Thomas Frank: If The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Is True, Expect a Political Earthquake

Thomas Frank asks an excellent question.

If the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be true, what are the implications for liberalism which has wrapped itself in the cloak of technocracy and smug professional class expertise? What if it turns out those people are corrupt, self serving liars who have been laundering their politics as “science”?

Guardian:

“There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this? …”

If the experts and fact checkers lied about a story as big as this, what else are they lying about? Could they be lying about, say, race or “trans”? Could they be lying about climate change?

There are really only three possibilities:

  • COVID jumped naturally from a “smoking bat” even though there are none of these bats anywhere close to Wuhan
  • COVID escaped from the Wuhan lab where gain of function research was being performed
  • COVID was created in a lab somewhere else with gain of function research and was released to undermine China

There is one thing we know for sure.

If COVID jumped naturally from the “smoking bat” that no one has been able to find, then its spike protein has a row of four naturally occurring amino acids with a positive charge.

Daily Mail:

“Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new ‘spike’, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2.

One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious. 

But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row  is ‘extremely unlikely,’ the scientist said.

‘The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,’ Dalgleish told DailyMail.com. …”

How likely is that to have emerged naturally?

The people who do not believe in miracles made an exception for this one.

Why would the political and medical establishment dismiss this possibility out of hand? Dr. Robert Redfield who ran the CDC under Trump didn’t and said he believes it escaped from a lab. Trump himself raised the possibility that it escaped from a lab based on intelligence sources.

The true reason seems to be that the possibility that the lab leak theory was true was ruled out of bounds on the basis Trump Derangement Syndrome and the obsession with antiracism and that Fauci was weak and went along with the prevailing sentiment of the progressive herd to own Trump. The original Democrat position in January / February 2020 had been that “racism” is the real virus which they returned to after the death of George Floyd when public health experts endorsed the protests.

This was from June 4, 2020:

It was obvious at the time that “science” was being conflated with politics:

Note: The CDC declared that “racism” is a threat to public health in April.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
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27 Comments

  1. Chinese LEGAL Immigrants brought the Wuhan Virus to America.

    Which raises the most obvious of questions?

    Why are Chinese LEGAL Immigrants allowed into America?

    Answer:‘so they can vote the Historic Native Born White American Working Class Majority into a violently persecuted White racial minority within the borders of America….

    I watched my mother die in a Catholic Hospice because of this…

    • No…Chinese LEGAL immigrants were vector that carried the corona virus to America….the fact that even the Pro-White Right never talks about this shows the extent that they have internalized the Democratic Party Framework for understanding post-1965 Immigration policy…

      Chinese Legal immigrants weren’t intentionally trying to infect White Americans….But they are allowed into OUR America for two reasons:

      1)to colonize US territory for China

      2)to vote the Native Born White American Historic Majority into a White Racial Minority within the borders of America=nullification of the White Vote on Nov 3 2023…

      1+1=2

    • Yep. Remember how one of the countries hardest hit early on was Iran, with multiple leaders dying?

      Who needs a Samson Option when you can just release a deadly plague on your enemies?

      COVID was created by Israel and our deep state.

  2. All the facts since the Spring of 2020 have pointed to Covid being a Chinese bio-weapon that either “leaked” from the Wuhan lab or was intentionally let loose.

    Remember the Chinese woman virologist who made a couple of big splashes on Tucker Carlson, but, was never covered by any other major media. No one has ever refuted her allegations.

    My question is why, after being exposed by Rand Paul, is Fauci still on the government payroll, or in any position of authority?

    • Chinese are more averse to rules, regulations, safety protections, etc. than even Anglos. Laws schmaws, whatever man, it’ll be ok. Here’s a video of a chemical plant exploding from 2015; it could be seen clearly from outer space and left a giant crater:

      Tianjin , China explosion 2015

  3. One does not believe or disbelieve the science. Its not a matter of faith. There is scientific method though.

  4. Sorry Hunter – I well remember you toeing the line last year and rubbishing anyone who believed it was of lab origin. You even posted stuff about pangolins, FFS!

    • If memory serves, I don’t recall ever saying the lab leak origin was false. We discussed both theories and ruled neither out. I was completely against the idea that the virus was a hoax or the flu. I said it was a moderately lethal, highly infectious virus.

      • My memory differs – and frankly I am too lazy to scroll back and check the OD archives. But pretty much the same info was in the public domain then as now, and you were strongly on the side of the pangolins (who have been sadly forgotten; used only for their weird appearance in order to give cred to the “natural origin” fib).

        Credit where it is due, however – you were covering coronavirus in China when it was virtually unknown in the media here.

  5. I believe one of the real subversive deep state sort of reasons why the American power establishment always hated Trump, and did what it did both above and below ground to quasi-overthrow him, was because his threatened economic hostilities toward Beijing would hasten a trade war which would hurt the portfolios of so many “important” American individuals, businesses and institutions. It’s also one of the major drivers I believe behind the narrative mongering of the “Great Yellow Panic of 2021” (i.e. the wave of hate crimes against Asians), because it’s a slick sly method to censor officially placing blame on Beijing and the CCP for the Wuhan Virus (be it wet markets, lab leak or bioengineering), in order to prevent such a trade war.

