A Covid Afterthought - Victor Davis Hanson

07/24/2022

Historians soon will grasp that the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed a presidency, blew up a booming economy, created suicidal quarantine and lockdown policies that sent the nation into collective hysteria that fueled the woke insanity of summer 2020, ruined years of the lives of our school-age children, spiked suicide rates, substance abuse, and household violence, radically changed the 2020 election into a 102 million early/absentee ballot nightmare, destroyed over one million lives, perhaps disabled over 10 million, created nonending nightmares for families of the dead and serially sick, paved the way for millions of doses of not fully tested vaccinates whose side effects have crippled and killed Americans, devastated the U.S. labor force and helped create the supply chain/worker shortage, and gave the nation Joe Biden, arguably the worst president since James Buchanan.

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Recently, there has been increasing pressure on China either to produce more data exonerating itself of birthing the SARS-CoV-2 virus or to confess that the pathogen escaped from its secretive biosafety Level 4 virology lab and was human-engineered, showing insidious characteristics not found in nature.

If the latter is true, and an increasing number of scientists believe it is, the best Chinese case is that some preventable laxity resulted in an escaped gain-of-function deadly virus that has so far not petered out like prior coronavirus epidemics.

Whether it has been engineered to aid vaccine research or was some sort of dark bioweapon experiment, no one knows. We assume it was released accidentally not because the Chinese Communist Party is incapable of such nefariousness, but only because it apparently had no vaccine to protect its own from its own self-created virus.

Still, if the virus, as speculated, is a gain-of-function monstrosity, let loose out of criminal laxity, and the sin is compounded by deliberate lying and subterfuge, then consider:

The Chinese are responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. In essence, they have waged war on humankind and unleashed a weapon thousands of times more deadly than a nuclear bomb.

But to what degree and why are they exempt from consequences? Do they own politicians, fund university research in the West, contribute to medical journals, and threaten media and universities that promulgate skepticism of the crackpot pangolin or bat theory?

Ponder further. The lab has been the scene of prior viral breeches. It continues to engage in gain-of-function research. There is a strong possibility that another virus in some year in the future will be accidentally released and we will revisit the present nightmare years. Is that enough to concern us?

So, what good are the UN, The WHO, NATO, etc. if they cannot "persuade" the Chinese to shut down the lab? Is it not the equivalent, whether intended so or not, of a weapons lab whose continued existence poses an existential risk to mankind?

And what of our own scientists? Did some approve the transference of sophisticated gain-of-function infrastructure to China? Did Americans in the past give China the know-how to produce mice with human-engineered organs that would make possible such diabolical research?

In other words, per their redacted emails, did CDC and NIAID top officials, most prominently Anthony Fauci, knowingly aid and abet the sort of research deemed too dangerous and thus illegal in the United States, by routing money and expertise to the Wuhan lab in semi-nontransparent fashion?

If true, what does that make Dr. Fauci, the supposed viral guardian of America? If Fauci had even a small hand in promoting foreign gain-of-function research that led to the present COVID-19 pandemic and if simultaneously he was de facto our official arbiter of Covid-19 policies, then what sort of existential conflicts of interests did he engage in?

Ostensibly any policy, any attitude, any protocol that even tangentially was connected to a Chinese origin, and thus eventually an American role in it, would eventually involve decisions made by Dr. Fauci and others?

Do you get the point? How in the hell is this official still running a multibillion-dollar federal agency entrusted to keep us safe from coronaviruses when he may have promoted or at least agreed to the transference of knowledge and wherewithal that put us in such existential danger in the first place?

In sum, are we snoozing through the greatest scandal in U.S. history, one that dwarfs Watergate or Russian collusion?

Has Peter Daszak ever been called before Congress to explain the rerouting of federal dollars to Wuhan, his questionable role in the Lancet "investigation," and what exactly are his relationships with the CDC and NIAID and Drs. Fauci and Collins?

A paranoid would almost believe that the Chinese communist government had been partially funding or subsidizing Lancet, given its transparently unethical whitewash investigation of the Chinese lab and exoneration of Western scientists likely culpable in transferring some of the ability to make such a virus to Wuhan.

There is something Hitlerian about the birth of this virus, and yet to even write or suggest the above is taboo and deemed dangerous to one's career.

Have we in our silence become absolutely unhinged?