Let's Revisit The 2020 Moral Panic In Light Of What We've Learned

Here in LA, we're just two days away from having most COVID restrictions dropped, and the outdoor mask mandate has been gone for weeks, but I still see a majority of people on the street wearing masks. Churches have been gradually returning to normal since the new year, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has just announced that things will be fuily back to normal (I assume this includes choral singing and missals in the pews, but we'll have to see) by June 20. Even so, some of our pew friends at pre-2020 mass are struggling for the courage to get back to in-person church.

In other words, the moral panic of 2020 has had lasting effects even as the COVID pandemic is in full retreat. What have we learned since the release of the Fauci e-mails and related developments? The big one is the strange suggestion that by January 2020, Fauci and others in the loop were fully aware that a lab leak had released a highly contagious new virus on the world, and that US government agencies were complicit in funding the lab that released it. Whether the virus was manufactured or not is beside the point for our purposes here, but I think it almost certainly was.

Fauci's flip-flops are completely understandable in this context. His immediate effort in February and early March 2020 was to minimize the potential seriousness of the outbreak. Thus his remarks saying most people should go ahead and go on cruises, his advice not to wear masks, and his objection to a China travel ban. Speaker Pelosi at the same time was taking the line that fear of a Chinese virus was racist, and she made a publicity trip to San Francisco's Chinatown, urging people to visit. At this stage, the people in the loop were pretty clearly hoping the thing would just blow over.

By mid-March 2020, researchers at Imperial College London released their infection model, which wildly overestimated the extent of infections. It recommended lockdowns and widespread closures. For reasons that aren't completely clear, the consensus among media and public health elites immediately switched from nothing-to-see-here to full panic. TV news shows began to broadcast the maps with scary expanding red circles.

Within a fairly short period, the Imperial College model began to be discredited, but its recommendations for lockdowns and closures persisted as the policy paradigm notwithstanding. After March, the narrative shifted from don't-wear-a-mask to masks required. We were locked down in California from March to June, but by the time I could get out, the strange public dance of social distancing was firmly established, with sidewalk signs and six-foot calibrations as a constant reminder. My wife was denounced by a Karen at the supermarket, not for not wearing a mask, but for wearing the wrong kind of mask.

I think the panic model proved useful to the lizard people. The virus was portrayed as a constant threat that could infect anyone at any time, even though hospital ships proved completely unnecessary, and data began to reflect that most victims were elderly with other serious illnesses. Thus people who didn't conform to visible norms -- wearing a mask, or even being outdoors without good reason -- were characterized as the real threat. In many areas, churches and communities of believers were regarded as centers of disease and were subject to specific controls.

Throughout the initial period, goalposts were moved, and justifications for particular measures were changed. I think this was necessary to keep the public off balance and maintain a situation where the plebs, in the form of Karens and snitches, turned on itself. This was needed to distract attention from the ineffectiveness of lockdown measures, the incompetence and hypocrisy of figures like Whitmer, the Cuomos, Newsom, Birx. and Fauci, and possible questions about the source of the pandemic, which those in the loop were fully aware was a leak from a US-funded Chinese lab.

An additional feature of the official tone throughout 2020 was the constant scolding of the plebs. The plebs was not staying home, not wearing masks, always threatening to hold parties or family reunions, never grateful to the elites. If the plebs would get with the program, we wouldn't have the surges. Instead, we had them, so the lockdowns and closures had to resume or continue, no matter the surges kept on whatever the remedies -- only a combination of vaccine and natural immunity reversed them in early 2021.

The plebs was clearly the folk devil, and not just in the COVID panic. The BLM-Antifa riots, which began in May and continued throughout the rest of the year, blamed not just police brutality but "endemic racism" and "whiteness". The plebs was encouraged, especially in corporate training, to be "less white". If anything this indicated an underlying fear of the plebs among media, political, academic, and corporate elites, a result in part of the success of Donald Trump in his incarnation as a politician and the threat a populist movement represented to the established order.

Nor can I completely neglect the potential power of the anti-humanist environmental movement. Those who ascribe to these views, which represent an incoate and completely unworkable fantasy, seek to save the planet by exterminating some large fraction of the world's human population. I can't help but wonder if the scary red circles on the Imperial College model maps were in fact aspirational.

