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The Lableak Ghost Appears on Dangerous Ideas

 

 

After I posted my March 1, 2023, blog item on the lab leak hypothesis, “It’s Lab Leak Day … Again,” I told myself I would never report on this story again, which is now officially a bullshit story.1 I also did not expect to be reporting about Lee Camp again anytime soon. However, on June 3, 2024, Lee Camp, on Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp, reported that the New York Times has “finally admitted” that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan.2 His story was full of fallacious misinformation and so I emailed Camp directly and sent him my three blog posts on this story, which include many articles from science journals and science magazines, as well as World Socialist Web Site articles on this story.3 As with the WSWS reporting on the ‘1619 Project,’ which involved interviews with leading American historians, the WSWS has consistently exposed the bipartisan vested interests that created this story and that later appropriated it for their own purposes. The WSWS did so by reporting on the research findings of science professionals. Camp was kind enough to reply to my email, thanking me for writing him but also warning that WSWS reporting is biased. I would agree that WSWS reporting has a partisan political stance, but I cannot say there was any bias on their part when it comes to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. A relation of mine who suffers from Long Covid has vouched for the fact that their reporting on Long Covid has been ahead of the curve when it comes to this aspect of the pandemic, often doing much better than the medical field itself, which has been slow to recognize Long Covid as a serious ailment. The WSWS has also denounced the “living with covid” policy of homicidal state regimes as well as populist anti-vaxx attitudes.

The day after this report, Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp revised its analysis, stating that they received many angry comments from viewers.4 In this instance, Camp cites a New York Times article from March 2023 that is much closer to the truth of the matter, and mentions the views of the consistently reliable scientist, Michael Worobey. That particular NYT article raddresses the vicissitudes of the lab leak hypothesis but is clear that there is no evidence of a lab leak. None. Regardless, Camp insists on the hypothesis that COVID-19 might have emerged from a lab, responsibly citing early conclusions that the virus was not a laboratory construct, but nevertheless adding that, technically speaking, it could have been. This conjecture has since that time been put to rest by the science community – it had already been dismissed before then – but it continues to re-emerge because it serves political interests, not to mention kitsch conspiracy blather.

Camp did the right thing by correcting himself, but he also both-sided the story, remaining reluctant to admit he was wrong. The notion of a lab leak has always hinged on the possibility that it might have emerged from a lab. But this conjecture has never and does not benefit from a shred of positive evidence to that effect. For whatever reason, normally reliable sources like The Intercept have attempted to make the pandemic research organization EcoHealth Alliance a scapegoat, no doubt because EcoHealth collaborated with Chinese and other foreign governments on pandemic research. Discrepancies in some of their reports has allowed the U.S. government to target EcoHealth for what is otherwise routine gain of function research, none of which has any resemblance to COVID-19 and all of which is designed to help scientists understand virus mutations, which is essential to understand how viruses spread. None of these governments and media organizations have given much attention to the real causes of the new types of pandemics, which has less to do with wet markets than with deforestation, agribusiness and global integration through mass transportation.

Meanwhile, public advocates like Ralph Nader and Thomas Frank – and neoliberal mouthpieces like Jon Stewart – have embarrassed themselves by making gain of function research seem like the cause of COVID-19, with no substantial retractions by any of them, nor from Matt Taibbi, who took his own unscientific stab at this issue. The best that any of them, including Jeffrey Sachs, could come up with is the fact that science can never be one hundred percent certain. If you had to make a health or an engineering decision, would you do so based on scientific consensus or on right-wing gaslighting premised on negative proof: Maybe this foreign policy and CIA-soaked hypothesis will serve you, but there is no proof, we’ll never be able know for sure and experts disagree with it. I think you know the answer, unless you’re really that special. USA #1. Go team! From the other side, there is ample positive evidence supporting the theory of zoonotic transfer, which makes the most sense and is supported by science professionals. However, since this story was concocted by the far right, and later adopted by the Biden administration, it has received the support of several commentators on the liberal left. Given Max Blumenthal’s red-brown anti-vaxx populist stance on the pandemic, he can readily be ignored, but most others have been reluctant to admit they were wrong, and none have cited the scientific research and evidence that has been produced along the way. Instead, they have opted for the safety of uncertainty, with little concern for the fact that scientists like Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli, not to mention the pliable Anthony Fauci, have been browbeaten by neo-McCarthyite government committees.

