They might have gotten away with it if their Lancet published letter hadn’t insisted on a “willing suspension of disbelief”.*
The now-infamous letter, signed by 27 leading public health experts, said they stood together to ‘strongly condemn’ the theories which they said ‘do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice’.
‘Prejudice’ here is just a stand-in for ‘racism.’ The word reinforced the “Trump is a racist” meme because he accurately called SARS-CoV-2 the Spanish flu German measles Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever Wuhan flu.
A letter from 27 elite public health officials? In the Lancet?! They cite “prejudice”!!?
That moves the burden of supplying any actual evidence to the footnotes, which the MSM fact checkers never check, giving headline writers a free hand. Too good to check. Probably too complex to understand. And, as it turns out, not at all settled science (oxymoron alert) – despite the credentials and insistence of the signatories.
The letter in question was written by Peter Daszak, whose blatant conflict of interest goes unmentioned;
[H]e told his fellow signatories in an email that the letter would not be sent under the EcoHealth logo ‘and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organisation of person’.
The emails show he even considered not signing the letter himself, although in the end he did.
The idea, Daszak said, was for it to be coming from ‘a community supporting our colleagues’.
It condemned as conspiracy any thought that the CCP virus did not naturally emerge from wild animals. Of course, he stands by it.
The letter would have been more plausible if the Chinese Communist Party had actually been “rapid, open, and transparent” in “sharing of data” at the beginning of the outbreak, rather than the opposite. It would have been more believable if the Chinese hadn’t restricted travel internally, while leaving international flights out of Wuhan undisturbed. It would have been more credible if the Chinese hadn’t stonewalled the WHO investigation of which one Peter Daszak was a part. It would have been less suspicious if the US Department of Health and Human Services hadn’t redacted parts (which, absent the other prevarication, would have appeared unremarkable) of an email from Daszak to Anthony Fauci, who had used Daszak as a cutout to fund bat coronavirus research in Wuhan. Research which had all the qualities of gain-of-function despite Fauci’s ever less plausible denials.
Peter Daszak enlisted 26 scientists and the Lancet to spike scientific inquiry of a totalitarian regime’s response to a pandemic, which unequivocally began in their country (though they mounted laughable attempts to shift the blame to the US Army, and imports of frozen food)… in favor of self-interest tempered by political expediency. What he was really concerned about was his own reputation, funding, and relationship with the totalitarians in China… and in our own NIAID.
The scientific credibility of the ‘Public Health’ elite Daszak brought on board has been damaged. Worse, much worse, the credibility of public health science and science in general has suffered.
The Lancet consensus science (oxymoron alert) article rejected as “conspiracy” the possibility that the CCP virus could have originated in a lab. It claimed the CCP “worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak” We knew the Chinese Politburo had by then already deleted a major bat coronavirus genome database, and had restricted the WHO team’s physical access to the wet market and to the labs.
After eighteen months the science is no longer settled.
We’d have far less vaccine resistance if we could place any trust in these ‘experts’ who think their most precious resource is credentials; when, actually, it’s trust. Credentialism corrupts absolutely. Trust is only protected by truth.
*H/T: Samuel Taylor Coleridge