HANSON: How COVID prompted politics of disinformation | Toronto Sun - "Political frenzy was inevitable since the SARS-CoV-2 virus likely escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. The rapid fire spread soon threatened to indict the communist Chinese government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions. Western elites, in response, feared their own lucrative investments in China would be jeopardized by such disclosures — and so acted accordingly in defending Beijing. Nonetheless, the most likely scenario remains that the escaped virus was birthed by gain-of-function research scientists — overseen by elements of the Chinese communist military. Worse, the lab was given subsidies by U.S. health authorities, routed through third parties. Hiding all of that damaging information warped government policy and media coverage... From the outset, the World Health Organization simply spread false talking points about the outbreak from the Chinese government, delaying a robust global response... Trump’s Operation Warp Speed project to develop vaccinations was also pilloried. Candidates Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did their best to talk down the safety of the impending inoculations. But once in power, they projected their own prior harmful rhetoric onto so-called “anti-vaxxers.” Then they claimed credit for the initial success of the Trump vaccinations. The Pfizer corporation had promised a major pre-election announcement about its likely rollout of a vaccine in October, just days before the 2020 election. Then, mysteriously, Pfizer claimed the vaccine, in fact, would not be ready before Nov. 3. A few days after the election of Joe Biden, the company reversed course and announced the vaccinations would soon be available. Then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo obstructed almost all federal help with Trump’s fingerprints on it. That way Cuomo became a media, Emmy-winning darling, before resigning in disgrace. Cuomo’s policies of steering infected patients into long-term-care facilities doomed over 10,000 of the elderly. New York is now illegally using race to grant preferences in the allotments of tests and new drugs. In the waning days of the 2022 campaign, Biden went so far as to blame Trump personally for all the deaths from the virus. Once the vaccinations had seemed to work in early 2021, an upbeat Joe Biden boasted that he would end the virus by summer 2021, by following “the science.” He went so far as to claim that no one had been vaccinated prior to his inauguration even though 17 million, including Joe Biden himself, had been... the left now calls for realism, emphasis on treatments and acknowledgment of the value of natural immunities. It is even newly curious about the origins of the virus and the need to “get back to normal.” We are suddenly told that thousands had died “with” rather than “because” of COVID — the exact opposite of what we heard in the Trump era. A skeptic might suggest terror over the impending midterms finally made the left face reality."
Science has become a cartel - "the “consensus” that Covid must have an entirely natural origin was established by two early pronouncements, one in The Lancet in February 2020 and the other in Nature Medicine in March 2020. These were op-eds, not scientific papers. Both spoke with certainty about matters which it was impossible to be certain about. Wade writes: “It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr Daszak’s organisation funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” In other words, the guy who was orchestrating research on bat coronaviruses at the lab in Wuhan corralled other scientists, with similar professional interests, into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the (obvious) possibility that the pandemic (which started in Wuhan) might have a connection to this research could only be doing so with bad intentions... The yawning gap between the actual state of knowledge at the time and the confidence displayed in the two letters should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology. And indeed, there were scientists from outside the guild, but in fields adjacent enough to speak competently, who said as much. The Lancet and Nature Medicine letters were in fact anti-scientific in spirit and intent. Yet the pronouncements had the effect of shutting down inquiry that was not only legitimate, but urgently needed... “in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.” This is consistent with everything we know from the sociology of science. With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality. Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus. The scientific paradigm they are invested in is typically superseded only when the scientists sitting atop the institutional hierarchy literally die, or retire. It is not “anti-science” to acknowledge this. Rather, the point is that one has to keep in mind that scientists are human beings first. That much is old news. But in the catastrophe of the Covid pandemic, something novel and disturbing comes into view. A peculiar form of intellectual intimidation has become prominent in public life in general, and science has not been spared... The invocation of “conspiracy theory” has become a reflex by which incumbents in many domains seek to arrest criticism. They have had to do a lot of this over the last 10 years, as the internet has broken the knowledge monopolies by which institutional credibility is maintained... policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation that is highly moralised. Epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people. What is significant is how effective the early, pre-emptive declarations of scientific consensus in The Lancet and Nature Medicine were in garnering media enforcement of public opinion on the matter. The “fact checkers” of PolitiFact used these statements to shut down any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. In