Editor’s Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.Anyone eager to re-experience the acrimony, lunacy and danger of the early Covid-19 pandemic might want to watch a few hours of Monday’s hearing of the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Kent Sepkowitz – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer CenterMembers spent much of the day questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, among many other government roles, former chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden on Covid-19. The subcommittee previously had grilled Fauci during two days of closed-door testimony in January.In their announcement for the hearing, the Republican majority made it clear that, rather than a standard after-action review to glean lessons learned as a means to inform the next public health crisis, their goal was to place Fauci once again onto the hot seat. As the subcommittee chairman, Dr. Brad Wenstrup, who is a podiatrist, said, the hearing was intended, among other things, to review Fauci “promoting singular, questionable narratives about the origins of Covid-19.”During the long and exasperating hearing (I watched more than 3 hours), Republicans seemed hellbent on connecting US support of virus research that began in the Obama administration with the origin of the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci was peppered repeatedly by questions that tried to hint at a supposedly nefarious role played by the US and/or Fauci himself. The still unsettled back story of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) apparently is viewed as a promising topic for political gain.Many articles already have been written and arguments posited on this issue. In one corner is the group who, like me, regard the pandemic as another natural occurrence resulting from standard-issue gene swapping across animals and people — back and forth until, accidentally, a really bad strain of the virus is unintentionally created.The other argument, which admittedly has an irresistible James Bond feel if much less credibility, views the virus as a man-made construct. Maybe the bad guys (the Chinese, in this movie script) with evil intention somehow deliberately hit a jackpot of evilness by creating a modern doomsday virus. For this theory there are two sub-versions: one where the bad guys were just being bad and did a bad thing, and the other where US funds were part of the evil plan as the money was used (advertently or inadvertently) to kickstart the entire evil program back in 2014 and 2015.Most of the hearing was spent trying to link the pandemic’s origin to a small National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant given to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which, as planned, gave the funds to the Wuhan lab to study coronaviruses in bats. No one contests that this occurred. The plot thickens (or, in my view, thins) when genetic fingerprint evidence is rolled out.The Republicans seem convinced that the grant advertently or inadvertently led to the doomsday virus by supporting “ga …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnEditor’s Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.Anyone eager to re-experience the acrimony, lunacy and danger of the early Covid-19 pandemic might want to watch a few hours of Monday’s hearing of the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Kent Sepkowitz – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer CenterMembers spent much of the day questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, among many other government roles, former chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden on Covid-19. The subcommittee previously had grilled Fauci during two days of closed-door testimony in January.In their announcement for the hearing, the Republican majority made it clear that, rather than a standard after-action review to glean lessons learned as a means to inform the next public health crisis, their goal was to place Fauci once again onto the hot seat. As the subcommittee chairman, Dr. Brad Wenstrup, who is a podiatrist, said, the hearing was intended, among other things, to review Fauci “promoting singular, questionable narratives about the origins of Covid-19.”During the long and exasperating hearing (I watched more than 3 hours), Republicans seemed hellbent on connecting US support of virus research that began in the Obama administration with the origin of the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci was peppered repeatedly by questions that tried to hint at a supposedly nefarious role played by the US and/or Fauci himself. The still unsettled back story of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) apparently is viewed as a promising topic for political gain.Many articles already have been written and arguments posited on this issue. In one corner is the group who, like me, regard the pandemic as another natural occurrence resulting from standard-issue gene swapping across animals and people — back and forth until, accidentally, a really bad strain of the virus is unintentionally created.The other argument, which admittedly has an irresistible James Bond feel if much less credibility, views the virus as a man-made construct. Maybe the bad guys (the Chinese, in this movie script) with evil intention somehow deliberately hit a jackpot of evilness by creating a modern doomsday virus. For this theory there are two sub-versions: one where the bad guys were just being bad and did a bad thing, and the other where US funds were part of the evil plan as the money was used (advertently or inadvertently) to kickstart the entire evil program back in 2014 and 2015.Most of the hearing was spent trying to link the pandemic’s origin to a small National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant given to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which, as planned, gave the funds to the Wuhan lab to study coronaviruses in bats. No one contests that this occurred. The plot thickens (or, in my view, thins) when genetic fingerprint evidence is rolled out.The Republicans seem convinced that the grant advertently or inadvertently led to the doomsday virus by supporting “ga …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
