The Guardian If the Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis is True, Expect a Political Earthquake The possible consequences of the virus’s origins are staggering – if they can be proven, Nuclear Scientists Bulletin earlier this month. ‘ Photo: Thomas Peter / Reuters There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It struck down the people we considered villains. It produced those who we thought were heroes. People who could easily work from home flourished, despite problematizing the lives of Trump voters who lived in the old economy. Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourged people for their sins against higher education and visibly separated the righteous from the exposed wicked. “Respect science,” warned our yard signs. Lo and behold! Covid came and forced us to do it, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they forbade gatherings, trade and everything else. We blame it so innocently back then. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and shook our heads to see the wrong players in their swimming pools and on the beach. It was perfectly understandable to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not understand the situation, that he was suggesting 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 prestigious news media even found a way to attribute the worst death toll to a system of organized ignorance they called “populism”. In response to fool Trump, liberalism has cultivated the hierarchy of recognized accomplishments in general. But nowadays the consensus is not as good as it used to be. Now the media is full of disturbing stories suggesting that Covid may have originated – not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory error in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral shocks that begin when the question sets in: what if science itself is in some way to blame for all of this? * I am not an expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing what I was told. A few months ago I even tried to dissuade a Fox News viewer from believing in the laboratory leak theory of the origins of Covid. The reason I did this is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I saw had assured me on many occasions that the laboratory leak theory was not true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, the only deluded Trumpists believed that the fact-checkers got infinite pants-on-fire ratings, and because (for all my cynicism) I am the guy who has always trusted the mainstream news media. My own complacency on this matter was blown by the Labor Leak Paper that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; A few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden admits that the laboratory accident hypothesis may have some value. We don’t yet know the real answer, and probably never will, but now is the time to anticipate what such a result could ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true? The answer is that these are the kind of things that could obliterate the beliefs of millions. The final global catastrophe, the 2008 financial crisis, destroyed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the new economy, and ultimately in the elites that led both American political parties. In the years since (and for intricate reasons) liberal leaders have sought to establish themselves as defenders of professional righteousness and legitimacy in almost every field. In response to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult of science, expertise, the university system, the “norms” of the executive, the “intelligence community”, the State Department, NGOs, the old news media, and the hierarchy of recognized achievement in general. Now we are in the fading days of Disastrous Global Crisis # 2. Covid is, of course, orders of magnitude worse than the mortgage collapse – it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the global economy on a far wider scale. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we can very well see the expert idolatry of modern liberalism sinking into a fireball of public anger. Consider the details of the story as we’ve learned it over the past few weeks: • Laboratory leaks happen. They are not the result of conspiracies: “A laboratory accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from it. • There is evidence that the bat coronavirus laboratory in question may have been doing so-called “gain-of-function” research, a dangerous innovation where disease is purposely infectious. Incidentally, the rightists have not come up with “functional gain”: All the cool virologists are doing it (here and elsewhere), even if the squares have been warning against it for years. • There is strong evidence that some bat virus research in the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national medical establishment – that is, the lab leak hypothesis is not unique to China. • There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people hired to investigate, and (as we know from Enron and the real estate bubble), conflicts of interest are always what upsets the well-trained professionals the liberals insist that we must all heed, honor and obey. • The news media, eagerly monitoring the limits of what is allowed, insisted that Russiagate was so true that the laboratory leak hypothesis was false false, and woe to anyone who dares to disagree. Reporters gulped down the line that was most flattering to the experts they quoted, then insisted that it was 100% correct and absolutely irrefutable – that anything else was just crazy Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when infidels join Word come and so on. • The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we are at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to true and right belief – as agreed by experts. * “Let’s pray for science now,” said a New York Times columnist at the start of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article established the basic belief of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is what you get if you ignore science.” Ten months later, Nicholson Baker wrote at the end of a frightening article about the history of the “gain of.” Function “research and its possible role in the ongoing Covid pandemic as follows:” This could be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world of scientists do all sorts of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth it. There would be no pandemic. “Unless there was. If indeed it turns out that the laboratory leak hypothesis is the correct explanation for how it all began – that the common people of the world were forced into a real laboratory experiment at an enormous cost – then there is a moral earthquake along the way, because if the hypothesis is correct, it will soon dawn on people that our mistake was not lack of respect for scientists, lack of respect for expertise, or insufficient censorship on Facebook It was a failure to reflect critically on all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq war, the real estate bubble, banks who are “too big to fail”, mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 – all these disasters disaster that brings you the total, confident unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to oversee them. On the other hand, I may be wrong in spreading all this speculation. Perhaps the laboratory leak hypothesis will be convincingly refuted. I definitely hope it is. But even if it’s closer to confirmation, we can guess what the next twist in the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who could have known? And besides (they will say) the origins of the pandemic no longer matter. Go back to sleep. Thomas Frank is a US columnist for the Guardian. Most recently, he is the author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism
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