The Left Now Have Covid Goo All Over Their Faces! By James Reed
One of the nice things about the present frantic unravelling of the Covid-19 narrative, is that the Left are starting to get hammered. The Left had opted for the natural release hypothesis, since, I imagine, given their love for all things communist, like China, a lab release might not look so good on the CCP’s CV. But now, the flood gates are open!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/06/leftists-repent-over-lab-leak-farce/
“In May 2020, the ABC’s Media Watch host Paul Barry dedicated two programs to attacking the Australian’s Sharri Markson (then at the Daily Telegraph) for reporting intelligence analysis that pointed to the virus that unleashed a pandemic on the world having escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. He also had a snarl at Rowan Dean, the editor of The Spectator Australia who had the temerity to point out on Sky TV that everything pointed to a lab leak. Barry rubbished the idea because as he explained, ‘almost every virus expert had dismissed the lab escape theory’.
Barry was right that there was indeed a cosy cabal of establishment scientists branding anyone who didn’t denounce the possibility of a lab leak a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but he failed to notice that many had an obvious vested interest in maintaining this narrative. And he was not alone. Not since Dr Bert Evatt announced in 1955 that he knew there were no Soviet spies in Australia because the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, told him so, have the useful idiots of the Left been so eager to swallow communist lies. Yet over the last week, mainstream media commentators have spent their column inches and air time reflecting on how they got it all so wrong. At the Guardian, columnist Thomas Frank admitted that the Left had enjoyed the plague of Covid, punishing leaders like Trump who refused to bow to expertise. Frank has been shattered by the mere suggestion that the pandemic came from a ‘laboratory screw-up’ and confessed to ‘moral convulsions’ at the idea that science, not Trump, might be culpable. ‘Suddenly’, he writes, ‘the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to.’
Franks was horrified to learn just ‘in the last few weeks’ that lab leaks happen, they aren’t just a right-wing conspiracy; that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was conducting ‘gain of function’ research where pathogens are deliberately made more lethal or more transmissible; that the WIV was funded to do this research by various arms of the US government including the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, headed by the Left’s patron saint of Covid, Anthony Fauci; that those who were meant to investigate the origins of Covid, such as Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, had a massive conflict of interest in that they were also funding the WIV; that mainstream media covered up for China, the WIV, Fauci and friends, and social media censored anyone who told the truth.
Over at the Washington Post, columnist Megan McArdle was equally shaken, asking how people with signs in front of their house proclaiming that ‘science is real’ and who belonged to ‘the party of science’ had turned the spirit of inquiry into a religious dogma handed down by credentialed experts. Those who challenged articles of faith would be excommunicated as heretics, much like the Closed Brethren cast out a sinner, calling on the faithful to ‘withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition …’. McArdle mournfully observes that it seems that expert consensus was ‘somewhat illusory’ and it would have been well to remember scientists are sinners like the rest of us mortals, prone to groupthink and all the other vices to which the flesh is prey.
She wondered whether there were other policy areas where the Left has ‘confused scientists with “science”, value judgments with cold calculation, and a shaky elite consensus with hard scientific facts’.
The short answer is yes. Indeed, the worst is arguably still to come. It is one thing for the US to have funded dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but there is little doubt that China is to blame for the leak of the virus, for its lax lab standards, and for the cowardly cover up which together turned the virus into a global pandemic. The harder truth to bear is that the huge death toll in the West must be sheeted home to Western ‘experts’ who have lied repeatedly and unforgivably about the efficacy of early treatments.
This week, the Indian Bar Association served notice on Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation for deliberately ignoring and suppressing data regarding the effectiveness of ivermectin, to dissuade Indians from using it. Luckily, the Indian Council for Medical Research and the All India Institute of Medical Science refused to accept her advice and retained the use of the drug in India’s national guidelines. The results have been dramatic. In every state where ivermectin was adopted cases and deaths have plummeted. In Delhi, where ivermectin was adopted on April 20 cases plunged from 28,395 to 1,246 on May 30. In Tamil Nadu, the one state to ban ivermectin on the explicit instruction of the aptly-named socialist leader M.K. Stalin, cases have rocketed up from 10,986 to 27,936.
