It’s fair to say that David Cole is a contrarian. He first came to attention as a “Jewish Holocaust denier”. Which is untrue, of course: Cole was a revisionist who questioned some claims about the Holocaust, but never denied that it took place.
Whatever the merits of his revisionism (as “David Stein”, he went on to make to make award-winning mainstream Holocaust documentaries), Cole remains a contrarian type in conservative circles.
His current contrarianism is fiercely criticising the growing lab origin theory for the Wuhan virus. Whilst I have been reporting the lab theory for over a year, it’s always worth considering opposing viewpoints.
The core of the lab thesis is that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), experimenting with “gain of function” (GoF) viral engineering to “supercharge” bat viruses so that they become preternaturally communicable human-to-human, created a Frankenvirus that somehow leaked from the lab and infected the world. The lab theory stands in contrast to the theory that Covid emerged as SARS and MERS did, organically through an animal source–to–animal intermediary–to–human chain.
As I brought up many times last year, international health experts expected a new zoonotic pandemic after SARS, because China refused to curb its trade in exotic food animals.
This is indeed true. Even Chinese scientists warned of not just the likelihood but the near-certainty of another SARS-like pandemic.
The lab theory was long derided by the mainstream media as a conspiracy theory – yet now even the New York Times and Washington Post are treating it seriously.
What changed? On the left, I can tell you what changed in five letters: T-R-U-M-P. The left will not, cannot let go of Trump[…]leftists need to find new ways to make him relevant, to make him responsible for whatever’s ailing the nation. The current iteration of the lab theory goes something like this: The Obama Administration banned GoF in 2014 (true). The Trump Administration reversed that ban in 2017 (also true). The NIAID, led by Fauci and now free to fund GoF, funneled money to a nonprofit that in turn gave $600,000 to the WIV (true)[…]
Trumpists say NIAID didn’t report the WIV grant as it should’ve. Anti-Trumpists say that’s irrelevant because under Obama’s ban, the grant wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
So there you go—both extremes are self-pleasuring to the lab theory now. Trumpists can blame Fauci, leftists can blame Trump.
All of which is a fair enough assessment.
But this mutual masturbation session is only justified if it’s actually true that Covid comes from GoF research at the Wuhan lab. And that’s where we hit a speed bump: There’s been no new scientific evidence presented over the past year to support the lab theory. The resurgence is purely political, not evidentiary.
Lab theory proponents still have only two things that pass for evidence:
(1) Coincidence: The first known Covid cases occurred in a city (a massive city of 11 million people) that also hosts a high-tech virology institute.
(2) It’s scientifically possible: Zoonotic diseases like SARS come from nature, but scientists can engineer a virus to look like something that evolved naturally. The technology does exist.
There, that’s it. And that ain’t evidence. It’s just saying, “It’s a coincidence” and “It’s not impossible.”
Cole is ignoring the evidence of, for instance Chinese whistleblowers who have gone on the record saying that it was created in the lab at Wuhan.
Cole next turns to the Medium article by NYT writer Nicolas Wade.
Wade suggests that three workers at the WIV fell ill in fall 2019. If they fell ill with Covid, that would predate the wet-market cluster of 27 cases. But…Wade’s “evidence” for the three-person mini-cluster is a Trump Administration “fact sheet” that states, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019” from what might be Covid or “common seasonal illnesses.”
So, an unsourced claim that perhaps three co-workers got the flu[…]
David Asher of the partisan Hudson Institute[…]declares that it’s “hard to believe” that three people in the same office got flu around the same time.
Has Asher never worked in an office during winter?
Wade’s own lab theory, frankly, doesn’t seem credible. Wade claims that COVID was engineered to be only transmissible from human-to-human. Yet, there is evidence that the virus was present in animal waste and runoff in the Wuhan wet market.
I’m not saying the lab theory can’t be true. But any thesis that ignores anomalous data is unsound, and any researcher unacquainted with that data is either careless or dishonest.
Takimag
That’s true: so, what about the anomalous data of Huang Yanling, the lab worker long suspected as COVID Patient Zero? Huang’s biography and research history were scrubbed from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website and she has vanished completely from Chinese social media, despite intensive search efforts.
All that remains is a grainy group photograph and single WeChat post purporting to be from Huang: “I am Huang Yanling, still alive. If you receive any email [regarding the Covid rumour], please say it’s not true”.
There’s also the fact that we now know that Chinese military and scientists were talking about weaponising SARS-like viruses. for years before the pandemic. Their scenarios have panned out very like the real thing.
Again, this is not hard evidence, but hard evidence so far is almost completely absent.
Frankly, the lab origin theory seems every bit as plausible as the wet market theory – but plausibility makes neither true.
So Cole may be right, he may be wrong. But at the least he’s doing us all a service by challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.
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