Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

For The New York Times, which started this whole fiasco dating from Feb. 27, 2020, with a podcast designed to drum up disease panic, it’s been a drip, drip, drip of truthiness ever since.

A fortnight ago, the paper finally decided to report on vaccine injury from shots that vast majorities never needed and that stop neither infection nor transmission. And now, as of June 3, we have as decisive an article as one can imagine that shows that “a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.”

“Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them,” the article reads.

“Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.”

The author is scientist Alina Chan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For purposes of documentation, let’s go through the points she makes.

1. The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the Chinese city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

2. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

3. The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

4. The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

5. Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

Keep in mind that people saying exactly this from the very outset of the crisis were censored by social media at the behest of government agencies. Media personalities ridiculed this view. It was called a wild conspiracy theory, unworthy of any respectable and responsible person. This went on for three years, with brutal results. People lost large channels and social media followers and accounts. This ruined whole livelihoods.

Now, here we are four years later, and we have the paper of record willing to admit that it was true all along.

Yes, it is infuriating.

Why does this matter? Because it is the turning point in the history of modern civilization. All the top public health officials had suspicions of this from the very outset. We know this from their own writings.

Instead of opening a clear and open investigation, they pursued a different path: Deny the leak, roll out the supposed antidote (vaccine), use experimental technology, and lock down the world’s population to stop the spread so that the vaccine would get the credit for ending the pandemic.

That’s the summary of what happened, based on my four years of research into this. In other words, to deflect blame, these people hatched an audacious plot to wreck rights and liberties the world over, in a futile attempt to prohibit natural exposure from ending the pathogenic wave (as always happened before). Instead, they would use the crisis to shove through approval of a technology that had never before received regulatory approval.

This explains the disparagement of natural immunity, the absence of seroprevalence tests, the removal of repurposed generics from the market that could have helped people, the rise of censorship of any dissident scientists, and the complete absence of any serious research into early spread in the last quarter of 2019. It’s quite simply an astonishing plot of immense importance to the whole of the world, all stemming from an attempt to cover up a lab leak.

That’s why the topic is important. This is not just a technical point. It is the first chapter of a wild and seemingly fictional novel of apocalyptic implications. The House subcommittee now investigating the public health response is barely scratching the surface in public, but behind the scenes, there is plenty of knowledge among investigators that there is much more going on.

Here’s the key point. The national media does not want this discussed. The agencies don’t want this investigated. The tech companies that censored people all along do not want this considered. The Democrats certainly don’t want this subject pursued. Many Republicans don’t want to examine this in any detail.

There is only one force at work that is pushing any of this forward, and that is public opinion, which, in turn, is fed by the handful of writers, researchers, scientists, moms, and many other grassroots people who correctly refuse to let this go.

This is the only reason these hearings are happening. It is the only path to getting the truth.

Of this, I’m thoroughly convinced. If we think the American people have already lost trust in public health and government, we haven’t seen anything yet. Once the whole story is out in the open, and we are headed in this direction, we’ll see a collapse without precedent.

The timeline is going far too slowly. There is no excuse for why we are only getting clarity on the basics fully four years later. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no basis for approving any more funding for these agencies or biodefense research and no basis for approving any new treaties or agreements from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Let’s not forget that it was the WHO that pushed hard for the world to copy the Chinese Communist Party in its crazy virus-control methods of violating human rights on a scale that should never have been tolerated in the West. And yet based on that advice, the United States, the UK, the European Union, and nearly every nation in the world adopted these policies, in contradiction to all laws and human rights.

Out of nowhere, our Constitution and Bill of Rights were overridden by bureaucracies about which most Americans knew absolutely nothing.

It boggles the mind that this happened, and we are still paying an egregious price in terms of inflation, learning loss, excess death, collapse of public health, expansion of government, pervasive censorship, and much more.

It felt like martial law at the time, and it is not clear that this ever went away. We absolutely must know the truth. More than that, we need to repudiate every bit of the COVID-19 response, including the mandates to get a vaccine that was, in fact, never proven to be safe or effective.

So yes, it matters that this virus likely leaked from a U.S.-funded lab. That was the beginning of the story. There is much more to it.