© Sputnik / Alexey DanichevFILE PHOTO
The Kansas City-born, New York-based Metzl, who served as Deputy Staff Director of the Foreign Relations Committee under then Senator Joe Biden (2001-2003) and before that on the National Security Council (1997-99) and the State Department (1999-01) under President Bill Clinton), theorizes it was most likely an accidental lab leak in Wuhan.
"There's no irrefutable evidence," said Metzl, who was appointed to the WHO's expert advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019 and is also the author of Hacking Darwin.
© Jamie Metzl/Postmedia files Photo by Files /PostmediaJamie Metzl
We caught up with Metzl down the line from San Miguel de Allende:
Jamie Metzl/Postmedia files Photo by Files /Postmedia
What about the original theory that this all started in a wet market in Wuhan?
That was a lie. And the Chinese government knew very early on that that was a lie. And so in the face of overwhelming evidence in May of last year, the Chinese government shifted its position.
Do you get the idea of scary viruses being created in a lab may seem a little sci-fi?
It may feel like sci-fi to people but what's happening is sci. There is a field of study called "gain of function" research, which is highly controversial in which some scientists amplify the virility of viruses. We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in gain of function research on bat coronaviruses.
Comment: And the US was in part funding that research: Project G-2101: Pentagon biolab discovered MERS and SARS-like coronaviruses in bats
Is it because this specifically started in China that we still don't know how COVID-19 started?
If there had been an outbreak in Congo or some country in Africa and that country, in the earliest days of the pandemic, prevented World Health Organization investigators from going onto the scene of the outbreak, for nearly a month, the world would have gone berserk.
Comment: Coronavirus was already in multiple countries, China was just the first to sound the alarm: Chinese Govt: 'Covid-19 began as multiple separate outbreaks globally, we were just the first to report'
Will a change of the U.S. administration help find an answer?
Biden will be tougher on China than President Trump because President Biden is very smart and strategic and he understands that American power and American strength doesn't rest on bluster, it rests on principles, it rests on partnerships, and alliances and accountability. And the Trump administration unfortunately gave China a pass by over politicizing the question of the origin of the virus by alienating America's partners and allies.
Until that's been purified and proven, all this is just mental masturbation.