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Quote of the Day: Ignorance is Woke
“Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” — Apoorva Mandavilli, NY Times reporter focused on COVID-19, May 26, 2021
This tweet (because of course, it is from Twitter) is absolutely maddening. According to this excuse for a journalist, we should not consider the theory that the Wuhan Coronavirus escaped from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because it is derived from racism. Aside from idea we should ignore concepts that evil people come with (in which case, I’m tossing out socialism, as Karl Marx was a scumbag), the whole idea that the lab leak theory is racist is pure and utter madness.
Have you ever heard of Malcolm Casadaban before? He died as a result of a lab exposure to what was thought to be a non-virulent strain of Y. pestis, to which he happened to be uniquely vulnerable. This was at the University of Chicago, in 2009. People unfortunately die in lab accidents regularly. My job is there to prevent this. Working with dangerous pathogens requires diligence and defense in depth. I can describe to you how to implement these protocols from the NIOSH Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL) manual – it is not a trivial process. One of the most important elements of our biosafety program is having an open and honest reporting culture – if you see something wrong, you can report it without fear of reprisal. As you can imagine, that is almost certainly completely absent from Chinese laboratories.
This is a recurring problem with totalitarian governments and safety. I can wax rhapsodic on how awesome nuclear energy is, and I would happily live at the fence line of the largest nuclear power plant in the United States. However, that does not go for totalitarian countries. You could not pay me enough money to live next to an RBMK reactor in the old Soviet bloc. Not only was it a bad design, it was operated in a culture of fear and cronyism.
This is why I am not concerned about the work at most US high containment laboratories, not very concerned about work in Taiwan, but very concerned about work in the PRC. I have heard reports of workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology selling lab animals for meat. If true, that’s such a failure of biosafety I would never imagine having to explain it, like having to explain to shop workers not to grab a running sawblade or lab workers not to do shots of denaturated alcohol.
This is something that sounded at least as reasonable as the bat soup theory since I heard of it in March 2020. No racism necessary. However, Facebook and other social media squashed it. It’s still something that people fear to mention on YouTube for fear of getting their channels struck down. I thought this was driven by Chinese cash and companies selling out, but this tweet suggests we may be giving them too much credit. This moron is so brainwashed into the woke cult that she views any criticism of a non-white country as racist in origin. I’ve seen video game characters with more depth and reasoning than this reporter, who probably looks down at all of us as subhuman. Better to refuse to know the truth than accept a heretical thought.
Ignorance is Strength, and also like totally Woke!
Published in Journalism
This is really a vital point contained in @thereticulator‘s POV on the regulatory state, too much political latitude resides with the regulators.
It was the Nicholas Wade article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that convinced me that there was something to this idea that sars-cov-2 wasn’t just the unfortunate product of mutation and natural selection. There was a lot about the genetic footprint that seemed suspicious, and then there was this section, which I have excerpted. Bolding is mine.
So we have one or two unelected bureaucrats with no apparent qualifications and in no chain of responsibility for making life-and-death decisions about national security, making life-and-death national security decisions. And nobody cares. Nobody is interested in coming up with a better system of control. That is what is frustrating about this.
[I’m a little confused at the moment, because this excerpt, which I saved to my Evernote back on May 6, doesn’t match the relevant section of the on-line article exactly. But there is nothing in the on-line article that says it has been modified since then.]
Reading the on-line article a little more carefully now, I see that it has been modified to refer to testimony given by Dr Fauci on May 11. But the dateline of the article still says May 5, and there is nothing that says the article has been updated. Doesn’t sound like good editorial practice.
Do you know if Senator Paul questioned Dr. Fauci regarding the use of this exception and the justification for that?
No, I don’t. That is a good question, though.
Embrace the power of AND.
Here’s the thing: Fraudci and the whole gang knew their counterparts in China were under the thumbs of the CCP. They knew this from the CCP’s reaction to an earlier SARS virus outbreak in 2004. That reaction was well documented. It was even part of Army War College readings, in a paper on CCP responses to disasters, natural and man-made.
Because if Fauci had funded research in France, Germany, Israel, Japan or possibly India we would not be having this conversation. China’s tyrannical government was a direct contributing factor to the worsening of the pandemic. China also lied and covered what happened in Wuhan. We’ve also been told that we cannot dare refer to the virus from Wuhan, China as a Chinese virus or the Wuhan Coronavirus, so people want to rebel against that.
We do not have key evidence yet that Fauci was aware that the research at Wuhan was being done in such horrible conditions. Thus far, we know he lied about gain-of-function research under oath in Congress. We know he lied repeatedly to all of us, treating us like mindless sheep. I’ve gone from respecting the man to despising him as a disgrace to the profession.
If a journalist wants to investigate, I can give them some angles to peer at the regulatory apparatus. We do not know what they knew / were told. When I evaluate a lab, I cannot be there 24-7, I do an inspection and walk through the lab, asking questions and looking carefully. We have to have a certain degree of trust in the lab – they could be violating the rules as soon as we leave, and we can’t know. Perhaps someone at asked questions and then got called a racist? We do not know yet.
I’ve prefer to call it the NIH-NIAID virus. Or the Deep State virus.
His article is on point and in line with other work I have read. He’s not going for crazy ideas or misinformed about biosafety practices.
Scott Hounsell is doing excellent work here