‘Graphite on the ground’: is covid-19 the West’s Chernobyl moment?

M.L.R. Smith and Niall McCrae

 

Amidst the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in spring 2020, the Civitas think-tank published our report Year of the Bat: Britain, China and the Coronavirus. This was a measured attempt to understand the global implications of the pandemic. An obvious consideration was the source of the virus in Wuhan, a major city in central China: how did it happen, and how did the disease spread so rapidly around the world? 

Rather than uncritically accepting a natural occurrence, caused by zoonotic transmission from bats sold at a market, we tentatively implicated the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Covid-19 could have escaped from the gain-of-function research in which the Wuhan laboratory specialised.  Some microbiologists asserted that the virus was engineered. As well as the likelihood of a leak caused by lax protocol or practice, we also mentioned suspicions of a deliberate release.

Of course we were not the only writers to suggest this.  In a series of investigative reports in the Mail on Sunday, Ian Birrell courageously argued that China had the means and the motive to control the Covid-19 narrative, and to exploit the virus for its own ends. 

Information supporting the lab-leak theory was in the public domain, much of it compelling. We suggested that at the very least the contention was a highly credible antithesis to the Chinese state-sanctioned story, which blamed a humble traditional ‘wet’ market (despite little evidence that bats were sold there). 

Naively, we expressed our surprise that mainstream journalists in the corporate media did not doubt the official truth of the Chinese Communist Party. On the contrary, they denigrated this reasoned hypothesis as conspiracy theory. For example, we cited Ben McIntyre in the Times: – 

‘Such claims should be treated with the same disdain sensible people attach to the conspiracy theory linking the coronavirus to the rollout of 5G. Giving credibility to such stories is the political equivalent of setting fire to a phone mast.’ 

Such lazy journalism, we argued, was ‘hasty and lacking in the critical thinking to be expected of a respected newspaper’. However, lab-leak conjecture was vilified in much of the press as fevered ‘right-wing’ fantasies. The political, medical and scientific establishments in the West seemed determined to quash any suggestions of fatal error or foul play.  On 18 February 2020, a letter signed by 27 public health scientists in The Lancet condemned ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin’, asserting: – 

‘The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins’. 

Monopolistic social media companies, citing supposedly objective ‘fact-checking’ websites (which they funded), policed the internet. Several figures with a large following were banned from YouTube and Twitter simply for suspecting that the virus emanated from the laboratory working on the very type of bat coronavirus responsible for the pandemic. 

In Year of the Bat we also noted that substantial funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology came from the US National Institutes of Health. This ‘gain-of-function’ research resulted in a series of scientific papers on the manipulation of SARS-related coronaviruses in piglets and bats. Funding was stopped in 2014 by the Obama administration due to safety concerns, although some money continued to be sent by the Pentagon under emergency provisions. 

A report by government scientists in May 2016 persuaded President Obama (eleven days before he left office) to renew funding. It is now known that the same experts who wrote this document actively suppressed claims that Covid-19 emanated from the laboratory site. Ralph Baric, Gigi Kwik Gronvall and Thomas Ingleby helped US government medical advisor Anthony Fauci to undermine the lab-leak theory. Kanta Subbarao was an author of the aforementioned Lancet missive. Yet in 2018 State Department cables had warned of biosecurity risks at the Wuhan laboratory. 

These events highlighted how political posturing overwhelmed principle. The mere act of President Donald Trump giving credence to the lab-leak theory was enough to send scientific and medical experts, along with a hostile media, scurrying in the opposite direction: Trump must not only be factually wrong but also spoutng xenophobic bluster. However, following the public acknowledgement of the Biden administration that a laboratory origin is a legitimate possibility, requiring urgent investigation, we have seen a rapid volte-face in the media. 

Added revelations from Fauci’s e-mails, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, further disclose a web of financial patronage, professional agendas and undeclared interests, particularly in relation to the role of the EcoHealth Alliance, which enjoyed close relations with the Wuhan institute and multimillion dollar grants from the NIH (which were stopped in April 2020 by the Trump administration).

Lessons must be learned from this disturbing departure from due diligence by the scientific and medical establishment and a heavily compromised corporate media on which people rely for truth. 

First and foremost, we must be more alert to vested interests and the tendency to use rhetorical tools to delegitimise inconvenient facts or plausible explanations. Never before have governments and their media appendages been so shrill in their warnings about ‘conspiracy theorists’. But there is nothing inherently wrong with conspiracy theory as a conceptualisation: conspiracies can be real phenomenon. By definition, theories may be tested and evaluated, and confirmed or disproved with available evidence.  

Far-fetched ideas without any evidence to support them are not really theories. But similarly, denouncing reputable people as conspiracy theorists suggests that debate is being stifled, and that the fundamental scientific premise of doubt has been abandoned. Many formerly trusted sources of knowledge in the West are fast forgetting their enlightenment origins. There must, accordingly, be a renewed commitment to logic, reasoning and core scientific principles in schools and universities. 

We could say ‘we told you so’ to those who derided people like us who advanced the lab-theory as a plausibility.  Revisionism is under way, as the lab-leak deniers proclaim that that this proposition is somehow new (or that they thought this from the outset). But the internet leaves an evidence trail. Undeniably, leading publications such as The Lancet compromised their scientific objectivity, and ultimately their reputations, by peddling propaganda to denounce often carefully researched commentary as ‘misinformation’. 

Our comment on a bioengineered virus in Year of the Bat drew parallels with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. It was the desperate attempt to hide the catastrophe by clamping down on experts and witnesses while knowingly underestimating the danger to citizens over a vast area that did much to undermine the credibility of the Soviet Union. 

By exhibiting more concern for prestige than its people, the Chinese state has re-enacted Chernobyl. But so have Western politicians, scientists and journalists, who uncritically chose to sustain their own positions and prejudices over a genuine commitment to truth-seeking inquiry. They, too, are facing their Chernobyl moment.

 ‘You didn’t see graphite on the ground’, was one of the most potent lines from HBO’s 2019 dramatisation of the Chernobyl disaster, as one desperate engineer tried to avoid confronting the reality before his eyes. ‘We didn’t see evidence of a bioengineered virus’, is likely to be a similarly damning indictment of the so-called scientists and media commentators in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

 

Dr M.L.R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory at King’s College London. Dr Niall McCrae is a specialist writer on mental health. Their report, Year of the Bat: Britain, China and the Coronavirus (London: Civitas: 2020), can be downloaded here: http://civitas.org.uk/content/files/2449-A-Year-of-the-Bat-ppi-72-WEB.pdf