On the Lab Leak and Naïevil Truth Policing
How the Wuhan plague clearly demonstrates the total folly of totalitarian arrogance
This video is from two years ago today. Revelations below would seem to suggest that the last 10 minutes have aged very well indeed.
Major news has broken that makes a mockery of Truth Policing. According to a June 13th story in Public, the “First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources”:
Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.
As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.
When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
This is HUGE news. The story by Public was then confirmed a week later by the Wall Street Journal. The Hill then published on the story summarising where we are, alongside the extent to which some supposedly credible people attempted to discredit the lab leak theory over the last few years. “Confirmation of Wuhan scientists as "patients zero" makes the lab leak theory look likely—and the misinformation police look like fools.” So runs the subtitle of a piece by Robby Soave for Reason.
At the time of writing, worldometer.com states that the official Coronavirus Death Toll is 6,894,141 people. Perhaps this estimate is too low due to inadequate records of relevant cases. Alternatively, perhaps it is too high due to the whole “dying with Covid” versus “dying from Covid” debacle. Regardless, if this is even partially accurate, millions of people died and the global economy was driven into chaos because of this virus.
Further, based on insight from a field of research psychology called Terror Management Theory, I have previously argued that the months of violent chaos and riots during the summer of 2020 in the US, caused by supposed “anti-racist” activists, were influenced by the pandemic because of increased mortality salience driving viewpoint extremism. Using the same logic, it wasn’t hard to have predicted the sort of violence which occurred on January 6th 2021 in Washington DC. For similar death anxiety related reasons, alongside the fact that pandemic norms meant an unwillingness for world leaders to meet in person, one could argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might have also, to some degree, been influenced by the pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a virus that started in a city containing a laboratory which had specifically applied for grants to create the exact type of virus which caused the pandemic. As such, might this Wuhan plague have begun because of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that specifically studies these viruses? This seems a reasonable question, does it not?
‘NO!’ they said. ‘You are a conspiracy theorist’ they said. ‘You are a far-right Sinophobe’ they said. ‘You are a racist’ they said. ‘The lab leak theory has been debunked’ they said. Soave provides some examples of such nonsense in his Reason piece:
The New York Times' lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, previously described the lab leak theory as having racist roots. Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez criticized the comedian Jon Stewart for daring to raise the issue on an episode of Stephen Colbert's show. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen lamented the theory's likelihood of inspiring anti-Chinese animus. Others in the media called the lab leak a "fringe conspiracy."
All humans are fallible primates with the capacity for evil. This means that nobody, no matter how well intentioned, can be trusted with the power to censor or suppress a free exchange of ideas and open inquiry. Nobody.
But because during the last few years many people did have this power, explorations into the origin of the Wuhan plague were impeded to an incalculable degree. Not only was it uncouth in much polite company to discuss the possible lab origin of the virus, but the topic was directly censored by the powers that be. For example, according to a Guardian piece from late May 2021 about Facebook:
Anyone posting claims that Covid-19 was “man-made or manufactured” could have seen their posts removed or restricted, and repeatedly sharing the allegation could have led to a ban from the site entirely.
And if Michael Shellenberger of Public was correct in a recent interview with The Spectator, Facebook may still be censoring lab leak related content. The “Censorship Industrial Complex” is still rolling. Leighton Woodhouse, Shellenberger’s colleague at Public, briefly described the elitist origin of this Orwellian chimera as follows:
Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a new so-called emergency: the “disinformation pandemic.” Like Oceania’s distant war with Eurasia, it’s an emergency concocted expressly to justify its proposed remedy: the erection and expansion of the Censorship Industrial Complex. . . . The defenders of the Censorship Industrial Complex regard themselves as ordained to rule. They take for granted their right to dictate to us what we read, watch and hear, as we can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves. To them, the public is a barbarian horde that, given an ounce too much freedom, will run amok, destroying all in its path.
“What Michael calls the Censorship-Industrial Complex”, wrote veteran journalist Matt Taibbi who worked to uncover very creepy events at pre-Musk Twitter, “is really just the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons. . . . this is the territory of George Orwell, who predicted a lot of what we saw in the Twitter Files with depressing accuracy.”
Coming back to lab leak, Facebook censorship is simply madness. Shellenberger, the journalist from Public who broke the big story above about the first three Covid cases from the Wuhan lab, wrote for the New York Post how, in February 2023, “the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”” But despite this and other statements by high profile US government agencies apparently coming as a surprise to certain people, the hypothesis that the current pandemic began due to a lab accident in Wuhan, had never once been discredited as a highly plausible possibility. Not even close. It was never “debunked” and could never have been plausibly dismissed as a mere “conspiracy theory”. Never. Work from the likes of Alina Chan, Yuri Deigin, Nicholson Baker, Norman Doidge, Josh Rogin, and Jamie Metzl demonstrated the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis long before Facebook lifted its despicably anti-scientific ban.
