The New York Times recently reported about a horrific situation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when COVID-19 first appeared. No, it wasn’t about whether a bat or a pangolin or an experiment gone wrong had set off an epidemic. It was far worse. In the midst of an extremely dangerous worldwide pandemic, young scientists were being censored, threatened and bullied by the CDC’s leadership and others holding high political office in the Trump administration, the paper reported. They were told to stop sharing their frank opinions on social media about what was going on as a lethal coronavirus began to spread around the world.
Incredibly, instead of indignation at the censorship of our scientists, this nation is consumed by an irresolvable, politically driven dispute over the origins of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 — lab leak or zoonotic spillover? That debate is all but pointless. The requisite evidence is not available, and the answer to the question is more or less irrelevant. Both origin scenarios are plausible and thus require worldwide policy attention.
“Early on during COVID … politics crushed the voice of the CDC.”
What should be commanding this nation’s attention, eliciting congressional hearings, independent investigations by high-level commissions and sustained outrage on the part of every American is the utter failure of the CDC to respond rapidly, truthfully and transparently to a global infectious-disease outbreak that ultimately killed nearly 7 million people worldwide, including over a million in the U.S. No one can argue we are in any way prepared for future outbreaks without fully understanding what happened early on during COVID when politics crushed the voice of the CDC. We need to know to ensure it cannot happen again. Key Words (February 2020): The coronavirus disease from Wuhan, China, now has a name: COVID-19 The Times reporting focuses on the agonizing experience of a group of young scientists w …