effect, it appears the scientists who were signatories to the two letters may have been acting as a classic research cartel. Such behaviour is common enough in science. But because of the political environment, they were able to use the magic words “conspiracy theory” to trigger a wider epistemic immune reaction in high-prestige opinion... As the evolutionary biologist turned cultural critic Bret Weinstein (who specialises in bats, as it happens) has pointed out, the resulting moratorium on pursuing the lab leak hypothesis may have been quite consequential, as an engineered virus behaves differently from a naturally evolved one, and this has implications for how it can best be fought... Nicholas Wade’s powerful and widely circulated article appeared, not in any national outlet, but on the blog site Medium. (It has since been republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, not an organisation within the orbit of virology or public health.) Only now has “the nation’s newspaper of record” and other organs of acceptable opinion been dragged into acknowledging what may be the most important story of the pandemic. The logic of the surrounding political frame for these events is painfully simple. 1. Donald Trump publicly floated the idea that Covid may have had its origin in a Chinese lab. 2. It was therefore a point of conviction for all those who believe in science that such a hypothesis could only be a conspiracy theory, probably rooted in “Sinophobia”... When the lab leak hypothesis has been mentioned at all in the legacy press, the “conspiracy theory” has often been juxtaposed with reporting on anti-Asian hate crimes, thereby subsuming an urgent scientific question to the Trump-era morality play. Journalism suffered a general intellectual collapse during the Trump administration, as many have noted on the Left and Right alike. The moral grandeur of #Resistance appears to have been so intoxicating to those who felt the mantle of Saving Democracy settle on their shoulders that the workaday demands of journalistic diligence and sceptical curiosity seemed paltry. The great imperative was to keep underlining the divide between good people and bad people. What we have learned is that a Manichaean atmosphere of moral sorting is intimidating, and therefore provides the perfect cover for “informal pacts of mutual protection,” to borrow a phrase from Martin Gurri. Liberalism began as a doctrine of political scepticism directed at rulers, based on the truism that power corrupts, and always adopts a virtuous pose. In time, this gave rise to a complementary form of journalism that was basically adversarial towards the politicians it reported on"
'Damning' science shows COVID-19 likely engineered in lab - "“Damning” science strongly suggests that COVID-19 is a man-made monster, optimized in a lab for maximum infectivity before hitting the outside to catastrophic effect, two experts said Sunday. Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation."
Wuhan clan: the price I paid for my lab leak exposé - The Spectator World - "On March 12 last year, I texted a trusted source connected to Australia’s foreign intelligence agency. “What do you think about the theory that the virus came from a virology lab in China? Does that have credibility? I know it’s officially a conspiracy theory but China is not exactly a picture of transparency so I thought it’s possible.” He replied to say he knew someone “very involved in the observation of that lab and its activities” and it was a definite possibility the virus leaked from the facility. It was a surprising response because, at the time, this view contradicted every utterance by scientists and world leaders, who insisted the virus had a natural origin. Most media outlets dismissed the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy. A month after this exchange, I confirmed and reported on a global scoop for my paper in Australia, that the Five Eyes intelligence network of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were seriously examining the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The story went global. For the following year, as I developed new sources around the world and unravelled the complexities of the Chinese Communist party’s suppression of the theory, I wrote a book on the topic and my reporting made me a target of the CCP... There have been hacking and malware attempts as well. My Wikipedia page is subject to constant trolling from IP addresses registered in China. The night after my first Wuhan scoop, I received anti-Semitic death threats that also targeted my family. It wasn’t until I spoke with officials who had led intelligence agencies that I properly understood the motivation behind such a concerted campaign against me in the Chinese media. The former secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo told me that the CCP was desperate to control the narrative about how the virus began and to deflect any attention from the Wuhan lab... Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. He told me that China was leading a “bloody outrageous global disinformation operation… You can bet your bottom dollar that the ministry of state security has been in control of the narrative from day one.” “This is what the CCP have spent decades since Tiananmen preparing for,” says Matt Turpin, the White House’s former director for China on the staff of the National Security Council. “They’ve got the influence and the media and propaganda apparatus to be able to control the story.” As someone who became fodder for the Chinese propaganda machine, I certainly discovered this to be the case. But what I found most remarkable in the past 18 months was the number of western scientists, government officials and tech giants who willingly accepted the CCP line. In doing so, they not only helped push China’s narrative, but shamefully aided and abetted the CCP’s vituperative attacks on people like me who dared question that narrative."