In Australia, his brother-in-arms Victorian premier ‘Stairman’ Dan, who leads his counterparts only in the amount he pays himself, hides in his bunker while Victorians are forced into their fourth lockdown, and ‘experts’ in the Therapeutic Goods Administration ignore the latest peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of ivermectin – overwhelmingly positive – published in May in the prestigious American Journal of Therapeutics. Meanwhile, a real expert like Wendy Hoy, professor of medicine at the University of Queensland, called this week for an end to the suppression of conversations about ivermectin and for its immediate use in trials for Covid prevention and treatment in Victoria. But nobody listens.
None of this is news to readers of these pages. I started reporting that the lab leak was the most likely origin of Covid in March 2020 and covered China’s cack-handed cover-up, the WHO’s disgraceful whitewash, the US funding of the WIV, and the censorship on social and mainstream media.
It’s good that key figures on the Left are finally admitting that they were wrong not just on fundamental points of contention throughout the pandemic but about the way they turned their ‘settled science’ into an instrument of oppression and censorship. Better late than never.
But no one could be surprised that there was no soul-searching from Mr Barry, or, Heaven forfend, an apology on Media Watch this week. He was too busy gloating over the ABC’s latest ‘big win’ in the right to rake muck and ruin careers.
Like the sappy catchphrase from the 1970 movie Love Story, working at the ABC means never having to say you’re sorry.”
That being said, let’s go to the British Left and see how things are going, with our stop being my very favourite Leftist paper, The Guardian:
“There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.
Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.
We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”
In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult out of the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.
But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?
I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.
My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?
The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.
In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.
Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.
Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:
Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.
There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.
There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.
There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.
The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.
The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.
“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”
Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”
Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.
Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.
But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.”
The Covid lab leak hypothesis was not exposed by the mainstream media, but rather by amateur sleuths, who still had the native journalist values of getting to the truth of things. If they could be embarrassed, the mainstream media should be blushing red. Come to think of it, they are “red”!
Yes, the lab leak hypothesis even if not established, was credible and was suppressed by the establishment, scientists and the Left. It was only a merry band of amateur sleuths, who broke the barriers:
“For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. (Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. intelligence. And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness.
The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab kept growing—until it became too substantial to ignore.
The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. They are a group of amateur sleuths, with few resources except curiosity and a willingness to spend days combing the internet for clues. Throughout the pandemic, about two dozen or so correspondents, many anonymous, working independently from many different countries, have uncovered obscure documents, pieced together the information, and explained it all in long threads on Twitter—in a kind of open-source, collective brainstorming session that was part forensic science, part citizen journalism, and entirely new. They call themselves DRASTIC, for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19.
For a long time, DRASTIC's discoveries stayed confined to the strange world of Twitter, known only to a few nerdy followers. The sleuths ran into a fair number of dead ends, got into the occasional spat with scientists who disagreed with their interpretations, and produced a firehose of reporting. Gradually, the quality of their research and the rigor of their thinking drew a larger following, including many professional scientists and journalists.
The Controversial Experiments and Wuhan Lab Suspected of Starting Pandemic
Thanks to DRASTIC, we now know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an extensive collection of coronaviruses gathered over many years of foraging in the bat caves, and that many of them—including the closest known relative to the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2—came from a mineshaft where three men died from a suspected SARS-like disease in 2012. We know that the WIV was actively working with these viruses, using inadequate safety protocols, in ways that could have triggered the pandemic, and that the lab and Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to conceal these activities. We know that the first cases appeared weeks before the outbreak at the Huanan wet market that was once thought to be ground zero.
None of this proves that the pandemic started in the Wuhan lab, of course: it's entirely possible that it did not. But the evidence assembled by DRASTIC amounts to what prosecutors call probable cause—a strong, evidence-based case for a full investigation. It's not clear that the best efforts of the U.S. and other nations to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis will ever turn up unequivocal evidence one way or another, at least without the full cooperation of China, which is unlikely.
But if they do, this small, motley group of amateur sleuths will have broken what may be the biggest story of the 21st century.”
This shows once more, that the mainstream media is the lame stream media!
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