Where’s the Democratic anger about COVID origins?

After President Joe Biden’s overseas meetings, the United States and G-7 countries agreed to support further investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nations called for a “timely, transparent, expert-led and science-based WHO-convened” investigation. That’s a problem. The U.S. and G-7 are going to rely on the World Health Organization after it released an investigation this year that Secretary of State Antony Blinken called “highly deficient” and others call a travesty? “Is that it?” asked The Wall Street Journal editorial page. “The world’s leaders want the same WHO that failed in its first COVID-19 origin study to do another one — this time with ... feeling?”

Here is a bigger question: Where is the Biden administration’s passion, its anger in pursuing the origins of COVID?

In 2016, Russia tried to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. There is no evidence the Russians ever touched any ballot, and there is no evidence their hacking and social media operations ever influenced any American’s vote. Yet the U.S. political, justice and media worlds became consumed for years with investigating Russia’s actions. Russia did not influence the election but succeeded spectacularly in setting off investigations.

Now, 600,000 Americans have died in a pandemic that began under suspicious circumstances in China and about which the Chinese government is stonewalling all meaningful investigation. 600,000 dead — that is a lot bigger than a few Russian Facebook ads in Wisconsin. And yet leading figures in the Biden administration and the Democratic Party seem to have far less zeal about pursuing the origins of COVID than they had in investigating what Russia did in the 2016 election.

It doesn’t make sense. Everyone involved agrees it is important to know the real origins of COVID. The Americans who want more investigation are not accusing China of deliberating loosing the virus on the world, but they do think there is persuasive evidence that it escaped into the human population as a result of an accidental leak during research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And they know that China has hidden the facts from the very beginning.

For months, many Democrats agreed with the international health establishment that there was nothing to the lab leak theory. Some in the media ridiculed or even suppressed the views of those who thought it was worth investigating. Now, after they have been forced to concede that a lab leak is at least a real possibility, they are doing the minimum to look into it. Under pressure from Republicans, Biden has directed the intelligence community to engage in a 90day review of an earlier, inconclusive look at COVID’s origins.

Some Republicans want much more. GOP Sen. Tom Cotton has been calling for a deeper investigation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Republican lawmakers will start a probe on their own. And some House Republicans are calling for sanctions against top Chinese officials in the way that the U.S. sanctioned individual Russians over election interference.

Why are the people who couldn’t get enough investigations of the 2016 Russia affair so relatively incurious about investigating the origins of a vastly more consequential disease?

The answer is Donald Trump. In 2017, there was agreement between Democrats and Republicans that Russia’s interference effort needed to be investigated. But then the investigate-Russia effort morphed into a get-Trump effort that failed to find TrumpRussia “collusion.”

Now there is a topic of enormous global importance. And the Biden administration is kinda, sorta pursuing an investigation. Does anyone doubt that it should be doing much more?