You can’t fool all of the people all of the time — even if you try very, very hard. That lesson comes through in today’s Morning Consult poll, a survey that seems to have coincidentally run in parallel to the publication of an intelligence assessment about the origin of COVID-19.

On midday Sunday, February 26, the Wall Street Journal published its reporting on the current operating thesis at the Department of Energy being a lab leak in Wuhan Institute of Virology. That came out with only hours left in a three-day polling effort by Morning Consult to determine what Americans think happened — and the lab leak garnered a wide plurality even before the WSJ report really broke into a national debate:

After three years of the pandemic — and three years of investigations, reports and rumors of its origins — a Morning Consult survey conducted days before the Energy Department revelation shows that a 44% plurality of U.S. adults believe the virus spilled from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, a share that has roughly held steady since June 2021. …

While over 2 in 5 U.S. adults said they believe the pandemic began because the virus spilled from the Wuhan lab, roughly 1 in 4 think the virus moved naturally from animals to humans. Both figures are virtually unchanged since a June 2021 survey on the topic.

About 2 in 3 Republicans back the theory that the virus leaked from a lab, more than double the share of Democrats (32%) who said the same. Meanwhile, just 14% of Republicans believe the pandemic began because of the natural transmission of the virus, compared with 39% of Democrats.

Expect people to seize on this split as a sign of partisanship, but it may not tell a story they like. First off, the numbers indicate that roughly similar numbers of Democrats resisted the mainstream media narrative that the lab leak theory was “debunked” as did those who bought it. That number has barely changed in 20 months, too; it was 32/40 in June 2021 and is 32/39 now. Two years of narrative enforcement by establishment media and government agencies that labeled the lab-leak explanation a “conspiracy theory” didn’t move the needle, even among Democrats who should have been their target demo.

It didn’t have much impact on independents either. In June 2021, they split 41/22 in favor of a lab leak rather than zoonotic transfer. In today’s poll results, indies split 38/19.

In other words, the collusion between establishment media and the government to label a legitimate hypothesis as “disinformation” and suppress debate over it failed, clearly. And that was before the news broke that DoE intelligence analysts and biolabs experts concluded that a lab leak from Wuhan seems likely to have been the origin. And by the way, that’s also been the FBI’s operating thesis since about the same time as Morning Consult’s first poll. It has been a legitimate thesis for three years, and mightily suppressed by the clique of media and government elites.

But why? For the last two days, talking heads in the media and in government have attempted to backtrack and obfuscate their efforts to suppress discussion of a lab leak. That should raise serious questions about their credibility, certainly, but also of the motives behind the campaign to silence this debate. It’s not just because “right wingers” believed it, because clearly a lot of people across the spectrum considered it not just plausible but likely the most plausible explanation. And it’s not because people conflated it with a bioweapons hypothesis, because the two are separable — and even then, that hypothesis still is open to rational discussion and debate, or should be.

This looks more like an attempt to cover up the potential role of the US in the Wuhan lab-leak scenario. In 2014, the US suspended funding for gain-of-function research on novel pathogens after the Cambridge Working Group report warned emphatically of the risks involved. This came after a series of laboratory errors exposed workers to anthrax, smallpox, and H5N1 pathogens, any one of which could have created a serious public-health emergency.

Over three years later, however, the National Institutes of Health lifted the ban. Founding Cambridge Working Group member Marc Lipitsch offered a prescient warning about what would happen:

Marc Lipsitch (Harvard University, MA, USA) is a founding member of the Cambridge Working Group. “I still do not believe a compelling argument has been made for why these studies are necessary from a public health point-of-view; all we have heard is that there are certain narrow scientific questions that you can ask only with dangerous experiments”, he said. “I would hope that when each HHS review is performed someone will make the case that strains are all different, and we can learn a lot about dangerous strains without making them transmissible.” He pointed out that every mutation that has been highlighted as important by a gain-of-function experiment has been previously highlighted by completely safe studies. “There is nothing for the purposes of surveillance that we did not already know”, said Lipsitch. “Enhancing potential pandemic pathogens in this manner is simply not worth the risk.”

The NIH defended the move in a statement from then-director Francis Collins:

GOF research is important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health. The funding pause was lifted in response to today’s release of the Department of Health and Human Services Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (link is external)(HHS P3CO Framework). The HHS P3CO Framework describes a multi-disciplinary review process, involving the funding agency and a Department-level review group, that considers the scientific merits and potential benefits of the research, as well as the potential to create, transfer, or use an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen. This framework formalizes robust oversight for federally funded research with enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential. It is the product of an extensive deliberative process undertaken by experts throughout the public and private sectors, and is aligned with the Recommended Policy Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO)(link is external).

We have a responsibility to ensure that research with infectious agents is conducted responsibly, and that we consider the potential biosafety and biosecurity risks associated with such research. I am confident that the thoughtful review process laid out by the HHS P3CO Framework will help to facilitate the safe, secure, and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health.

Collins published that statement on December 19, 2017. Less than two years later, the GOF research at least indirectly funded through grants to the Wuhan Institute for Virology appears to have created a global pandemic responsible for millions of deaths.

If that resulted from a lab leak and/or mishandling of a deliberately mutated pathogen, then everyone involved in the decision tree to restore funding for GOF research would be responsible for it. They were all warned by the Cambridge Working Group repeatedly that such research was not necessary and was too dangerous for any benefit it might produce. They also knew about the laboratory accidents in years past, the incidents that resulted in the suspension of GOF research in the first place. Those decisions by Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others need to have consequences applied and — most importantly — new safeguards to prevent the manipulation of such pathogens in the future.

If we had a media industry that was committed to such accountability, we’d have been working on this three years ago. Instead, our media has decided to help suppress the debate on this point in order to provide cover for the incompetent elites who likely created this situation in the first place. And the broad suppression of the debate by media in collusion with government shows that they clearly understood that this debate would be devastating for that clique — otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered to suppress it in the first place.

As luck would have it, this issue was one the major topics that Andrew Malcolm and I discussed on the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast. Today’s show features:

• Yet again, another piece of “misinformation” turns out to be reality. Why did the media suppress the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origins? Andrew Malcolm and I discuss the impact that has on mainstream media’s already crumbling credibility.
• We also look at whether and when sanctions on Russia will have a significant impact on the war.
• Plus, Andrew talks about Jimmy Carter’s decision to enter into hospice — and how much the world has changed in that regard since his presidency.

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!