ThePrint and its Editor Shekhar Gupta must be given credit for being among the earliest anywhere in the world to create a full-length video covering journalist Nicholas Wade’s lab-leak thesis on the origins of Covid. Let us look at the story now given the astonishing “non-testimony” of the famous, or infamous, Dr Anthony Fauci. After all, the former top US pandemic adviser refused to answer questions 111 times at a Senate hearing last week.
As early as February 2020, The Lancet, a British journal considered one of the finest medical journals in the world, published a letter signed by 27 “reputed” scientists asserting emphatically that “scientists overwhelmingly conclude” that Covid had a wildlife origin. The letter went on to deride and condemn “conspiracy theories” that suggested a non-natural origin. In other words, those who even whispered about a possible lab leak were nut cases.Within a month of the first Lancet letter, in March 2020, Nature Medicine, another prestigious journal, published an article on Covid origins. Since this was a proper article, Nature Medicine could not hide behind the fig leaf available to The Lancet, which had published a letter. It was duty-bound to conduct due diligence and have the article scrutinised by independent reviewers if its editors were following the basic protocols of scientific journals. The article argued that the Covid virus was not a laboratory construct and that a lab-based scenario was not plausible.