That Facebook is at the centre of our global information commons, with billions of users, yet had (and still has) the ability to impede truth seeking on this scale, is utterly insane. Just because Facebook might very well have had good intentions around stopping the spread of what they saw as supposed “misinformation”, and had been in consultation with the demonstrably fallible and marionetted WHO, does not mean that they had access to some sort of God given truth. Whether or not uncovering the pandemic’s origin was key to optimally addressing this current virus, from a public health perspective, is irrelevant. Not only do the millions who suffered deserve answers, we must minimise the risk of future pandemics. It is, of course, not as if this would have been the first lab leak in history. Far from it.
On June 25th 2021, two years ago today, I released the video at the top of this page (Scientific Heresy and a Leaky Laboratory). I spent the first 17 minutes explaining what “science” is and how science actually depends on heretics who are willing to go against the herd of consensus opinion. The final 10 minutes or so involve a description of why the lab leak hypothesis should never have been so arrogantly and tyrannically discounted by the supposed “expert” class in whom us plebs have been expected to uncritically place our trust. I have also written about—or at least mentioned—the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis in many essays, including:
1. Covid is Over: Gollum must let it go (Substack - December 2021)
2. Existential Roulette: Ukraine and the Quagmire of Defending Freedom in the Nuclear Age (Substack - April 2022)
3. ***Surety Brings Ruin: The Scientific Navigation of Ignorance and its Dogmatic Impediments (for Heterodox STEM - Mar 2023)
[***NOTE: This piece goes deepest on lab leak and censorship at large]
4. The Death of Truth and the Chinafying of the West: Censorship literally kills (for Gript.ie - May 2023)
All this said, future evidence may emerge—such as even earlier suspected Covid cases than the lab scientists who wanted to create the exact sort of virus that caused the pandemic—that suggests the Wuhan lab may not have been responsible. So be it. I only care about the truth of where the Covid-19 plague came from so that steps can be taken to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. And a free exchange of information alongside open inquiry, unimpeded by Truth Police, will increase the chances that this truth is actually discovered. An Amnesty International report has highlighted the damage done to democratized problem-solving around the pandemic due to increased censorship:
Restricting freedom of expression must not become the new normal. Restrictions to the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds must be lifted as they are not only unnecessary and excessive, but also counterproductive in dealing with the pandemic. The solutions to the huge problems created by the pandemic are out there. Enabling the full enjoyment of freedom of expression is key in finding them.
This key applies to most, if not all of our biggest problems. Hence, it would seem that the maximization of decentralized collective intelligence is of central importance to securing humanity’s best possible future. A prime example of this from the recent pandemic involved a loose confederation of online sleuths who called themselves ‘Drastic’—an acronym for ‘Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team investigating COVID-19.’ Drastic, according to Alina Chan and Matt Ridley in their book, Viral, “filled the gap” where “the scientific and intelligence establishments had, in 2020, displayed only a surprisingly shallow interest (at least publicly) in the origin of the pandemic.” (pg. 26) In relation to censorship, Chan and Ridley go on to highlight the role of Big Tech in the discussion of pandemic origins:
Drastic had its beginnings on Twitter, one of the few places that did not censor discussion of the virus origin throughout the first year of the pandemic. Facebook flagged as “false information” much of the work of these sleuths, even when it proved to be true information, while Reddit simply deleted it. (pg. 28)
The continued error and totalitarian arrogance amongst self-appointed Truth Police illustrate why threats to the free exchange of information and open inquiry are dangers to the future potential of humanity. Taibbi described the apparent attitude of what I have come to think of as the scientistic-consensus-blob as follows: “Over here are people who are conscientious and believe in science and fairness and democracy and puppies, and then everyone else is a right-winger.” But since mind reading is beyond my skillset, I can’t determine whether the driving intent of this censorial Truth Police is naïveté or evil or both. Hence I have taken, somewhat clumsily, to making up a word: ‘naïevil’.
