The biggest scandal is COVID

Plus, election shenanigans: my beef with Matt Yglesias

Most of us prefer not to remember the bad old days of 2020 through the end of 2021. Masks, footprints on the floor designating how far you have to be from people, plexiglass everywhere, bleaching your groceries (well, we did a few times), and, if you are one of the lucky ones (like me), the virus itself. COVID sucked and still sucks.

I was really ready to be through with it, forever, but then I saw in, of all places, The New York Times, a guest essay by Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist with both Harvard and M.I.T. who wrote a book titled “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” This book. from November 2021, is currently #1 in Bacteriology, #4 in Virology and #5 in Biochemistry on Amazon. Why would the NYT now publish an essay by the author of a 2 1/2 year old book on a supposedly discredited topic?

Maybe it’s because COVID—and its origin—are back in the news, with Anthony Fauci testifying before a congressional committee. Much of the news is focused (and not incorrectly) on the egregious and moronic behavior of one Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who does not deserve to be on any committee, or in any legislative body, for that matter. But I’m in agreement—despite my emotional response to bury my head—with many others on the topic. We can’t really move on from COVID until we find what caused the pandemic, at least to a degree of certainty much greater than the closely-managed media versions we’ve been fed.

Chan checked off several reasons it’s worth looking closely at Wuhan, and a lab leak, as the likely source of the virus.

First, it began in Wuhan. Early in the spread of COVID-19, I wrote that if the virus had begun spreading in Frederick, Maryland, the media would simply assume—without any hard facts in evidence—that it came from USAMRIID ( United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) at Fort Detrick. It wouldn’t matter what evidence then emerged that the virus might have a different origin; the coincidence would simply be too great for the media not to keep digging.

At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to one of the few (there are only 51) biosafety level 4 (BSL-4, the highest) labs int the world, researchers were working with SARS-like viruses for over ten years. The viruses the team led by Shi Zhengli were working with are very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus.

The team went to the hot spots where cave bats live, the natural home of the virus, to collect specimens. But these scientists argued, right up until 2019, according to Chan, crossover infections to humans is rare. Dr. Shi herself, upon the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, wondered if the source was her own laboratory. In the years since the outbreak, scientists have found no known trace of infection at the purported source (hotspots) or anywhere along a 1,000-mile path from those places to Wuhan, Chan said.

In the year before the pandemic, Dr. Shi’s team experimented on SARS viruses, to determine how coronaviruses jump between species. The work was completed in cooperation with U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, the recipient of over $80 million in federal funding (that Fauci largely controlled) to research infectious diseases. The research involved risky practices that increased the infectious nature of the viruses. Samples were grown and genetically recombined to form novel types not found in nature. These were used to “infect civets and humanized mice,” Chan wrote (that’s mice with humanized genes).

Dr. Shi’s database describing 22,000-plus samples was published, then held back by the Chinese government in the fall of 2019. A 2018 project named Defuse, a collaboration between EcoHealth, Wuhan Institute of Virology and a researcher at the University of North Carolina, was uncovered by The Intercept: this proposal “described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS-CoV-2.” The proposal was never funded, but Dr. Fauci on Monday told Congress the Wuhan institute may have proceeded without U.S. funding.

During the pandemic, EcoHealth never disclosed the existence of the Defuse proposal. The Biden administration has recently barred EcoHealth from receiving federal funding, which Dr. Fauci said in his testimony, that he supports.

Though Wuhan Institute of Virology possesses a BSL-4 lab, they regularly worked with coronaviruses under BSL-2 conditions, which are much less secure than BSL-4, according to Chan. Even BSL-3 is insufficient to contain SARS-CoV-2. Chan wrote:

• SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.

• One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.

Chan also wrote that she believes the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in the Hunan wet market is weakly supported by evidence. She cited bias in the Chinese investigators and how the Chinese government restricted or ordered destroyed patient samples on January 3, 2020. She further explained that “key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.”

A pretty reasonable, even a strong, case. But in 2020 and 2021, even positing such a case was considered rumormongering, conspiracy theory, or “fake news.”

In 2023, the New York Post reported how scientists feared a “s**tshow” if they found China responsible for the COVID-19 origin.

“​​Given the s–tshow that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process,” Dr. Andrew Rambaut, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in a Feb. 2, 2020, Slack message to co-authors Dr. Kristian Andersen, Dr. Edward Holmes and Dr. Robert Garry.

A press release by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on March 8, 2023 noted that “facts, science, evidence point to a Wuhan lab leak.”

Nicholas Wade testified about the campaign to discredit the lab leak theory. He pointed out that scientists kept in line with the natural origin camp led by Drs. Fauci and Collins because of their dependence on government grants and that the media failed to challenge the forced narrative.

All witnesses agreed that the possibility of COVID-19 originating from a lab is not a conspiracy theory.

In his testimony before the House on Monday, Dr. Fauci denied suppressing the lab leak theory.

