We'll never know the full truth about COVID-19 origins. Political infighting won't help.

With recent revelations about the Department of Energy now saying that COVID-19 most likely came from a lab leak, and Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and their own version of the COVID-19 select committee, the raging debate about COVID origins has come back to the forefront.

This is a debate that stirs emotions like few other aspects of the pandemic. The truth is, we never will know the full truth about the origins of a virus that has killed millions, decimated a global economy, and set children’s education and development back – and that’s exactly the problem.

From the very beginnings of this once-in-a-century pandemic, China's rulers have demonstrated a stunning lack of transparency regarding what they knew about the virus – from its likely origins to its symptoms to how it was being spread.

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This lack of transparency has caused irreparable planetary harm, and yet the World Health Organization still hasn’t shown itself willing to hold China to account, or to put in place measures to ensure that we have the necessary sharing of critical information when inevitable crises occur in the future.

In other words, we remain just as vulnerable now as we were in December 2019.

Political infighting leaves U.S. vulnerable

Here in the United States we aren’t focused on China, or the WHO.

We still are fighting over whether all problems related to the pandemic should be blamed on Donald Trump or Tony Fauci. According to one narrative, a virus such as COVID-19 was an inevitable occurrence – especially with China’s further unwillingness to adequately address safety in wet markets – so we should be focusing not on China, but on the Trump administration’s poor handling of the response.

The competing narrative is that Fauci’s master plan – a plan that took 50 years of government service to enact – was to covertly fund risky Chinese research activities so that he could get financial kickbacks.

Neither of these theories is true. The pandemic wasn’t inevitable, nor do administration policies or consequent mortality suggest one administration handled the response substantially better than the other, and Fauci’s retirement plan wasn’t predicated on funding shady Chinese research. Unfortunately, both a prior Democratic House and now seemingly a Republican-controlled one will spend an inordinate amount of time exploring these politically motivated theories.

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This theater is great for cable news talk shows and will advance many a politician’s careers, but it comes at the expense of addressing the real issue at hand. The simple truth is that with the degree of global travel and commerce we now have, we can no longer rely on outbreaks occurring on the other side of the world to stay local and eventually burn out.

We have to assume that any disease is no farther away from our front doorstep than our next Amazon.com purchase – and we need the same transparency from China and other global partners when outbreaks occur that we get when tracking our online orders.

We need global solutions for global pandemics

Whether COVID-19 came from a lab leak or a naturally occurring animal mutation is almost certainly an unknowable answer. Chinese leaders will never give us access to the information necessary to confirm either theory one way or the other, and the WHO so far seems completely unwilling to take measures that would compel them to do so.

Unfortunately, we are all also as culpable as either China or the WHO, as long as we continue to pretend that this is all about Trump or Fauci, and fail to address the knowable and alterable causes of pandemic spread – a lack of timely information about a deadly and planet-changing virus.

Instead of circling the wagons and shooting inward, we need Congress and the news media to pay attention to the real threat in regards to future pandemics. The real threat doesn’t come from a lab or from Mar-a-Lago but is instead a deadly virus allowed to proliferate and spread unchecked, because we have no plan or system in place to compel the timely sharing of information necessary to mount an adequate response.

Let's hope future congressional hearings will spend at least a modicum of time discussing this.

Dr. Jerome Adams, a former U.S. surgeon general, is a distinguished professor and executive director of health equity initiatives at Purdue University and a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lab leak? COVID origin story won't solve China's lack of transparency