In the leadup to the November election, then-President Donald Trump ramped up the volume and sharpness of his attacks on China as the source of the coronavirus pandemic, derisively labeling it the "China virus" and repeating speculation about a government lab in Wuhan as the place where the global nightmare began. Trump never provided substantiation, and the public didn't buy his wild assertions about the lab, mainly because his antics came in the context of an election campaign in which his main goal was to distract Americans from his own miserable pandemic-response record.

The media openly challenged Trump's assertions about the lab. Had he presented even a reasonable measure of proof, that would've been a different story. New reporting, however, adds enough cause for concern about the pandemic's potential origins that the entire lab issue deserves thorough reexamination — and it's not just because President Joe Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to take a closer look. Considering the magnitude of deaths and disruption this pandemic has caused, the world needs to know with certainty how, where and why it started so the next global outbreak can be prevented.

The goal must not be to assign blame and punish those responsible. No individual or government could possibly compensate the world for the death and damages this catastrophe has inflicted. Negligence abounded, including by Trump himself. But that's not the point. Neither he nor China can ease the sorrow or bring back the dead. The only mission now is halting the next pandemic, whether it's another coronavirus, swine flu or ebola.

The most likely answer this time is that the 2019 coronavirus mutated naturally from animals and found a fertile host in humans. But unanswered questions surrounding the Wuhan lab deserve deeper investigation to ensure negligent procedures are corrected.

Top infectious-disease experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical adviser, say it's time to look into what was happening at the lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the coronavirus began to spread. It's been long confirmed that scientists in the lab were working on coronaviruses in the fall of 2019.

According to a U.S. intelligence report cited by The Wall Street Journal, three researchers in the lab were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19. It is, however, entirely possible they had the flu or some other ailment. The timing is crucial because the first known cases of the virus at the point of origin in Wuhan were not reported to the World Health Organization until late the following December, after which the disease spread globally, ultimately infecting more than 168 million and killing nearly 3.5 million.

"The historical basis for pandemics evolving naturally from an animal reservoir is extremely strong. And it's for that reason that we felt that something similar like this has a much higher likelihood," Fauci told a Senate panel on Wednesday. "No one knows, not even I, 100% at this point. Which is the reason why we are in favor of further investigation."

Biden agrees and has ordered the U.S. intelligence community to provide answers leading toward a "definitive conclusion" within the next 90 days.

That'll be a tough goal to meet, largely because China has refused to cooperate with international investigations and has even gone so far as to counter that the pandemic originated in the United States, not China. Efforts to gain China's cooperation cannot have been helped by Trump's repeated taunting and humiliating public attacks throughout 2020.

His attacks, in turn, spurred Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in April 2020 to file a bizarre lawsuit against the Chinese Communist Party, alleging that the party suppressed information, arrested whistleblowers and downplayed how contagious the coronavirus actually was. The lawsuit cited a New York Times story that nearly 175,000 people left Wuhan on Jan. 1, 2020, even though China knew at the time that the virus was spreading rapidly across the city. As if to emphasize the preelection posturing of Schmitt's action, as opposed to a genuine desire to get answers, he didn't get around to serving the lawsuit to the Communist Party, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences until May 18 — more than a year later.

Not to be outdone, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley launched his own series of attacks on China. Other Republicans jumped onto that bandwagon, just in time to milk it for maximum political advantage ahead of the November 2020 elections.

Sure, their antics made for great campaign fodder, but the effect was to foreclose any possibility of winning China's cooperation. And that's where the real damage has been done.

Certainly, Trump's crash program to develop vaccines ultimately proved to be the force that reversed America's catastrophic death toll and spurred its recovery. Had he spent as much time focusing on masking-up his own nation instead of attacking China and encouraging Republican defiance of precautionary measures, hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved before vaccines came available. And the world might have been far closer to an answer on how the pandemic began.

It's time to calm down and depoliticize this effort as much as possible, casting this new intelligence investigation as one aimed at helping the world prevent the next pandemic or, at least, minimize the damage a new outbreak might cause. The lawsuits and breathless political rhetoric can only help ensure China's stubborn resistance. And without China's cooperation, definitive answers almost certainly will not be forthcoming.

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