  6. Over a year ago I said to my wife : ‘Honey, this is an attack on us a million times beyond that that of Pearl Harbour, but, I doubt they’ll make anything of it, because This purposeful Chinese bio-weapon could easily be renamed United States’ Globalist-Corporate Government attempt #5 to get rid of President Trump.’

  7. Incompetent Chinese technicians. Then a malevolent exploitation of the crisis by the boss in China to let infected individuals fly out of Wuhan on international flights as a form of economic biowarfare. That’s the best explanation.

    • @Captain John…

      Sir, it is just a bit too coincidental this whole Covid thing is accidental, what with all the other presidential election scams to get Trump out.

      2020 was when either the CIA, or their colour revolution playbook, was brought back home, in full colour, here.

      This was Jew England Yankee United States’ Government regime-change, done to itself, pure and simple.

  8. Glad I’m not the only one who remembers you, Brad, publically buying into the Deep State narrative about Covid-19. I’ll forgive and forget as long as you promise to never buy into the Deep State propaganda even if you do really want to see the patriotard’s heads explode.

    As for what actually happened with the Coronavirus, I don’t generally ascribe those things to malice which are easily ascribed to incompetence. The Chinese love taking short cuts. One of those short cuts ended up causing a catastrophic lab release. The malice came later when the CCP deliberately spread Covid-19 around the world.

    The “cure” is worse than the disease too. Anyone who voluntarily gets any version of this “vaccine” is a complete moron. Every day brings more horror stories about what has happened to healthy young who got some version of this vaccine. You’d think they were out ot kill us all off or something…

    • I have a different recollection.

      If memory serves, I said from the beginning that COVID was a highly infectious, moderately lethal virus and that it wasn’t “just the flu” and that it wasn’t a “hoax.” It was a real virus. It either jumped naturally from an infected animal to a human, OR, it escaped from the lab, which some commentators like Snowhitey believed. We discussed both origin theories on this site. The death toll from COVID is currently over 600,000 which rivals only the Civil War and the Spanish Flu.

      A year ago, if I remember correctly, the narrative on websites like Daily Stormer was that it was a massive global HOAX. It was nothing compared to swine flu (H1N1) or the seasonal flu. The real threat was the vaccine. The military was going to come to door to door and pull people out of their homes and vaccinate them. Millions of people were going to starve to death because of lockdowns. None of that happened and most people now know someone in their family who has had COVID and gotten over it. The fact that COVID might have come from a lab doesn’t imply that all of these other conspiracies were true.

      If I said otherwise in the archives, feel free to correct me. Everything that I wrote about the subject is still there.

      • We don’t really know the true death toll because so many non-COVID deaths have been ascribed to the virus.

      • “narrative on websites like Daily Stormer was that it was a massive global HOAX”

        Yes, Anglin/weev often go overboard on their speculations.
        (I suspect weev was the promoter of that idea. It would fit his character pattern.)

    • ” I don’t generally ascribe those things to malice which are easily ascribed to incompetence. ”

      Most especially, when there is a ((( fauci )) involved in the deed.

      ( anyone wi a modicum of common sense would do everything possible to avoid modifying a known contagious virus, much less pay for same.)

    • Hunter… “Covid-19” is the “new disease” caused by the supposed “sars-cov2” novel coronavirus. But… There is no identifiable new disease because “sars-cov2” is a “virtual virus” serving as what John Rappaport speculates is the cover story for a new Opium War centered in the fentanyl manufacturing and distribution hub of Wuhan, China.

  9. What the hell is going on at the Lugar center? Why was the Wuhan Lab collecting bats from China and sending them to the Lugar center in Tiblisi for study?

  10. Thanks to Rand Paul, Fauci has been ousted as a liar and Paul proved Fauci had dealings with Wuhan labs. He should be in jail, not writing a book but that the US govt for you.

    • @John

      Remember this
      From2020

      “Dr. Lieber who has served as the Principal Investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard University, which specialized in the area of nanoscience, has received more than $15,000,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD). These grants require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities. Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China ”

      Dr lieber ( a fellow WHITE) Woking with Wuhan and , wi fauci, I suspect.

  11. It’s all fake – and ghey. The US empire creates its own reality now – everyone is told who to hate – China, Iran, Iraq, Syria.

  12. Here in Australia, we have the media constantly calling for borders to be reopened to India, etc, where the virus has a real grip……..then whine when more lockdowns are imposed because some Indian caused another spread. If you don’t want lockdowns, then keep the fucking borders closed!
    And for me, I don’t give a shit about the origins of the Handemic. All I know is, China tortures animals to death for food, and I want nothing to do with them. I want our manufacturing and sovereignty back.
    The Triads in Beijing likely released the virus on purpose as a bioweapon, killing three million, or it came from a bat in one of those repulsive markets, and they failed to give the world a heads up….. AFTER they knew about it and yet, let their citizens continue traveling abroad, infecting the world. Either scenario paints China in a poor light, and we should make them pay with decoupling, tarriffs and sanctions.
    Fuck em!

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