Trust the science, eh?

Covid-19 is a scientific scandal from which it will take decades to recover. Dostoevsky and I explain.

Grad school, circa 1991

Lying liars and the COVID lies they foisted on us. That’s where I’m at right now with regard to the large, steaming pile of BS that has heretofore been the approved scientific narrative concerning the origins of COVID-19. I’ve previously written (here, here, and here) about the black eye that I thought that science was earning over its general decline, as evidenced by its particularly poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as I would have liked to have been wrong about this, it now appears as if there’s no chance that I am.

I’m a retired physicist. I have respected science since I was old enough to know what it was. I spent my life promoting science and standing up for its utility in solving many of the world’s problems, its fairness, and its dispassionate meritocracy. It’s a hard thing to see your life’s work sinking into the morass of a declining intellectual culture like a lead balloon on Jupiter. But here we are. I’m sad, but I’m much more angry. You don’t want to be the next person within arm’s reach to claim, for instance, that only a right-wing nut case believes the lab-leak hypothesis.

The reasons for the spectacular failure of science in dealing with the origins of COVID-19 aren’t overly difficult to discern. A critical mass of those involved in examining the origins of COVID-19 (and crafting our response to it) were either more concerned with ideology than science (woke), had extreme conflicts of interest, were incompetent, or were too cowardly to challenge the developing orthodoxy. In some cases, all of the above.

I happen to have no use for any of these.

Yesterday, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag dropped a series of bombs (one and two) on Public Substack concerning the origins of COVID-19. The “official” narrative concerning the origins of COVID-19 has been that it was the result of zoonotic spillover in a wet market in Wuhan, China—one that just happened to be a few kilometers from not one but two laboratories researching coronaviruses.

From the get-go, the problem with the zoonotic spillover hypothesis has been that coronaviruses, which originate in bats, are not transmitted directly to humans; an intermediary species is required. In this particular case, the intermediary was thought to be a pangolin. This is an entirely plausible idea with well-documented antecedents that merits consideration. The problem is that in the case of the coronavirus behind COVID-19, no intermediary species have been identified. In the absence of an intermediary, the zoonotic spillover hypothesis is no better than informed speculation.

Which leads us to the leading alternative hypothesis concerning the origins of the COVID pandemic: an accidental release from one of the nearby labs doing research on coronaviruses. In the absence of any evidence for the zoonotic spillover hypothesis, a lab accident is at least as good a hypothesis as zoonotic spillover. Probably better.