It’s ironic, but “progressives” so often progress toward Truth only long after ridiculing their opponents for espousing it. The COVID-19 lab-leak theory is no exception. It now is graduating — in the University of Leftist Thought, anyway — from tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory to striking possibility.
Why, even the Facebook censors are now giving it some sunlight, points out American Thinker’s Mike Landry. This is no doubt partially attributable “to a recent article in the famously left-wing Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [BAS] suggesting what you probably know by now: apparently, the coronavirus was human-engineered and somehow got out of the research lab in Wuhan, China,” Landry writes. “Potentially deadly viruses tinkered with at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had containment protocols no greater than those of a standard dentist’s office, the article says.”
One man influenced by the BAS article is columnist Thomas Frank, “a former Wall Street Journal editorial page writer of an oddly left but independent bent,” as Landry describes him. In a mild mea culpa in the quite left-wing Guardian US, he admits:
There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.
Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.
Yet Frank, to be frank, used the wrong word. More accurate than saying the China virus seemed to confirm leftists’ “assumptions” is that it confirmed their prejudices. The problem with a truly prejudiced person is that — as the Left acknowledges itself when going on about “unconscious biases” — it can be painfully difficult for him to look past his own prejudices. When you’ll react childishly and say “up” just because a president you hate says “down,” or will say “up” just because a nation you’re beholden to (i.e., China) says “up,” you and the Truth will rarely have the same address.
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Frank also errs when saying we were “elevating our scientists”; “we” did no such thing.
Rather, pseudo-elites elevated certain scientists — always the wrong ones.
Oh, it’s of course true that in a secular age people may tend to deify things worldly, such as science. But the point is that there were and are plenty of scientists who disputed the government-approved, but pathologically contradictory, China-virus narrative. And they were and are censored by our Ministry of Truth: Big Media and Bigger Tech.
If anything, this has gotten worse, too, as the government narrative increasingly lies in tatters. Immunologist and physician Dr. Hooman Noorchashm and epidemiologist Tracey Hoeg were recently censored by GoogTwitFace, and all Hoeg did was quote the Centers for Disease Control’s own data showing that young people face a greater risk from COVID vaccines than from the disease itself.
Then there’s Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yang, who last September claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China; she was censored by Facebook. But, hey, what does she know? She’s only a virologist who worked in China and is risking her life by blowing the whistle.
As for Frank, he’s not malevolent. But if a “schlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup and a schlimazel is the person it lands on,” as the Yiddish saying goes, he’s definitely a perhaps-willful schlimazel. As he writes, “A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.”
Words fail me. But at least Frank has been shaken from his “complacency,” as he puts it, and now says of the lab-leak theory, “What if this crazy story turns out to be true?”
Of course, he may thus phrase it to pry open the minds of the Guardian’s left-wing readers. But as Frank points out later in his piece, lab leaks “happen all the time.” For sure. As left-wing Slate informed in 2014, “In 2010 [alone], 244 unintended releases of bioweapon candidate ‘select agents’ were reported.”
So looking “at the problem pragmatically, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak,” the site continued, “but rather what the pathogen will be and how such an escape may be contained, if indeed it can be contained at all.”
The point? The China virus lab-leak theory not only isn’t crazy, it is and always has been the most plausible COVID-origin explanation. In fact, this is why I and other observers sent that very message even early last year. Yet this conclusion didn’t require genius — only that you opened your eyes.
This brings us to Frank’s money line: “You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this [the pandemic disaster]?”
But Frank and fellow travelers will really feel moral convulsions if they begin pondering the actual truth. For his above line smacks of psychological-avoidance-inspired shallow analysis. Perhaps “science” is responsible for the pandemic in the sense that “ideology” (as opposed to a specific creed) was responsible for Nazi horrors — speaking loosely. But ideologies go nowhere without ideologists, and there is no science without scientists, and there’s good and bad in both realms.
And bad scientists go nowhere without enablers.
The 21st-century Lysenkoists peddling COVID fiction would have been lonely forest voices without politicians, bureaucrats, influential academia, entertainment, Big Media, and GoogTwitFace elevating them while silencing dissenting voices. And, Mr. Frank, willfully blind people who couldn’t look past their own prejudices are also culpable.
It’s now clichéd to say that the powerful lied, and people died. But we should remember that prejudices correlate with prevarication — so they kill, too.
