Wanted: A thorough investigation of the pandemic's origin

WHILE experts have come out in public proclaiming it "unlikely" that the Covid-19 pandemic resulted from a leak in the functions or procedures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the laboratory leak hypothesis on the pandemic has lingered because of the experience of frontliners getting infected from sheer constant exposure to the virus. Might not WIV personnel have caught the virus and transmitted it to outsiders, whether or not they were hospitalized? Might not those personnel have been asymptomatic, hence the failure of American spies to find proof in hospital databases? It's too much of a coincidence that the pandemic originated from the city where the WIV is located.

While the same experts have dismissed the pandemic's resulting from the militaristic ambitions of an emerging superpower as the idle musings of conspiracy theorists, the behavior and pronouncements of China's current Supreme Leader, increasingly unconcerned about hiding his contempt for international law, are cause for worry. How much of a regard has he for, in particular, the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention (formally, the UN Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological [Biologic] and Toxic Weapons and on Their Destruction)? While the Wuhan Institute of Virology has established a reputation as an institution of scientific research, might the rise of Chairman Xi have occasioned a change in the work of this state agency leading to its weaponization, in whole or in part?