A year ago, almost to the day, the United States House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing. The hearing was called, “Investigating the Origins of COVID-19.”
The main takeaway from the hearing was that the idea that the pandemic which took seven million lives around the globe was caused by a leak from a Wuhan biology lab was not, in fact, a conspiracy theory. The scientific consensus presented was that COVID-19 did not occur naturally. We did it to ourselves.
During the pandemic, we believed Dr. Fauci when he told us it came from somebody eating an infected bat from a nearby meat market. I believed him. I wrote in support of him.
The Committee had originally been formed during the 116th Congress while the Democrats held the majority. It was a bipartisan group charged with preventing waste, profiteering, and price gouging during the worst days of the shutdown. It sought to make sure that our responses to the outbreak of the virus would be guided by science.
In January of last year, the 118th Congress, now governed by a Republican majority, agreed to keep it going. The new Congress, however, changed the mandate. Now they were going to investigate how the virus started, examine our mask and vaccine guidelines, and monitor pandemic-related government spending. The then Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, announced that Republican Congressman Brad Wenstrup of Ohio would chair the committee.
Kevin McCarthy was the first red flag. Whoever Wenstrup was, I thought I should probably find out.
Wenstrup created a rather dubious record for himself while in the service of our great nation. On the plus side, he did affirm all states’ Electoral College votes after the last election. That’s kind of it for him on the plus side.
On the downside, Wenstrup signed the Texas legislation which was designed to disenfranchise millions of American voters. He made no public statements about the legitimacy of the 2020 national elections. He voted against impeaching the former president for his role in the January 6th insurrection. He voted against the creation of an independent commission to investigate the insurrection. He also voted against holding Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.
This gave me my first sense of what to expect out of this committee.
During the initial hearing of the new committee, Republican Jim Jordan accused Dr. Fauci of convincing two scientists to change their positions regarding the virus’s origins, in exchange for sending a large multi-million-dollar grant their way. According to Jordan the two scientists first believed that COVID began in a lab, but Fauci manipulated them into saying it began naturally.
Then there were the witnesses.
Dr Robert Redfield, a former director of the CDC, testified that the biology of the virus pointed to it having been created in a lab.
Nicholas Wade, a former science and health editor at the New York Times testified that Dr. Fauci and others used unverified data to prove that the virus was naturally occurring.
Jamie Metzl testified that the Chinese government destroyed test samples, hid records, imprisoned Chinese journalists, and muzzled Chinese scientists, thereby preventing an evidence-based investigation.
That all seems incontrovertible. Who are these people?
Dr Redfield’s appointment as the head of the CDC by our former president was opposed, at the time, by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and by Patty Murray, the lead Democrat of the Senate health committee. He came out early in support of the virus having begun in a lab. Many of his colleagues at the CDC disagreed with him.
Nicholas Wade wrote a book in 2014 called A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. After it came out, 139 members of the scientific faculty community, many of whom Wade referenced in his book, wrote a letter against him that said, in part, “Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures.”
When Wade came out with his lab-grown hypothesis about the coronavirus in 2021, there was a similar reaction from the scientific community. Most state that there is simply not enough evidence to support his claims. They say that much of what he writes about is made up.
Jamie Metzl is a geopolitical commentator. He also runs marathons. He’s written five books including some science fiction novels. He’s had a good education, but hardly seems an expert on anything.
These were three of the people whom the United States House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic based their ultimate findings. The one thing the three of them have in common is their embrace of the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic happened because of the virus escaping from a Chinese lab. None of them can point to anything substantive to back it up.
Jumping away from all that for a second, something is going on with Catherine, the Princess of Wales.
In January, she had some sort of abdominal surgery. The press representatives for the Royal family were decidedly cagy about the nature of it. At about the same time, it was announced that King Charles had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. They’ve been pretty cagy about that too.
My interest in the doings of the Royal family is not zero, but it is very close to zero. To be fair, I only get interested in them when they mess something up. Whatever is going on medically with either Charles or Kate is certainly their own business except that they represent a gigantic corporation. And, of course, an entire country.
I would argue that revealing the facts about what they are each experiencing would be a step in demystifying and destigmatizing medical issues.
I said this to someone the other day and they told me that Charles is probably deeply embarrassed about his prostate cancer so he should be allowed to keep it private. Embarrassed? Why is prostate cancer something that should be considered in any way shameful or embarrassing? Talk about it openly and the fear and anxiety around it all lightens considerably. That is exactly why Charles should be open about it. I would even go so far as to say that in his position he should be dutybound to do just that.
Lest you think I’m being callous, I have had prostate cancer, myself, and survived it. My poor prostate, alas, did not. It’s likely in a medical waste landfill in Bayonne somewhere. If anybody wants to know anything at all about it, I am more than happy to share the details. It had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was something that happened to me, through no fault of my own. Hiding it all gives it power. I refuse to do that. For heaven’s sake, going through it all is hard enough without feeling like you have to keep it a secret.
Kate, the Princess, has said, or maybe it was her husband who said it, that she’s trying to protect her children from the press. Well, that doesn’t seem to have worked at all. They’re probably even more freaked out about the circus going on around them now.
A day or two ago, Kate released a picture of her and her three kids for Mother’s Day. It’s the first official photograph taken of her since the surgery, so every news outlet picked it up. Now, of course, it turns out that the picture has been photoshopped. Something is awry with one of the kids’ cuffs. Kate’s zipper disappears. Her hand is blurry. Is her face from another shot? It looks suspiciously identical to a photograph of her on the cover of Vogue.
