As journalists and government agencies continue to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears increasingly likely that the novel coronavirus was unleashed, inadvertently or not, by a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, where dangerous "gain of function" research was being done on bat coronaviruses of the COVID-19 variety.

However, the potential scandal is magnified by the fact that the Chinese were not conducting these dangerous experiments on their own; much of the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs was being advocated, defended, and funded by the leadership of the United States National Institutes of Health and the United States Agency for International Development, in coordination with the World Health Organization and various U.S. universities and institutes.

If it is ultimately proven true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology unleashed the novel coronavirus upon the world, then not only China, but the United States and the global health establishment as well will be implicated in the worst socioeconomic and political crisis of the 21st century, a pandemic that has now taken the lives of over 400,000 people and has wreaked havoc on the global economy.