Monday, March 20, 2023

The "Strongest Evidence Yet" for the Zoonotic Hypothesis?

I can't get behind the paywall right now, but here it is.
   I have to admit, I don't take these people seriously anymore. Their hysterical three-year campaign to stifle the--obviously more prima facie likely--lab-leak hypothesis has steadily eroded my ability to be objective about this.
   I don't care where it came from. But:
(a) I want to know the truth
but, perhaps even more importantly:
(b) we have to push back against Lysenkoism.
   The answer to this particular question is interesting and consequential. But it pales in comparison to the problem of the general politicization of science--not to mention all our other institutions--by the PC left. The Lysenkoization of science has profound implications not merely for the answer to this question, but for the answering of all scientific questions. Political correctness is the subordination of the epistemic to the political. And that means replacing conclusions supported by the evidence with conclusions preferred by leftist ideologues.
   From the beginning, the blue team has tried to make the zoonotic hypothesis, basically, true (or "true") by fiat--or, rather, on the political grounds that--somehow--LLH was racist.* Hence it was declared (as one internet interlocutor said to me) "tin-foil hat territory." Supporting the zoonotic hypothesis became a matter of political principle. So what we ended up with is what we so often end up with today: all the relevant elites and institutions lined up, striving mightily to make a case for the left-preferred answer...and anyone who questioned the madness declared crazy, racist, anti-science... Because actually considering the evidence in a politically neutral way is...totally unscientific...
   And the pattern is familiar, of course, from the debates about transgender mythology, climate change, and "systemic" racism in all its alleged varieties.
   So anyway, the zoonotic hypothesis could, of course, turn out to be true anyway. And I haven't seen any reliable reporting on the new evidence yet.
   But I have to say, I still think the LLH gets presumption.




* I refuse to play the stupid yera racist game. So I tend to pass on the many chances we have to outmaneuver the PCs at their own game. But I do think it's important to point out how impressionistic, improvisational, ad hoc that game is. When, at first, it looked like the Wuhan virus really might have come from the wet market, the left was already spinning up its racism! drives...because it's racist to think that wet markets are gross. If this had all gone slightly differently, the left would be insisting that the zoonotic hypothesis was racist. And certainly if the competing hypothesis were It started in China and It started in Belgium--or Russia!--the China one would be, like, totally racist...

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