Whatever Happened to the Lab Leak Theory?

Shapers of public opinion and media news editors are at a loss, but Congress isn’t taking any chances.

Photo by Parastoo Maleki on Unsplash.

House of Representative Amendments titled, “Amendments to the labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies appropriations bill FY2023,” don’t normally get much attention in the news cycle.

Such documents are usually filled with bland legal language and near-incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon like, “On page 117, line 9, insert ‘IN GENERAL. — ’ after ‘(a)’,” and, “On page 43, in the paragraph beginning with, ‘Alcee L. Hastings’, in the last sentence, strike the word ‘tobacco’”.

Amendments, even short ones, are often very long. They frequently cover a wide range of issues, with scores of corrections, revisions and inclusions. House Appropriations Committee amendments make for interesting reading- for people who consider C-SPAN interesting.

Still, in the many committees of the House of Representatives is where the magic of democracy happens, or where the sausage gets made, depending on your perspective.

In important committees like Appropriations, the whys and wherefores and what ifs are abandoned eventually, if temporarily, for the more practical and workaday question: “How?”