Another Impossible Lab Leak

Oh, “Trust the Science.” Isn’t that what we’re always being told? Whether the subject is global warming…or climate change…or whatever it’s called, or the origins of a deadly pandemic, science is something done by humans. Humans, while no doubt quite intelligent, every bit as fallible as the janitor who fails to use a clean mop, or the fast-food employee who forgets your pickles.

Lately, we’ve been conditioned to see certain scientists as something more akin to high priests. Untouchable sphinx-like figures whose pronouncements have the ring of religious finality.

There are a few reasons for that, in my opinion. One is general scientific illiteracy. Decades of Bunsen burner-style science education have eradicated any curiousity or understanding among the general public of basic science and its precepts. Don’t believe me? Have you driven on a highway lately? If you have, you’ve probably seen idiots following the car in front of them at suicidal speeds, while maintaining a distance best described as “intimate.”

Would you do that if you understood basic physics? That a vehicle in motion at high speed, no matter how good its brakes, requires time and distance in order to stop? I suspect a great many people die every year from this basic lack of scientific understanding, coupled with a healthy dose of impatience.

Another reason is the absence of religion in our lives. My theory is that humans, save perhaps the most intelligent and dispassionate among us, need some sort of certainty. Faith is very much undervalued these days; yet even I, as an agnostic, can see what sort of hole its absence leaves in our existence.

We worship the false gods of Marxism, consumerism, hedonism. We prostrate ourselves before trends, celebrities, and cults. If Jesus returned to the moneylenders’ today, he’d really have a shitfit.

And so, we confuse a reasoned acceptance of fact with belief. Science does not rest on belief; it rests on established and double-checked facts. But we don’t really think that now, do we? Why else would we use the hoary slogan, “Trust the Science,” when we ought to be saying, “Fuck Trust, Let Me See Your Facts.”

Last but not least: A seepage of political partisanship into every single aspect of our daily lives, from sex, to sports, to comedy, to science. Nobody, it seems, can be neutral anymore. And that’s a really huge problem for an endeavour like science, which depends on peer review and skepticism to evaluate new claims.

Why is this important, the science-free among you might ask? Well, for starters, I would ask the following question: Would so many supposedly educated people believe the earth is flat, or vaccines cause autism, if science was doing a better job of seeming less like a cult, and more than the thing Einstein and Galileo did? It probably doesn’t help that science is relying on people like Bill Nye and Greta Thunberg to push its current “the end is nigh” messaging.

But that’s another article. In this article, what I really want to suggest is that good, old-fashioned science, de-politicized and uncorrupted science, might be the key to answering the biggest scientific question of the 21st Century.

Namely, who killed four million people and shut down the world economy? Was it a natural occurrence, or something else? I am talking, of course, of the COVID-19 pandemic. That pandemic, we were assured for over a year, that couldn’t possibly have been the result of anything other than natural, zoonotic (animal-to-human) transmission.

Ah yes, “Trust the Science.” The problem now, it seems, is that the “scientific consensus” we were assured of by a herd of scientists signing a letter poo-pooing any other explanation, is built on a foundation as secure as a Miami condos.

The consensus is a manufactured, political consensus. It’s a consensus tainted by research money, desire to protect prestige and reputation, and pure and simple politics. Trump suggested a lab leak; therefore, it cannot be true. You don’t agree? Conspiracy theorist!

The consensus, though, is now looking weaker and weaker. Since the start of the year, not-so-coincidentally since the Bad Orange Man moved out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a disturbing pattern of facts has emerged to challenge the hitherto trustworthy science. Some examples:

-The favoured theory of zoonotic origin via wet market has, as yet, zero supporting facts. Yet the circumstantial and genetic evidence supporting the lab leak of a chimera virus grows and grows.

-The virus, according to US Intelligence, emerged in September, not December 2019, and appears to have started with three infected employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

-The WIV’s “Bat Lady,” Shi Zhengli, has had more story changes than Jussie Smollett. First, a lab leak was possible. Then, it was “Bats? What bats?” despite the fact that an Australian TV crew had filmed all the bat cages in the institute. Lab workers posed with bats for photos and went into isolation when bitten or peed on by said bats. Thousands of virus sequences were wiped from the institute’s cloud storage, which Shi insisted was due to hacker attacks after the outbreak started. The only problem? That wiping actually occurred in September 2019, long before anyone outside of WIV had heard of the virus. Don’t worry, Shi, US Intelligence is working hard on recovering your data. Time for a new version of your story, perhaps?

-The WIV, supposedly an impregnable bastion of lab safety, has had, in fact, four prior serious lab safety breaches. Photos exist of lab staff handling potentially infectious bats without protective equipment. Foreign experts, visiting prior to the outbreak, were alarmed by loose protocols and a lack of trained staff.

