Despite the assiduous propagandising of the Xi regime, propaganda all-too-willingly parroted by nutters in the West all-too-ready to believe anything they read – especially if it blackens America’s name – there is no doubt that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Beyond that, though, it gets murkier. Inadvertent transfer from wild bats via an intermediate species (pangolins) has long been regarded as the most likely source of the outbreak. Others have convincingly argued for an accidental release from a nearby virology lab specifically researching coronaviruses in bats. From there, the theories get wilder in direct proportion to the lack of evidence for them.
Ann Coulter hoses down some of the wilder speculations – and reminds us what happened the last time we fell for wild reports of secretive military experiments.
Granted, whatever the truth is, it will somehow become an argument for more immigration and more war. Still, the lab theory sounds a lot like what we were told before going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to liberate the poor Afghans and Iraqis from their vile leaders! They’re just like us!
Then it turned out the Iraqis were shooting at our guys, as well as one another, and the Afghans were pederasts. Twenty years later, we’re still there and not much has changed. They weren’t just like us.
The Chinese aren’t just like us. Cultural differences are a more likely explanation for the Wuhan flu pandemic than a simple lab accident.
As Coulter points out, Mainland Chinese have a taste for…well, just about anything. Especially if it’s, as Gollum says in The Lord of the Rings, still raw and wriggling. Bats, dogs, scorpions, pangolins.
Wet markets [are] jam-packed with wildlife being slaughtered on site in breathtakingly unsanitary conditions. Among the “high-risk” behaviors at wet markets cited by the National Institutes of Health, shoppers “[blow] the cloacae of chickens” to “examine their healthiness.” (Look it up.)
I’d rather not, thanks.
As Coulter also rightly points out, even China’s own scientists have been warning for decades that these chicken-clacker-blowing wet markets are a “time bomb” for an emerging pandemic.
Coulter also argues, rightly, that any lab studying emerging viruses is going to be studying bats. In fact, the scientists working at the Wuhan lab had studied bat coronaviruses in labs in Australia, too.
But labs like the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP), in Australia, are not located smack-bang next to crowded, unsanitary wet markets. Aside from a dodgy kebab in town, ACDP’s scientists aren’t going to pop in anywhere nearby for some too-fresh bat or pangolin.
The lab theory places great stock in the fact that bats were not for sale at the wet market in Wuhan.
But the coronavirus didn’t jump from bats directly to humans. Like SARS, MERS and the bird flu (H5N1), it migrated from bats to some other exotic animal, and then to humans.
Based on a genetic analysis, the intermediate animal in the Wuhan virus is believed to be the pangolin.
Guess what was for sale at the Wuhan wet market? Pangolins!
This is under dispute, in fact. While it has long been reported that pangolins were sold at Wuhan, Nature has reported that pangolins were not listed for sale at the Wuhan market – although that doesn’t, of course, preclude illegal, unregistered sales. It also doesn’t preclude the possibility that the bat virus was inadvertently introduced to pangolins at the wet market via the lab.
Worse, Coulter continuously conflates the plausible idea that the virus accidentally escaped from the lab with the plainly silly claim that it was “engineered” as a bio-weapon and deliberately unleashed. The former may or may not be true, but there’s certainly at least circumstantial evidence (the Vanishing Virologist) to point to that.
Finally, we don’t need a crackpot It Escaped From a Lab! theory to blame the Chinese for this pandemic. They allowed these disease-ridden wet markets to continue, year after year, pandemic after pandemic, putting the entire planet at risk.
We also don’t need another war to “liberate” the Chinese from their Communist masters[…]
We just need to shut down the wet markets, shut down the border and bring our manufacturing home.
Despite its proclivity for straw-manning, Coulter’s article has a sound point: just as the Xi regime must not be allowed to turn the pandemic they unleashed to their own, grubby advantage, war-hawks must not be allowed to manipulate foil-hatters with yet another “WMD” story. Trump is doing too good a job extricating America from pointless wars to get sucked into a new one.
The Chinese Communist regime stakes its domestic legitimacy on its supposed infallibility. That’s why it lied and covered up the initial outbreak. It’s why it’s so fiercely pushing back against Scott Morrison’s proposed international investigation.
Xi knows that if the truth about Wuhan is laid bare for all to undeniably see, it will be his Chernobyl moment. The myth of communist infallibility will be shattered.
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