Writes Jim Geraghty in "The Circumstantial Evidence at Wuhan Lab Keeps Growing" (National Review)(reacting to the big Wall Street Journal scoop "Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin/Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab").
UPDATE: Here's Jonathan Chait in NY Magazine: "How the Liberal Media Dismissed the Lab-Leak Theory and Smeared Its Supporters":
Many mainstream journalists, though not all, dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis out of hand as a conspiracy theory.... The confusion surrounding this issue was sown in no small measure by Trump, who used China as a transparent gambit to distract from his failure to respond to the pandemic....
Obviously, the idea China would intentionally start a deadly pandemic inside of China, just so the virus would eventually spread around the globe and kill Americans, is preposterous.... However, the charge that the virus began in a lab and China was covering it up was never clearly false. Yet many media reports treated this aspect with the same skepticism as Trump’s other lies on the subject, often blending different aspects of these claims together....
The security level of a lab in China is not something the Western media was, or is, in a position to assess. But this assumption that the lab almost certainly couldn’t suffer a breach became embedded in a lot of the coverage that followed. In February, Senator Tom Cotton appeared on television to raise questions about what China was hiding. Cotton kept his exact accusation vague, perhaps deliberately.
“We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” he said of the Wuhan lab, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.” Reporters immediately began accusing him of promoting the most extreme version of Trump’s charge.
The New York Times labeled Cotton’s remarks a “conspiracy theory.” The Washington Post’s account was headlined, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” The Post quoted an expert denying the virus “was a deliberately released bioweapon,” but Cotton hadn’t said that....
Much more at the link.
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7 comments:
Mattman26 writes:
The fact that Fauci et al. (and by “et al.” I mean all of our betters in government, media, etc.) were slow to come around on the lab leak theory would not, by itself, be so infuriating.
It was their absolute certainty (or rather their expression of absolute certainty) that it was impossible, that it was a tinfoil-hat-conspiracy theory. And (and this part really hits home for me) that anyone who credited it, even as one possibility among several, was some combination of complete moron and/or mental defective who can’t possibly be reasoned with.
They get away with this time and again (climate change, concerns about the risk-benefit ratio for Covid vaccines, questions about whether anything hinky occurred in the 2020 election), and I am so sick of it.
Owen writes:
I have to agree with “Mattman26” that the most infuriating part of this long strange trip we’re on, is the insouciant and impenetrable confidence of people like Fauci —and his media coterie, who both nourish him with interviews and references, and who also depend on him to nourish them with “Science”— that presents “things as they are” without any hesitation or qualification, until —on a fucking dime— they are presented in some other way.
This is the very essence of bullshit. And it is unstable. It works wonderfully, until of course it doesn’t. And when you see the telltales, you should be very nervous. Because they mean that the Faucis either don’t know or cannot afford to care any more about moving things back toward what might actually be true. They are going to keep flying this confabulation without hesitation or qualification. Right into the deck.
This should be obvious to anybody who survived middle school. What am I not getting here?
Bob Boyd writes: "I suspect Fauci is just posing as open-minded and I predict CCP surrogate WHO will conduct an investigation and determine there is no credibility to the lab leak theory. Fauci will then support their conclusion as "the science"."
Montgomery writes: "I saw an analyst say on a news channel today that the experts like Fauci have come around on the "escaped from the lab" theory because that was what Trump was saying a year ago and they felt they had to be contrarian to counter Trump. I suspect it is more of the fact that the journalists at the Wall Street Journal are digging up the evidence, even circumstantial, that MSM journalists used to do instead of being lazy and reporting on what the experts are saying as the "facts". I also wish these experts would stop discounting the possibility that this was part of an experiment by the Chinese government like they were a year ago about it coming from the lab. The Chinese are investing huge amounts of money in not only trying to force the world to be economically dependent on China and military weapons hardware, but also in computer viruses and hacking to undermine our infrastructure. It would be logical that they are investing in chemical and biological warfare to attempt to disable as much of our population as possible to save casualties for their military in an armed confrontation with the West."
Tom writes: "Just because the virus may have been accidentally released does not mean that China didn’t or wouldn’t use it as an asymmetrical warfare weapon against the United States once it was released. It also doesn’t mean the virus wasn’t developed as a biological weapon - just that it was accidentally released. At this point, all of those possibilities need to be thoroughly vetted.
"Speaking of COVID as a weapon, if you were designing a biological weapon designed to wreck a global economy, would you design the virus any different than COVID 19?"
Joe writes: ""Obviously, the idea China would intentionally start a deadly pandemic inside of China, just so the virus would eventually spread around the globe and kill Americans, is preposterous...." Why is it preposterous? Sounds like a great cover story to me. China is a communist, totalitarian dictatorship hell-bent on usurping American global dominance through any means necessary. This is the same government that puts segments of its population in prison camps, sterilizes women, approves of slave labor and child labor to build Nike sneakers, and exports fentynal to the U.S. that kill thousands of our citizens. Accidental release or strategically planned...look what they gained. The biggest success was getting rid of Trump, the one American politician up until just a few years ago to question the CPC and push back against trade deals that cost the U.S. billions each year. So a few hundred thousand Chinese 'cogs in a wheel' die from a virus...think of them as dying for the homeland. Pretty good trade if you're Xi. If I were a commie dictator asshole I'd make that deal in a heartbeat."
Bob Boyd writes: "Fauci's not without conflict on this issue. He was directly involved with funding the Wuhan lab so the Chinese could do these gain of function experiments. If a product of that research then jumped the fence and killed millions, what's Fauci going to say? "Woops, my bad"? He must have been crapping his pants for Christmas in 2019. It's amazing, but not surprising the press is still so focused on Trump and the Republicans and ignoring this huge story. They are more concerned with not calling Science and Expertise into question than with learning and reporting the truth."
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