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The deadline set by the Covid Origin Act of 2023 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text) to release names, symptoms, hospital visits, and roles of WIV researchers who had Covid-like symptoms in fall 2019 has come and gone. A Google News search for "Covid Origin Act" results in a single article released over the weekend:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/covid-was-not-developed-as-a-bioweapon-dni-finds/
This source is not mainstream. It suggests that the legally mandated report has been released, but puts a spin on the results of the report (Covid not likely an intentional bioweapon) without revealing the full text. Most importantly, it doesn't name any of the names that the Act required. So I went to the website of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Crickets. Twitter? There has been a post, but it is about Juneteenth.
Edit: I suppose it is possible that the DNI has made their mandated report to Congress, and that no congresspeople have leaked it yet. In which case one would expect articles in a few hours to days?
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right. I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.
It looks as though that article has since been taken down, or at least the link doesn't work for me. I think it was almost inevitable that the lab leak or other non-natural origin theory for covid would become right-coded because it strikes at several key aspects of modern liberal orthodoxy: believing in the credibility and good intentions of technocratic experts, believing in "science," assuming the best of non-western foreigners for fear of being labeled racist, and more fundamentally the conceit that modern technological advances and research are the solution to our problems rather than a potential cause of them.
It would be one thing if covid turned out to be a nothingburger, and back in early January 2020 when we didn't expect it to spread worldwide it was more or less the consensus among biological researchers I knew that it was a lab leak, but given where it ended up it's simply a bridge too far nowadays for many of them to admit that the system could have failed so catastrophically (although as far as I can tell many of them still privately believe it; they just either think the public couldn't handle the truth or they are afraid of speaking out). Considering that even the 1977 Russian Flu has not been conclusively accepted as a lab leak by the general public I doubt we will ever get closure on this issue.
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
The main issue here is cost. No funding agency would ever agree to build a BSL-4 facility on a remote island when the cost of upgrading a lab at an existing research institution is so much lower unless there was sufficient public and internal pressure to do so. The only options for gain of function research that have been widely discussed are either no restrictions or a complete moratorium like the one between 2014 and 2017 in the US, and pretty much all debate among biologists is between those two positions alone.
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