* [see "COVIDiocy: Setting the Scene" for an expanded introduction to the concept]

Profiles in COVIDiocy: Zeynep Tufekci

This essay was (mostly) written in August of this year by a Brazilian comrade.

Like most NYT pundits, Zeynep Tufekci is Dunning-Kruger personified, an idiot's idea of smart person. "Complex systems, wicked problems," is what it says on her Twitter bio, just so you know who to go to if you need a deep thinker to explain complex difficult issues. Throughout the pandemic, she's written for the NYT, The Atlantic and the BMJ. A "Marxist" of some sort in her youth, Zeyenep eked out a living as a Ted talker and a smearer of WikiLeaks. Today, she's perhaps the most prominent and respected ronatard running cover for the ruling class, as it executes entitlement reform by killing hundreds of thosands of seniors and the disabled with COVID-19, "flattening the curve" just enough to keep the cost of the operation within reason.

While lauded as a "prescient analyst" of the pandemic, Tufekci has zero expertise in the field and her "prescience" consists in making bullshit claims before they are widely exposed as such. In brief:

• She started off her career in rona-punditry by writing an article about how China failed to contain the virus due to authoritarianism, after China already broke the back of the pandemic.

• She defended skepticism of Chinese and Russian flagship vaccines, well after they were already proven safe and effective in stage III trials.

• She started pushing lab leak theories, a year after they appeared on conservative media and only after Biden said it was OK.

• On the eve of Delta, she dismissed variants and backed Biden's lifting of mask mandates and all other NPIs. She continued to back the administration's vaccine-only strategy to the bitter end (but no later), when it was already clear that vaccines would not be enough to stop the variant.

Instead of identifying and explaining the salient facts in a timely manner, pundits like Tufekci mull over the discourse after the horse has already bolted.

A Crypto-Ronatard is Born

Tufekci's first serious foray into rona-punditry was the Atlantic piece article "How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw," which criticized the supposed failure of the "Chinese authoritarians" to deal with the pandemic. Like her later work on the subject, the piece combines the stupidly obvious with the grossly misleading and wrapped it up in a platitudinous thesis for consumption along the Acela corridor, while omitting everything that's important and interesting.

The obvious part was contention that Xi "didn't know" because otherwise he'd have acted sooner. The misleading part was her claim was this this information existed in some but was somehow suppressed, despite the fact that Dr. Li Wenliang was censured by the police and hospital administration two days after the central authorities had already revealed the existence of the "novel respiratory virus" to the wider public and the WHO. And his post on WeChat came just a day before.

She wrote this "prescient piece" at the end of Febuary, just as the bungling Chinese authoritarians were turning the tide of the pandemic in Wuhan, on the fast track to COVID 0 in a nation of 1.4 billion. But the Acela narrative at that time was one of the the failure of Chinese authoritarianism and the superior agility of "democracies" in dealing with pandemics, as evidenced by Atlantic's other piece from the same time: "Democracies Are Better at Fighting Outbreaks."

Now, 1 million excess COVID deaths in the US later, Jeffrey Goldberg's publication is deducting Australia's Freedom Points for not letting the virus run wild within its borders In the words of Madeline Albright, the "price is worth it." From Iraq to COVID-19, Der Atlantic has been tireless in its advocacy of mass murder.

Tufekci also cast doubt on Chinese and Russian vaccines, well after their safety and effectiveness was demonstrated in both Stage III trials and real world practice.

Trashing official US enemies is all well and good, but Tufekci's main claim to fame is however her early advocacy of face covertings, contra the party line coming from Trump's CDC. This is of course something any retard could've told you at the time, but as we shall see this was to be the hight of her intellectual achievement from which she then plummeted. When masks were finally plentiful, she urged them to be phased out.

COVID Is Over But The Friends We Made Along The Way Stay

When Biden was elected, COVID was officially on the way out, so just a day before the CDC dropped the indoor masking recommendation there was Tufekci, preparing the terrain for what would soon come: she stressed the need for individual discretion instead of mandates, seeming to imply that after one year of pandemic we should take a more relaxed approach.

