Thread by @VanityFair

Throughout 2020, the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab was off-limits, scorned by experts and tainted by Donald Trump’s xenophobia.

But those who dared to fight for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark. vntyfr.com/gNKxaCp

In 2017, a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research—experiments meant to make pathogens more infectious—was lifted. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has received U.S. grant money via an intermediary.

By late 2020, a small group within the State Department was investigating the WIV. Classified intelligence suggested that several researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill the autumn before the outbreak was known to have started.

Along with these revelations came another: Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the initial Lancet statement rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—including the WIV.

In January 2021, 13 international experts—including Daszak—paid one visit to the WIV alongside 17 Chinese experts and an entourage of government minders. Its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences had been taken offline without explanation.

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis, but it should now be possible to reject the xenophobia sown by Trump and still ask why, of all places, the outbreak began in the city with a laboratory doing some of the world’s most extensive research on bat viruses.

A months-long V.F. investigation. Interviews with more than 40 people. A review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, memos, and emails.

Read the full report from @KatherineEban: vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/t…