In 2020, though, such smears were common. I was not the only one to note that researchers had previously been convicted of selling lab animals to the Wuhan wet market and that China had taken down its coronavirus database and scrubbed the Wuhan wet market clean for nine months before letting a Beijing-picked team of UN investigators visit. For just four hours of pre-approved questions under the supervision of Chinese officials.
No one claimed they did it on purpose but those asking if it happened and being called racist for it was bizarre. Sorry, apologists, a BSL rating in America is legitimate and yet we still have accidents. A BSL rating in China is only real when someone from the CCP is visiting. This is well-known so the Wuhan Institute of Virology being called a true biosafety level 4 laboratory was only believed by those who were content playing politics with people's lives.
Jon Stewart, darling of the US left, found himself under fire when he suggested that a lab leak needed to be considered. COVID-19 had caused social authoritarians to lurch so much farther to the left that Jon Stewart was on the right. Science has left the building when those people control Twitter, the same wacky epidemiology that claims tea causes cancer, and a whole lot of corporate journalism.
Efforts to suppress any discussion inside the US government, by scientists who should have known better, held a real investigation back, because it provided fodder for conspiracy theorists. "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," wrote a team in The Lancet when WHO was still refusing to call it a pandemic and worries that we should cut travel from China were dismissed as, wait for it, racist and xenophobic.
One of the co-authors; Peter Daszak, who was funneling US money to China for gain-of-function research on coronavirus.
A team of analysts not working for the US or Chinese government sifted through the "secret language of Chinese officialdom" and concluded the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
Despite six months of Washington, DC panels and agencies finding the same uncertainty, the White House is doing damage control, noting there is "no consensus" and that is certainly true. There also never will be, if China is allowed to submit false equivalence claims like that American frozen food might be the same likelihood as that shoddy practices and unchecked protocols next door to the wet market were.
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