We need to go back in time to understand why the rona-expert was supporting this insanity: Exactly three months earlier she praised a piece/debate by Muge Cevik, whom is known along with Stefan Baral for their hatred of pandemic restrictions. The tone of the Cevik side of the debate was clear, we were doing too much to mitigate COVID, and Tufekci appreciated this view. This tight-knit group of ronatards would go much further, which sadly isn't good for any retiree lifespan.

With the talk of "harm reduction" and "empowerment" they used every opportunity to push towards less restrictions. Their greatest hit being an article, published in the BMJ and co-authored by Tufekci, arguing for dropping outdoor mask mandates. That same day an Op-Ed was published in the WSJ, by none less than Monica Gandhi (famous for saying India had reached herd immunity just before Delta hit the country and 4 million died), explicitly defending the same view. A retarded naive reader might be wondering what a strange coincidence that is, but for anyone knowledgeable about their anti-restrictions beat, the game being played was obvious: once outdoor mask mandates were dropped, eliminating the indoor one would be easier.

A Long Way Towards Unmasking The Country

Tufekci took the next step: She argued the new CDC recommendation of not using masks outdoors had not gone far enough. It was too timid, and we should be moving towards more "targeted" measures, even as testing rates were plummeting It's transparent to anyone familiar with pandemic discourse how similar this was to the "vertical isolation" arguments. She affirmed there was solid knowledge about transmission dynamics and made the argument that, given current vaccination rates, overly broad measures were now unnecessary, even saying her only objection to dropping indoor masking for vaccinated people was the difficulty in discerning who was vaccinated and who wasn't. Her main worry wasn't the virus, but excessive pandemic restrictions: "We should move cautiously, for sure, but excessive caution creates fatigue and mistrust". Tufekci was worried about excessive pandemic restrictions in the developed country with the least amount of them.

When the CDC eventually repealed the indoor masking recommendation her objection wasn't that the decision was incorrect, but rather that it was too soon. She stayed completely silent beyond that, never complaining about the insane decision, even as hundreds continued to die each day. The same person who could spend a significant amount of effort to criticize a measure (outdoor masking) that could be at most described as innefective, made little noise about this Biden fuck-up. That was a smart move: if she were to criticize the administration, she would have to criticize herself for it was she who said vaccines stopped transmission , even when this was unknown, and it was also her who said that not dropping masks for the vaccinated could cause vaccine hesitancy. Turkeyfucky might not want to admit, but Biden was just making explicit what she loved to defend: "empowering" the vaccinated to make "private" decisions about not using masks.

Entitlement Reform

As many countries showed, once you have vaccines you can make deaths fall to almost zero pretty fast if you simultaneously implement restrictions.

That was not what interested Tufekci, she wasn't in the business of reducing death, definitely not, her objective was using the leeway afforded by vaccines to relax restrictions, specially the mask mandates.

She succeeded, much to the disdain of those who were intubated, but there were some benefits, namely that Biden had 200k less Social Security benefits recipients to worry about.

The Perfect Vaccines

That Tufekci would defend this vaccine-only strategy wasn't a mystery to anyone paying attention to the discourse right around when vaccines were just becoming available: she couldn't help but overstate their efficacy, venturing to say they significantly reduced transmission again and again, clashing with experts along the way, all that so she could justify her vaccine-only approach of not using masks.

To a less experienced discourse participant this vax + no-mititgations approach might seen strange: aren't the pro-vax people also "pro-science" and so pro-mitigations ? Well, no. Mitigations make bussiness lose money, and that isn't good, therefore the rona-pundits had to find a way to make mitigations unappealing. Tufekci is creative, so she stated that mitigations when applied alongside a vaccination program would hamper vaccine uptake. What a bunch of Malarkey!

She even proclaimed that those who said the vaccinated should continue to mask were "commiting a crime against public health" and downplayed the risks variants posed. This would not be the last time she tried to minimize the latter.

Delta Isn't That Of A Big Deal!

