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“Experts” Need to Stop Gaslighting Us About Possible Lab Origins of COVID
Anyone who has dared mention the possibility that coronavirus was created in a lab in Wuhan has been treated like a tinfoil-hat wearing lunatic. When Senator Tom Cotton broached the possibility, he was labeled a fringe conspiracy theorist by the New York Times and was the subject of similar disdain across the media landscape. Just a few days ago CNN wrote on the subject, unable to hide its contempt for anyone who dared disagree with the “experts.”
Despite evidence from infectious disease experts suggesting otherwise, nearly 30% of Americans in a new Pew poll said they believe the novel coronavirus was likely created in a lab. https://t.co/3JxOBdMssk
— CNN (@CNN) April 13, 2020
Those same experts are pawns of the Chinese Communist Party. Here are just a few recent examples of the WHO endangering public health in favor of running cover for the CCP:
World Health Organisation supporting the reopening of China's wet markets. What on earth are they playing at?https://t.co/Q5jKRXgs0K
— Michael Heaver (@Michael_Heaver) April 14, 2020
NEW: WHO Official Says She Suspected Human-To-Human COVID-19 Transmission ‘Right From The Start’ — But The WHO Echoed Misleading Chinese Claims To The Contrary For Weeks https://t.co/KmP44Ea4bf
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) April 14, 2020
“Why was it when the Taiwanese told the WHO on Dec 31 that they had evidence of human to human transmission…Why does it take a whole month for the WHO to respond? You want to know why? Because China has kept Taiwan from being a member of the WHO.” https://t.co/dXoPcsRs8j
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) April 13, 2020
These are the experts we’re supposed to be trusting. The same experts who told us:
Dr Fauci: WHO boss 'really an outstanding person', done 'very well' on coronavirus.
WHO:
Jan 14: No clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of coronavirusFeb 7: Masks don't necessarily protect you
Feb 22: No benefit to stopping international travel pic.twitter.com/R69p9BkcXl
— Mike Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) April 10, 2020
And now, at the same time experts are scoffing at anyone who dares suspect we might not be getting the full story on the origins of coronavirus from a regime that has spent months lying about its death toll, we’re seeing these stories:
Exclusive: State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses https://t.co/kgwc21YwBP
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) April 14, 2020
China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus, according to a central government directive and online notices published by two Chinese universities, that have since been removed from the web. https://t.co/bguqr2tCDz
— CNN (@CNN) April 12, 2020
A tip for the “experts” and their defenders in the media: A little bit of humility about how much we actually know, how much you’ve been wrong about thus far, and an honest statement of fact about the CCP’s lying nature, would do a lot to engender trust in your future reporting and statements. But for now, the American people aren’t going to trust almost anything we’re told. And the responsibility for that is on you, not us.
Published in General
This.
Thing is, everyone could be right. It could be from the biowarfare lab and it could be from the wet markets.
There was an anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979. There was a germ warfare lab in Sverdlovsk, experimenting with anthrax. Some thought it might have been the source of the anthrax, and it was, sort of. A couple of workers in the plant has sold animals killed by lab testing to a black market meat market to “supplement” their income. With poison gases, they could get away with it. Maybe some people might get ill eating the meat, but that was a far as it went. With a disease agent, like anthrax, the killing agent replicated itself. And became an epidemic as those ill from the meat passed it to others.
I could see the same miscalculation happening in Wuhan, and the wet markets would be a natural outlet for Wuhan’s aspiring entrepreneurs.
It would be foolish not to consider the possibility coronavirus was a bioweapon under development, and somehow it leaked out either unintentionally or intentionally. Investigative journalism involves looking at all angles behind a story to find out the truth. When one starts with a narrative and eliminates all angles other than those that support the narrative, you’re practicing advocacy, not investigative journalism.
I’ve relayed in other threads before that I relocated from Tokyo back to Boston in late February due to the Wuhan Virus. As it happens, my 26 February arrival in Boston was something I decided on only as of the 15-16 February weekend: I then raced to pack up and ship out four years’ worth of my then-current Japan stint — a stint that in Work Visa validity terms still had almost three valuable years to go.
Now, bear in mind that as of Valentine’s Day, I was very much on the fence about whether I could really bring myself to exit Japan: Even without a Japanese significant other in my life, my emotional bond with the country and my sense of professional mission were both immensely strong.
And even though I have a healthy sense of filial obligation — and took my parents’ pleas to relocate back to the US seriously — heading into the weekend of 15-16 February, these family considerations were frankly in close *second* place behind my Japan attachment.
Then I spent that weekend contemplating what the CCP/PLA regime was then *doing* over in China, as opposed to what most anyone was *saying* at the time about the outbreak (whether in the PRC, the US, or Japan).
And, by that Sunday night, I found myself vigorously in agreement with my parents and absolutely determined to return to the US as soon as I possibly could.
What I realized during that weekend of contemplation was this: The regime in the PRC couldn’t possibly be taking the steps they were — not merely in Wuhan, but nationwide — if this thing, this source of the outbreak, didn’t stem from an unexpectedly disastrous lab-safety protocol oversight.
