On Monday, the White House announced that there is no consensus in the Biden administration on whether COVID-19 jumped from a virus lab leak in China or was the result of a jump from

another

kind to man.

The announcement was prompted by a Wall Street Journal report that the Department of Energy, one of several federal entities in the intelligence community that has looked into the origins of the virus, had little confidence that

T

The pandemic then started a new coronavirus

escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some proclaimed this as evidence that the virus was a Chinese leak. But other parts of the intelligence community disagree.

However, according to a 2021 declassified assessment by the Director of National Intelligence, there are areas of agreement among the agencies investigating the origins of COVID:

The first cluster of COVID-19 cases emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The virus was not developed as a biological weapon and

it probably wasn’t

genetically modified. Chinese officials knew nothing about the virus before the pandemic broke out. And no one can say with a high

degree of certainty whether the virus was the result of animal-to-human transmission or a terribly unfortunate laboratory incident.

Was a laboratory worker in a high-security environment accidentally infected while collecting unknown animal specimens? Or is it more likely that infection has occurred among the many people who have frequent, natural contact with animal hunters, farmers, merchants?

Bottom line: We may never have a definitive answer to the virus

S

Beijing has (mostly) refused to cooperate with the world scientific community. It has resisted information sharing and has blamed other countries for the outbreak, including the United States.

As a regular old citizen, I can live with the uncertainty. We know that accidents will happen in the lab from time to time because people and their safety systems are fallible. We also know that diseases can jump between animals and humans, such as plague, rabies, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, to name a few.

I reserve my anger for the way the administration under former President Trump botched its response to the disease, the way some conservative ideologues continue to propagate bogus theories, reject proven science about the effectiveness of masks and vaccines, and in general experts like Anthony Fauci demonize, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who devoted a long career to protecting the health and lives of his fellow Americans.

Experts warned for years that the world was too late for another pandemic. In 2019, the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” included this admonition: “The United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next influenza pandemic or large-scale outbreak of an infectious disease that could lead to massive death rates and disability, have dire consequences to the global economy, straining international resources and appealing to the United States for increased support.

Instead of a coordinated response, confusion and conflicting prohibitions reigned, fueled by a US president who took too long to admit the obvious, shot from the hip and seemed to see the pandemic as a personal enemy to fight. overcome with bold, nonsensical statements.

Trump

took advantage of scientific uncertainty about the new virus and, fearing to be seen as a failure, gagged by the government’s top scientists and then tried to scapegoat them.

Did some health officials overreact?

In hindsight yes

but not out of incompetence or malice.

Fauci, who changed his mind about masks, has likened fighting a new disease to the fog of war. In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last year, he explained his changing outlook: It was really the evolution of science. Once it became clear that there was no shortage of masks, that asymptomatic infections were common and that the virus spread through inhaled particles or aerosols, Fauci urged people to cover their faces. Do the Republicans want to investigate him for this? Give me a break.

These ongoing and ridiculous debates about masking are just another symptom of our political dysfunction. People without any background in science or medicine decided they were experts on whether masks and mask mandates were effective. Or, horrors, an invasion of American liberty. It cost

Than-

President Trump

seven months

to wear a face mask in public, because in his crooked look, masking was a sign of weakness.

Of course, masks are effective in preventing disease transmission. Would you choose to have surgery in an operating room full of bare-faced doctors and nurses?

Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens announced that a new meta-study on masking concluded that mask mandates were a bust. The mainstream experts and experts who supported mandates were wrong. Masking, he admitted, should always be a personal choice, not a requirement.

Not so fast, my colleague Michael Hiltzik wrote, accusing Stephens of not actually reading the study he cited. The two studies in the meta-analysis that actually measured the effect of mask mandates in the COVID-19 pandemic, from Bangladesh and Denmark, Hiltzik wrote, showed that mask mandates reduced infections and the spread of the virus, contrary to a conclusion that they did nothing.

One thing we can all agree on (I pray) is that vaccines are more effective than masks in preventing serious illness and death. But I dare say there’s a big overlap, Venn diagram, of people refusing to put on masks and those refusing to get vaccinated.

For the latter, especially if they’ve had COVID,

at least some of their skepticism has recently been bolstered by research

.

A meta-study published in The Lancet found that natural immunity after COVID-19 infection can be just as protective as vaccines. It has taken almost three years

substantial

confirm the claim, although it is still unclear exactly how long the protection will last. (

It will eventually wear off, so you still need to take the vaccine.) Early on,

experts

natural immunity downplayed because

there was no hard evidence for it. Now there is.

I will always place more trust in health experts, vaccine developers and doctors than in politicians and right-wing cable TV hosts. When it comes to COVID

origin,

prevention and treatment, we didn’t know much at first, and now we know a lot. That’s how science works, folks.

@AbcarianLAT