So The Wuhan Lab Escape Theory Wasn’t Crazy?
Someday, when Covid-19 is mercifully far in the rearview, we will look back on 2020-2021 and shudder.
At least I hope we do.
Especially when we reflect on the treatment of children and how we closed their schools, isolated them from their friends and treated them as little viral vectors despite the fact that kids were at low risk from the disease.
We’ll also remember how the media’s undisguised loathing of President Donald Trump caused reporters to abandon any normal journalistic curiosity about the pandemic and led them to simply parrot the drivel du jour from Anthony Fauci and other experts.
No matter how many times they were wrong.
In fact, questioning the lockdowns, the mandates, the curfews, the school closings and the genesis of the virus often got one dismissed as a “Trumptard” instead of a liberty-loving American.
Don’t ask me how I know.
And let’s not forget that challenging the status quo on the pandemic was enough to get many folks banned from Twitter and Facebook.
Trouble is, Trump wasn’t always wrong.
Last May, for instance, when Trump said that he believed the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he was quickly slapped down by Fauci and the doctor’s obedient acolytes in the press corps.
Here’s a snarky CNN story that didn’t age well from May 5, 2020. (Boldface is mine.)
“Anthony Fauci Just Crushed Donald Trump's Theory On The Origins Of The Coronavirus”
For weeks now, President Donald Trump has been making the case that the coronavirus originated not in nature but in a lab in Wuhan, China…
Enter Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and perhaps the single most prominent doctor in the world at the moment. In an interview…Fauci was definitive about the origins of the virus …:
"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated ... Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species."
Now, before we play the game of "he said, he said" remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it's not Donald Trump.
In short, Fauci's view on the origins of the disease matters a whole lot more than Trump's opinion about where it came from. Especially because, outside of Trump and his immediate inner circle, most people in a position to know are very, very skeptical of the Trump narrative that the virus came out of a lab -- whether accidentally or on purpose.
Like the intelligence community, which in a statement last week via the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said this: "The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
All righty then. No need for further investigation.
Shoot, early in the pandemic common sense told some of us that it might be more than a happy coincidence that a highly contagious virus originated in Wuhan, home of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In fact, I’d stumbled on a story in nature.com from February 2017: Inside The Chinese Lab Poised To Study World’s Most Dangerous Pathogens,” and shared it on Twitter - twice - long before Trump seized on the issue.
There was a time when the national press corps would have dug deeply into such a theory. This time, instead of launching their own investigations into the roots to the pandemic, they gleefully pounced on the president and accused him of spreading conspiracy theories.
That was so much easier than doing real journalism.
Fast forward to the present and Fauci has changed course, admitting that the virus may not have jumped species and may have escaped from the Wuhan lab. He was forced to change his opinion after The Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers in the Wuhan lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November of 2019.
As part of a recent symposium with the Poynter Institute - a journalism school in Florida - Fauci seemed far less certain now than he was a year ago that the virus was born in China’s wet markets or in bowls of bat soup.
Fauci was asked during a Poynter event, “United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking,” earlier this month about whether he was confident that COVID-19 developed naturally.
“No actually. I am not convinced about that. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said, according to Fox News.
Turns out Trump was right when he predicted that the fatality rate of the coronavirus might be less than 1%. And when he said that a vaccine could be developed by the end of the year. Both pronouncements were treated as insane optimism by a delusional president.
Look, Trump was a problematic president. He said lots of wacky things. But that was no excuse for the press corps to abandon all pretense of objectivity.
There is much we should know but don’t about Covid-19. We can thank America’s unquestioning press corps for that.