As I’ve reported elsewhere, there are many reasons why people might want to believe in a lab leak, but wanting to believe something does not make it factually true. A child believes in Santa Claus, but the parents understand that Santa bought the children’s new video game at Best Buy for $79.99. The “interpassivity” of belief results in the social phenomenon where because some people believe something, others believe it also. Camp decided to judge the truth of the matter by polling his viewers, 80 percent of whom believe that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, 5 percent of whom believe it came from wild animals, and 16 percent of whom say that we cannot know yet. The latter, one can imagine, consists of those who believe such evidence is bound to emerge. However, as scientists have said since 2021, evidence for a lab leak will yield diminishing returns. At this stage, even if it were true, the possibility that it will be discovered that the origin of COVID-19 was a lab beak is less than nil. All the bases for that hypothesis have already been covered. Opposite this, evidence for zoonotic transfer has reached the level of consensus, with plenty of science papers confirming and supporting this viewpoint. Camp’s second report is unfortunately full of twisted reasoning and his decision to judge his mistake by polling his viewers does not speak well of his skills as a journalist or of the extent to which his audience is informed on this issue.

Enlightenment reason presumes to be able to clear the cobwebs of superstition. Modern education, however, does not prevent people from holding non-scientific and non-verifiable beliefs. An IPSOS poll conducted in 2019 revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that ghosts are real, and 32 percent believe that aliens visit Earth. Someone could easily do a study to understand how it is that so many Americans, including Lee Camp, came to believe that COVID-19 emerged from a lab. They would have to follow this up with a further study of why it is that even when presented with scientific evidence, they prefer to rely on the same deep state and New York Times sources that they elsewhere reject as corporate propaganda. There is no proof that the Chinese government has lied or has tried to hide evidence. However, mistrust of the Chinese government and its dangerous spy balloons is perhaps reason enough to trust the very reliable U.S. government and democracy-loving allies like Israel and Ukraine.

This next paragraph is a comment I posted on the second Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp episode. Because the comment is only visible when I am signed in to YouTube, and not visible when I am not signed in, its invisibility indicates that I have been shadowbanned from the show. I hitherto participated in a few chats for the livestream of this show as a fairly well-informed Marxist participant with a sense of humour. For whatever reason, a moderator thought it fit to shadowban me, perhaps because I was promoting Garden Rock 2024 as an alternative to Lee Camp’s innocuous Yard Rock. Since Camp is supposed to be “the most censored comedian in America,” it’s anyone guess why his moderator would squelch the voice of someone who does more than fawn over the host and second his rightful indignation with clicks. Has the Internet replaced commercial media and mass audiences with trolls and sycophants? Let’s hope not.

 

My invisible shadowbanned YouTube comment on Lee Camp’s second lab leak report:

