The lab leak theory about the origin of Covid-19 has gained new ground with US President Joe Biden endorsing a fresh intelligence-gathering exercise to investigate the hypothesis.
The Chinese Communist Party has denied the theory, which should be good enough for you because it satisfied the World Health Organisation and its crack Covid team, the UN and its one-world crackpots, the BBC, the ABC and every anti-Trump blowhard twit with a keyboard. The possibility that it could have leaked was dismissed at about the same time that the WHO classified closing borders to China to prevent Covid as racist. So many experts, such inexpert advice.
On May 29 last year the WHO released some grim Covid statistics. There had been 5,701,337 cases reported worldwide. A year later, the confirmed cases stood at 168,599,045 and the death toll had risen from 357,688 to 3,507,477. As the world cries out in anguish, the CCP plays politics. It destroyed early samples of the virus. It silenced whistleblowers. It hoarded medical supplies and pressured countries to keep their borders open – a decision epidemiologists blame for the outbreak in parts of Europe. It claimed the virus came from here, there and everywhere but Wuhan. And still the Chinese government is obstructing investigations into the origins of the pandemic.
It is hard enough to discern the truth about Covid without having lines of inquiry shut down prematurely. But in Australia the idea that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was treated with derision.
As with climate change, we were told the scientific consensus was settled. Alternative views were dismissed summarily. Curiously, the consensus had been reached less than six months after Covid-19 was discovered. Key scientists cited by the media to shore up support for the natural evolution theory of Covid were associated with politicised organisations including the WHO and the CCP. Both have a vested interest in denying the possibility that Covid may have escaped from the WIV. But much of the media made little mention of it.
In May last year the ABC’s in-house medical expert, Norman Swan, argued that Covid did not come from a lab or the wet markets but evolved naturally. The 7.30 program gave extensive coverage to Swan’s views with one-line sound bites for dissenting opinions from Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state at the time, and conservative commentator Andrew Bolt. To get a measure of the tone, consider the opening lines: “One of the mysteries about the coronavirus is where it actually came from. The US government is peddling a theory that it escaped from a Chinese lab.” And later: “There have been concerns about how secure the Wuhan labs are, which has created fertile grounds for … conspiracy theories.”
To believe the world is ruled by shapeshifting reptilian elites who sacrifice children to Satan is conspiratorial. To question whether Covid leaked from a virus research laboratory in the city where it was first detected is perfectly reasonable.
The lab leak theory was dismissed before it was tested, and politics had everything to do with it. After US president Donald Trump touted the theory, the reflexive response of the reactionary left was to disagree. People who held that the theory could be valid were dismissed as conservative crackpots in a game of guilt by association. The Australian’s investigations writer Sharri Markson was ridiculed for her inquiry into the matter.
In politics, science and the media, reputation is power and authority is everything. Across time, authority has come to mean never having to say, “I don’t know.” We do not have to entertain every theory we hear, but when the argument is reasonable or the hypothesis is reasonably possible it should not be dismissed out of hand.
Like many people, I was unsure about whether the lab leak theory was credible. The only researcher I could find early last year who seemed to have some ability to consider the question with an open mind was not part of the scientific consensus. He made clear from the outset that he was not an expert in the field and he had no institutional affiliation so could not be cited as a source.
But Yuri Deigin’s work provoked debate because it appeared to be a rare attempt at addressing the theory from a scientific approach: a willingness to ask unpopular questions, break down a hypothesis into testable sub-hypotheses, test them against available data, present the case for and against, and qualify inconclusive findings with words such as preliminary, provisional, possible.
Deigin did what the scientific consensus on the lab leak theory would not; he tested it. Or at least he tried to. And his conclusion was that it could not be ruled out.
Early this year the theory became the subject of debate after the WHO once again ruled it out without proper consideration. As I wrote at the time, the WHO’s investigative team had denied the validity of the hypothesis without testing it scientifically.
As science and technology combine to produce ever more complex fields of research, scientists who believe in democracy have a special duty to consider questions that vex their fellow citizens and present the findings in a reasonably accessible manner.
The first lab leak theory debate was a missed opportunity to teach people more about science. Do not miss its second coming.
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