What can she be hiding? What’s wrong with her? Conspiracy theories have saturated the internet. Several news agencies have now dropped the picture. There is endless speculation about what is real in it and what has been carefully edited. All her past pictures are now being scrutinized to see what she might have done to them.
Everything we read has a slant to it. Nothing is ever what it seems. I try to be honest when I write, but I do leave things out. Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because I don’t think about them until after I’ve finished. I try and be respectful of Michael and let his stories remain his stories. Our lives do intersect, though, so finding that line is sometimes tricky, Occasionally I swerve around something to allow him his privacy. I’m not always successful, however, and every so often we need to have a “talk”.
For the most part, when I post my weekly photo dump, the pictures are as I saw whatever it is. That said, I will crop and straighten them if necessary. If I take a photograph of a skyscraper, it is either going to end up dead straight or at such a definite angle that you know I meant it that way. Every so often I’ll erase someone’s foot or an errant corner of a sign that has crept into a corner of a shot and thrown off the balance.
Am I lying when I do that? Maybe. To the best of my knowledge, I have never changed a picture to the point that if anyone stood next to me while I took it, they wouldn't see exactly what I saw.
In case you’ve missed it, we are now just about at the 4th anniversary of the official shutdown for the pandemic. Four years ago, while it was happening, none of us ever really knew what was going on. If I learned anything during that time, it was not to trust a blessed thing that was being said. It was obvious that our president was telling us nonsense. Remember him saying we should all drink bleach? Dr. Fauci, whatever the skewed findings of the Committee might have announced, I believe did his best to be upfront and honest with us. Was he always successful? I am sure not. How could he have been?
In my work, I have often had to withhold the truth from an individual or even a whole company as a directive from my boss. Sometimes it was genuinely in the group’s best interest for them not to know. There are times when total transparency only causes anxiety. To be fair, sometimes withholding the story was only in my boss’s best interest. During a national emergency, do I really want to know everything that’s happening, or do I want someone to fix it before it becomes an issue? Sometimes not knowing everything means we sleep all the better for it.
There are always reasons for altering the record and changing the truth. Some of them good and some of them pure unadulterated self-serving evil. I don’t much care anymore whether the virus leaked out of a laboratory or on its own crept its way into a cooked bat. Moving forward, I think that we should behave as if it came out of the lab if only to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. If it turns out that the lab is not where it came from, the worst thing we would have done is make ourselves safer from that being a possibility.
I do hope the Princess is okay, but her condition, whatever it may be, doesn’t really have anything to do with me. That’s about as much emotion as I can dredge up around that. As to what’s going on with the photo editing, though? That I am riveted by. Heads are going to roll. Popcorn is being popped.
The British people have so much invested in these people. I know we have plenty of people here who follow their stories like they’re watching an afternoon soap opera, but the Brits? Even the most fervently anti-Royal among them will bristle a bit if you happen to say something disparaging about one of them. They do not want to hear it. It’s as if you’ve insulted their family. They may not like Aunt Edna, but she’s THEIR Aunt Edna.
In the end, whatever is going on, it seems to me that the surest way to reveal a secret is to try and hide it.
I desperately want to know what Catherine; Princess of Wales is covering up and how the “firm” thinks it is going to affect the rest of them. If she’d just said I have such and such a condition and I had this procedure, I wouldn’t be giving any of this a second thought. It’s the subterfuge and its spectacular failure that keeps me watching.
I started writing this thinking that, indeed, there was a scientific consensus that COVID-19 was man-made. That’s what the very official-looking report from the United States House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said. Then I found out who the controlling members of the panel were. Then I found out who the witnesses were. Whatever it was that I thought I was going to say then veered off in an entirely different direction.
The truth around all these stories has been so sorely abused to the point that we will never truly know for sure what that truth is. That very well might be the case for our entire history. Nobody is simply recording what’s happening. We all have our biases and our internal editors.
Whatever truly happened in China four years ago, we are the survivors. Seven million people died, but we didn’t. We may not be so lucky the next time, but we will deal with that when it comes. For now, happy 4th Anniversary to all of us.
And get well soon, Kate. I am sorry that you’re having to go through whatever it is that you are going through.
Early on, genetic analysis of the COVID virus showed that it was almost impossible for it to have come from a lab. Another, and arguably more telling fact, is that there are several labs in the market area, and no one of them could have both cooked up the virus AND released it into the market area. The only lab from which it could have escaped is not capable of cooking up an artificial virus, and has no reason to have such a virus on hand. I no longer recall, from the article I read, if any of the remaining labs could have cooked up an artificial COVID by itself.
Always enjoy your perspective. I was just thinking that it was 4 years ago today that we left our chicago city house and left for Michigan to stay in our second home. We thought it would be a couple weeks. In the end our daughter’s family took over Chicago house and we stayed in Michigan. There was never going to be enough bandwidth for everyone working and schooling remotely. It is was also the period I found my way to your covid blog. I have found it sustaining still. So thank you!
One more comment on prostate cancer. My husband was diagnosed and treated this winter. We were astounded at the number of friends (people we have been close with for years) who also had been treated, but never shared. Women friends have freely shared their “conditions” of all sorts, but not the guys. Mike (husband) has been very open which has prompted the “oh yeah, I went through that” response. A doc friend observed that it would be a great PSA if men were more open about their experiences with their psa scores and prostate cancer. Perhaps there is too much privacy around privates?
Ok…and thinking after all these years, I should subscribe!