Mick Hartley

At the time of the Covid outbreak, Trump blamed China. "The China plague", he called it. This was so shocking that decent-minded people everywhere went out of their way to go easy on China's culpability, and never to mention the lab-leak hypothesis except as the province of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.

Now:

The CIA now believes it is more likely that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak rather than emerging from nature, a spokesman said.

The question of the source of the virus that has killed more than seven million people is politically charged and China has repeatedly denied responsibility.

For years the CIA said it could not definitively say what Covid’s origins were but the spy agency has now shifted that assessment while stressing the finding was “low confidence”.

“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a spokesman said in a statement on Saturday….

In his first interview since being confirmed by the Senate as the new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe said one of his first priorities was for the agency to make a public declaration on its assessment of the origins of Covid.

“That’s a day one thing for me,” he told Breitbart. “I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictate that the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Also:

The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would halt federal funding, at least temporarily, for a risky and controversial kind of research into viruses that makes the pathogens more dangerous or contagious.

The goal of the order would be to stop scientists with U.S. funding from conducting “gain-of-function” research on viruses that could endanger human health, people familiar with the plans said….

Some Republicans have blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on gain-of-function research. Defenders say it helps scientists assess the potential of pathogens to infect humans and find ways to combat them.

President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has expressed support for a pause on the research.

Doesn't seem such a bad idea – considering, you know, that it's quite possible that earlier “gain-of-function” research on viruses shut the world down and caused the death of some 7 million people.