On a dark note, happenings in Communist China illustrate where naïevil censorship of viewpoint expression and open inquiry can lead. Dr Norman Doidge, in the February 2021 piece for Tablet that seriously piqued my interest in the lab leak hypothesis, described the absolute shambles that was the January 2021 WHO investigation into the Wuhan lab:
Chinese physicians who had sounded the alarm during the original outbreak were threatened with prison for sharing information with medical colleagues and the world. They were not interviewed. Dr. Ai Fen, head of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital, saw many of the first cases and would have known where her patients might have been prior to getting sick. She dared to publish an article on the topic in China’s People. But the article disappeared, within hours, and then she disappeared. Censoring speech, and erasing brave people often go hand in hand.
“A healthy society,” said Ai Fen’s colleague Dr Li Wenliang, “should not have only one kind of voice.” Those were deathbed words.
Apart from consistently dismissing the lab leak, the naïevil scientistic-consensus-blob in much of the West was wrong about so much more. They were wrong in dismissing work from Stanford University from April 2020 which downplayed the harm of Covid by presenting an infection fatality rate of 0.2% which appears to have stood the test of time. They were wrong about fomite transmission and the subsequent need for obsessive hand sanitizing. They were wrong about lockdowns which have done far more harm than good. They were wrong about masks which appear to have done nothing to decrease the spread of the virus. They were wrong about the Covid vaccines preventing viral transmission. They were wrong about the cost to benefit analysis in vaccinating healthy young people—especially young males, who were disproportionately injured (I explored this in December 2021, in Covid is Over). Some of these errors have been more egregious than others, but the point is twofold: first, the scientistic-consensus-blob who relentlessly berated us to “Trust The Science” are fallible primates full of snakes like the rest of us; second, the suppression and censorship of dissent against lockdowns, prolonged school closures, vaccine mandates, and masks have been shown to be arrogant idiocy.
Taibbi, for example, wrote of his discoveries in the Twitter Files about something called the “Virality Project”. He described this as “a cross-platform, information-sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook shared information about Covid-19.” On this Orwellian Virality Project, Taibbi writes:
They compared notes on how to censor or deamplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.
One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as “standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects… true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as well as “worrisome jokes” or posts about things like “natural immunity” or “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway.” . . . they reduced everything to a binary: vax and anti-vax. . . . So, this content was true, but politically categorized as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation – untrue.
The endlessly demonstrable fallibility of the scientistic-consensus-blob, and the groupthink they displayed with dogmatic fervour during Covid which punished heresy both formally and informally, should tell us one very important thing: impeding scientific and journalistic truth seeking is one of the main reasons why the safetysim-coated move toward censoring “mis” or “dis” or “malinformation” is naïevil.
Thankfully, the unfolding lab leak scandal has shown us that censorial Truth Policing – even when marketed under the pretence of “preventing harm” or some other nonsense – has lost all credibility. Due to the lab leak scandal, we have arrived at a point where anyone who doesn’t have the intellectual capacity of a C. elegans worm, or the predatory intent of a C-Suite psycho, can come to agree that granting naïevil powers of censorship over viewpoint expression and inquiry to some scientistic-consensus-blob “fact-checker”, or anyone else, is not only a vile act of despicable totalitarianism, but fully counterproductive to the enterprise of authentic truth seeking.
The same can be said for the genuinely shocking new “hate speech” bill here in Ireland—a bill which I first wrote about for Areo Magazine in 2021 (and recently republished with updated context). Arrogant elitist notions around silencing “hate” is nothing new, however. “We live in a moment,” said Salman Rushdie recently, “I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish, has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West”. In his deeply insightful and prescient book, The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri wrote:
Their hope is to silence the public, not persuade it. Hillary Clinton ran for president on a promise to keep the deplorables in their place. Angela Merkel clings to office to suppress the secret Nazi inside every German voter. Europe’s hate-speech laws ban conversations that are offensive to the elites. (pg. 336)
Something I would implore the reader to ponder with regards to the perpetrators of this naïevil mess, however, is to find it in themselves to hate only the sin and not the sinner. Dr King addressed this beautifully:
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. (pg. 17, A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart)
We must learn to forgive while also looking to the future. “In the end,” wrote Gurri, “everything will hinge on the public: on us . . . we have lost the right to rant about our rulers. Instead, we must go about the job of selecting their successors.”
I have argued before that we have been sleepwalking our way into a Chinafying of the West. Perhaps the absurdity of this lab leak scandal, as an exemplar of the harm caused by the stifling attitudes toward dissent at large, will wake more people up to the harsh reality of totalitarian creep.
Arrogant censoriousness in the West has, by treating certain views as sacred dogmas thereby hobbling scientific and journalistic truth seeking, been solidly revealed as naked folly. This could, if we seize the opportunity, mark the beginning of the end for naïevil Truth Policing. Let us hasten its doom.