So we’ve had regime change, and the new party line is that Covid was a lab accident. The CIA, which may or may not have anybody working there by the time this is published, now says they think the Covid was caused by a lab leak — but that is a “low confidence” determination, which is bureaucratic-speak for, we don’t know either but people will fire us if we don’t say what they want so we are saying it.
All this is crazy because we don’t know and will never know whether Covid evolved naturally in animals and spread to humans, or whether it was created by a lab in Wuhan that was engaged in gain-of-function research.
We don’t know where Covid came from because the Chinese destroyed all the evidence that would have allowed us to know what really happened, by the end of December 2019. They sterilized the live animal market in Wuhan before investigators had a chance to gather samples, so we’ll never know if Covid came from animals to humans through that market. Then they leaned on anyone who might know what was going on in those labs in Wuhan. (Then they completely blew the public health measures that might have contained the original Covid outbreak by not limiting foreign travel as soon as the outbreak was identified, and by failing to start masking and social distancing right away, at the point sources of the outbreak. Politicians in Wuhan threw a party for 14,000 people in mid-January of 2020, which likely spread the disease, and let 400,000 people travel between China and the US in January of 2020, which certainly brought the disease here.)
The lab leak theory itself is based on a bunch of unproven and likely unprovable assumptions. There were at least two labs in Wuhan doing research on coronaviruses, which include viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Institute for Disease Control. (SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus. Covid-19 is the name of the disease.) One of those labs, the theory goes, “must” have been doing gain-of-function research on the virus. Gain-of-function research takes a virus and modifies it genetically so that it can more easily spread or can cause more serious disease, so researchers can study how to kill the more dangerous virus or develop vaccines against it. That way, the thinking goes, if a similar virus evolves in nature, we’ll be better prepared to deal with it. One of those labs, the theory goes, developed SARS-CoV-2, and then that genetically engineered virus “must” have leaked out of the lab, spread among people and to animals, and caused the pandemic.
According to the theory, the US Government, which was funding some research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was behind or knew about the gain-of-function research, and so Dr. Fauci, who is a very important immunologist, must have known about our role, and must be engaged in a coverup so he and the NIH don’t get blamed for starting this terrible pandemic and closing schools, bars and restaurants, making people social distance and mask and killing all those people. (Some of these conspiracy theorists also argue that Covid-19 itself was a hoax.)
But. But. But. Gain-of-function research was widely banned in 2014, thank goodness, because it is a crazy idea that no rational scientist should have ever convinced themselves to engage in, exactly because lab leaks happen. We have no idea if the labs in Wuhan were actually engaged in that kind of research. If they had been, no one in China is ever going to tell us or anyone else, because they’d be imprisoned or shot. (The Chinese police “admonished” Dr. Li Wenlaing, for example, a courageous 34-year-old ophthalmologist for sending an email to colleagues in December of 2019, about patients with this new kind of pneumonia he was hearing about, just for sending that email. And then he died, supposedly of Covid 19. At 34. February 7, 2020– five years ago today.)
So the lab leak theory might be true. There’s just no evidence that it is true. It sounds more like a story made up to justify a set of beliefs: the Chinese are our enemies, because they engaged in gain-of-function research, let a lab leak happen, and then covered up their evil deeds. Dr. Fauci and the whole medical research world is just a big syndicate that let loose a bad virus on the world so they could profit from selling the vaccine. The swamp is evil. There are Jewish space lasers, and so forth.
The problem is that all of this turns our attention away from real problems, and toward what we cannot now know, which is where SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 actually came from. We can’t know the truth because the Chinese destroyed all the evidence.
Here are the real problems that this made-up controversy is covering up: the Chinese failed to contain an outbreak of a new virus and let it turn into a worldwide pandemic by mismanagement. No one is holding them accountable for that. Another real problem: we are not investing in public health and have lost the focus, rigor, and discipline we need to contain disease ourselves. Another real problem: the medical industrial complex is out of control, because we have let the market run health care, and that makes people lose trust in doctors and other health professionals, so no one trusts what they say about how to stop pandemics and how to make the population healthy.
The problem isn’t Dr. Fauci. The problem is us. We don’t have the self-discipline to build a health care system that is not-for-profit and that focuses on the health and safety of all of us, in part because we’ve let greed and profit itself divide us, so we don’t trust government or one another.
Thinking that a ten percent tariff will somehow right the wrong that China committed by its failure to contain Covid is beyond crazy. We, the people, should boycott China ourselves, until the Chinese can prove they have a way to make sure they can and will control disease outbreaks, so this never happens again. And we the people should take health care in the US back from the greedy and corrupt.
Please remember that the next bad virus is out there evolving, and it may be ten times worse than Covid. Remember that we just gutted CDC, left a very corrupt WHO (which, for all its many, many faults, lets nations talk to one another about disease outbreaks) and remember that we have no one scientifically competent running our health care institutions.
Right now, it looks like craziness rules. Shame on us.