On the “Lab-Leak” Theory
Tags: Politics, Asian American, Corona, Lab Leak, Coronavirus

When Donald Trump first proposed that the coronavirus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institution of Virology, the entire media lined up against him, citing the WHO and many other unaffiliated scientists dismissing it as the racist horseshit it is. If you believe it, well, the Liberals will sneer, we got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn, and it is Q-Anon approved you fucking idiot rubes. It is there with Chemtrails, Anti-vaccination, FEMA camps, and Pizzagate as the conspiracy theories that only the most diehard right wingers would believe since they are stupid rednecks who can’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground. It was out of the pale for normal, reasonable people. Now that Biden says that is may have come from a Lab, with the exact same data, and the exact same lack of any evidence whatsoever, we are to take it seriously- and look, it even got Fauci and other doctors on board despite them saying it was baloney only a few months ago. What changed?

The thing that most people may find baffling about American politics is how there is very little substantive difference between our two parties, and yet, our media likes to make a drama of it, and the people below can change their views on literally everything at the drop of the hat. For example, during the Bush years, the Democrats spent their time moaning about the severe restriction on American civil liberties thanks to the PATRIOT ACT, the meatgrinder that is our war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamophobia, mass deportation and severe repression of Latinx people, etc., and when it came time for Obama to take up the mantle, with a Democratic house and senate, almost all of those things basically continued. He even added Libya and Syria to our list of “humanitarian intervention”! All the people that only a few years before were talking about the inhumanity of it were now its greatest cheerleader. I remember my high school English teacher, who was critical of Iraq, suddenly jump up and down at Libya because “this was Iraq done right”. So while the media have been critical of Trump’s various policies, from his camps across the border, encouraging racist attacks, xenophobia, misogyny, etc., we are going to see the media keep silent or “nuance” as Biden continues Trump’s policies more or less; we are already seeing that with the relative silence of the continued existence of our concentration camps and the continuation of our policy of deporting immigrants back to extreme violent Central American countries when reporting on this abomination was constant under Donald Trump.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Biden, after closing down the Trump administration’s case for proving that China manufactured the virus for evil ends or something, decided to give it credence by re-opening the investigation into whether it was leaked from a Lab. Certainly, it is more nuanced than Trump’s assertion that “China concocted a virus and then used it just to prove that it is ten folds more effective at managing it by the simple method of putting up a cordon sanitaire whilst the rest of the world just sat on its thumbs and write op-eds about how China is going to collapse any day now from this”. What the investigation was to do was to investigate the possible origin(s) of the virus, including the non-zero possibility that it may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sure, there is also a non-zero chance that it was sent in by teenage greys to pull a very deadly prank on this planet, or else poofed into existence by Jehovah in lieu of a second flood.

The evidence remains exactly the same as it was then, there is still no credible evidence beside Beijing’s caginess to prove it one way or the other. But, now we are to take it credibly since it isn’t Trump tweeting it at four in the morning from his porcelain throne in the White House, but because Biden said it in a more dignified way, and there are scientists saying that we should take it seriously, even if there is absolutely no evidence for it. Suddenly, every respectable liberal columnist decide we should give air time to this theory, despite the fact that there is no fucking evidence for it, despite the fact that it follows every other previous pandemics as it spread from nature to human, despite the fact that the by far most likely explanation is natural origins.

And so, why shouldn’t China be cagey with us, when our media seem ready to jump upon this conspiracy with a vigor disproportionate to the actual evidence! If China were to allow the US to investigate its “Lab leak hypothesis” (especially with the political context that we now operate), should China be allowed to investigate its own stupid, “non-zero possibility” that the US concocted the virus in Fort Whachamacallit.

But I don’t give a damn about the US and China’s inter-Imperialist rivalries, the dickwaving and saber rattling squabble between their bourgeois over economic and political clout means nothing to everyone else, what matters is that Biden and people surrounding him are not idiots, they know that this will trickle down from “We are investigating the origins of the Coronavirus, including the unlikely possibility it came from the Wuhan lab based solely because some scientists there were under the weather in November, during flu season” to “Lab leak theory credible, must be taken seriously” by the media, and then “the chinks are fucking responsible” to the masses. They know that this will be putting the millions of Asian people living in the US in danger of yet more reprisal in a time when hate crimes against Asians are on the rise. Don’t think they don’t know, they simply don’t fucking care. When that white kid shooting up Asian spa, they tried to pass it off as him being violent because he’s just having a bad day and apparently haven’t learned how to jerk off yet, and not because of all the violent, racist remarks he posted on the internet prior to his shooting spree. Washington really wants to ratchet up its feud with Beijing, and if that means Asian Americans getting the shaft, so what?