Several recent developments have cast renewed doubt on the claim that COVID-19 naturally spread from animals.
There’s a growing amount of at least circumstantial evidence suggesting that it escaped from the viral research lab in Wuhan, China. The New York Post has a good recap of what happened up until now and why we’re suddenly hearing a number of authoritative voices speak up to question the official story.
An aside: Yes, I said the virus came from China, because it did. That’s not racist, any more than saying “German measles” is racist, and it’s certainly not an incitement to idiots to attack Chinese people.
Anyone who pushes that line is a patsy doing the propaganda work of China’s communist government, which is hiding behind false claims of “racism” to escape scrutiny of its own culpability in allowing this virus to spread worldwide.
Besides, anyone who howls that “Chinese virus” is racist and then talks about the “Indian variant” is either a hypocrite or, by their own definition, a hate-inciting racist. (Aside over.)
For a long time, any suggestion that the virus might have come from a lab in China was treated as a crazy, racist conspiracy theory, and any mention of it was banned by social media outlets and their “fact-checkers.”
But this weekend might have brought a tipping point, as even Dr. Fauci pulled his biggest flip-flop yet and admitted that maaaaaybe it’s not so certain where the virus came from and he is now “perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.”
Of course, any investigation would require the cooperation of the Chinese government, which has never given it before, and that’s why all the adamant denials and censorship were unfounded from the get-go.
While this debate rages on, let me just point out one big problem with many of the “fact checks” that are being used as excuses to silence legitimate questions.
Many of them, as in this case, don’t debunk the claims with actual facts, but with “appeals to authority.”
They cite some prominent “expert” who disagrees, and that’s taken as proof that the claim is false. But an “appeal to authority” that cites a questionable authority is a textbook example of a logical fallacy.
(No wonder leftists are trying to brand logic and reason as “white supremacist concepts” and kill them.)
I’ve said since this pandemic began that I didn’t blame health officials for getting things wrong at first or altering their initial comments because it was an entirely new disease and they were scrambling to learn what it was and how it spread. I get that mistakes were made about things like whether or not to wear masks, or how contagious surfaces are.
But too many times, opinions (often biased opinions) were treated as if they were settled truths. One example was when Trump was branded as a liar for predicting that a vaccine would be available before the end of the year — “experts” said it would take at least until 2021.
Not only was Trump’s statement just a hopeful prediction, not a lie, but he turned out to be correct and the so-called “experts” turned out to be wrong.
Now, the flat denials that the virus might have come from a Chinese lab and the attacks on anyone who suggested it are looking like the assurances of “experts” who didn’t know what they were talking about.
It’s still an unproven hypothesis for which we need to get to the truth. But if you censor questions and silence debate, then how do you ever expect to get to the truth about anything?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
