Since this thread has been bumped... one of the biggest recent stories that fits the topic is the Covid-19 origins.
For over a year, anyone who even brought up the idea of a lab origin for the virus was called a conspiracy theorist (in some cases even called "racist" for mentioning the possibility) and there seemed to be a concerted effort to silence anyone who'd voice or entertain this theory.
But now, after a little more evidence comes out that makes the lab origin seem far more probable, even those who accused others of being conspiracy theorists are giving the theory credence.
But what seems to be lacking is any withdrawal, retraction, correction or apology from those who labeled others "crazy conspiracy theorists" or other names for a theory they are now saying is not only possible, but probable.
I agree that the initial "consensus" response was irresponsible, and we're already seeing some use the pseudo-logic of "if it's this, then that" to further question everything from mask efficacy to the 2020 election.
I became intrigued by the theory of the lab-leak with the release of two State Dept. cables, reported by Josh Rogin in the
Washington Post.
Here's the best rundown of Rogin's reporting. When it became clear that Pompeo had deliberately leaked these (incomplete) cables, as a way to shift blame from Trump's horrendously botched response to the outbreak back to the CCP, many in the mainstream were content to ignore it. However, two things can quite frequently be simultaneously true: the cables have been shown to be authentic, and Trump still, through a combination of arrogance, inepitude and deceit, greatly exacerbated the pain and death the Americans suffered from the virus. (And, ironically, the portion of the cables that Pompeo chose not to release show that the Trump admin refused WIV's request for additional funding and training for the safety protocols that could have prevented the leak.)
What we can determine as fact is that the CCP engaged in a massive cover-up, restricting acess to the patients and their medical records, engaging in mass cremations of victims, shutting down any media access to the area, and arresting any medical professional who spoke out against the party narrative. As we've seen in other conspiracies, the cover-up itself allows room for the kind of vacuous ambiguity that enables speculation to thrive. But the fact is that due to this cover-up, we may never have the evidence necessary to confirm what actually happened.
What ended up being more persuasive for me is when I looked back at the little-noticed but still very publicly available news surrounding the WIV's efforts in the years prior to the outbreak. Shi Zhengli was an internationally recognized WIV scientist studying SARS-CoV for a decade. In 2017, WIV scientists released a paper (
here's the layman article at the time, and
here's the full paper) which noted that they had extracted up to 15 variations of SARS-CoV virus from a bat cave in Yunnan, and that these samples were being held at the Wuhan lab (note the use of 'WIV' as individual viral prefix identifiers). (fwiw, Yunnan is nowhere near Wuhan, being some thousand miles away in southwest China). The actual paper is pretty dense for someone (like me) who doesn't hold a degree in virology, but it does have a couple of important quotes which stand out: "In this cave, we have now obtained full-length genome sequences of additional 11 novel SARSr-CoVs from bats"; "In addition, we have also revealed that various SARSr-CoVs capable of using human ACE2 are still circulating among bats in this region." So WIV had a dozen strains of coronavirus from bats who were 1000 miles from Wuhan on the other side of the country, and that at least some of these strains already showed a possible capability of direct human infection, via the ACE2 lung receptors. (In addition, the wet market in Wuhan did not sell bats; it was a seafood market.)
The primary rationale for shooting down the lab-leak theory was that the virus' genome showed no evidence of laboratory manipulation or tampering. But the stated purpose of the research involved "
monitoring of SARSr-CoV evolution", not genetic engineering. (For the record, we should throw the entire 'bioweapon' theory out for complete lack of evidence.) Did this research involve exposing these SARS samples to the DNA of other animals, or, possibly, human cellular tissue in order to monitor its
natural mutations? Does the use of 'chimeric viruses' to augment the proteins of SARS-CoV amount to what's called 'gain-of-function'? I've seen arguments on all sides of these questions, but I haven't seen much in the way of consensus. And with the omission of any actual WIV documentation, it's unlikely that we'll have any. But, long story short, the excuse that the genome showed no evidence of laboratory engineering is now shown to be irrelevent given the fact that the research was designed to look as natural as possible (which is the only way it would be beneficial for the purpose of studying how it would naturally mutate).
One other thing that I will weigh in on, which is that I think that the recent attempt to paint Dr. Fauci as some sort of diabolical villain in all of this is so obviously erroneous that this alone should be an effective metric for whether to take anyone's theory seriously. All of the Rand Paul's and Scott Atlas' of the world are just sore about Fauci proving their feeble and cruel notions of herd immunity patently false, and, for them, this is their paleocivic version of payback. As Steve Bannon said, Fauci didn't "get with the program".
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