Why the Lab Leak Theories Matter
The Ministry of Truth Doctors Historical Consensus
Dedicated to those scientists, political activists and fellow writers who have dared to speak truth to power.
It is a truism at this point to state that governments across the globe did not react swiftly enough to the coronavirus pandemic. It is also an understatement that mainstream media and Big Tech have censored the criticism by certain voices within the scientific community and within the public square regarding all facets of this pandemic to include lockdown measures. I have interviewed two of the creators of the Great Barrington Declaration, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Sucharit Bhakdi who offer a different perspective to the “Lockdown, Baby, Lockdown” model most of us have barely survived since Spring 2020. I have also spoken with the statistician Douglas Frank who discusses the way the COVID-19 data is being used, abused and misrepresented by governments and the media. The thread running through their narratives is that major media is colluding with political actors to propagate political messages rather than reporting the news and covering various arguments on all sides of this debate.
In recent months, we have seen British institutions wiping their official records on their official internet sites as the court judgments in various cases was expected to swing against policies they had long buttressed such as the NHS and the BBC which late last summer scrubbed their websites to reflect shift position on childhood gender dysphoria to include a shift in how they view childhood desistance and ROGD (rapid-onset gender dysphoria). These and other institutions have removed their references to Mermaids, the UK-based lobby group that has pushed the ideology of the “transgender child” seeking to expand the medical practices of childhood medical “gender transition.” This group has also pushed policy changes within the British governmental agencies to quicken the process for making lifelong medical patients of children while ensuring the fewest safeguards. I wrote about this here.
I have also noted how political machinery is working with major media to scrub fact-based reporting from existence even with the help of Big Tech censoring the sharing of the Hunter Biden story last autumn and the embedding of Big Tech within Biden’s inner circle.
So it came as no surprise when I learned that the “lab leak hypothesis” had been scrubbed from various media outlets, not least of which the Washington Post which has since issued a correction reading:
Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term “debunked” and The Post’s use of “conspiracy theory” have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.
And earlier this month the Washington Post had the chutzpah to run a piece pretending it was clued in along about the legitimacy of the lab leak hypothesis.
The Washington Post is in good company with Vox which has doctored its original coverage to the tune of plastic surgery for the rich and delusional. Writer Paul Graham created a chart that details some of the nips and tucks that Vox undertook to whitewash its reputation while behaving as the Ministry of Truth recalculating future political outcomes as editors redact already-published news articles to correct their misinformation as they rewrite history.
Where former New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. reported on the lab leak theory about the coronavirus that had just begun to spread around the planet, his article was never printed. He writes about this process and why his article was tabled noting that his former New York Times colleague Nicholas Wade recently argued in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the lab-leak theory not only deserves a “harder look,” but in his conclusion he gives his readers much to chew on from the politics within the international scientific community and within granting structures.
Wade specifically examines some of the early science in this area, most notably the research of China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li, who has warned of dozens more SARS-like viruses in bat caves and co-written a 2015 research paper which suggests “a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” Wade begins with Shi’s research which I leave bracketed to later take up after Wade’s investigation of how public opinion was swayed by Shi’s scientific colleagues.
Wade spends much of his article examining quasi-scientific statements that downplayed the lab leak hypothesis shaping public opinion such as a letter published in Lancet in February 2020 organised and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Highlighting that Daszak’s organisation funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wade notes that this conflict of interest was not only elided but was entirely misrepresented at the bottom of the letter where it is clearly stated “We declare no competing interests.”
Wade moves onto a second letter that similarly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis:
A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Wade notes how this op-ed piece penned by Andersen similarly drew conclusions based on what he calls “poor science” given that the newer methods for cutting and pasting viral genomes were not even considered, the “no-see-um” approaches concluding: “If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.” This conveniently escaped media scrutiny.
Wade’s conclusion homes in on the issue of common interests shared by the US and Chinese governments to include the fact that, should the lab leak hypothesis be correct, this would mean that Shi’s research was funded by the US National Institutes of Health within Chinese borders. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to cover how this would go down.
A significant feature of his conclusion, however, points to the professional malfeasance that takes place within scientific institutions not least of which is how certain scientists have been rewarded for successfully repressing public scrutiny:
Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Andersen and Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the second and third names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020.
To anyone following the pseudo-science being trotted out to support the sterilisation of children within the transgender debate, this statement from Wade will sound more than familiar. Doctors, therapists and scientists have been harassed, lost their jobs and funding and they have suffered reputational damage all for saying that rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a current-day reality, that children should not be sterilised or that males have a scientifically demonstrable advantage in sports. If all the above sounds completely undebatable as a premise, think again. Scientists are in the crosshairs of political censorship whereby those who toe certain lines are rewarded as in the case of Daszak and Andersen and others are punished.
