Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Magazine Shatters Thought Control on COVID 19 Lab Leak Hypothesis

Update: See also The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins, and Origins of SARS-CoV-2, (Jaime Metzl).

In 2020 to suggest that Wuhan Lab Leak hypothesis should be investigated and interrogated was considered heresy in elite circles. This was non-permissible thought, a forbidden topic, hence a media blackout.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  — the venerable journal that has long criticized government duplicity on major safety concerns  — has published major features in 2020-2021 that, in sum, reveal research scientists and U.S. and Chinese public health officials conducting themselves akin to dishonest politicians on the topic of the origin of COVID 19.

The COIVD 19 origin conversation has appeared often an exercise in thought control and propaganda, a situation made worse by the presence of a lunatic in the White House throughout 2019- Jan 2021. 

On the one hand, there was a prominent research community promoting disingenuous statements on the lab leak hypothesis that were marked by misleading characterizations, deceptions, omissions and a failure to declare conflicts of interest by statement authors and organizers; on the other hand — the lunatic.

To disagree with the consensus is to engage in "conspiracy" talk, an elite research community assures us in well-publicized statements in The Lancet (Feb 2020) and Nature (March 2020).

A May 5, 2021 Bulletin feature, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, suggests looking closer and considering the evidence, without apology to the moment's consensus. Wade's piece has reignited journalism on the origin topic.

Writes Wade:

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

Wade has written a brilliant analysis and it is crucial reading for those demanding transparency and candor from their governments during this unprecedented crisis.

Nineteenth Century Raciology Comes Back to Welcoming GOP

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1819)

Racism is a pillar of today's Republican and Tea Parties.

American right wingers and myriad know-nothings feel a need to dress up their ugly appeals to racism in the cloak of academic research or at least the appearance of a reasoned argument.

Republicans' near-constant appeal to racism and their collection of racial taunts that comprised Mitt Romney's 2012 Republican general election campaign are apparently not sufficient.

Racists need a sense of security, a psychological justification, an authoritative purpose to legitimatize their pathological racial contrivance from whom they need to take their country back.

Nicholas Wade fulfills this need in his A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin Press, 2014), along with Charles Murray, Jason Richwine, the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, hate Radio, and Fox.

Wade attempts to bring back the conception of race as a legitimate means of the classification of human beings who, in Wade's view, have a range of intelligence and character differences associated with their "race" that Wade maps out.

It's an old and ludicrous argument properly met with scorn and derision. See Jonathan Marks at In These Times, for example.

There is no need to grapple with Wade; it's akin to arguing biological evolution or climate change with a fundamentalist. Waste of time.

"(I)rrational, unscientific and demonstrably nonsensical," racists longing for purity from unclean, foreign others should be exposed and denounced, not given the legitimacy of drawing serious conclusions, as Norman Cohn reminded the world some 50 years ago.

It is worth considering Wade's conclusions—echoing nineteenth-century racist anthropology—and asking, "What social or ideological needs do they serve," as Noam Chomsky notes of nonsense like Wade's in Chomsky's classic 1971 update of his dismantlement of B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, 14 years prior.

Exposing Wade, George Will, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, the whole bunch of race baiters is easy.

It has been clear since Nixon's Southern Strategy, and Ronald Reagan's infamous racist dog whistles sounded when Reagan kicked off his 1980 general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi and declared "I believe in states’ rights."

States' rights. Sound familiar today?

The White Party has made the calculation that white racists are necessary to its political coalition and minorities need to be further marginalized.

The GOP welcomes racists into the ranks of their party provided they use properly coded language in polite racist company; openly racist chatting is fine unless the racism is exposed a la the Scott Walker emails.

As for Nicholas Wade and his comrades Limbaugh, Walker and the more subtle Paul Ryan with his concerns about the large "urban" vote in 2012 and the "tailspin of culture in our inner cities," even as the five GOP justices on the U.S. Supreme Court continue their program to dismantle efforts combating racism using the same rationales and rhetoric as that assailing Reconstruction (see Raskin, Z Magazine; May 1995), Wade's work of Reconstruction-era raciology should be noted and understood for its service to the Republican Party and racism.