If you don't "trust the science" you are a dangerous, ignorant, far right conspiracy theorist
One cope I got was that since the consensus that covid was natural was not published as a scientific research paper but as a statement in the Lancet, it didn't mean "science" was politically influenced - despite what we had been told earlier about what "science" claimed.y
Adam Housley on Twitter - "Also...US intelligence believes China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that it originally came from a lab. The belief is still that it escaped accidentally, but was allowed to spread."
Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’ - "Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China... An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab. The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”... Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.” In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells. Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans. Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely. “I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.” Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release. The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally... Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”. He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”... by February 2 2020, scientists were already trying to shut down the debate into the laboratory leak theory... Institutions which held the emails have repeatedly resisted efforts to publish their content. The University of Edinburgh recently turned down an Freedom of Information request from The Telegraph asking to see Prof Rambaut’s replies, claiming “disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals”. James Comer, the Republican congressman who secured the unredacted emails, said it showed that experts like Dr Fauci had taken the Wuhan lab leak theory “much more seriously” than they had let on."
COVID 'more likely lab leak than weapon,' U.S. spies find - "Some US spy agencies had believed the virus originated in nature. But there has been little corroboration. The ODNI report said four US spy agencies and a multi-agency body have “low confidence” that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus."
The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier - The Atlantic - "According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.” But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites”... Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”"
The Covid lab leak theory just got even stronger | The Spectator - "a bunch of emails, uncovered by a lawsuit from the so-called White Coat Waste Project, returned the ball right back over the net. They comprised an exchange between the American virus--hunting foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance and its funders in the US government. The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan... As for that missing furin cleavage site, another leaked document revealed in September by Drastic, a confederation of open-source analysts like Demaneuf, sent shock- waves through the scientific community. Dr Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, spelled out plans to work with his collaborators in Wuhan and elsewhere to artificially insert novel, rare cleavage sites into novel Sars-like coronaviruses collected in the field, so as to better understand the biological function of cleavage sites. His 2018 request for $14.2 million from the Pentagon to do this was turned down amid uneasiness that it was too risky; but the very fact that he was proposing it was alarming. Most of the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from the Chinese not the American government, after all; so the failure to win the US grant may not have prevented the work being done. More-over, exactly such an experiment had already been done with a different kind of coronavirus by — guess who? — the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is almost beyond belief that Dr Daszak had not volunteered this critical information. He played a leading role in trying to dismiss the lab-leak idea as a ‘conspiracy theory’, using his membership of the WHO-China investigation to support the far-fetched theory that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen food. If the trail to the source of the pandemic leads through Laos, it is possible western countries can find out more. The Chinese government has blocked anybody who tries to get near to the mineshaft in Yunnan where RaTG13 was found. But now that we know the US government was funding virus sampling in Laos, the EcoHealth Alliance should be required to report in full on exactly what was found. Saying ‘Oh, that data belongs to the Chinese now’ is not good enough. American taxpayers funded the work. Belatedly, the US National Institutes of Health has requested more information... But even finding relevant viruses in Laos still won’t answer the question of how they got loose in Wuhan. And with the continuing failure to find any evidence of infected animals for sale in Chinese markets, the astonishing truth remains this: the outbreak happened in a city with the world’s largest research programme on bat-borne corona-viruses, whose scientists had gone to at least two places where these Sars-CoV-2-like viruses live, and brought them back to Wuhan — and to nowhere else."
