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[Zmeselo]

Opinion
If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

Thomas Frank

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... dApp_Other

The potential consequences of the origins of the virus are shattering – if they can be proved


‘My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month.’

Tue 1 Jun 2021

T here 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.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/07/ ... expertise/ even figured out https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2021/04 ... ic-results a way to blame https://www.cfr.org/article/how-populis ... l-pandemic the worst death tolls https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ronavirus/ on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult out of the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. https://www.theguardian.com/world/china You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. 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.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-ori ... -at-wuhan/ that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.

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Biden move to investigate Covid origins opens new rift in US-China relations
Read more... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ns-beijing

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In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, https://www.propublica.org/article/here ... onaviruses in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opin ... msday.html for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-ori ... -at-wuhan/ — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/ ... 9s-origins among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-chec ... er-beating — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/2 ... ade-491053 actually censored posts https://nypost.com/2021/01/05/facebooks-covid-coverup/ about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

*

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/opin ... ience.html a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism:

Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article ... heory.html as follows:

This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Thomas Frank is a Guardian US columnist. He is the author, most recently, of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

[LeeVanCliff]

This is a big news
https://in.news.yahoo.com/chinese-milit ... 49951.html

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News

Swarajya
Chinese Military Scientist Filed Patent For A Vaccine Soon After China Revealed Covid-19 Details in 2020
Bhaswati Guha Majumder
Sat, 5 June, 2021, 4:25 am·2-min read

New reports reveal that Zhou Yusen, a military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army who died in May last year, had filed a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on 24 February 2020.

China has been the focus of debates related to the coronavirus pandemic since the beginning of the health crisis. But the country is still struggling to find an escape point as more controversial reports are emerging.


According to a new revelation, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military scientist who received money from the National Institutes of Health submitted a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine in February 2020.

This new report is now raising concerns that the unnamed vaccine was being tested even before the Covid-19 pandemic became public.

According to documents obtained by The Weekend Australian, Zhou Yusen, a respected military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who collaborated with the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and American experts, submitted a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on 24 February last year.

The scientist later died under mysterious circumstances in May 2020.

Despite Zhou’s status as an award-winning military scientist, there were no reports or tributes, with him only being labelled as “dead” in a Chinese media item from July and a scientific publication from December last year.

However, the report revealed that the patent, filed by the PLA’s Institute of Military Medicine, was lodged just five weeks after China acknowledged human-to-human transmission of the novel virus.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper: “This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much ­earlier”.

Additionally, the report said that Zhou worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and collaborated with the New York Blood Center before joining the PLA.

Zhou also collaborated closely with the Wuhan lab, which has come under increased international scrutiny for its role in the pandemic, as well as the famous “batwoman” or the Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli.

According to the report, the pair’s strong working relationship backs up declassified United Stated intelligence data released in January 2021 that claimed the Wuhan facility was engaged in “secret military activity”.

It said: “Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military”.

“The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” the intelligence report added.

It also noted that the United States and other donors who supported the civilian research at the WIV have the right and obligation to investigate if any of the research funds were diverted to secret Chinese military initiatives.

[Zmeselo]

Journey to the East: The flow of Yangtze

By Alemseged Tesfai

China Daily

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202106/ ... c3a17.html

2021-06-04


The Yangtze River flows through the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, Hubei province. LI TAO/FOR CHINA DAILY

In 1967, I think, one of the great historians of the day, Arnold J, Toynbee, delivered a lecture at the Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, where I was a law student. He made several predictions for the end of the millennium.

First, he said, unless a major spiritual revolution salvaged Western democracy, the moral crisis that was then in the offing, especially in the United States, would lead to its decline. And China would emerge as a superpower, leading to a complete overhaul of the world order.

Since then I had yearned to visit China, to dip my feet in the mighty Yangtze and feel its bountiful movement and, indeed, that of China itself. The opportunity came in a way I had never expected. In early 2019, I fell seriously ill, threatened with renal failure. As I lay in the ICU of Orota Hospital in the Eritrean capital of Asmara, swollen all over the body and gasping for breath, my old schoolmate and friend Tsegai Tesfatsion, Eritrea's Ambassador to China, called and asked me to come to Beijing for treatment. A few days later, I was in the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing.

On her first visit, my doctor, a respected nephrologist and professor, pressed my calf and feet with her forefinger which created huge dimples.

Don't worry, we'll take care of that,

Professor Su told me.

She then checked my wheezing, excruciating chest and said:

We'll take care of that too.

She spoke with a soothing voice, calm and confident.

I stayed in the state-of-the-art hospital for almost a month. From the lobby in my ward, where I preferred to sit with a book, I could see the hospital staff in constant motion. The division of labor amazed me. After one month of hospitalization, forty pills a day and volumes of oxygen to keep me breathing, the life-threatening clots in my bloodstream were gone and my body was liberated from the horrors of swelling.

But my treatment had just begun. For nine more months, while I enjoyed the hospitality of Tsegai and the Eritrean embassy staff's hospitality, Prof Su called me to the hospital once every one or two weeks. The picture of the professor peering into the computer, analyzing my test results and prescribing me medication remains imprinted in my mind. Although I was taking about 40 pills a day, I couldn't grasp their names and functions.

Your friend knows more about your disease and your medicines than you do,

she said at one point.

