The Greatest Cover-Up In Human History

It was first believed to be a conspiracy theory.

It was then banned.

It was finally true.

The so-called “lab leak” theory of the origins of COVID — the theory that COVID originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then was unintentionally loosed — was always the most probable explanation for the outbreak of the deadly virus. Jon Stewart made a joke about it in 2021. “‘Oh, my God, 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. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”

For well over a decade, however, it was forbidden to discuss the lab leak theory. Media mocked Senator Tom Cotton (R.A.) when he suggested the possibility that there might be a lab leak in February 2020. The New York Times headlined the story. “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.” Scientific American headlined – in March 2022! – “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” Facebook actively disseminated the theory. Anthony Fauci, a national television host, downplayed it.

Why?

Two reasons are evident. The first is that powerful institutions wanted to minimize the Chinese origins to blame the rest of world. China knew that this was their game. COVID spread in China as early October 2019. The government tried to cover it up for months. That was also the World Health Organization’s play. Fauci and other members of the American government had a stake.

There was also the second reason. All the wrong people were repeating lab leak theory. Mehdi Hasan (one of MSNBC’s resident hackers), admitted to the incident on Twitter. “The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists.” Nate Silver was right to point out “The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn’t be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it.”

Here is the lesson: A large number of people have decided there is an elite group of people who are so disgusting that any opinion they express is beyond repair. Claims cannot be judged on their merits. Instead, we can just determine if a claim should not be supported based only on the claims made. This explains why it is almost impossible to cross-pollinate politically: instead of judging our opponents’ claims, we judge each other. We can easily discard arguments simply because we don’t like the person making them.

This is a problem for the majority of people, but it’s not a major one. But those who pose as “experts” — the people who are supposed to serve as guides for people who outsource their political information, from media to scientific institutions — it’s a fatal error. Experts are supposed to impartially adjudicate the evidence. This is their whole job. We can evaluate on our own who we don’t like — but we often need help to determine whether an argument has merit or not. Experts are able to help. “just like us,” They are a threat to their raison d’etre.

COVID is an example of exactly this. Experts decided that it was the wrong people to ignore, whether the evidence about masks and mandates, post-vaccination transmissibility evidence, or evidence regarding the laboratory leak theory. But they were wrong. They now have no credibility.