As you all know, I’ve been obsessed with the origins of COVID-19 and what is clearly the cover-up arising from it. To me, there are two main components to the story. The first is the malfeasance of the press, which swallowed whole the nonsense served up by the Chinese, the Government, WHO, and people like Peter Daszak and relegated the idea that maybe we should investigate the possibility of a lab leak to the domain of the tinfoil hat brigade making it impossible to even be discussed. Most infuriating of all, the press spent a whole year patting themselves on the back for “fighting disinformation” while they were the principal purveyors of it.
Tablet has an excellent article on the press’ disastrous coverage of the controversy. At every turn they chose to support those saying the cause was zoonotic dismissing any other explanation and ignoring the vested interests of those they were quoting. They’re still doing it today and show no signs of admitting that maybe they were wrong. Tablet makes out a pretty good case that their coverage was politically driven and it wasn’t until the change of administrations that it became permissible to even speculate on an alternative explanation.
The second issue is more serious. Everybody now admits—although the government and Fauci denied it for a long time—that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research. As Tablet points out in another article, the term is a euphemism for something that could better be described as “Viral-deadliness enhancement”. Sensible people—including many virologists—are asking why anyone would do such a thing let alone fund it. The usual answer is that will help us fight future pandemics but as the second Tablet article makes clear that hasn’t happened and is unlikely to happen because virus mutations are unpredictable and are unlikely to match what the researchers are ginning up in the lab.
The main takeaway from all this for me is that we need a strong moratorium on gain-of-function research. The last year and a half should have taught us at least that.