For more than 15 months, the loudest voices on Earth worked very hard to distance Covid-19 from China’s only Level-4 Bio-Safety Lab in Wuhan. It turns out the actual distance between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the area’s “wet market” – where local authorities reported that the outbreak began -- is roughly 23 kilometers.

In fact, in spite of China christening the lab in 2017 to literally research the world’s most dangerous pathogens – including bat-derived coronaviruses like SARS-1 – the global media machine quickly tamped down any suggestion – from the few voices asking questions – that the lab might need to be investigated on the grounds of public health concern or that the virus had come from anywhere besides the wet market.