Today’s Tablet Scroll draws attention to the recent Daily Mail story on the origins of the Coronavirus plague. I have slightly edited Tablet’s summary and commentary below, but it makes the points I would want to make:
World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus privately told a senior European official that he believes the COVID-19 virus was accidentally released by the Wuhan virology laboratory in China, according to a report in the Daily Mail. Read it here.
The WHO has not officially endorsed the lab-leak theory and still considers the origins of the pandemic to be undetermined. What makes Dr. Tedros’s alleged confession all the more notable is that under Adhanom’s leadership, the WHO praised China’s COVID-19 response in the early days of the pandemic and declared in February of 2021 that it was “extremely unlikely” the virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory before later changing its tune.
Of course, the WHO was far from alone in burnishing the Chinese government’s public relations efforts by dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis. “Experts debunk fringe theory linking China’s coronavirus to weapons research,” declared The Washington Post in a January 2020 article that set the tone for subsequent coverage. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab-leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,” tweeted New York Times science writer Apoorva Mandavilli in the summer of 2021 before subsequently deleting the post.
Tablet’s summary concludes with a note on the fallacious Dr. Fauci:
Now if only we can revisit all that crazy “disinformation” about a U.S. health agency under Anthony Fauci’s leadership funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan laboratory where the leak is thought to have occurred …
Fauci himself has more or less consistently maintained a skeptical reserve regarding the lab-leak theory. Most recently, just last week, Fauci told a Senate committee that the Coronavirus likely resulted from a “natural occurrence” rather than a Wuhan lab leak. I think he keeps up a Covid error rate that asymptotically approaches 100 percent.
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