Why Is The NYT Admitting the Covid Lab-Leak Theory Now?

I am moving the Class, which is rather specialized, to the end of the week.

Yesterday the New York Times, the written order-of-the-day for the old school left, put out an op-ed admitting, in so many words, the covid lab-leak theory. Check the revealing title: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives“. Some were surprised about this.

I am not. I’ll tell you exactly why these prevaricating no-good slime-pushing would-be tyrants are admitting what the rest of us have been saying for years. Because they are scared for their jobs, their funding, their money, their slipping prestige.

Good. Be afraid. We should take it all away. All of it.

Now you’ve heard me many times call for the ending of government having a direct, and the direct, hand in funding science. But it sounds strange to hear. It doesn’t sound sensible. It sounds impossible. But let the NYT itself convince you.

Gain-of-function is the euphemism. Gain-of-lethality is the truth. Scientists, funded by you, dear reader, monkey with bugs to see if they can make them deadlier. To you. Which you pay for. They do this out of morbid curiosity, from the fiction that having created Frankenstein bugs they’ll be able to find cures for their own creations, cures which they wouldn’t need if they didn’t invent Accelerated Death, and because they have money to spend and prestige to seek. Your money.

They made the covid bug in a Chinese lab, which you partly paid for, and they were sloppy and it got out. That story has been told so many times you’re sick of it. But one item I don’t always emphasize. Why did they panic, when it was obvious to the sober there wasn’t any need?

Because of their Uranus-sized egos, egos pumped to colossal size, funded by you. They said to themselves, “We, being credentialed geniuses, made this terror. It must therefore be the Mother of All Bugs. It will kill everybody. The only thing to do is panic. And lie. Lie are asses off.”

So that’s what they did. And yesterday, the most prominent of the guilty was thrown under the Greyhound. All in an effort, I say, to save what’s left of the crippled system.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. 

Op-eds don’t just find their way into the main propaganda source of the old regime. They put this here, now, for a reason.

Read this whole quotation (my emphasis):

The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists, and which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

Government scientists in charge of handing out NIH science grants conspired. The NIH controls almost all medical research, directly or indirectly.

It is worse (again my emphasis):

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

Consensus in science is a long-running joke, or used to be. And should be on any question of policy, because that is very definition of scientism. There is a “consensus” in “climate change” being the end of the world, too. The worship of Nobel prizes must also end. Having one has not proven to confer immunity from idiocy. What value is some “laureate” spouting off on subjects like this? Not one of the “laureates” had a “degree” in lying to the public.

Again, you’re tired of hearing it, but it wasn’t only these eminences being loosey goosey or being ignorant-but-opining on the facts, it was also officials like the CDC, ours and others, spitting lies about how you couldn’t get sick or pass on the bug if you got the shot, or it couldn’t possibly have any side effect, this being the first in the history of all medicine of achieving a perfect drug. I’m nauseous having to tell it over and over.

And you don’t need to hear it. All of you who were with us since the beginning of the panic know all this, and much more. What’s important, I say again, is not that they admitting it now, when lowlifes like Collins and Fauci are basking in retirement, well fed by your money over these many years. They can weather the black eyes they’ll get from this, because they’re no longer in charge of anything.

The people behind the NYT care about keeping the system as it is. Here the last quotation:

Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses or computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. 

That bit comes well after the sins of others are confessed. It’s nothing more than than “Oopsie: mistakes-were-made.” This minor suggestion, a mere tweak to the system, is supposed to make amends, and prevent future intellectual larcenies. It’s meant to comfort those in power now who are considering de-funding, at least the worst offenders, if not many more.

Trivial funding changes wouldn’t change a thing. Won’t change a thing. It’s my guess de-funding all government science is too radical an idea to embrace. But you never know. We’ve seen a lot of everybody-thought-it-impossible things happening lately.

Come back tomorrow for more direct evidence, about how science funding is used to “prove” everything.

Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: \$WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank. BUY ME A COFFEE.