It continues to amaze me just how little interest Western political and media circles have shown in getting to the bottom of the question of where this virus, which upended the world (in fact much of the upending was due to misplaced government responses, but that is a different matter) came from. In the US the Democrats have blocked all Congressional enquiries. Extraordinary. As the MIT scientist interviewed by Al Jazeera says – there is unmistakably a cover-up.
Al Jazeera – doing balanced journalism – reports that there has been a slew of recent studies which claim to locate the origins in the Wet Market. (The Wuhan Wet Market seems to fall in and out of favour as the putative origin). What strikes me about this is that it is a fact (as reported e.g. by Colin Butler a Professor at Australian National University in Canberra and UN Contributor) that China has not supplied researchers with all the required data. Indeed, as the article reports, China has removed useful information about the genetic sequences of early cases from the Internet – and the actual Wuhan lab database was hidden back in September 2019. So – these researchers who are loudly proclaiming “Wuhan market” (and therefore it seems “not lab”) are doing so despite a deliberately controlled and restricted evidence base. This is hardly objective science. Indeed it is extraordinary. But the media is often (not in this case) using these studies to once again dismiss the lab-leak theory.
As the article reminds us – the supposed intermediary animal has not been found and so as of now there is no solid evidence to support the animal intermediary theory. (Even if there were an early cluster of cases at the market one can simply posit an infected lab worker infecting people there when she was doing her shopping on the way home from work – the lab being just a few Km away).
No. 10 recently announced a new programme for improving bio-security in labs handling dangerous pathogens. An expert involved in advising the British government was reported by the Daily Telegraph as saying that privately the British government considers lab-leak the most likely origin for the source of Sars-Cov-2. But, again, this deadly silence from the government and largely from the media – especially the liberal media e.g. the Guardian and Independent in the UK. Why? The pandemic did kill millions of people. There is indisputable evidence of a cover-up by China (removal of key databases, non-provision of full early case data to investigators, running a tightly controlled WHO mission to China, invention of false trails such as pangolins or frozen foods). But largely silence. It is very strange. It looks like the political and liberal media classes, working in conjunction with the pharmaceutical community and a large part of the academic community in the fields of genetics and virology, have simply decided to brush this one under the carpet. Six million people in total have died. [1] And a near total lack of interest in establishing how. If anyone still believes “democratic” governments still act “for the people” rather than for certain powerful interest groups they need to explain this.
Notes
- https://covid19.who.int/