Last year I interviewed virologist Jonathan Latham, PhD who recounts the story of a mystery disease that struck six Chinese miners in Yunnan province in 2012 after shovelling bat faeces (guano) produced by Rhinolophus sinicus, a species of horseshoe bat abundant in the mine. The illness of the miners was later described in detail in a master’s thesis entitled “An Analysis of Six Severe Pneumonia Cases Related to Unknown Viruses,” written in 2013 by Li Xu. These patients were remotely observed by Zhong Nan Shan who noted the following symptoms: dry cough, shortness of breath, fever, limb soreness (myalgia), headaches, and low blood oxygen. Latham and geneticist Allison Wilson, PhD conducted research and co-wrote “A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic” wherein they lay out the Mojiang Miners Passaging hypothesis. Though different to the lab leak theory their theory has certain commonalities aside from the hypothesis that these miners acquired a coronavirus from the bats in the mine. In their paper, Latham and Wilson contend that this bat virus evolved extensively inside the miners’ bodies to become a highly human-adapted virus during an extensive hospitalisation period lasting many months. Li’s thesis maintains that blood and other samples were extracted from the miners and were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Latham and Wilson suggest these samples contained highly human-adapted viruses and were used at the WIV for research. During this research, their hypothesis suggests that the virus escaped thus initiating the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic.
Latham went on to tell me how scientists and various working groups have complained about the methods of collecting dangerous pathogens that posed a threat to humans and he spoke to some of the professional malfeasance that Wade refers to above, namely how scientists are pitted against the greater scientific institutions that have consistently shut down debate holding their livelihoods and reputations in the balance:
The scientific community has made it very clear that they don’t want to hear about a lab origin. You can see that in the coverage of the pandemic. There was a letter in Lancet calling the lab origin a “conspiracy,” and what you gather from that is that the bigwigs of virology who signed the letter have set up the dynamic that anyone who comes up with reasonable theories is necessarily a conspiracist.
Just as women speaking to the scientific truths of human sexual dimorphism or women’s rights to compete in female-only sports categories have been maligned and threatened over the past decade, so too have the scientists working in virology been made to feel the effects of speaking out about possible origins of the global COVID-19 pandemic. There is even documented evidence in the case of e-cigarettes and dab pens demonstrating that the news coverage of EVALI shifted public opinion vastly on the use of cigarette alternatives. It is not difficult to see that the way media covers identity politics or the origins of COVID-19 is inextricably linked to public opinion, international diplomacy and the possibility of open scientific debate.
There is the lab leak theory and there is Wilson’s and Latham’s cave-lab leak hypothesis. Both merit open and well-documented scientific and media debate without the likes of Big Tech and major media censuring users and writers respectively without history being rewritten as older news stories are edited to enhance media outlets’ reputations in the light of their previous misreporting of the events.
Forbes writer Ethan Segal criticises the 18 scientists who last month signed the Scienceletter calling for an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis claiming that these signatories should “simply write a research grant to do so,” adding “That’s how virology is routinely performed.” Segal’s criticism is one of those laugh or cry moments given that he works for a publication that churns out one paid fake news story after another to include its non-stop stories as part of its “BrandVoice” advertising-cum-fake-news on vacation travel during the height of the pandemic selling the services of travel insurance, resort spas, hotels, restaurants, Sea Island, casinos, and wellness getaways. It is most difficult to trust a writer from a publication that pimps out hundreds of travel and vacation articles during a global pandemic. Moreover, this same writer demonstrates bath faith arguments as he attempts to liken scientists who question the origins of the pandemic to those who deny the Apollo moon landing. To be perfectly clear here: I seriously doubt Segal has spoken with any scientists. Every single scientist questioning the origin of COVID-19 whom I have interviewed has confirmed that if they dare to speak out they may very well lose their livelihoods or at the very least their professional honour.
Certainly, we already know what a reputational beating the creators of the Great Barrington Declaration have taken for a document they co-authored that has amassed over 14,000 signatures from medical and public health scientists and over 43,000 signatures from medical practitioners. These professionals signed the declaration in support of standard focused-protection measures which, as it turns out, seem to have worked in Florida without the negative consequences that their political detractors envisioned. What matters here is that scientific debate is not barred and that the dialectic process is allowed to take place free of politicised witch hunts and unfettered by media censorship. Scientific debate is necessary so that truths can emerge through disagreement ad the intimidation of scientists and academics has squarely undermined scientific debate during the pandemic.
Latham related his exasperation over the Lancet letter which called the lab leak theory a “conspiracy.” Latham then told me, “What you gather from that is that the bigwigs of virology who signed the letter have set up the dynamic that anyone who comes up with reasonable theories is necessarily a conspiracist. Every scientist in the world knows what way the wind is blowing. We want to say that this is outrageous.”
Indeed, it is outrageous.