The regime was taking action on the basis of knowing something that they weren’t (and aren’t) telling the rest of us about, but it was (and remains) the kind of action whose impetus and implications couldn’t fail to be clear to those willing to see.
Picture it this way: Recall the toga-party scene from “Animal House” where John Belushi’s “Bluto” character suddenly grabs and smashes into pieces an annoying beatnik musician’s guitar as he passes the crooning hipster on the Delta House staircase; if you say that “Bluto” represents the PRC regime, the other people on the stairs represent the general public in China, and the guitar represents China’s economy (and maybe the beatnik’s song as the coronavirus); well, that’s what the regime was (and is still) deliberately doing.
With this in mind, I knew as that weekend concluded that I had to flee the Northeast Asia neighborhood right away — that this was no time for regrets or even much sentiment at all.
Obviously in retrospect, my hopes of finding refuge in the proverbial Fortress America have proven naive, but overall I don’t doubt that I made the right decision and did so in the nick of time.
One addendum: I surmise that this particular coronavirus that “leaked” was under active work because it was a specific strain being prepped for quiet but entirely deliberate deployment in the “re-education centers” that the CCP/PLA regime have herded so many older-generation Uyghurs into over the past few years in Xinjiang province.
I’m not so tin-foil-hatted as to suggest that this is an “engineered” coronavirus — I’m well aware that the facts don’t bear such an idea out at all.
But I don’t think that guys like Tian Jun-Hua at the lower BSL-rated Wuhan CDC lab were frenetically amassing a collection of hundreds (as many as 2000-plus?) of bat-derived coronaviruses over the past several years strictly to advance the boundaries of human understanding. The regime’s Uyghur-targeted sinicization efforts lately seem to include shipping out from Xinjiang massive numbers of the high-school-age cohort, basically placing tens of thousands of them in manufacturing facilities elsewhere across China with a dual aim of labor extraction and indoctrination. Well, while these youngsters are away from Xinjiang, gee — wouldn’t it be just a terrible tragedy if their parents and other Uyghur cultural role models were all to succumb to an inexplicable flu epidemic in the enclosed environments of the “schools” they themselves have been “studying” in?
At least, this is roughly the scenario I surmise was something that the regime was intending to orchestrate — using the right, naturally-occurring if difficult-to-trace tools — until there was a negligent slip-up by their toolsmiths in Wuhan.
All of us outside of the PRC wouldn’t be getting such deflection and runaround — and even vituperative psychological projection — for such a long time from the CCP/PLA thugs if the root-cause (what unleashed the outbreak) *and* its driving reason (why the regime was working on what it was working on when it accidentally “leaked”) were merely embarrassing.
In other words, the regime can’t even bring itself to do the kind of PR defensive maneuver the Watergate-embattled Nixon White House famously called the “Modified Limited Hangout” — for example, admit to a lab accident but say that the work in question was strictly for purposes of advancing the frontiers of virology knowledge.
Even if it wasn’t created intentionally as a weapon, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t intentionally released as a weapon. And they would release it in their own country first to cover their tracks, because after all what government would put their own people at risk?
Probably not, but now that the bad guys know how much economic ruin it inflicts upon us, it might become a real temptation in the future.
This is one theory about the Wuhan lab. China is notorious for corruption, which is why it is crazy to be using Chinese plants to make pharmaceuticals. This last week there was a recall for generic Zantac because of contamination with a chemical thought to be cancer related. The level of contamination was minimal but the Heparin scandal a few years ago was serious.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i40/Making-heparin-safe.html
Pig intestine mucosa is currently the only approved raw material for producing the heparin sold in most of the world, including the U.S. And given that each mucosa yields only a few grams of heparin, China’s huge pig population is essential to the world’s supply of the drug.
The risks inherent to this long supply chain became apparent in 2007 and 2008 after hundreds of patients in the U.S. and other countries suffered severe allergic reactions to Chinese heparin that had been adulterated with an unapproved additive. More than 80 people died in the U.S. alone.
The FDA “inspectors” sent to these Chinese plants don’t read or speak Mandarin and are shown records they can’t read.
I first saw this in something Mark Steyn wrote:
Is the CCP foolish enough to keep “investing” in US higher education, American politicians and more if there’s not a good return? Or journalism; though I have no evidence for that. Still… cui bono? was Russiagate good for Russia? Or was it better for China?
Speaking of heparin and supply chains: China has had to kill off a lot of its pigs to stop African Swine Fever, and while China has been importing American pork to feed the huge pork demand, it’s been importing finished carcasses, and the guts – the raw material for heparin – are staying in the US.
Welcome back, @dannyalexander. And thank you for sharing your insights. It is all so difficult to fathom.
Those were my thoughts at that time too. It was pretty weird to see the reaction of the CCP. It was as if they knew what they were dealing with.