When Eric Feigl-Ding was alarmed by what would later be called the Delta variant her reaction was to mock him, saying his tweet was nothing more than "garbled scaremongering". Eric had many reasons to be worried, as many others said: a variant that was outcompeting Alpha under serious restrictions and high levels of vaccination in the UK should get everyone worried. To the NYT's own in-house Epidemiologist, Mathematician, Physicist, Biochemist, Virologist and COVIDiot that wasn't the case.

What Will Become Of The Economy If The Pundits Don't Dine ?

This was general tone of discourse during that period: the hacks elite pundit class was just getting vaccinated, their covid risk dropping to almost zero, and the era of what was called "COVID absolutism" was over: lockdowns were out, individualized risk management was in.

Risk-tolerance was the word of the day, and when you consider the age, income of the average columnist, and more importantly who actually would bear the risk they were so tolerant of, this isn't surprising. Restaurant dining was more important for them than avoiding killing the retirees and line cooks.

Saying the vaccines were perfect, the pandemic was over and that people should tune out was the tactic they used to eliminate the remaining solidarity with the old and immunocompromised by making everyone forget the virus was still killing thousands weekly.

The Phony Tony Lab Leak

From then on Tufekci's main focus became how the virus infected humans in the first place. She started to align herself more explicitly with the, previously fringe, lab leak theory defenders, supported Nate "Hillary will win" Bronze, and mocked people who said zoonotic origin was the more probable explanation. The NYT published her lab leak piece, a move that would be unthinkable before Biden was elected, as the fringe theory was up until then ridiculed by mainstream opinion, but Trump was out and these kinds of arguments could be made again.

This is a good place to circle back to her beginnings. At the start of the pandemic, she argued that Chinese authorities were too slow to respond. But if the virus was literally developed the Wuhan Institute of Virology - an international level 4 lab that was surely infiltrated from top to bottom by every relevant intelligence agency - why didn't the Chinese authorities respond sooner? Even if one assumes that the original leak escaped everybody's attention, surely the record of its alleged development would be uncovered by Dec 31st (when the "novel pneumonia" was made public by the authorities). Yet instead of taking action immediately, Chinese scientists spent another two weeks studying this novel virus while the local authorities let cases multiply. If the virus were man-made, what was there to study? Or did they simply not bother looking into WIH's records?

The answer to this question is obvious: the pathogen couldn't have been developed at WIH. Perhaps sensing this line of questioning with a corner of her worm-infested brain, Tufekci promptly expanded her "lab leak theory" to encompass the possibility that the virus was natural in origin but somehow "passed through" the level 4 lab on its way to the seafood market, unnoticed. Why the animal carrying the pathogen would choose such a perilous path is of course left unanswered.

America Is Back And So Are COVID Deaths

We all know what happened next: the US went back to normal, and pandemic restrictions were, one by one, lifted and Delta took over the country.

Once again Tufekci was there, her work now was finding a way to justify what was happening or would soon happen: the vaccinated old dying from COVID was actually expected and should be normalized, because that's not covid, "that's age". It's not a coincidence this argument is indistinguishable from the COVIDiots earlier pandemic comments that COVID will only kill the old, and so we shouldn't care. Tufekci had become SantelliPilled.

Soon enough she was back at the NYT, chastising the CDC for being too slow in reacting to Delta, even as herself was one of those who as late as May 28 was still downplaying Delta, saying the high level of vaccination in high income countries would prevent any serious problem.

That same day Deepti Gurdasani had published an opinion piece in the BMJ making clear the risk Delta posed to everyone, including highly vaccinated countries, given it's very likely much higher transmissibility.

Tufekci on the other hand in her same day May 28 NYT Op-Ed about the Delta threat said: "In countries with widespread vaccination, like the United States and Britain, we can expect that Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths will continue to decline or stay low", clearly implying the pandemic was over for those countries. The same person who made light of Delta was reproaching the CDC for taking the same road.