The question remains what those who funded and managed the Chinese virus labs were actually intending to do, no matter their actual product. The leaked COVID virus represented near complete incompetence: if they meant to conduct safe experiments, they certainly couldn't do that, but if they intended to create a weapon, it was at best a damp squib and must eventually anger the wounded bear of the plebs that was its presumptive target.

I think an encouraging lesson from the last year and a half is that, whatever the ill intent among our elites, their incompetence puts a strict limit on the damage they can inflict on us.

So Again, Why Is The US Deep State Funding Chinese Development Of Superbugs?

Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 short story "Welcome to the Monkey House" depicts a dystopian future in which the world government runs ethical suicide parlors to control overpopulation. The idea of mass euthanasia as social policy began around the turn of the 20th century in the eugenics movement. It had a thorough beta test under the German National Socialist regime, with results many felt were a failure, but it has never quite fully disappeared from the overall conversation.

Nor have neo-Nazi wackos been its chief proponents. The idea of population reduction -- and we're talking reduction, not just stabilization -- has been present in the environmental movement from the start. The problem is that when environmentalists start seriously projecting what's needed to achieve things like carbon goals, they begin to realize that electric cars and synthetic beef just aren't going to be enough to do the necessary job. Even if you get rid of all the cars and all the farting cattle, human beings alone, in the numbers in which they now exist, emit too much CO2 just by breathing. For instance,

The largest single threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the planet in the decades to come will be global climate disruption due to the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. People around the world are beginning to address the problem by reducing their carbon footprint through less consumption and better technology. But unsustainable human population growth can overwhelm those efforts, leading us to conclude that we not only need smaller footprints, but fewer feet.

Portland, Oregon, for example, decreased its combined per-capita residential energy and car driving carbon footprint by 5 percent between 2000 and 2005. During this same period, however, its population grew by 8 percent.

Or, from an environmental group called Population Matters,

The effects of global warming are already bringing harm to human communities and the natural world. Further temperature rises will have a devastating impact and more action on greenhouse gas emissions is urgently required. Population and climate change are inextricably linked. Every additional person increases carbon emissions — the rich far more than the poor — and increases the number of climate change victims – the poor far more than the rich.

. . . We are currently adding more than 80 million people a year to our global population. The UN projects that without further action to address population growth, there will be two billion more people by 2050, and three-and-a-half billion more by 2100.

The piece then quotes from something called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018:

"All options need to be exercised... We can make choices about how much of each option we use... but the idea you can leave anything out is impossible."

So, just what option are we "leaving out"? They never quite say. But so far, neither Planned Parenthood nor even the Chinese one-child policy has had the effect these folks have in mind. This body of opinion has been recognized for what it is:

There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity.

We can't say with any certainty who among the environmental or public health establishments ascribes to these views, but on one hand, they aren't limited to redneck Nazi cells, and this sort of thing has also, since the start of the eugenics movement, been part of the elitist mindset. Do Fauci, Collins, and other deep-staters who've laundered hundreds of millions through EcoHealth Alliance to Chinese virus labs want population reduction? We don't know. We really ought to try to find out.

It seems to me that if population reduction advocates are serious -- and they certainly sound that way -- they're in fact aware that the existing respectable measures for population control have proven ineffective. They must certainly be at least spitballing other options. Unfortunately, these pretty much all involve some way of getting many millions, or even billions, of people off the planet. Zyklon B was tried in the 1940s beta, but even 6-12 million bodies proved too great a relocation and disposal problem, not to mention the public relations issues, and even that number would not address current population optimization needs.

Nor, we can be pretty certain, would ethical suicide parlors. People aren't going to line up to get the problem solved themselves.

So, what about a really good killer virus? If you do it right, the people who get the program going won't be identified, and it'll just be written off as an unfortunate natural disaster like the Black Death. And also, if you do it right, the people who get to survive will have the vaccine before the virus is unleashed. I'm not saying this is the only explanation, but it is in fact one that fits. And even Vanity Fair is implying that hinky stuff is about to come out in the Gates divorce:

Gates has embarked on a 20-year public relations effort to frame himself as a good-guy geek deeply excited by new technologies and leading the effort to fix the ills of the world. He’s given away billions to fight malaria, climate change, world hunger. He led the effort to warn of a potential global pandemic (back in 2015, Gates famously said a pandemic was imminent and could lead to the deaths of more than 30 million people), and then, when his vision became reality and COVID-19 obliterated the global economy and killed millions, there he was at the forefront of vaccine research efforts.