China's mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19 pandemic revealed by leaked documents - "In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak. The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention... The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak... The Chinese government has previously pointed to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan as the likely initial epicenter of the outbreak in mid-December, where meat of exotic wild animals was sold. Yet that claim has been at least partially challenged by a Lancet study of the first December patients, which determined one third of the 41 infected that month had no direct connection to that market. Yichang, 320 kilometers (198 miles) west of Wuhan, was hit hardest by the influenza outbreak -- almost three times as many as Wuhan in the same week beginning December 2... During the last 30 years, analysts say, many in China have appeared willing to relinquish political freedoms in return for increased material wealth, social stability and greater opportunities. The virus fundamentally threatened that social contract -- putting hundreds of millions at risk while damaging an economy already weakened by an ongoing US-China trade war."
Damn CIA, fabricating documents again!
Question the ‘lab leak’ theory. But don’t call it a conspiracy. - "If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, labels get in the way of facts and make the truth that much harder to find... like everyone else involved in the discussions about the lab leak theory, scientists have something at stake: If SARS-CoV-2 did escape from a lab, it could further shake trust in research, and threaten funding. In the search for truth, it is good to ask questions, and it is good to doubt, as colleagues and I have noted elsewhere. It is also good to try to understand the motivations of those who ask questions. A lack of obvious financial incentives doesn’t mean someone isn’t biased or making other gains. But just because your intellectual opponent has particular motivations, it doesn’t mean that they are wrong — or, on the flip side, that they are right if their motivations align with yours... kneejerk dismissal — from both “sides” — has played out time and time again during the pandemic. In the last 18 months, for example, practically no one could have a dispassionate discussion of the evidence — or the lack thereof — for using various older drugs, usually approved to treat parasites, against Covid-19. Such discussions frequently escalated into screaming matches between polarized opposites. If you had ever made a comment that could be interpreted as saying that Donald Trump was not wrong about absolutely everything — including his boosting one such drug, hydroxychloroquine — you were clearly promoting the drug because you were partisan. If you dismissed the drugs, surely you were partisan on the other side. And if you gained any following thanks to media mentions, or had ever been paid to write anything for a media outlet, clearly you were opposed to ivermectin, another of these drugs, only to make a name for yourself. And so on. A similar dynamic played out in discussions about vaccines. Public health officials, mindful of vaccine hesitancy in some quarters, made the vaccines sound 100 percent safe, when no such thing exists. They opted for clear messaging over nuance, dismissing safety concerns. But when a small number of reports of blood clots surfaced and they paused one vaccine’s rollout, that only led to even more distrust (and accusations of a conspiracy). Peter Sandman, a longtime communications strategist, argued that a better approach would have been to provide what’s called “anticipatory guidance,” which involves advising people about rare side effects that may happen. It takes away the reactive “but you told us X, so now I don’t trust you” argument that can further muddle a complex situation. Just as with the nuances about vaccine safety, too many people were too quick to dismiss the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy. But once they took a careful look at some of the evidence, they sometimes had to update stories and statements to acknowledge the possibility, however remote, of a lab leak. (One correction by the Washington Post specifically removes the term “conspiracy theory.”)... Some may argue that, in the middle of a health crisis like Covid, it’s justifiable to shut down an idea that lacks evidence of certainty by labeling it a “conspiracy theory,” particularly if it distracts from the main goal of preventing more illness and death. But there is at least some evidence that the approach doesn’t work. According to a 2016 study, people are no less likely to believe something just because it’s dubbed a “conspiracy”; in fact, that label may even prompt them to give the idea extra consideration or credibility. That makes intuitive sense: If you hear something referred to as a conspiracy theory and then you learn that one of the arguments supporting this theory, however minor, is factual, that revelation may bolster the idea that there really is a cover-up. Or perhaps you learn that a vocal critic of the lab-leak conspiracy theory had a significant but undisclosed conflict of interest — namely that his organization had collaborated with the Wuhan lab that would have been the site of the leak. Along these lines, evidence of stonewalling by the Chinese government also reinforces the suggestion of a cover-up. It is human nature to want a definitive answer to questions. But science is not about certainty"
Science is not about certainty. But the same people who scream "trust the science" are very quick to claim that "the science changed". So we are supposed to treat as gospel truth something that changes
Addendum: Wuhan Lab Publishes Study Manipulating H7N9 Virus To Be More Lethal.
