On February 10, Scowcroft Strategy Initiative Nonresident Senior Fellow Jamie Metzl appeared on Fox News to discuss the need for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus. He asserts that the noncompliance of the Chinese government is cause for worry, and further investigation is the best means to prepare for – or even stop – a future pandemic. Metzl stresses that this is a bipartisan issue that has seen agreement and consensus among members of both sides of the aisle. He also notes the lack of transparency on the part of the NIH in the work they were minimally funding in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
We still don’t have the kind of comprehensive investigation into pandemic origins that we need. Congress needs to push it. Certainly, the biggest challenge is the Chinese government, which is doing everything possible to prevent an investigation, but that doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands… If we don’t learn the lessons of this one, we’ll be facing something much worse in the future.