Right. How come nobody trusts the guy? He's willing to go public with saying we need to get used to the taste of synthetic beef (though nobody thinks he'll ever eat a bit of it) -- what is he not willing to say in public? For that matter, we learn from Fauci's e-mails that he and Mark Zuckerberg are on a first-name basis, but what they talk about has to be redacted. Why?

I'm not sure we have a whole lot to fear even if deep-staters are colluding with megabillionaires to save the world by killing most of the human race, even though I think there's a good chance that some of these guys actually believe this. The level of incompetence displayed by the credentialed elites in the COVID episode, top to bottom, start to finish, suggests that at least what these people envision can't come to pass.

But they still have the potential to do lots of damage, and we really need to find out what's been going on behind the scenes, because something certainly has.

Trump Wants $10 Trillion China COVID Reparations

This according to the Daily Caller. In a comic book world, this might be justified, but Trump himself is fully aware that the US deep state funded Wuhan gain-of-function research to the tune of at least $100 million, and probably more, since an estimate given by the NIH director is "hundreds" of millions.

In April 2020, according to Politico,

The Trump administration has pulled funding for a group of scientists studying coronaviruses in bats and the risk of their spillover into humans -- the very kind of infection that started the COVID-19 pandemic -- according to EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based nonprofit organization conducting the research.

. . . In a statement, the EcoHealth Alliance said it wanted to know more about the NIH's reasoning. “For the past 20 years our organization has been investigating the sources of emerging diseases such as COVID-19,” the group said. “We work in the United States and in over 25 countries with institutions that have been pre-approved by federal funding agencies to do scientific research critical to preventing pandemics. We are planning to talk with NIH to understand the rationale behind their decision.”

So talk with NIH is just what EcoHealth Alliance did. In August, just a few months later,

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $7.5 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on finding unknown viruses in nature, months after the cancellation of an earlier award to the group prompted an outcry over political interference.

EcoHealth had previously established a partnership with a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China — the city where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have begun — under the terms of a five-year grant from the NIH. That grant was due to run through 2024 but was abruptly canceled in April.

At the time, conspiracy theories were emerging that suggested that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was either accidentally or deliberately released from the lab in Wuhan. There is no proof to support the theories, but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed in April that U.S. intelligence was investigating the claims. And at a news conference that month, President Trump, when asked about the EcoHealth grant, pledged to “end that grant very quickly.”

No reports from August mentioned that the specific grant Trump ended was in the $600,000 range, while the new grant as reported comes to $7.5 million.

Amid the grandstanding calls for reparations, nobody seems to be asking to call either Peter Daszak or Francis Collins, the NIH director, to testify in front of congress, though this would clearly be a productive path. And if the US funded so much of the COVID reaearch that led to a lab leak, it would only be logical for other countries that felt entitled to damages to go after the US, which has the deep pockets, not China.

EcoHealth Alliance is clearly a major deep state player, and the current lab leak kerfuffle apparently hasn't stopped the steady stream of money headed to the Wuhan lab through it. Drs Fauci and Collins of the NIH aren't the major players, either, as it's generally acknowledged that grants to EcoHealth from the Defense Department and Homeland Security are far larger.

Precisely what are all these grants going to? Is there any audit or even followup to be sure we know? Who are the major players, especially if Fauci and Collins are just handy scapegoats?

The EU is now calling for an "unfettered" investigation into COVID's origins, but it's focusing on China. Unless such bodies ask just as many questions about Washington, this will remain kabuki, which I suspect it's desined to do.

But countries like India, which could actually use serious reparation money, will need to go after the deep pockets, which is to say the US.

So It Was Probably A Lab Leak

Within a matter of a couple weeks, the Overton window of COVID's origin has shifted, from Facebook completely banning the lab leak theory to just about everyone saying, well, it's a possibility, and well, it does seem credible, but of course, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Wait a moment. Let's take a look at this kind of accident. On March 6, 1970, members of the Weather Underground were building a bomb in Greenwich Village when it accidentally went off, killing three. But that's OK, it wasn't deliberate, it was just an accident. On August 21, 1945, physicists playing around with the plutonium core of a nuclear bomb in Los Alamos mistakenly dropped part of its shield, causing a criticality incident that killed one physicist and exposed others to dangerous radiation. But that's OK, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Nobody seems to want to ask what's behind this kind of accident. It seems to me that in our examples, people were messing around with material they knew -- and which any sensible adult would conclude -- was part of a highly destructive final product. In one case, it was clearly part of a larger terrorist plot. In the other, it was part of a project deemed essential to national security. But the mistakes were integral to the nature of the devices, they just didn't occur exactly as intended.

