The idea that Covid-19 did not originate in a lab became an obligatory talking point, as TK contributor Matt Orfalea pieced together in his latest delightfully unsettling excursion to our recent past. If epidemiologists had clearly established the disease’s origins, this would have made sense. But they hadn’t, which made the press’s outrage both amusing and suspicious. One prevalent interpretation for the propaganda is that once Donald Trump stated the sickness had a scientific origin, it became politically necessary to oppose the theory.
As Orfalea shows here, the Trump-said-it-so-it-must-be-wrong perspective was also prevalent:
After Covid-19 hit America’s shores, a question naturally arose: how did this happen? Most of us assumed the mystery would soon be unraveled, that the society of epidemiological detectives who found everything from the rat that transmitted Lassa Fever to the leak that caused viral outbreaks in Marburg and Frankfurt would nail down the origin of the pandemic.
It didn’t happen. We were initially told something about bats, a weird animal called a pangolin, and a Chinese “wet market,” but never heard the full story. A combination of the virus originating in an authoritarian state and a sudden seizure of incuriosity among the international press corps led to a strange coverage détente, in which we weren’t told exactly what happened, but we were told all sensible people were sure of what didn’t happen. 27 scientists in The Lancet put it this way in mid-2020: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
A common explanation … >>> Continue at Substack
Source: TK New By Matt Taibbi