I'd never been so connected to a doctor. I observed the way she was guiding me back to functional health, medically and psychologically. Whenever I felt low due to unsatisfactory weekly test results, she noticed it and tried to cheer me up, and increase or decrease the doses, or prescribe new pills to treat new conditions.

It seemed prescribing medicines was like making a move in chess. But I also felt that, with the right soul handling it, prescribing medicines is a lot like art. From my limited experience with Professor Su, I could see that medical treatment in China was patient-oriented.

In between the weekly or fortnightly visits to the hospital. I ventured out to "feel" the movement of China and its people. But, except for the thrill of connecting with history at the Forbidden City (Palace Museum), the Great Wall and Mao Zedong Mausoleum, I had to readjust my earlier impressions of China. The same drive and discipline that built the Great Wall have today propelled the country to unprecedented heights.

Nothing, it seems, can ever be small in China. Some of the numbers are staggering: 3,000 skyscrapers,100-storied buildings. About 800 million people lifted out of poverty. Indeed, the flow of the Chinese people has diversified.

Though I did not get to dip my feet in the Yangtze, I did enjoy an evening on its banks under the glittering lights of bustling Shanghai. I got a glimpse of the river again as I crossed the Wuhan Bridge, barely a month before the outbreak of COVID-19.

While making the prediction about China's rise over half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War, Toynbee had also said the West's reaction to that development would grow confrontational. I remember his warning that, if that led to war, which he deplored in the strongest terms, it would not be ideological. It would be between the East and the West, possibly ending with the destruction of both.

That evening in Shanghai, on the banks of the Yangtze River, my thoughts had crossed continents to the other global financial center, New York City. I was left wondering how two entirely different societies, of contrasting values and competing principles, could achieve similar results.

As ferries crisscrossed the river carrying cheerful tourists, Toynbee's warning invaded my thoughts. I pushed it away for more positive thoughts. I cannot pretend to fully understand where the major power rivalry is heading. But I find solace in thinking of the tangible and intangible benefits of major power cooperation over confrontation, and peace over war.

In late December 2019, Professor Su was happy enough with my results to allow me to return home. As I said farewell to her and my friends at the Eritrean embassy, I vowed to revisit China and eventually dip my feet in the Yangtze, but not as a sick man.

The author is a historian and writer in Eritrea.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

[Zmeselo]

Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan Lab

Emails add to the mystery over U.S. funds for risky research.

By The Editorial Board

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthony-fa ... 1622759752

June 3, 2021

(Embedded video)


Dr. Anthony Fauci answers questions during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the on-going federal response to Covid-19 at the U.S. Capitol on May 11. PHOTO: GREG NASH - POOL VIA CNP/ZUMA PRESS

Anthony Fauci’s email correspondence from the early days of the pandemic have ignited a spate of recriminations over masks and the doctor’s celebrity. But what really matters is that some of the emails raise more questions about the origin of Covid-19.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci cast doubt on the theory that Covid-19 came from a laboratory like the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). After ruling it out several times, he publicly said last month it is possible, as the hypothesis was getting a second look in media and academia.

The emails, released after media freedom-of-information requests, show that Dr. Fauci followed debates about Covid-19’s origin from the beginning. In early 2020, the immunologist Kristian G. Andersen wrote to him that the virus had some “unusual features” hinting at manipulation in a lab setting.

Mr. Andersen later published a paper rejecting the lab-leak theory for lack of evidence. And Dr. Fauci began sharing articles arguing in favor of a natural origin while giving advice to scientists writing about the issue. But conclusive proof of a zoonotic origin hasn’t emerged, and it’s reasonable to ask why Dr. Fauci was slow to accept the possibility of a lab leak.

Of particular interest: From 2014-19, the National Institutes of Health sent $3.4 million to the WIV through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin,

EcoHealth Alliance chief Peter Daszak gushed to Dr. Fauci in a partly redacted April 2020 email.

Your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.

The NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, and it’s likely the WIV conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious. In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy Hugh Auchincloss a paper about gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. “Read this paper,” he ordered.

You will have tasks today that must be done.

His deputy commented on the paper and said they would

try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.

Dr. Fauci has since said his outfit didn’t fund gain-of-function research; the EcoHealth Alliance funding was meant to go to collecting samples. But

I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab, we can’t do that,

Dr. Fauci said Wednesday in an interview with NewsNation Now.

Dr. Fauci also said this week that his emails

are really ripe to be taken out of context

and that

you don’t really have the full context.

That may be true. But it’s all the more reason to investigate the U.S. links to WIV and gain-of-function research. The issue relates to Covid’s origins but also to the future risks and benefits of such research.

The current Congress doesn’t seem interested, but President Biden could help by establishing a fact-finding commission like the Robb-Silberman effort on intelligence failures before the Iraq war. This shouldn’t be a “Fire Fauci” partisan exercise. Understanding where the pandemic came from—and what officials knew and when they knew it—can teach valuable lessons and perhaps save lives.

[Zmeselo]

Candace Owens: ‘Firing Fauci does not go far enough, he needs to be put in prison’

[Zmeselo]

Gina McCracken:

The French helped to build the Wuhan lab. The Wuhan lab was initially intended to be used as an international lab. As soon as construction of the Wuhan Virology Institute was complete, the Chinese military stepped in and forced the French out, completely blocking all access to the lab. The French sounded the alarm that they thought the Chinese Government seized all control of the lab in order to study bio-weaponization by means of Gain of Function and as it stands right now; the French were right.