Yet More Confirmation of the Lab-Leak Hypothesis: First People Sickened by COVID Were Scientists At the WIV

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   To repeat myself repeating myself: a lab leak has, with the exception of a few brief windows, always been the lead hypothesis. Those brief windows were opened up mainly by a few concerted efforts to promote the zoonotic hypothesis. I took the first few efforts seriously. But this point, I'm not done exerting compute cycles on outlier hypotheses.

   The opposition to the LLH seems to have been driven largely by some sort of vague, impressionistic considerations of political correctness. For whatever reason, the left did not want LLH to be true. And, as we know, they also didn't want it be called anything that even acknowledged that it first appeared in China. Hence their unhinged attacks on Trump or anyone else who called it what it was: the Wuhan virus, or the China virus. There's a bizarre anti-Russia/pro-China sentiment on the left. It may have to do with the left's continuing love affair with communism--but that doesn't quite ring true to my ear. It may be a reaction to the right's similarly bizarre pro-Russia/anti-China attitude... Dunno which came first. They may have co-evolved.

   At any rate: it's political correctness and the left's control of media and science that has kept the LLH from being acknowledged as probably true. The left has such power that it's able to take any hypothesis and declare it "The Science(tm)", or shove it into the epistemic twilight. It didn't want LLH to be true, so it's been able to maintain the facade that it's not the lead hypothesis. Eventually, the truth usually wins out. But the left's standard tactic is to allow that to happen only gradually, after the storm, when political damage will be minimized. As with, in politics, Laptopgate. 

   (Sidebar: one reason gender ideology is so alarming is that the left has been able to take obvious falsehoods (e.g. some women are male) and turn them into unquestionable, undeniable orthodoxy. This is a huge step beyond it's normal capabilities of spinning unclear cases into orthodoxy or heterodoxy... Hence my great concern with that case.)