Editors at the Washington Examiner ponder scientists’ duplicity regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
An undeniable example of news media distributing propaganda rather than reliable information was their suppression of the now-vindicated lab leak theory of COVID’s origin and the arrogant assertion that it was false. If you pondered this theory out loud on social media in 2020, you were likely to be banned and bizarrely called a racist by journalists too lazy or politically biased to seek the truth.
One would expect better from scientists and public health officials, but sadly, they have been just as bad.
Dr. Anthony Fauci once referred to himself as the embodiment of science. During the pandemic, he received acclaim from the worst media sources of COVID disinformation, such as CNN and MSNBC. But according to new information, Fauci held a conference call with a handful of scientists in early February 2020 in which he stressed the need to make people stop talking about a possible lab leak origin of COVID. In the words of one of those scientists from a subsequent email, Fauci “prompted” Dr. Kristian Andersen and others to draft a paper debunking the lab leak theory titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
There’s nothing wrong with trying to prove or disprove something. That is what science is. But the Fauci paper was the product of motivated reasoning, which is a great sin against science. It could be fairly referred to as a cover-up. Although there is ample speculation, the precise reasons for the cover-up must now be thoroughly investigated.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a memo last weekend documenting the history of this paper, the sole purpose of which appears to have been to stanch talk about an obvious explanation — that the novel coronavirus might have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute studied precisely those bat viruses, and it is a few paces from the wet market that had become the focus of early speculation. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the virus had nothing to do with the lab — altogether astonishing and implausible.