-Peter Daszak, a top figure in the Eco-Health Alliance, doing emerging virus research in China, and the World Health Organization’s investigation into said emerging virus research (no conflict there) was the driver behind a very early letter to The Lancet decrying any suggestion of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory. He also helpfully suggested that compromising interests, like his own, not be mentioned in the letter. Now, some of the signatories have backed away, and a closer inspection of the letter reveals there is little or no evidence to support its contentions.

-The Furin Cleavage on the SARS-COV-2 virus is unlike any other virus in its family, and to quote a research paper in Environmental Chemistry Letters:

In summary, the FCS confers SARS-CoV-2 enhanced human pathogenicity and has never been identified in another Sarbecovirus. At the same time, FCSs have been routinely inserted into coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments, and we provide a hypothesis through which the specific amino acid sequence of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS may have been generated through cell culture. (Segreto et al, 2021)

To simplify, what this means is that the part of the virus that binds to human cells and makes us sick is far, far more efficient than any other virus in the family of coronaviruses. In fact, the most likely progenitor of SARS COV-2 is a virus called RaTG13 found in a cave in Mojiang, China 2012; one that killed three miners with COVID-like symptoms. Our friend Dr Shi was researching that one; but somewhere along the way, this very similar virus became something not found anywhere in nature but the bodies of humans: a RaTG13 with a Furin Cleavage site combining proteins from several other deadly coronaviruses. Other scientists reviewing the 96% commonality between the two genomes concluded that it would’ve taken RaTG13 fifty years to evolve into COVID in the wild. Given that the RaTG13 was discovered 1000 miles away from Wuhan and eight years prior to the outbreak, is this all just a coincidence?

-Shi and her colleagues have, in the past, engaged in “Gain of Function” experiments, a dubious practice undertaken not only in China, in which virologists tinker with the genomes of viruses to see how bad they can get. The result is the creation of “chimera” viruses, papers on which Shi has published in the past, something no doubt of great interest to General Wei Chen, a Chinese Army biological weapons expert on the board of directors of the WIV.

-China has obsessively blocked, obscured, and diverted every attempt to find the origin of the COVID epidemic. The simplest explanation is that there is something to hide.

But how could all this evidence be disregarded for a solid year by the majority of the scientific community? Surely, this is unprecedented, right?

No, it’s not. Ideology, flattery, and plain naivety can infect scientists just as effectively as a thumb pricked with a syringe full of Ebola. Take, for instance, the cautionary tale of Dr Matthew Meselson.

Dr Meselson is an esteemed, and much-awarded geneticist, long active in biological weapons defense and disarmament programs. He helped bring about the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Dr Meselson is no dummy.

In 1979, in Sverdlovsk, Russia, a mysterious outbreak of Anthrax killed, if you believe the official totals, 66 people. Ken Alibek, a former high-ranking research official in the Soviet bioweapons program, believes it was much more.

The official Soviet version? Contaminated meat. Dr Meselson, a bioweapons expert, let’s remember, visited the Soviet Union in 1986, and bought the official version like a bad sandwich.

The only problem for the esteemed Dr Meselson? He was wrong. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and Boris Yeltsin took over the show, he admitted that a mistake in replacing filters in an Anthrax manufacturing plant spread the deadly spores across the city in the middle of the night. This account was supported by Dr Alibek, and by genetic analysis after the fact.

How could a man like Dr Meselson be wrong? The same way Dr Anthony Fauci, or any other human being can be wrong. “Trusting the Science” requires a quasi-religious belief in people who are human, fallible, and raised in democracies. They don’t always understand the totalitarian talent for lying embodied in societies like the Soviet Union or modern China.

I’m no scientist. I can only try and absorb what’s put in front of me like any semi-educated layman. But I do know three things I’m almost certain of at this point:

-Dictatorships are built on lies and fear. If Dr Shi wanted to tell us the truth, could she?

-People only cover-up when there’s something to cover-up. An innocent natural origin for a virus requires no secrecy. So, why the secrecy?

-If I had to decide this case based on the “balance of probabilities” standard used in civil courts, China would owe billions of dollars to the rest of the world. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the pet theory of the establishment, namely that COVID originated from a natural leap from animals to humans. On the contrary, there is a preponderance of evidence to support the contention that COVID, likely a chimera virus originating in Gain of Function testing, escaped from WIV in the fall of 2019, and originated the nightmare we now live in.

None of this is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, mind you. But the evidence is mounting, and the facts to support the contrary view simply haven’t arrived. Yet there are many people in the West who have a vested interest in wishing this story away. Too many reporters, scientists, and politicians conflated their politics with their responsibility to the truth. As a result, many blue-ticked “guardians of truth” are, if not completely ignoring this story, then they are certainly soft-pedaling it.

How many people have to die before we get really angry? Or does China get a pass on everything? Have we already decided they rule the world?