Xi and his people seem to believe China’s market size and the volume of their foreign exports essentially had made them “Too big to fail” in the same way some of the major banks and financial institutions were in the 2008 financial crisis. Except there, instead of having the Obama Administration come out and make the declaration, they basically made it for themselves with warnings to foreign businesses and threats to withhold things like exports of generic drugs to nations that criticized the regime too harshly.
They have the belief that their size gives them the ability to be both a driver of world markets and a totalitarian dictatorship that can bribe or bully others to ignore their failings, while at the same time using their profits to build up their military and ability to project power outside of China (along with possibly building up their bioweapons systems). It’s the same arrogance that makes them still try to claim there are zero new coronavirus cases in the country, and to assume they’ll pay no long-term price for their actions, because they’re sure they’ve either bought off or intimidated enough people to accept their explanations and peddle their spin (and they’re not wrong, since their spin is being bought by many in the media in the U.S. simply because they see China as an enemy of Trump dating back to the tariff fight, and when the COVID problems have eased you know the big corporations are going to be lobbying like crazy to resume their normal business dealings with Beijing).
I believe the Mask Fiasco has done much to hurt the public’s trust in “experts” and the press. One day we’re told that masks really don’t help at all (but must be saved for doctors and nurses) and the next day we learn we will be arrested if we aren’t wearing masks on the rare occasion we are allowed to venture outside. So, no, I will not immediately trust the “experts” parroting the words of the Chinese government on the origins of the virus.
Jim Geraghty has been doing some great work over at NRO reporting on the possibility of the virus coming from a lab instead of the markets in Wuhan. He’s been very clear to stick to theories with actual evidence and not ones spread by the tinfoil hat crowd. One problem I’ve seen is that some people are missing (some purposefully, some not) the difference between “intentionally developed in a lab as a weapon” and “developed naturally and accidentally released” from a lab. The former is a conspiracy theory but the latter is something that is looking more and more likely. The statements from some people that the Chinese government is too careful and its researchers are too professional to allow such an accident to happen are ridiculous. We may never know for sure exactly how the virus moved from bats to people in China, but the facts that we do know are damning enough.
The question is not whether or not SARS Cov 2 came from the Wuhan lab, but why the Wuhan Lab is messing with bat Coronaviruses in the first place. Germ warfare is banned by Treaty. China is a party to that Treaty.
Not only should wet markets be cleaned up around the world, but China should open up its biolabs for continuous independent, international oversight. I’m one of those 30 percent who believe that this virus did originate in a Chinese lab, whatever the intent was for its creation. If anything is obvious after this crisis, it is the fact that we cannot trust China. Remember who was ringing that alarm back in 2016? Then candidate Trump.
The media, the government, and the official authorities all lie to us “for our benefit” so often that it is important to remain skeptical and use the balance of evidence. We were lied to about masks to maximize mask availability to health care workers and first responders…..but it was still a lie, and still a reason to not trust what we were told.
Whenever you hear financial and market advice, keep in mind that it’s primary purpose is to maximize the advice giver’s wealth and position. Hold onto your stocks until the wealthy can unload at a good price, etc. Most advice given, if followed, will benefit the person giving the advice.
Remember that many businesses and people in the USA benefit financially from slave labor in China, or from financial support from the Chinese government.
And that bothers the hell out of me more and more. Do I like my relatively cheap iPhone? Yes. Do I like the fact it was made in a factory run like the sweatshops of the early 20th century? No.
Probably for the same reason that we are. Doing genetic analysis and research that will lead to better treatments and vaccines. There are perfectly valid reasons for studying viruses that have nothing to do with “germ warfare” or any other malicious use. Given that the original SARS coronavirus also came from China, it would be incredibly negligent if they weren’t studying it. The study isn’t the problem. It’s the possibility that they either let one of their researchers get infected or let infected waste get out of the facility untreated that is the concern here.
But Doug, Trump was a racist for singling out and trying to strong arm China. That’s what the media told me. They wouldn’t lie, would they?
Are the researchers human? Then obviously an accident can happen. Also since when do these people think the Chinese government is careful – after the baby formula ‘accident’, after the schools collapsing in earthquake prone areas, etc.
Here is what I don’t understand: it is illegal to import drugs from abroad but it’s legal to manufacture ‘American’ drugs in China?
Good point. There are a lot of valid reasons for having bad viruses out there, but the Chinese have a problem because 1) they’ve lied in the past, and 2) it would be hard to tell if they were lying if they actually told the truth.
I know what you mean. These laws defining “Made In America” and the Buy American Act can be twisted like pretzels to the point Chevys could be legally made on Mars by Martians (or their illegal aliens) . . .
Why can’t we import generic drugs from Switzerland or Germany?
Who invented aspirin? Bayer?
I felt guilty about my iPhone, until I tried to find a phone NOT heavily dependent on China. I don’t think there is a non China alternative out there.
Nokia was made in Finland but they seem to have dropped behind. The operating system is Android which is Google. Google is very China connected.
One fact we know, among so many questions.
God. Bayer was the company that synthesized it . . .
Google is pro-China and anti-Pentagon
Silicon Valley is demented
Trust no one!