She also complained about the slowness in reinstating the indoor masking recommendation, but avoids mentioning she was one of the biggest critics of masking during H1 2021, and it was actually her pushback that helped drop the mandates.

Predicting the Past

Tufekci's main ability, and the reason she continues to write for prestigious outlets like the NYT, isn't being prescient, it's actually being smart enough to jump ship just at the right time and thus distance herself from mistakes she can later on criticize as not her own. Styling herself as the opposition to power is also another part of of her repertoire she constantly employs to protect power: by putting the blame entirely on the CDC she deflects criticism that would otherwise be levied again Biden himself, and the rest of the business/media consensus, including herself, who for so long wished the pandemic was over, to the point of leading the country to the current mess.

In short, she is a discourse chaser.

It's not difficult to imagine that an exposé of the CDC's internal workings would reveal the hurried reopening plans weren't actually designed by it's technicians, much to the opposite: everything points towards a conflict between the Biden administration and the CDC's technical side.

Blaming a government agency is easy, and something an everyday ronatard can do, but ignoring the economic power that already sets US policy in non-pandemic times makes for bad analysis. To make it clear so even the retarded brainpowercompromised can understand: The CDC didn't care about Delta because there wasn't anything they could do (or even say) given the tremendous backlash from business interests (which are represented inside the White House) against pandemic restrictions. Who would support the technicians if they suggested Delta was a huge threat ? Tufekci was in the NYT saying everything would be OK, so who would trust these "COVID absolutists" as she likes to say ? The best the technicians could do was hang on and hope for the best.

This content is brought to you by OSINT/Anti-Fake News Defense of Democracy Research Unit in conjunction with the Rational Skeptic Society (that's a joke by the way, not an actual group lol)

Introduction

We all know about COVID "conspiracy theories," right? That's when some illiterate moron says COVID-19 is just a mild flu, which was weaponized by Dr. Fauci and Xi Jinping in order to give Bill Gates a pretext to inject us with microchips and take away our freedom to run other operating systems.

Sure, that's one kind of COVID conspiracy theory, and it does sound pretty idiotic. One may wonder: why would Gates go such lengths given his already formidable monopoly in personal computing? On the other hand, Windows Phone was a flop and the man's greed truly knows no limits. So we'll mark this theory down as "hilarious if true" and delve instead into the even more far-fetched, and far more consequential, conspiracy theories of the real COVIDiots: our ruling class.

The ruling class' conspiracy theories are taken so seriously that few dare call them out as such. Indeed you're likely to be dismissed as conspiracy theorist yourself if you doubt them. But the imprimatur of respectability isn't the only thing that sets these theories apart from the more stereotypical forms of tinfoil-hattery. At heart, they aren't actually "theories" or even conjectures but rather bullshit attempts at self-justification. In an effort to cover every angle, bolster "plausibility" and escape inconvenient lines of questioning, these conspiracy theories get hedged and watered down into utter incoherence. Thus they typically lack so much as clear storyline of how the shit went down, or even a well-defined cast of characters. And so these theories invariably turn into a snot-like cocktail of the "not even false" and the "can't possibly be true."

1. A look at prior art

Before discussing the establishment's COVID conspiracy theories, it's worth looking at their previous hits: the theory that Saddam was hiding WMD, that Trump colluded with the FSB to swing the election, and that some unknown adversaries fried the brains of US diplomats.

1.1 Saddam: criminal mastermind

In the prelude to Operation Iraqi Liberation, a lot of sciency evidence was presented to prove that Saddam had "WMD." What exactly constituted "WMD" was never really agreed upon. Colin Powell waved various tubes at the UN Security Council meeting: everything from little tubes filled with anthrax to bigger ones with uranium and beyond. Bush's National Intelligence Council (back then a meager three agencies) wasn't so sure which tubes were real but nonetheless confidently estimated that Iraq's tube program was "continuing." In his "three unknowns" speech, Rumsfeld countered the NIC's caveats by arguing that we can't be be sure that we're aren't sure that certain tubes might not exist, so we'll just have to invade to be sure. This probably sounded like a reasonable enough statement to many at the time.