"I've also been very, very clear, and said multiple times, that I don’t think the concept of there being a lab (leak) is inherently a conspiracy theory," he said.

"What is conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject, like it was a lab leak, and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak," he told a U.S. House of Representatives panel.

As early as June, 2021, the Washington Post acknowledged that the “lab leak” theory was deemed a “conspiracy theory.” It seems the word “conspiracy” didn’t describe the likelihood of the theory itself, but who was promoting it (Trump-aligned people). Respectable sources, like NPR, were given more weight, even if they were totally off base.

NPR reported in April 2020 that there was “virtually no chance” that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory in China “or anywhere else.” Such an accidental release, it said, “would have required a remarkable series of coincidences and deviations from well-established experimental protocols.”

WaPo acknowledged in 2021 that they characterized Sen. Tom Cotton’s remarks about a lab leak as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” before retroactively “softening” the headline, calling it a “fringe theory” instead.

So, two and a half years later, here we are, with many people still claiming any lab leak theory must be a conspiracy, despite all the piles of evidence and qualified researchers saying it’s a very serious possibility, if not a probability.

If COVID-19 did in fact come from the Wuhan lab, and in fact was the result of human error, or failure to observe proper safety protocols when conducting intentional research into a modified, enhanced, dangerously contagious virus, this is the biggest scandal of the century. It towers over J6, over anything Donald Trump did as president, or since. This should be the focus of our news, not the garbage we’re spewing every day.

Dr. Fauci, I think, has never been totally honest. He’s always looking over his shoulder, waiting for the truth to catch up with him. I believe he had the nation’s best interests at heart, but we never should have trusted someone so at home with the “science writer” media, the WHO, and the triumvirate of university research, private contractors, and military-linked foreign labs.

Before we move on to anything else, we need to know the whole truth about where COVID-19 came from. It’s looking, to me, more and more likely that the most simple explanation—that it came from the lab in Wuhan—is the truth. And that is a reason for us to be marching in the streets, demanding accountability.

My beef with Matt Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias wrote an essay, “How I went from left to center-left,” that’s both enjoyable reading, and enlightening at the same time. I do have one nit with it.

I was shocked and appalled by the way that George W. Bush was able to steal the election, but what made an even bigger impression on me was how mainstream Democrats didn’t really contest or fight it.

Wait, what?

Matt then linked a piece by Nate Cohn in the NYT about the “butterfly ballot” in 2000 and Palm Beach County. Let me (very briefly, because I’m running low on time and you on patience) address this.

Yes, the Palm Beach County ballot was sub-optimal, even defective in a way, because if you didn’t pay attention, you may, as a voter, cast a ballot for the wrong candidate. It seems, statistically, an anomaly of demographics that Bush won in PBC. But you can’t take statistical anomalies into account when you’re deciding to count or throw out ballots.

The Supreme Court stopped the recount because its interest was preserving the electoral system that America uses to choose a president. Florida’s secretary of state had already certified (in the safe harbor time frame) the state’s results, and therefore the election had moved from the realm of state elections to the Electoral College.

If the Florida recount had continued, and overturned the state election, the cure would not be simply changing the counts and proclaiming Gore president-elect. It would be a competing slate of electors, one certified by the Florida secretary of state, and another put forward by the Supreme Court-endorsed recount. When Congress met to certify the results, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, with each state casting a single vote. Bush would have won.

The Supreme Court, and the Gore campaign, knew this political reality. Why put the nation through it? Maybe there was reason to know, but as Nate and Matt admit, we can’t know how many ballots were mis-cast, and a recount can’t answer that question.

Yet Matt wrote:

It seemed to me that since Gore was clearly the preferred choice of the majority of the voters, both nationally and in Florida (remember the butterfly ballot?), the post-campaign should be fought not just in the courts but in the streets. Where were the mass protests? Where were the strikes? Where was the pressure to force Bush to do the right thing and concede? [My bold]

Why would Bush concede when the political reality is that he won? Is Matt suggesting that an election could be overturned by litigation? Worse, is he advocating what happened on January 6th?

C’mon Matt. If you think the 2000 election, in which Al Gore had a legitimate beef with PBC ballots, could be overturned by conjecture and “mass protests,” “strikes” and pressure for the winner to concede, that’s a tacit acknowledgement that the “stop the steal” on J6 was a valid expression of the same kind of conjecture, after all legal remedies had failed.

The Supreme Court did the right thing in 2000. Al Gore did the right thing. Not all elections end the way you want them. In 2016, Maggie Hassan beat Kelly Ayotte for a New Hampshire seat in the U.S. Senate. She won by 1,017 votes, or 0.14%. Ayotte could have called for a recount, by law. In fact, there were allegations that somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 Massachusetts voters cast ballots in both their home state and in New Hampshire where they maintained summer homes. Ayotte very well could have won. But she conceded immediately. Sometimes the political reality shapes the race.

Marching in the streets, or mass protests (what was J6?) does not solve electoral problems, especially in presidential elections. I hope Matt realizes this.

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