It’s good that Lee Camp revised his certainty from yesterday’s show. But this episode is not much better. He corrected himself by quoting from the NYT rather than the science journal and science magazine articles I sent him – not to mention the excellent reporting on this issue on the World Socialist Web Site. The fact of the matter is that there is ZERO evidence of a lab leak – none, nada, nothing, I repeat, nothing – and there is CONSENSUS enough in the science community, up to recent reporting, that a) the virus developed from zoonotic transfer, likely transmitted through bats, and b) the Wuhan market was the site of its transfer to humans. As for Peter Daszak and EcoHealth, there is no cloaks and daggers here. Daszak is a biologist who studies these kinds of viruses. That’s his profession. He’s not a CIA agent. This show says he applied for funding from the Defense Department. What other sources of funding has he applied to? This question was not even asked. Where has most of his funding come from? Come on, Lee, what you’re doing here is suspicion mongering, not investigation. Read a few more articles please. People have also tried to blame EcoHealth for reporting discrepancies, with some story about experiments on dogs, or something stupid like that I don’t remember. People have fixated on Daszak as a scapegoat, as I mentioned in my email to LC, with articles to back up that story. Daszak is a biologist who specializes in SARS and MERS type viruses, he’s not Dr. Strangelove. Camp should invite Daszak on his show rather than help along in the neo-McCarthyite witch hunt on scientists like him, and on people like Scott Ritter, because Daszak and Ritter, and student protesters, are in the same boat as everyone else who is being attacked for “security” reasons. You got it backwards Lee. The very reason the Wuhan lab was built near the Huanan market is because these diseases tend to emerge in these kinds of places, so they expressly built the lab there to be as close as possible to any outbreak. There are others like it also built near wet markets. This shows the Chinese government being responsible, not the opposite. And this tends to ignore that in the first two years of covid, when close to 1 million Americans died from the virus, around only 10,000 Chinese died from the disease, because they followed the science. Sorry but this reporting spreads the tendency to conspiratorial thinking on this issue, à la anti-vaxx Max Blumenthal and red-brown populists. Thomas Frank was wrong about this, Ralph Nader (his guests) was wrong about this, Matt Taibbi was wrong about this, and Cornel West is wrong about this. There is also plenty of evidence of hack scientists and hack journalists spreading lab leak conspiracy who also spread WMD conspiracy before that, and there is evidence that the US GOV agency that tried to officiate the lab leak hypothesis was also responsible for WMD reports (a sub-section of the Dept of Energy, with links to Intelligence agencies, if I recall correctly). So Lee Camp is interpreting parts of this report backwards. Yes, there is conspiracy-mongering on this and the conspiracy is that the origin of the disease was in a lab. I sent this info to Camp and so why is he ignoring this? Maybe he does not have the time. Also, this 80 percent of people polled (who obviously know nothing about the subject except what they read in the corporate media, or they’re anti-vaxx, or they like the spectacle of it all) simply proves that if you tell a lie often enough people believe it. Did you know that the US is clamouring for war with Russia and China? Hmmm. Makes you think. This episode was hardly about science, but Michael Worobey, who is mentioned here, is a reliable source on this topic. The reporting on this here could have had fewer “dangerous” ideas and better research. It’s important. This is a deadly and debilitating disease, so enough mucking about please. Let’s hope Scott Ritter can continue his travels and reporting.

 

 

Notes

1. Marc James Léger, “It’s Lab Leak Day … Again,” Blog of Public Secrets (March 1, 2023), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/03/its-lab-leak-day-again.html. Note that this article is now impossible to find through a Google search.

2. Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp, Live Show, YouTube (June 3, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdZAW_jtUAY. The full live video version of this episode is now marked private, and the snippet about the lab leak story has not been made available in the ‘videos’ section of Camp’s YouTube channel. See also Alina Chan, “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab,” The New York Times (June 3, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html.

3. See also Marc James Léger, “New Issue of Kong Flu Magazine: Conspiracy Virus,” Blog of Public Secrets (June 12, 2021), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2021/06/new-issue-of-kong-flu-magazine-conspiracy-virus-.html, and Léger, “The Talking Dead,” Blog of Public Secrets (October 25, 2021), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2021/10/the-talking-dead.html.

4. Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp, “LIVE: Scott Ritter Passport Seized! + Water Crisis in Gaza,” YouTube (June 4, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAyrVirPWdw&t=6s.

5. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller, “Lab Leak or Not? How Politics Shaped the Battle Over Covid’s Origin,”YouTube (March 19/23, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html.

 

July 4, 2024: For an update on this topic, including criticism of the work of Alina Chan, see Benjamin Mateus, “The Wuhan ‘lab leak’ fraud: A political witch-hunt against science and public health,” World Socialist Web Site (July 3, 2024), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/03/pevp-j03.html; Edward C. Holmes, “The Emergence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” Annual Review (April 17, 2024), https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-virology-093022-013037; Ethan Siegel, “No, gain of function research did not cause COVID-19,” Big Think (June 6, 2024), https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/gain-of-function-research-covid-19/?s=09; Michael Hiltzik, “After smearing Anthony Fauci, House Republicans proceed to defame a prominent vaccine scientist,” Los Angeles Times (June 6, 2024), https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-06/column-after-smearing-anthony-fauci-house-republicans-proceed-to-defame-a-prominent-vaccine-scientist; David Gorski, “The New York Times promotes ‘lab leak’ conspiracy theories [by Alina Chan],” Science-Based Medicine (June 10, 2024), https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-new-york-times-promotes-lab-leak-conspiracy-theories/.