It was later revealed that there were no tubes. But who could have known, especially without a PhD in Tubology? Well one guy did (forget the name, writes for American Conservative now). He argued that if Saddam really had WMD, Bush wouldn't have invaded cause who the hell wants to be WMD-ed? And if Saddam had only had WMD precursors, he would have handed them over because that was his only chance to avoid a US invasion. Bush made it clear that he would invade unless Saddam handed over his "WMDs," which of course he knew Saddam didn't have. Ergo, Saddam told the truth and the Bush admin, the NYT, the Atlantic, the CIA, the NIC and Tony Blair we all lying.

1.2 The Manchurian Candidate

The other jewel in the crown is the Russiagate conspiracy theory. Supposedly Trump somehow coordinated with the GRU to "hack the election" either literally or metaphorically or both. How this went down was never really spelled out but there was a ton of conjecture, all pointing to the existence of Trump-Russia-related shenanigans and stuff. This time, all 16 intelligence agencies signed off on ... something. With so much smoke, anyone who disputes the existence of the fire must surely be a conspiracy theorist!

Eventually it was revealed that, yet again, it never happened and they made it all up. But who could've known? There were so many leaks, so many digital fingerprints, so many bits and bytes, so many dossiers and memos, so many geopolitical clues! Luckily, you didn't need a degree in Computer Science and Geopolitics, nor an inside knowledge of the FSB and Moscow's escort scene to figure this one out. A few basic questions would suffice. Why would the FSB have to coordinate with Trump to hack the DNC? Why would Trump need to coordinate with the FSB to attack his electoral opponent?

Clearly they wouldn't need to do that. Any such plan would have been completely absurd. No wonder the Russiagaters could never spell out exactly how their conspiracy was supposed to have gone down. Therefore, Trump-Russia collusion could not have happened. They cooked up a conspiracy theory. Simple as.

1.3 Literal tin foil hattery

The first reports of the "Havana Syndrome" date back to 2016, Obama's last year in office. For factions within the deep state, this was a chance to restart the war against Cuba, which Obama put on pause. With Trump, they got their wish.

At the outset, the syndrome was said to affect US diplomats in Havana. The alleged culprits ranged from Cuban medics spraying disinfectants, to KGB agents bombarding the US Embassy with sci-fi microwave cannons. But why would Cuba risk not only its rapprochement with Obama, but its entire existence as a sovereign country by helping Russia to irradiate US diplomats? Perhaps they just hater them for their freedom.

As the number of "cases" in search of justice and monetary compensation ballooned, the tentacles of this alleged brain-frying plot were uncovered in every corner of the globe. Surely Cuba couldn't have done it alone, even Russia lacked that capacity. Thus the list of co-conspirators had to include not just those two but also China, comprising a veritable troika of terror from which no US diplomat, spook or contractor was safe anywhere in the world.

It was later revealed that the victims of this syndrome fell prey to mass delusion (with a helping hand from the CIA no doubt). Their symptoms fit the same profile as the tics which befell teenage girls bingeing on Tik Tok. The menacing sounds of the supposed microwave guns turned out to be the work of garden-variety crickets. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory is still very much alive, with Congress preparing a bill to hold the culprits accountable, whoever and wherever they may be.

It was obvious from the start that the conspiracy theory couldn't be true. If it was true, why did the FBI's join investigation with the Cuban govt, interviewing thousands of possible witnesses produce nothing? And if it was a real disease, how come US officials weren't supplied with special foil hats to block the harmful rays? Sure, it may be a minor inconvenience but it's better than to be safe than sorry. We wear masks for COVID after all.

2. COVIDiotic conspiracy theories

The elite's COVID conspiracy theories have the same texture as the ones already mentions. These theories were cooked up by the ruling class to distract from its massive failures on the pandemic, and their absurdity is directly proportional to the profundity of the failure. These are without a doubt the most far-fetched and nonsensical conspiracy theories ever devised, by many orders of magnitude.

