Yes, it’s a special Saturday edition of Shouting Into the Wind! What gives? Well, my good friend Dr. Phil Lefty took great umbrage with something I wrote in yesterday’s column, and I promised to respond with a full article here.
In my piece about our new Ministry of Truth, I stated that the “origin of the Wuhan virus that brought the world to its knees” is an example of a news story the media and government declared to be “disinformation,” but which turned out to be 100-percent accurate. Dr. Phil argued with that assessment, claiming there is “no evidence” that the virus originated from the Wuhan lab. Instead, he is convinced that it came from the infamous “wet market” in Wuhan.
(To be fair, after a brief discussion, he reassessed the probability of the lab leak theory to be “10 percent.”)
Before we delve into the science, let’s approach this “mystery” using plain old-fashioned common sense.
Do you mean perhaps there’s a chance that [the Wuhan virus] was created in a lab? A chance? There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab! The disease is the same name as the lab! Look at the name! If there was an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, maybe it’s from the f—king chocolate factory!
That was Jon Stewart on the Stephen Colbert show last June. I never thought I would agree wholeheartedly with anything Jon Stewart ever said, and yet here we are. When even Jon Stewart understands the crux of this argument, you know it has to be a winning argument. Bill Maher, another leftist cultural icon, has echoed this sentiment several times over the past two years.
It seems rather obvious, from a common-sense perspective, that a virus that shares much of its genomic sequence with a very specific breed of horseshoe bats, which are found nowhere near Wuhan, China, except in the lab where gain-of-function coronavirus experiments on horseshoe bats were known to have taken place before an outbreak occurred just outside of that lab…probably came from that lab.
THE CLAIM
Let me be very specific about the claim I am making here. I am NOT claiming that the Chinese government deliberately created this virus for the purpose of weaponizing it. I am also not claiming that scientists in the Wuhan lab genetically-engineered this virus by inserting and deleting nucleotides in the genetic code.
I am claiming that scientists in the Wuhan lab deliberately manipulated the spike proteins from horseshoe bats, through natural evolution of serial passage of genetic traits, allowing the virus to mutate in unnatural ways and jump from one species to another (i.e. gain-of-function.)
I back this claim with the fact that gain-of-function research was being conducted in that specific lab, using that specific breed of bat, with partial funding by the United States National Institute of Health. We know this is a fact, because we have the receipts. We also know this is a fact because the NIH has admitted to it. No one disputes these facts.
The argument made for “natural origin” of the virus is a red herring. No one disputes that the virus was created naturally. That does not, however, mean that it happened by accident, through random mutations and natural evolution. A toy poodle did not naturally evolve in the way it appears today. Human beings deliberately bred small dogs until they achieved the breed that we now know as the toy poodle. We do the same exact type of deliberate genetic manipulation with our food products. The seedless grape does not exist via natural accident. These are all examples of natural evolution, deliberately manipulated by human beings with an end purpose in mind.
In January of 2020, Dr. Fauci received an email from a researcher named Kristian Anderson, who commented on the “unusual features” of the virus, which he noted comprise a very small part of the genome (<0.1%). “One has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he wrote. He and several other high-profile experts in his organization all arrived at the same conclusion: the genome of the virus is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last year, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller wrote that the lab leak “theory” is “firmly based in science.” They explained that the genome sequence observed in the Covid-19 virus has never been found naturally, but is often used in laboratory settings. The virus replicated in a way that would have been precisely identical to the way in which gain-of-function researchers would have performed.
“At minimum,” they wrote, “this fact that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers, implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”
THE COVER-UP
Another piece of strong evidence supporting the lab leak conclusion is the amount of effort that went into covering up “inconvenient” truths throughout the past two years. If the “accident of nature” explanation is true, then why has there been such a widescale concerted effort to suppress the competing theory? If the evidence for natural accident is so convincing, then why couldn’t we openly challenge it?
Way back in September of 2019, months before the Chinese government admitted the existence of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) wiped out its entire database of 22,000 viral samples and sequences, and permanently erased all records from early patient cases. Numerous Chinese whistleblowers suddenly “disappeared” without explanation. More than 5,100 Chinese citizens were arrested for sharing information about the virus. Shi Zhengli, China’s “bat woman,” who was arguably the world’s leading expert on bat coronaviruses, mysteriously disappeared for a brief time before resurfacing and vehemently proclaiming the innocence of her lab’s role in the virus’ origin.
The World Health Organization, which effectively acts as a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party, instantly declared that a “zoonotic spillover” (i.e. natural accident) was the “likely to very likely” explanation for the origin of the virus, and that a laboratory incident was “extremely unlikely.” The media happily ran with that explanation, as the WHO was one of their undisputed single sources of truth.
In February of 2020, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak scrambled to cover his ass. It was EcoHealth that had received a $3.7 million grant from Dr. Fauci’s NIH way back in 2014. The WIV received a whopping $600,000 from that grant, which was used to “screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge the risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk.”
Daszak assembled a group of fellow scientists who were willing to tell the tall tale that the virus was a result of an accident of nature, coming from a wet market in Wuhan that just happened to be located right next door to the WIV. Daszak, Fauci, and several other members of their team assembled behind the scenes to pen a letter that was published in the Lancet – the most respected and influential medical journal in the world. Their letter proclaimed that the lab leak “theory” was entirely groundless, and was nothing more than a “conspiracy theory.”
