“The core of the dispute is this,” declares The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column: “Did the virus emerge from nature — ‘zoonotically’ from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?”
Ah, modern journalism: even when dealing with some actual facts, is the real point to maneuver the reader not to consider possibilities?
In “Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding,” the Post’s fact-checkers seem most concerned to tell readers that while it is now OK to question the origin of SARS-CoV‑2, still, only within limits: as between normal viral evolution and an accident regarding gain-of-function research into viruses.
Outside this Overton Window, though, readers are still being instructed not to think about sabotage, conspiracy and biochemical warfare.
The upshot of the Post piece?
Senator Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) gets “two Pinocchios” for his alleged overstatements about NIH funding of Wuhan gain-of-function research.
After the Post’s listicle treatment of relevant facts, though, if you came to a different distribution of wooden noses — say, giving a few to Dr. Anthony Fauci, instead — you could make a plausible case.
After all, when Fauci himself says that he’s not convinced that the pandemic was not human-created — despite telling Rand Paul that the senator’s facts were “entirely and completely incorrect” — we should take that not merely as a cue to accept the Post’s latest Overton Window placement.
I say, open up that window all the way.
On Medium, science writer Nicholas Wade treated the actual evidence seriously, discovering that “the science” we were fed early on — the “science” that insisted that the gain-of-function story was highly unlikely — was actually orchestrated by the NIH’s subcontractor at Wuhan.
If you smell a rat — or a bat — at this point?
Your schnozz is in working order.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: While trying to put this story to bed, The Wall Street Journal broke news that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”
Previous coverage: here.
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3 replies on “Wooden Noses”
Trust has been broken. It cannot be repaired anytime soon.
If ever.
The Overton Window is interesting.
So is Occam’s Razor. So, which of these two things requires the fewest assumptions:
1) That the SARS-COV‑2 virus is just the latest of bazillions of zoonotic viruses that has naturally made the jump from animals to humans, many of them from that same reason of China; or
2) That one of two things that, so far as we know, has never in human history happened, and that so far there’s zero evidence for having happened, happened?