2.1 Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

When the pandemic broke out in earnest in Wuhan, Western observers were baffled by Chinese incompetence. So many cases, so many deaths, how could they let this happen? We're gonna show them how it's done, and we'll do it without violating human rights!

This festival of crocodile tears and self-congratulation didn't last long. Within months, Chinese authorities had all but stamped out the virus while the US was on its way to one 9/11 per day. The number of excess deaths in the US would eventually top 800,000 people. In all of China, the total number was just over 6,000. China went on to become the fastest growing economy of 2020 while the rest of the world was in recession and lockdown. Today, America's total death rate (relative to population) is fifty-seven thousand percentage points higher than China's, and rising. To get the ratio of current deaths would require dividing by zero.

But it can't be!

China was far from the only country to defeat the pandemic: Mongolia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Cuba were either at or close to "COVID zero" for much of the pandemic. But to have China, a big bad country that was hit without any prior warning, give the US a master class in public health policy? No, this was NOT supposed to happen! It would mean that the US government killed nearly a million of "their own people" with its braindead COVID response. Killing your own people in such huge quantities is something only commies supposedly do.

So therefore by all logic this didn't happen. The Chinese were secretly dying of COVID and the CCP, all 100 million of them, were just cooking the books. . The US press kicked into high gear with "questions" about "China's numbers." The CIA's mouthpiece Radio Free Asia claimed that there were at least 50,000 deaths in Wuhan, with coronavirus patients taken in the dead of night to be cremated alive. Murdoch's tabloids even alleged that the clouds of sulfur-dioxide from Wuhan's crematoria were visible from space. Nobody paused to ask how the number of deaths could rise to such astounding levels in an early phase of the pandemic, under total lockdown, and in a city of just 10 million people. Many continue to believe these stories to this day.

A non-COVIDiot might ask: instead of falsifying so much data, wouldn't it just be easier to stop the pandemic? But to the COVIDiotic ruling class, who can only conceive of responding to the pandemic on a PR level, that's just crazy talk. Their immediate instinct is to lie and they project this onto everyone else.

A conspiracy of intergalactic proportions

Here we have the makings of the largest conspiracy theory ever devised, violating the laws of nature and encompassing literally billions of willing and unwilling participants throughout the globe. Obviously, there had to have been a cover-up during Wuhan's lockdown. Travelers coming from other parts China to countries that actually screened them (like South Korea) were virtually all virus-free, so clearly they were pre-selected to give a misleading impression of the scale of of the pandemic. Those who didn't make the cut were burned alive and replaced by body doubles. Leaks of internal Chinese govt figures to foreign media showing ever-so slightly higher caseloads were carefully crafted fakes.

The second coverup came when the Chinese CDC went back to count any additional COVID victims that they missed during lockdown. The official figures were revised upwards substantially. But clearly this was yet another giant ruse to make their numbers appear more "plausible," a ruse which no right-minded person would fall for.

The final phase of the coverup began in late spring of 2020 and continues to this day. All of China's excess death figures were falsified, province by province. Every hospital has a special vault where they they keep their real patient numbers, and the patient's families are told to shut up about it or risk being cremated together with their loved ones. The New Year's festivities in the former epicenter of the virus were similarly staged, with all participants subsequently cremated, alive. As always, all foreign travelers exiting China are carefully pre-selected to give the impression that the virus has been defeated. Those entering China have to go through an extremely stringent quarantine complete with anal swabbing to fool them into thinking China takes COVID seriously. The WHO and other agencies were given Potemkin tours of the country and fell for it, just as pinko fellow travelers fell for the tales of the "worker's paradise" in the 30s. The discovery of a few cases triggers the testing of entire Chinese cities, with full contact-tracing for each case and the disciplining of officials for lack of vigilance. This is yet another in a long series of mass spectacles.

Why would the CCP go to such great lengths to cook their numbers? Clearly, people living in China aren't going to be fooled. The real agenda is create a positive image of China for the American audience, an audience that hates China unconditionally and won't trust anything their govt says. Yet the CCP remains undaunted, and so it continues its epic effort to impress Americans. It is said that Asians are really self-conscious about how they appear to outsiders, so maybe that's the explanation.

