We Must Not Let China Plead the Fifth on Covid’s Origin

By Jianli Yang

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Anthony Fauci was back in the hot seat last week. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) once again sparred with the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) over the origins of Covid-19, while newly released materials — including Fauci’s personal notes and diary entries made public through congressional investigations — provided fresh fuel for accusations surrounding Fauci’s role in directing the country’s response to the pandemic.

 

I have little interest in the political theater surrounding a renewed Fauci drama. What concerns me is something far more consequential. Covid-19 caused an estimated 28 million excess deaths worldwide, shattered hundreds of millions of lives, and inflicted economic damage measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. Yet more than six years after the pandemic’s onset, remarkably little progress has been made toward discovering the virus’s true origin.

 

That failure should disturb anyone who cares about preventing the next pandemic. Unfortunately, the American debate has been focused on the wrong battles.

 

There are two principal hypotheses regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The first is that the virus emerged naturally and spread naturally into the human population. The second is that it escaped from a laboratory. But even that second hypothesis contains two distinct possibilities that are too often conflated. One possibility is that a naturally occurring virus was being collected, stored, or studied in a laboratory and accidentally escaped. We have historical precedent for this: In 2004, the SARS coronavirus escaped from a laboratory operated by China’s Center for Disease Control in Beijing. The other possibility is that the virus resulted from laboratory manipulation, including gain-of-function (GoF) research, before leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

These distinctions matter.

 

Even if scientists eventually establish that SARS-CoV-2 originated in nature, that would not eliminate the possibility of a laboratory accident. A naturally occurring virus can still escape from a laboratory. By contrast, if convincing evidence were ever produced that the virus had been artificially engineered, then laboratory leakage would no longer be merely one possibility — it would become the only plausible explanation, because nature does not manufacture laboratory-designed viruses.

 

This is where the United States enters the story. Did NIAID, under Fauci’s leadership, provide funding through EcoHealth Alliance that ultimately supported gain-of-function-related research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

 

If the answer is yes, and if future evidence were to establish that Covid-19 resulted from an engineered virus leaking from that laboratory, then American institutions — including the National Institutes of Health, NIAID, and their leadership — would inevitably bear part of the responsibility.

 

China’s refusal to cooperate makes it extraordinarily difficult for the United States to determine conclusively whether the virus was engineered in Wuhan. But determining whether American agencies funded or collaborated on research that crossed into gain-of-function territory is largely within America’s own power. Why, after more than six years, does this question remain unresolved?

 

That is precisely the investigation America should have undertaken thoroughly and transparently. Instead, Wednesday’s hearing seemed designed less to resolve these substantive questions than to produce another round of made-for-television partisan combat. If Congress truly wishes to advance the search for Covid’s origins, it should conduct a comprehensive, credible accounting of NIAID’s relationship with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Such an inquiry would not only clarify American accountability; it might also uncover critical evidence pointing toward the pandemic’s true source.

 

More importantly, the United States should be leading an international political and scientific campaign to compel genuine cooperation from Beijing. From the very beginning, the Chinese government violated both the spirit and the obligations of international public-health cooperation. Authorities suppressed whistleblowing doctors, silenced journalists, censored scientists, destroyed or restricted access to early data, refused independent access to crucial records, removed online databases, and tightly controlled every stage of the investigation. Every meaningful inquiry encountered political barriers erected by Beijing.

 

To borrow an American courtroom metaphor (indeed, one that Fauci himself displayed on repeat on Wednesday), Beijing has effectively “pleaded the Fifth” hundreds of times. The irony, of course, is that the Fifth Amendment exists to protect constitutional rights. Beijing has transformed it into a governing philosophy.

 

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the entire Covid-origin investigation is how unserious the international community ultimately became. The so-called joint World Health Organization–China investigation in early 2021 was less an investigation than a carefully choreographed diplomatic performance. Its most memorable conclusion — that transmission through imported frozen food was more likely than a laboratory leak — would have been hilarious had the stakes not involved millions of deaths.

 

The report quickly became a symbol of how political constraints can overwhelm scientific inquiry. At first, governments demanded answers. International organizations raised concerns. Scientists called for transparency. Then, gradually, the voices faded. Congress largely moved on. Successive American administrations shifted priorities. Scientific institutions turned their attention elsewhere. The WHO continued requesting information but lacked meaningful leverage. The United Nations General Assembly, pandemic-related international meetings, the G-7, the G-20, NATO, the European Union, and numerous multilateral forums quietly allowed the issue to drift into the background.

 

It is as though Covid’s origins became the world’s forgotten cold case. One almost gets the impression that the international community collectively granted Beijing the same kind of pardon President Biden granted Anthony Fauci.

 

Still, the most curious question is not whether China obstructed investigations. It clearly did. The real mystery is why so much of the world eventually accepted that obstruction.

 

One overlooked fact deserves greater attention. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a nationwide scientific mobilization on Covid origins in early January 2020, shortly after the outbreak became apparent. Beijing rapidly directed enormous state resources toward investigating the virus while simultaneously tightening political control over information related to the outbreak. Around the same period, Major General Chen Wei, China’s leading military virologist from the People’s Liberation Army, assumed a central role in Wuhan’s pandemic response and in work involving high-security laboratories.

 

Xi’s urgency was entirely understandable. At that moment, perhaps no one on Earth had a greater incentive to know the truth than China’s supreme leader. Until he understood where the virus came from, Xi could not know whether China faced another biological threat, whether military laboratories had experienced a catastrophic accident, whether local officials had concealed vital information, or whether the political survival of his own government might eventually depend upon the answer. Every day without certainty would have been another day of strategic anxiety.

 

Now more than six years have passed. Given Xi’s extraordinary concentration of power, his obvious motivation to discover the truth, the immense resources of the Chinese state, and China’s world-class capabilities in virology and biotechnology, it strains credulity to believe that he still does not know far more about Covid’s origins than the rest of the world.

 

Knowing the truth, however, is not the same as revealing it. If the truth threatens the stability or legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, concealing that truth becomes a political imperative. If this analysis is correct, then Covid’s origins are no longer merely a scientific question — they are a geopolitical one.

 

If Senator Paul — and every American leader genuinely committed to uncovering the truth — truly wants answers, then the objective should not be to win another cable-news argument with Anthony Fauci. America has already spent years fighting theatrical, partisan, and deeply personal battles that generate headlines but very little knowledge.

 

The real challenge is building sustained domestic and international political will to make transparency on Covid origins an enduring priority in relations with Beijing. That means coordinating democratic allies, integrating origin transparency into broader diplomatic engagement, demanding continued access to evidence, supporting independent scientific investigations, protecting researchers from political intimidation, and refusing to let the issue quietly disappear simply because it has become inconvenient.

 

In short, stop giving Beijing a pardon. With all due respect to constitutional traditions, it is long past time to stop allowing the Chinese Communist Party to “plead the Fifth.” The victims of the greatest pandemic in a century deserve better than another Washington shouting match. They deserve the truth.