Liberals and “the experts” are dead-set on convincing everyone that the novel coronavirus came from a dirty “wet market” where Chinese people were eating scaly rodents. They are so intent on this gross story, in fact, that it makes you wonder if it has any correlation at all with the supposed rise in anti-Asian violence.
For more than a year, overlords at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and in the news media have ferociously attempted to stifle any suggestion that the virus originated in a science lab that was doing gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses in Wuhan, China. Was the virus manufactured by the Chinese, or could it possibly be natural and in the lab for study? Did it spread outside the lab after infecting personnel? Those are questions that other scientists and researchers have only guessed about.
But each and every time, it is greeted by the Washington press at large (and the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci) as an existential threat to be crushed with immediacy.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has made a compelling case that the virus leaked from a lab. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science writer for the New York Times, has also made the case.
It’s at least as good a theory as the wet market one. But the visceral aversion that liberals and “the experts” have to it is strange, made no less weird by the alternative narrative they’ve cuffed themselves to — that the virus jumped from a bat to another exotic animal and then to a human at one of those filthy markets where exotic beasts, vermin and other dead wildlife are traded on ice in the open air and with complete disregard for hygiene.
That’s the story these people want cemented into our collective consciousness. These same people called former President Donald Trump a racist for saying “China virus,” but they are perfectly at ease telling a tale of unsanitary congregations of Chinese people passing around organs and skins from filthy creatures.
Critics of the wet market theory suspect a possible cover-up, believing that some health officials, including Fauci, could be implicated if it’s true that the virus came from a lab.
Again, I have no opinion on that. But the wet market theory and the devotion to it by this specific group is looking very, very odd.