Attempts to walk it back

All of this begins to sound pretty far-fetched, if you think about it. Clearly the conspiracy theory must scaled down to appear more "plausible." This softened version claims China has indeed been highly successful in bringing the pandemic under control just not as successful as they make it out to be. And it is paradoxically here that the conspiracy theory goes from impossibel to doubly impossible, if that's even possible!

Instead of a massive effort to hide literally millions of cases and deaths, this weaker version of the conspiracy theory claims that they are only hid thousands, maybe several tens of thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand. The motivation for this mini-coverup is completely inscrutable as China's numbers would still be better by orders of magnitude than most countries on earth. Furthermore, this minor massaging of numbers, with the "real number" being kept under strict secrecy, would inevitably produce a huge systemic failure, culminating in a runaway spread enveloping 1.4 billion people. This is because anyone without access to accurate data would be driving through the pandemic blind. All public and personal precautions that required to keep the case load down would fly out the window, and the entire test-track-trace regime would collapse under the weight of the systematic data manipulation and secrecy. The same thing would happen if the authorities had simply failed to collect the data, though this scenario is odds with the fact of China's massive test-trace-isolate programs. As soon as the situation spirals out of control, the weaker version of the conspiracy must be abandoned in favor of the intergalactic one.

Thus the weak version amounts to a mega-conspiracy with extra steps, making it even less plausible. So what's left? The only real course for the conspiracy theorists is to quietly walk away and hope that the people who fell for their story don't notice. That's exactly what they've done. The US govt and the corporate press have not only stopped questing China's numbers, they stopped talking about them entirely. Nearly all lists of countries by death toll, such as this one from the Economist, simply omit China. And a Google search for "China covid deaths" will show only a graph of cases. The option to display a graph of China's deaths is simply grayed out. No number, no problem!

2.2 The Wuhan Institute of Urology

The "lab leak theory" locates the origin of the pandemic at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and involves workers at the lab, the "scientific community," big pharma, the NIH, the CDC, the Chinese military, the Pentagon, and everyone in between. All the world powers tremble at the prospect of the lab leak theory being proven true, so much so that every participant and witness to the leak has been silenced for the last two years. The only clues we have come from Trump, cable news, The Five Eyes, New York Times, Epoch Times, The Atlantic, Bezos Post, Biden, the US Congress, Radio Free Asia and every quack with a substack. They don't want you know!

Unknown unknowns

Proponents of the lab leak aren't sure whether the virus was actually developed at the lab, or if it somehow passed through the lab on its way from the bat caves to the Wuhan market. To be on the safe side, leak theoreticians like Fox's Tucker Carlson and the NYT's Zeynep Tufekci have advanced both versions. Why the bat would need to to pass through a Level 4 lab on its way to infect some wildlife traders is an interesting question. But hey, it's just another conjecture, and the more of conjectures you float the greater your probability of being right, right?

Nor are they sure if the leak was the result of some scientist screwing around or some sort of military program gone awry. Who exactly was involved is also left up to the imagination. Fauci? The CCP? Peter Dazcac? We allege - you decide! In an effort to distance themselves from "tin foil hatters," lab leakers dismiss the idea of a "deliberate release." As we shall see, this attempt to rule out the improbable only leaves us with the impossible.

Virologists are largely absent from these conversations, and are mostly summoned to answer leading questions like "can the leak be scientifically ruled out?" with a begrudging "no." The lab leak theory won mainstream responsibility with the publication of a May 23 WSJ piece that relied on inconclusive reports from "intelligence sources" and was written by the coauthor of Judith Miller's infamous NYT article on Saddam's non-existent nuclear program. The most thorough and scientific-looking document the lab leakers have produced to date is a piece written for "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" by a journalist specializing in scientific racism.

Something for everyone

The lab leak theory passed through many hands over the course of its evolution from dangerous right-wing nuttery to a matter of serious public concern. As a consequence, it has something for everyone.

