The State Of Play

The standard line of the COVID moral entrepreneurs has continued to be that we can't really drop the mask-and-social-distance routine, because there may be variants.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned last week that the variants could fuel a new surge and that states should not rapidly relax restrictions.

The question nobody is asking -- and I'm not sure why -- is, "If you're so concerned about more dangerous COVID variants, what can you do to assure us that the Wuhan lab isn't cooking these up itself?" The current position of the legacy media and the public health elite appears to be, "Well, of course, maybe the origin of the virus was a lab leak, or maybe it was still just a really, really sick bat. We don't know. Maybe the intelligence community can give us a clearer answer when it makes its report next fall."

So, why has nobody asked whether the Wuhan lab is still getting US taxpayer money -- my bet is that it certainly is -- and why the payments aren't on hold until we get a clear answer?

The closest we've come has been this past weekend's remarks from Rep Kevin McCarthy:

The American people don't have trust in Dr. Fauci,' McCarthy told the Breitbart News Saturday radio show. 'Let's find a person we can trust. Take politics aside, I mean we're talking about American lives here.'

Dr Fauci and Mrs Biden were up in Harlem to talk down to African-Americans and address the perceived problem of vaccine hesitancy. African-Americans have been particularly reluctant to take the government shots in view of the government's past history of using African-Americans as medical guinea pigs. So of course, two phony white elitists from the government, one the wife of a southern-state segregationist, will be just the folks to address this problem. The tone deafness here is astonishing.

This is, though, also an indication that the moral entrepreneurs are steadily losing their prestige. If the public health types want to continue a go-slow approach on reopening due to "the science", they're going to have to reset the scientific arguments, which are increasingly in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. If they seriously want to address vaccine hesitancy, they need to clear up the uncertainty on where the virus came from and who benefits from it and its putative remedies.

But so far, the narrative isn't on the establishment's side:

A top-secret report from a "respected national laboratory" dated May 25, 2020 during the Trump administration declared a potential COVID-19 lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology plausible and in need of more investigation.

The contents of the classified document prepared by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California were the basis for the State Department investigation begun under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to The Wall Street Journal.

President Joe Biden ended that investigation and called on U.S. intelligence agencies to deliver a report in 90 days on the origins of the global coronavirus pandemic.

. . . Sources told the Journal the LLNL study was prepared by the lab's intelligence arm, called the "Z Division." The lab is focused on national security, including biological weapons, and "drew on genomic analysis," according to the Journal.

. . . Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are conducting an investigation into COVID-19 origins and have requested a classified briefing from LLNL Director Dr. Kimberly Budil, the Journal reported.

Trump is taking the lead here. In North Carolina he raised the question of Chinese reparations, although a problem there is that the US was complicit in funding the Wuhan lab. The whole scandal is going to run very deep and require serious investigation and serious remedies. But at least it's the Republicans who are just starting to ask the right questions.