We now have video of Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance launders US grant money to Chinese gain-of-function labs, explaining that gain-of-function is exactly what they were doing:

“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.

“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,” he adds.

So it sounds more and more like US government agencies were knowingly sending what the NIH director estimates were hundreds of millions to Daszak and his "colleagues in China" to play around with some extremely dangerous stuff. There was a lab leak, but it wasn't deliberate. Huh? Why were they funding this kind of work in the first place? What was the intent?

Commentators have pooh-poohed the idea that this might have been some kind of weapon -- they ask why China would want to kill millions of its own citizens as well as millions of others worldwide. It's a good question.

But visitors here know I'm fascinated with pieces of pop culture that are also perceptive indicators of what may really be going on. Animal House is one very good example. The Fringe TV series is another. It merges classic mad scientist stereotypes with real-world figures like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy Leary and comes up with theories of how the world works that we can't just completely toss out.

So the Overton window is open just wide enough at the moment to allow us to think the Wuhan lab leak was just an accident, but that's OK, it wasn't deliberate. But one implication of even this is that the US and China were working jointly on a very big project to develop a virus with the potential to kill lots of people. An accident with a beta version, as far as I can see this, did escape from the lab and kill lots of people. The production release will probably be even more deadly.

Harvard graduates will sneer, as they already have, that China won't build a weapon that would kill millions of its own people. And why would the US countenance such a thing, much less fund it?

Fringe has a possible answer, another merger of the mad scientist stereotype with real world figures like J Robert Oppenheimer, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Howard Hughes, the reclusive multidimensional tech magnate William Bell. In Season Four, Bell plots to create a new third alternate universe that suits his vision of what a universe should be, but to do this, he needs to destroy the two existing alternate universes, one of which is ours. In other words, to someone like William Bell, apocalyptic destruction isn't a bug, it's a feature.

So shy would US and Chinese elites collaborate to kill many millions of people worldwide with a technologically enhanced superbug? Don't neglect that radical environmentalists currently believe there are already far too many people in the world, and Planned Parenthood isn't up to the job of reducing population to the levels we need for true sustainability. We're in William Bell territory here, but that doesn't mean it's just a wacky fantasy. We've already seen how quackery can drive civilized nations off the rails in the real world. What do people like Gates, Zuckerbrg, and Musk really believe about where world population should be headed? If they're serious about lowering it by, say, 95% or more, even gas chambers and ovens will be far too inefficient.

A new Black Death would do a much better job. People come out of Harvard believing crazy stuff. We need to keep this in mind as this scandal develops.

"Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates"

I ran into this op-ed at yesterday's Wall Steet Journal that somehow escaped their paywall, so I'm not sure how long it will be up. The thing that strikes me is that the author, R R Reno, who according to the thumbnail is editor of First Things, thinks something changed about elite schools after he graduated (but they were at one time fairly recently, i e, when he was an undergraduate, definitely OK places):

I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.

I went to the First Things website, and immediately I got a pop-up message from the same R R Reno, Editor, that informed me:

First Things is firmly grounded in the truths that endure. We enter the fray of contemporary cultural and political discussions with the confidence that it is God above who oversees our victories and setbacks. This confidence allows us to see clearly and speak soberly during uncertain times.

So I have a few questions for R R Reno, Editor. The first is, precisely when did the big change in the Ivies take place? He implies it must have been just within the past decade, certainly since the turn of the millennium. And Reno is clearly a very smart guy. I mean, he went to Haverford, although this is a safety school, not actually an Ivy. Exactly what changed, and when?

As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.

It's almost as if he was cruising along and happily attending class reunions and alumni dos, but last fall, somebody flipped a switch, and the students suddenly became thin-skinned narcissists, while the administrators became self-abasing poltroons. Just like that. Almost overnight.

