Before we get buried in monkeypox hysteria, let us once again visit the possible origins of the COVID-19 virus plague that, to the chagrin of normal people, keeps on giving.
The Washington Post snuck an article online late Tuesday at a time when they usually only publish breaking news. The title was rather attention-grabbing though: “Scientists hone argument that coronavirus came from Wuhan market.”
There’s a lot of hemming and hawing in the article, as well as enough qualifying words to fill up a White House press release on inflation. There are also a few juicy nuggets to chew on.
WaPo:
The coronavirus pandemic began in separate viral spillovers — at least two but perhaps as many as two dozen — from live animals sold and butchered in late 2019 at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, according to two papers published Tuesday in the journal Science.
The publication of the papers, which underwent five months of peer review and revisions by the authors, is unlikely to quell the rancorous debate about how the pandemic began and whether the virus emerged from a Chinese laboratory. And the authors acknowledge there are many unknowns requiring further investigation — most notably, which animals were involved.
We’re moving in the right direction here. Hey, at least the “follow the science” people are admitting that the path is a little foggy at the moment.
There is a line about the “lab leak” theory that I found interesting:
“Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not. Will we ever be able to? No. But there are ‘possible’ scenarios and there are ‘plausible’ scenarios. … ‘Possible’ does not mean equally likely,” Andersen said.
And “plausible” is stronger but not as chock-full of science as they’re implying it is.
What makes this story newsworthy is that there was a time in the early COVID days (we were just calling it “coronavirus” then — ah, nostalgia) when the mere suggestion that the plague originated in China was immediately branded — you guessed it — RAAAAAAAAAAAACIST. President Trump was routinely excoriated for referring to COVID as “the China virus,” despite the fact that viruses have long been named for their regions, or animals, of origin.
Because the world is hypersensitive and in need of an endless supply of fainting couches, we can’t do that anymore because feelings and reasons and stuff. Oh, yeah: there’s a stigma attached to everything, too.
Seriously, we’re supposed to rename monkeypox now:
NYC health commissioner Ashwin Vasan wrote a letter to the World Health Organization (WHO), joining several health professionals urging them to change the name of the monkeypox virus.
The commissioner made clear in his letter that he feels the name monkeypox could bring back stigmas in both the Black and LGBTQ+ community.
Vasan is worried that if these stigmas arise, people could avoid getting the help they need if infected, referencing a similar occurrence during the heart of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Only the diseased mind of a liberal could infer that much from a benign virus name. Make it stop.
Back to Wuhan.
The list of things that we over here in Rightwing Nutjob Land were vilified for in the early days of the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu was lengthy, and we are slowly but steadily finding out that we were pretty much right about everything. The experts were anything but.
Beginning with the Democrats in November, let’s fire them all and see if we can follow the real science.
And a map.
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