Published on
Wednesday, June 02, 2021
byCommon Dreams
Was There a Wuhan Lab Leak? An Inquiry Won't Dig Out the Truth. It Will
Deepen the Deception
Our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over
the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told
only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
byJonathan Cook
A fireman disinfects a lab of Wuhan No. 3 Boarding School in Hanyang
District of Wuhan City, central China's Hubei Province, Aug. 3, 2020. (Photo
by Wang Fang/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/ via Getty Images)
A fireman disinfects a lab of Wuhan No. 3 Boarding School in Hanyang
District of Wuhan City, central China's Hubei Province, Aug. 3, 2020. (Photo
by Wang Fang/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/ via Getty Images)
A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan-a short
distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the
virus-was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump,
QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with
China.
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak
theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President
Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a
consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged,
rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered
by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic
that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can
be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan's have conducted
Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally
occurring infective agents-often found in animals such as bats-to try to
predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses,
might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head
start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to
cope.
Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan's many times before.
And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan
got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world
stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and
spread around the world?
No interest in truth
Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that
question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth-or at least,
they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not
US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate
media.
The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the
origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is
still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful
political, scientific and commercial interests.
We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab
leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia-when it was very
obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has
switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the
US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling
us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.
No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact,
quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story
might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political,
media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological
basis on which their power rests.
Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth
of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue
controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to
a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
Virus experiments
Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific
establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat
introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to
blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as
Trump tried to do.
But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to
go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to
refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension
with a nuclear-armed China.
Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an
in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically
strong, citing some of the world's leading virologists.
But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before
the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with
the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus
experiments-what is known, in scientific parlance, as "gain-of-function"
research.
Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama
administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a
human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under
Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work
at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the
EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr
Anthony Fauci-yes, the US President's chief medical adviser and the official
widely credited with curbing Trump's reckless approach to the pandemic. If
the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic's saviour in the US might
actually have been one of its chief instigators.
And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for
being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like
EcoHealth.
Colluding in deceit
This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so
aggressively last year by western political, medical and media
establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or
investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or
concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of
naked self-interest.
If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the
president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded
gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the
lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO's spokesman on the matter. To
say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the
problem.
He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps
not surprisingly, continues to direct the media's attention to Wuhan's wet
market.
The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover
the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude
in deceiving their audiences-and sweeping these egregious conflicts of
interest under the carpet-is illustrated by this article published by the
BBC at the weekend.
"The events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive
cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab
leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of
authority on which the power of western elites rests."
The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid's origins.
But it mentions none of Wade's explosive findings, including the potential
US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak
are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures
who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at
the Wuhan lab.
Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a
pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because,
if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very
structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.
Media blackout
So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden,
the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public
with the possibility of a China lab leak?
The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade's article, in
particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the
lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated
with Trump or a "conspiracy theory" have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out
of the bag.
Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, "the
driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping
Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had
dismissed the theory."
The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18
prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories
were equally "viable" and that the WHO's earlier investigation had not given
"balanced consideration" to both-a polite way of suggesting that the WHO
investigation was a fix.
And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B:
damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the
corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are
excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate
Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile,
Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by
trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)
The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade's research,
is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address
the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade's
revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of
potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing
from almost all corporate media reporting.
Evasion tactic
Biden's so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It
makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is
nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might
otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on
the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO
complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to
highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation
is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start
to emerge from under the pandemic's shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public's interest rapidly wanes on
this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In
any case, the investigation's findings will most likely be inconclusive, to
avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese,
the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally
report its accusations against China as fact-just as they loyally blacked
out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the
past few days.
Illusion of truth
The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield
their narrative power over us-to control what we think, or are even capable
of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.
In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What
is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to
keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the
western system-despite all its flaws-is the best possible one for arranging
our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes
rocky, path towards progress.
The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It
will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly
lively-but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive-debate about
whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The media's task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year's
unquestionable certainty-that the pandemic had an animal origin-to a more
hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but
very much Chinese, role in the virus' emergence. It is to ensure we do not
feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by
the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though
nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is
that we do not ponder deeper questions:
* How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once
again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally
important matter-in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
* Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media
organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently
and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
* Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the
imposed narrative of Covid's animal origin remain silent for so long about
the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
* And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and
scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us
the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have
repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer
periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been
looming since the 1950s?
Class interests
Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs
to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the
public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests-or
those of their class or professional group.
Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same
establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with
research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because
scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own
professional community's failings, or increase public scepticism towards
science and scientists.
Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media
corporations that want to maintain the public's faith in the "benevolence"
of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius
and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has
no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really
operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people
rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.
And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they
represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose
corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing
everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests
of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on
their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly
by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern
for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened
in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence
over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making
the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.