So, are the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Covid-19 linked, just like all the damn fools said?

What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass. 

Lord Melbourne

British scientist Peter Daszak's career has been dedicated to showing that environmental changes caused by humans have caused various diseases. It is a highly fashionable area for research, which attracts a lot of taxpayers' money in funding, but that does not mean he is necessarily right.

A campaign he organised in a very circuitous way (I do not want to be sued) succeeded in cancelling the idea that Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan laboratory. 

A laboratory with which he had an important connection.

Documents released this week revealed a 2018 proposal by Dr Duszak to help the Wuhan Institute of Virology engineer bat coronaviruses to be more deadly, by inserting genetic features that are similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2.

From The Mail on Sunday today:

Daszak's 2018 proposal calls for testing different strains of the engineered viruses on 'humanized mice' to see which would be deadliest to humans. The Wuhan lab is known to use just such mice, with humanized lungs, to carry out research.

Once the deadliest viral strains had been identified, Daszak proposed attempting to inoculate bats against them in Yunnan Province, which is around 1,240 miles south west of Wuhan.

Daszak believed that his work would prevent a global coronavirus pandemic, such as the one that is underway, by decreasing the likelihood of natural spillover of dangerous SARS-like coronaviruses from bats to humans.

'Our goal is to defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high-zoonotic risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia,' his proposal states.

Once he persuaded a large number of scientists to sign a letter condemning the theory as an unfounded conspiracy theory it became mixed up with American culture wars and politics and with the moral imperative of the crusade against climate change.

The Pope, instead of using the pandemic as an opportunity to remind us of the four last things, blamed the virus on man-made harm to the environment, despite there being absolutely no evidence that this was true. Politics interests him more than religion, strange to say.

Then the two most highly distinguished virologists, Palese and Roizman, who signed the first letter condemning the leak from a lab theory both declined to sign a second letter on the subject.

Increasingly the respectable media are now eating their words and taking the idea of a leak from the lab seriously.

As Donald Trump has gone, the media no longer cares very much.

Starting in April 2020 Donald Trump and his administration started to talk about Covid-19 having been created in a Chinese laboratory. The American media accused him of racism that would encourage violence towards Chinese-Americans.

From the beginning of the pandemic warnings about Covid-19 were met by accusations of racism. Do you remember the Mayor of Florence telling citizens to hug a Chinese? 

Now that Trump is out of office and evidence piles up the media rethink. This trajectory has been the same with lots of news stories. Hunter Biden's emails are another example and there are too many more to remember. 

The lesson to draw is that none of the media is trustworthy, though the Mail, Telegraph and Spectator are rather more so than most.

Do people still trust hard scientists to be disinterested seekers of truth rather than political activists like the soft scientists and the respectable media?

Possibly, but they should not. 

"The personal is political" was a frequently-heard feminist axiom in the 1970s. Feminism was a form of hard left thought then and it is now, but now everything is political. That's even the title of a book just out, which I shan't bother to read, by left-wing Nobel prize-winning economist and prize silly ass Paul Krugman, the man who said the internet would have no more economic consequences than the fax machine.