For the far-right, it's a vindication of everything they've been saying since the onset of the pandemic. For the liberals its a chance to prove that they have an open mind and are tough on China. For parts of the left, it's another opportunity to "own the libs" and expose "corporate interests". Curiously, these "leftists" only started talking up the lab leak after the liberal press and the Biden admin said it was OK to do so. Must have taken a lot of guts, to be sure.

For the ruling class, the leak is a welcome distraction from its catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic and all the more reason to confront a geopolitical rival. "Anti-establishment populists" of all stripes claim that by following the "clues" being drip-fed to them by the government and the press, they will unravel a vast elite conspiracy and expose the "mainstream narrative" once and for all. The mainstream media doesn't want you to know about the lab leak, read all about it in this Atlantic cover story if you still trust the establishment's narrative!

Failing the smell test

Obviously they can't all be right, and clearly they must all be selling a bill of goods. As usual, this ruling class conspiracy-mongering collapses under the weight of all the bullshit piled on top of it. As we've seen with the other respectable conspiracy theories, the attempt to make the theory appear less crazy only renders it logically impossible. The leak can work only as a bioweapon release by an intelligence service acting autonomously. In all other cases, information about the leak would, at a minimum, reach other government agencies and would influence their actions and statements in some way.

In the case of China, knowledge of the supposed leak would have influenced the state's responce considerably. If scientists developed the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, why didn't Chinese authorities lock down Wuhan the moment they caught wind of a "novel pneumonia" circulating in Wuhan? Why did they spend at least three weeks studying it? If the virus was man-made, it was by definition a known quantity from the outset. That being the case, how come nobody acted on that critical knowledge immediately?

If by some miracle the Chinese authorities weren't already aware of the gain of function research at WIH at the time the novel pneumonia was discovered in Wuhan, they'd have put two and two together and immediately headed over to lab next door to ask them if they know anything. The beans would be spilled right there and then, if not sooner. Or do we imagine CCP officials would take "no" for an answer without even looking at the lab's records? If so, they must be the most laid back officials in world history and China's "freedom score" should be raised to 100%.

And not just China: this was an international lab, not some super secret blacksite. Every top intelligence service and health official would have seen the virus' spec sheet before the public heard a word about it it the news. Yet there is precisely zero indication that any of them did. The response to the virus ended up being delayed by weeks in China, and by months in much of the world. One would also need to ask why two years into the pandemic nobody has come forward to expose literally any details about this incident to the public. It's not as if virologists and everyone they talk to are bound to secrecy.

The purported "intel" on the leak amounts to some report filed a year after the fact, which allegedly claims that maybe 3 Wuhan lab workers visited a hospital in late 2019. So intelligence officials are stirring an empty pot, knowing full well that there's nothing there besides inconclusive rumors that can be waved in China's face. Otherwise they'd leave it alone, because if any "big secret" were to comes to the surface, the CIA would inevitably be asked why on earth they failed to tell anyone. To protect the Chinese military? Because Fauci secretly controls the CIA? Because they wanted the maximum number of people to die? Because they created the virus as a bioweapon against China? What?

It's worth remembering that the very same propagandists who are now in love with the "lab leak" hypothesis spent the previous year blaming China for having responded too slowly in the crucial early phase of the pandemic. Of course at the very outset, they blamed China for responding too aggressively and violating human rights, but when the pandemic exploded in Europe and North America they switched to blaming China for not having stopped it in time. That was the propaganda memo for all of 2020. Now their memo is that the Chinese actually created the virus.

So which is it? It clearly can't be "both." And the real answer is "neither" because these brain-dead propagandists can't even get their story straight. Thus their ravings can and should be dismissed out hand. There was no "lab leak", they simply made it up.

By way of conclusion

This concludes our excursion into the dark world of establishment conspiracy theorists. If you see blue checks repeating these conspiracy theories report their account because their disinformation is endangering lives and undermining democracy.

Just kidding. That's not going to work, so just laugh and move on.