The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a de-classified summary of what intelligence agencies have learned about the origins of COVID-19.
As you might expect, it’s a whitewash.
“This report does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses, nor does it explore other biological facilities in Wuhan other than the WIV,” it said. “All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.”
Meanwhile, other, less biased observers have been chipping away at the wall of secrecy put up by the Chinese government and U.S. public health agencies and have slowly — painfully — begun to unravel a story of incredible stupidity, carelessness, scientific arrogance, and criminal negligence. And that’s just on the Chinese side.
In recent months, two serious, thorough, and eye-opening investigations by ProPublica/Vanity Fair and The Times of London have come as close as we are likely to come in proving the lab leak theory. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Times summarizes.
Just this week, the Wall Street Journal confirmed reports that the earliest outbreak of the coronavirus occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019.
“Patients zero” are now presumed to be three Chinese scientists, including Ben Hu, who worked extensively on gain-of-function research (the manipulation of viruses to make them more dangerous), which was funded by grants from the U.S. government. Those cases occurred in November 2019—well before the Huanan wet market outbreak favored by some in the scientific community as the more likely origin story—and they occurred among the very people one would predict if the virus originated in a lab. This is quite damning, to say the least. Anyone still clinging to an animal origin theory—remember the pangolins and raccoon dogs?—is running up against Occam’s razor.
Assuming the intelligence reports are accurate and that Hu and his colleagues did contract the earliest cases of COVID-19, the implications are huge. This would mean that substandard safety protocols at the Wuhan lab probably unleashed a killer pathogen on the rest of the planet, and the Chinese government attempted to cover it up.
It’s always been Wuhan’s nearly third-world approach to safety issues that worried many outside scientists and made a lab leak certainly a dangerous if not inevitable possibility.
It didn’t worry scientists like Dr. Antony Fauci or Peter Daszak who had the most to lose if it could ever be proved that the coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan lab. Add to that the very real possibility that the U.S. government-funded gain-of-function research — or a kind of research that was gain-of-function in all but name only — may be responsible for creating the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has killed six million people.
So now that the lab leak theory has proven more than credible, what happens to those who worked frantically to suppress it?
Said cops including some of the most influential voices in the scientific community and expert commentariat. The New York Times’ lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, previously described the lab leak theory as having racist roots. Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez criticized the comedian Jon Stewart for daring to raise the issue on an episode of Stephen Colbert’s show. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen lamented the theory’s likelihood of inspiring anti-Chinese animus. Others in the media called the lab leak a “fringe conspiracy.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, vigorously banned and suppressed posts about the lab leak before finally abandoning this policy as the theory gained some mainstream acceptance toward the latter half of 2021. As revealed by the Facebook Files, Reason‘s report on the communication between social media companies and federal health bureaucrats, Facebook took its COVID-19 content cues from the government. All of this behavior—these efforts to shame or suppress individuals who were asking questions about the preferred narratives of government scientists—now seems incredibly short-sighted.
And these same people are worried about “election disinformation”?
No one is holding these arrogant p**cks accountable. In fact, the Biden administration wants to hand many of these characters the keys to the disinformation kingdom and put them in charge of deciding what is true and what is false to protect the American people from what they define as “disinformation.”
We all know there’s a lot of crap being disseminated on both sides during a political campaign. Propaganda, outright lies, gross exaggerations — it’s been the way of American politics for 235 years. There has never been a “golden age of truth” in American politics, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. All parties and candidates do it. When we give one side the power to decide what is true, what is false, what speech belongs in the public square and what doesn’t, we end up with legitimate debate — like the COVID origins debate — suppressed.
And the American people are poorer because of it.