The mainstream media and Big Tech echoed that claim, proclaiming that any suggestion that the origin of the virus may have come from the WIV was “disinformation.” They worked together to censor, or outright ban, anyone who made such a suggestion. They slapped “warning labels” on any post that mentioned the origin of the virus.
Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director at the time, pushed back against this effort, and urged Fauci to investigate the possibility of the lab leak “theory.” Redfield was then excluded from all further internal meetings among this group of esteemed scientific experts. “Their goal,” Redfield explained, “was to have a single narrative.”
Last June, thousands of pages of email exchanges involving Anthony Fauci were released through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Those emails revealed that Redfield was hardly alone among scientific experts who pushed back against the narrative crafted by Daszak and Fauci, and were subsequently frozen out of future discussions. One of those emails, sent from EcoHealth to Dr. Fauci in April of 2020, thanked Fauci for squashing the lab leak theory.
THE WET MARKET THEORY
To date, not a single animal in China has been found that naturally carries the virus that causes Covid-19. The horseshoe bat species that matches the genetic sequence of the virus does not exist anywhere within 56 miles of Wuhan. More than sixty people have been interviewed by Chinese and foreign investigators to date, all of whom were known to have been connected to the Huanan wet market. Not a single one of them reported horseshoe bats ever being sold in that market.
Nevertheless, last February, the New York Times published a front-page article written by a team of eighteen scientific experts, claiming that “new analysis” from the Huanan market in Wuhan provided “dispositive evidence” that the virus came from animals sold there. Several other top scientists, including evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom responded by noting that the “evidence” provided in this claim hadn’t been peer-reviewed, relied on incomplete data, and had yet to discover a single animal infected by the virus.
A ridiculous article from Vox (is there any other kind on that garbage site) makes the same claim, using the same study cited by the Times:
Together, the studies connect the dots of transmission at the epicenter of the pandemic, observing that the virus likely made the leap from animals to humans more than once. “Once you understand that there were infected animals in the market, then multiple spillovers are not just a possibility, they’re what you would expect at that point,” Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and a co-author on both papers, told Vox.
The article is full of red herrings and strawmen. No one is claiming that animals don’t carry coronaviruses. No one is claiming that these viruses often jump from animal to human. No one is claiming that this happens multiple times, resulting in countless mutations and viral variations. The issue in dispute is whether this specific virus could possibly, plausibly, likely, be the result of these natural evolutionary processes.
The Vox article notes that researchers have been unable to identify a single infected animal that could have possibly been the viral host. “And though scientists have found several related viruses in the wild,” the authors note, “they haven’t found one yet that they think could have directly spawned SARS-CoV-2.”
Well, stop the presses. That, right there, should have been the final sentence of the article. More than two years after the initial outbreak, researchers still cannot find the virus that spawned this specific virus, but they have identified the genomic sequence of the virus that “appears engineered” and “has never been found naturally, but is often used in laboratory settings.”
Mic. Drop.
GOSH, MAYBE THERE IS SOMETHING TO IT AFTER ALL
Dr. Fauci finally admitted in May of last year that a lab leak could possibly explain the origin of the virus.
“I have always said, and will say today,” said Fauci, “I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human, but I keep an absolutely open mind that if there may be other origins of that, there may be another reason, it could have been a lab leak.”
Better late than never, right?
At the end of May, “President” Biden reportedly ordered an investigation by U.S. intelligence to look into the possibility of a lab leak origin – which the mainstream media and Big Tech had declared a year earlier to be a crazy conspiracy theory. Earlier in his administration, Biden had shut down a State Department investigation into that matter. His reversal was reportedly due to “new evidence.” The only “new evidence” that surfaced around that time were Fauci’s revealing emails.
I have not seen any update on that Biden administration investigation. It took the same administration eighteen months to investigate the “Haitian whipping” incident. I imagine it might take a little longer for this investigation to conclude, given the amount of eggs that are needed to splatter across so many faces.
100 PERCENT?
In retrospect, perhaps there was a bit of hyperbole in my statement yesterday that the lab leak theory has been “100 percent” validated. Short of a written confession by the Chinese government, that will never be true. Very few theories in this world can be proven with 100-percent certainty. However, if we piece together all of the facts that we know, with 100-percent certainty, are true, then the conclusion seems plainly obvious.
My question is: why on earth wouldn’t any reasonable person believe this is true? What is there to gain from the belief that the virus was a one-in-a-trillion coincidental accident of nature? There are more than ample reasons for the Chinese government, Dr. Fauci, the WHO, the NIH, and everyone else connected to this virus to deny this plainly-obvious connection. But what on earth motivates the true believers on the left who continue to cling to this ridiculous theory?
I can think of only one reason: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump called it the “China virus” from the very beginning, and held China solely accountable for the origin and spread of the deadliest virus in more than a century. Those suffering from TDS cannot bring themselves to agree with the Bad Orange Man on ANY issue; therefore, he must be wrong about this one as well.
TDS is real, my friends. If you know someone who suffers from TDS, please be kind.
Is "polite civility" good enough?
Also, I've seen enough movies to immediately suspect the 1 in a trillion possibility as most probable.