wet market, Republicans and Fox News have seen fit to ignore the "low confidence" part of the equation. 

The awful truth of the matter is that we will never know what caused COVID. For this there are two reasons.

First, there is the Chinese government. They have not been forthcoming according to FBI Director Christopher Wray (who subscribes to the lab leak theory) as one would expect of a totalitarian state. So long as they remain a totalitarian state then nothing shall change. If the facts do point to a lab leak, I suspect it is likely due to incompetence rather than a sinister plot notwithstanding the low regard for human life the Chinese government holds for their own people. 

This brings me to the United States, specifically the aforementioned Republican/Fox News alliance which never met a conspiracy theory it did not embrace. Let's keep in mind this segment of the population cannot bring themselves to admit Joe Biden is President of the United States much less accept the veracity of vaccines or acknowledge that COVID has claimed more than 1 million lives. If we cannot bring ourselves to agree to the most basic of facts then how will we ever know what caused COVID?

Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to look for answers and bring pressure to bear upon the Chinese government. But the results, whatever they might be, will have little meaning to the Republican/Fox News crowd who have no interest in the facts and only want to be told what they want to hear.