R R Reno, Editor, did you ever watch Animal House? I especially liked the "road trip" episode, where the Delta guys visit Emily Dickinson College, see a campus paper headline, "Sophomore Dies In Kiln Explosion" and pick up dates from sorority sisters of the deceased sophomore on the claim that Otter is the distraught fiancé of the explosion victim.

That was the Ivy campus culture of the 1960s, which I lived through. I had lots of dates from sister schools of Emily Dickinson. The Delta guys saw their fellow Ivy students as shallow, self-congratulating, pampered, sheltered, marks. They saw their classes as worthless, and their professors often as not as corrupt opportunists on the make for pretty coeds. Dean Wormer, when it suited him, was a self-abasing poltroon. According to Wikipedia,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was No. 1 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". It was No. 36 on AFI's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list of the 100 best American comedies. In 2008, Empire magazine selected it as No. 279 of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time".

I've loved Animal House since it came out. We have it on DVD. It spoke to the not fully formed insights I had at the time about Dartmouth -- one of the schools it was based on -- in a very basic way. I'll grant that most of my schoolmates at the time didn't see things through the same eyes. The whole Ivy admissions routine, then as now, was that the Ivies select the best and the brightest, based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, and prepare them to be the next generation of blah blah blah. The students are the first to buy into this; they've played the game, and they've been told they won it. But they're pampered, sheltered, marks.

It's not unusual for Ivy alums to follow campus news and get some inkling that all wasn't as represented to them when they got their letter from admissions telling them they'd made it. The reaction is pretty much uniform -- something's changed! That wasn't how things were at Faber College back then! And generation after generation, decade after decade, there are little alumni revolts.

Maybe R R Reno, Editor of First Things, can get another one going. He's convinced that back in the day, the Ivies produced nice, talented kids. I would suggest he's got some image roughly like the sophomore who died in the kiln explosion at Emily Dickinson. What concerns me is that the editor of First Things shows so little insight into a key cultural issue.

But then, I can't think of even half a dozen pieces I've read in that mag over the past several decades.

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.

The COVID Thing Is Starting To Look Like Watergate

Except that in Watergate, nobody died. One big currernt similarity, though, is that calls go out for the resignation or removal of key figures -- in this case, Dr Fauci -- that are stubbornly, and even arrogantly, resisted by the administraion, until after months of pressure and successive revelations, they're finally removed. I lived through Watergate; to refresh my memory, I went to the timeline on Wikipedia.

John Ehrlichman, whose photo is above, was one of the more annoying figures in the scandal. He was one of those who resigned or was fired from the White House on April 30, 1973, following months of demands for such action. He eventually served 18 months for perjury and conspiracy. I'm beginning to have a sense of inevitability to the departures of current, similar figures like Fauci, Collins, Daszak, and no doubt others whose names we hardly know.

In fact, another similarity to Watergate is the constant emergence of new names and new details. For Watergate, which was in comparison a fairly simple scandal involving a single burglary and subsequent coverup, the time between the crime in 1972 and Nixon's resignation in 1974 was more than two years. The COVID-Wuhan lab story is much bigger, involving millions of deaths worldwide, enormous worldwide economic damage, and general disruption to much of the world's population.

Among other issues, there's a question of how the world can stop China from continuing its lab research on making viruses more deadly, which is probably more critical to human health and survival than banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere. This isn't going to blow over. Biden clearly doesn't yet understand this, if he ever will.

One data point that just emerged this morning is Dr Kristian Andersen, one of those new names that, as in Watergate, is likely to keep emergine from obscurity. Andersen surfaced last week as an e-mail correspondent of Dr Fauci, advising him on Januaary 31, 2020 that the COVID virus appeared to have been "engineered". However, in public statements made at the same time, Andersen denounced Sen Tom Cotton's similar theory, and later published a paper insisting the virus was natural. Andersen received NIH grants after his change of opinion, raising the question of conflict of interest.

Over the weekemd. after first blocking journalists asking him about his change of stance, Andersen deleted his entire Twitter account. This contained about 5,000 posts, which suggests his use of social media had been at best imprudent prior to this time.

But he seems to be the first of the figures suddenly reaching the public eye to realize the best couse is to stop talking. This is a fast-developing story that I think will be much more significant than Watergate. Other figures need to start reassessing where they stand.