Lying liars and the COVID lies they foisted on us. That’s where I’m at right now with regard to the large, steaming pile of BS that has heretofore been the approved scientific narrative concerning the origins of COVID-19. I’ve previously written about the black eye that I thought that science was earning over its general decline, as evidenced by its particularly poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as I would have liked to have been wrong about this, it now appears as if there’s no chance that I am.
I’m a retired physicist. I have respected science since I was old enough to know what it was. I spent my life promoting science and standing up for its utility in solving many of the world’s problems, its fairness, and its dispassionate meritocracy. It’s a hard thing to see your life’s work sinking into the morass of a declining intellectual culture like a lead balloon on Jupiter. But here we are. I’m sad, but I’m much more angry. You don’t want to be the next person within arm’s reach to claim, for instance, that only a right-wing nut case believes the lab-leak hypothesis.
The reasons for the spectacular failure of science in dealing with the origins of COVID-19 aren’t overly difficult to discern. A critical mass of those involved in examining the origins of COVID-19 (and crafting our response to it) were either more concerned with ideology than science (woke), had extreme conflicts of interest, were incompetent or were too cowardly to challenge the developing orthodoxy. In some cases, all of the above.
I happen to have no use for any of these.
Last week, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag dropped a series of bombs on Public Substack concerning the origins of COVID-19. The “official” narrative concerning the origins of COVID-19 has been that it was the result of zoonotic spillover in a wet market in Wuhan, China — one that just happened to be a few kilometers from not one but two laboratories researching coronaviruses.
From the get-go, the problem with the zoonotic spillover hypothesis has been that coronaviruses, which originate in bats, are not transmitted directly to humans; an intermediary species is required. In this particular case, the intermediary was thought to be a pangolin. This is an entirely plausible idea with well-documented antecedents that merits consideration. The problem is that in the case of the coronavirus behind COVID-19, no intermediary species have been identified. In the absence of an intermediary, the zoonotic spillover hypothesis is no better than informed speculation.
Which leads us to the leading alternative hypothesis concerning the origins of the COVID pandemic: an accidental release from one of the nearby labs doing research on coronaviruses. In the absence of any evidence for the zoonotic spillover hypothesis, a lab accident is at least as good a hypothesis as zoonotic spillover. Probably better.
Although correlation is not causation, it’s a remarkable coincidence that in all of China, the COVID pandemic originated, inarguably, in a city, Wuhan, with several labs studying coronaviruses. It takes some willful ignorance to set this completely aside.
At least one of these Wuhan labs was doing “gain of function” research designed to make these pathogens more virulent in order to make them easier to study. These labs had notably poor biosecurity measures and had been asking the United States, the WHO, and others for help in upgrading their facilities. There are even photos circulating in Chinese media showing lab personnel handling pathogens in a spectacularly cavalier and unsafe manner.
I recommend that you read the pieces by Shellenberger et al. for the details. Suffice it to say that the preponderance of evidence now points to the lab leak hypothesis as the best explanation for the origin of COVID-19. We’ll know a lot more in another week or so when the U.S. government declassifies what it knows about all of this. I’d be surprised if it’s anything other than a rebuke of the zoonotic spillover hypothesis as the only game in town.
Back during the height of the pandemic, the zoonotic spillover hypothesis might as well have been handed straight to Moses from a burning bush. Anyone who dared question the prevailing narrative, regardless of qualifications, was labeled a tinfoil-hat-wearing kook, if not a racist. Facebook would label any posts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis as “disinformation,” based on the recommendations of at least one very conflicted fact checker, Danielle Anderson, a scientist who’d worked at one of the Wuhan labs in question and had made rounds in the media praising her Chinese colleagues.
All of this drove people like me crazy. For the first time in my life, the utopian nonsense behind the rejection of the lab-leak hypothesis made me feel as if I had a direct, visceral connection to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. The “experts” behind the absolute rejection of the lag-leak hypothesis were either dishonest, conflicted, or incompetent, but that made absolutely no difference to the media or their enablers in government. It was their way or the highway. Nothing was going to get in the way of their preferred narrative.
Perhaps the thing that got me the most in all of the BS flying around concerning the origins of the pandemic was Anthony Fauci’s denial of involvement in “gain of function” research. Fauci’s denials relied on a very lawyerly interpretation of what gain of function research means. It’s somewhat akin to me claiming that gravity doesn’t work because masses attract one another in a Newtonian manner; it works because of a potential gradient in spacetime.
This is pure sophistry, a technique known as “baffling with BS,” and it’s done to play pedestrians as suckers.
I suspect that in a week or so, some of these folks are going to have some ‘splaining to do. It now appears that the data not only supports the lab-leak hypothesis but that it has all along, and that many of those shouting the lab-leak hypothesis down as a MAGA fantasy knew this while they were shouting it down.
The “science” behind all of this, as it turns out, wasn’t much science at all; it was woke ideology, a problem that is becoming more prominent as wokeness continues its march to invade science. It’s now abundantly clear that a lot of those who should have known better about all of this either did not or were too cowardly to act. Neither of these is good; you decide which is worse.
Millions died of COVID-19 or related illnesses during a pandemic that now appears to have been caused by poor handling of pathogens in a Chinese laboratory funded, in part, by our own government. A few of these people were good friends of mine, and it appears that more honesty up front might have prevented their deaths.
What I want to know now is: who’s going to face the music first? I’ll bring the tar; you bring the feathers.
(8) comments
Martin, sorry to inform you that you had no friends then, now, or in the future. Mainly because you are woke.
These leftists goons still can't admit that the vaccines don't work and never did. I would put
My immune system up against six shot booster boys immune system......any day. Wait until Fauci
Releases the new improved corona virus....you
People are screwed.
"Millions died of COVID-19 or related illnesses during a pandemic ... and it appears that more honesty up front might have prevented their deaths."
I'm sorry that you lost friends to COVID-19, but it's not clear to me how honesty regarding its ORIGINS would have saved lives here or elsewhere. By the time the virus left China, it was what it was and its origins were irrelevant. Unless of course, the Wuhan lab from where it escaped had data that could have shortened the time it took to develop a vaccine and this data was not shared by the Chinese government in order to avoid admitting that the virus originated in one of the Wuhan labs.
What I do know is that the American-Asian community took a lot of grief--to put it mildly--over COVID-19 simply because the virus originated in China. How much worse would this have been, do you think, if it is truly the case that the virus originated in a Chinese lab and the U.S. government had not played down this possibility during the pandemic?
I think one can only hope that if it turns out that COVID-19 did originate in a Chinese lab, and convincing evidence comes to light that this was the case, the Asian-American community does not suffer from the truth because the pandemic is now over.
It surely would have helped if the politically driven Lysenko-style “science” did not also quash scientific investigation of the various off label drugs that had shown efficacy in stopping the infections when administered early on.
Yes because when Americans are dying of the Kung flu, our first priority is Chinese American
Feelings.
I'll go one further......Fauci brought a sample back
From Wuhan in his pocket because the military wanted it for it's biological weapons arsenal. And then it was purposely released in order to bring down Trump with the millions of mailed unsolicited ballots scam and to control the masses and keep them home. Our carbon footprint went down during the pandemic. And the commiecrats in the deep state also wanted to thin out the population of elderly to ease the burden on Social Security. And what do you know.....their plot worked like a dream.
Then trump lost the election, tried to overthrow the government, was impeached, stole documents, obstructed justice, was successfully sued for sexual abuse, sued for defamation and charged with fraud for paying off a porn star. But don't ever let the true story inform you.
Your next President you leftist loser.
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In