Monday, March 6, 2023

Looks Like We Just Got A New Overton Window

One intriguing indicator that we've reached the Morning After phase of the COVID moral panic is how the Overton Window, the permissible range of opinion on public issues, has changed almost instantly over roughly the past week. At the peak of the panic, the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak in China wasn't just a minority view, it was a pariah view associated with racists and conspiracy theorists. But as of this past Saturday,

FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News' Bret Baier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" came from a Chinese lab.

. . . The Energy Department, which had been undecided on the origin of the pandemic, concluded that the coronavirus most likely spread due to a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and "key members of Congress."

. . . Beyond the FBI and Energy Department, the National Intelligence Council and four other unnamed agencies assess at "low confidence" that the COVID-19 pandemic originated due to natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the Journal.

The CIA and another unnamed agency are reportedly still undecided.

At the same time, we might also conclude that respectable opinion is beginning to entertain the idea that the panic was manufactured by public health officials who were fully aware of what they were doing. Recent revelations suggest that this was the case in both the US and the UK. In the UK,

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “squeeze the pants off” the public and ensure they comply with lockdown, leaked news from The Telegraph has revealed.

. . . Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/guilt factor” was “vital” to “boost messaging” during the third national lockdown in January 2021.

The previous month, Matt Hancock, then Health Secretary, appeared in a message to suggest that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would help prepare the ground for the looming lockdown by scaring people to comply.

In almost so many words, these officials agreed that the way to influence the public was to incite panic. In the US, Dr Fauci commissioned an academic paper using his power to approve research funding and then used the paper he'd commissioned to support his official line on the lab leak theory:

New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

What's changed? Matt Hancock was UK health minister, apparently equivalent to Dr Fauci in his influence, from 2018 to 2021. He had a role in starting the panic, but he left office well before the panic began to subside in mid-2022. On the other hand, Dr Fauci didn't retire from all his public roles until the end of 2022, while his boss, Francis Collins, retired as director of the US National Institutes of Health at the end of 2021. Both Fauci and Collins appear to have been in full agreement on how to handle issues like the lab leak theory, and records have already shown that together, they closely coordinated the COVID strategies of the public health estabilshment.

It's likely that the Overton Window shifted so quickly in the US, if not in the UK, due to the narrow Republican win in the 2022 midterms, though the retirements of both Fauci and Collins, as well as the difficulty Dr Rochelle Walensky had in establishing a credible public profile, also enabled the shift. Thus we have a Republican House leader stating flat out opinions that only weeks before would have been unacceptable:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said Sunday he wants to get to the bottom of one "fundamental question" concerning the ongoing investigation into the origins of the COVID-19: pandemic: Why was Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to hide the narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from China's Wuhan Institution of Virology?

. . . "With this virus, they have told us all kinds of things that turned out to be false," said Jordan. "They told us it didn't come from a lab, now it looks like it sure did because the Department of Energy, FBI, everyone says it came from a lab. They said it wasn't gain-of-function research, but it sure looks like it was. They said it wasn't our tax dollars used at that Wuhan Institute of Virology, yes, they were. Then they told us the vaccinated couldn't get it, couldn't transmit it, there was no such thing as natural immunity, so time and time again they told us things that were not accurate."

In June 2021, Forbes reported,

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci said Wednesday. “All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.”

Fauci is no stranger to criticism. The nation’s leading infectious disease official was a frequent target of former President Donald Trump, who called Fauci “a disaster” and floated the idea of firing him. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump told reporters in October.

Indeed, Fauci said at the time the idea of firing him and putting him in jail was "totally preposterous". But times are changing. As Ed Morrissey wrote in the Hot Air link I cited yesterday,

[T]he conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

. . . [T]he people who made those choices avoided accountability for them, and were protected by news organizations, social-media platforms, and the government’s law enforcement and scientific bureaus by suppressing any questions about it.

What's interesting is that we aren't looking at new facts at all. Much of the information on the Wuhan lab has been available since before the COVID panic began. The question is how and why relevant information was suppressed and public panic was stoked -- and questions on whether people should have been fired, and whether people should still be sent to jail, are a lot less preposterous.

On the other hand, if Trump was saying in October 2022 that he should have fired Fauci, it's worth asking him again why he didn't.

posted by John Bruce @ March 06, 2023   0 Comments