In Trouble: Liberal America’s “Believe in Science”

Shi Jengli, China’s Wuhan Lab Bat Lady (2017)

A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. [emphasis added]

— Dr. Anthony Fauci

If you “believe in science,” you don’t bow to their authority. You don’t transform them into living legends and teach your children to follow the example of their lives. You don’t light votive candles to them and castigate anyone who dares doubt their infinite wisdom. Instead, you demand the best proof they can offer. You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.

— Leighton Akira Woodhouse, “Rough Cut”

As of now, it appears that 1) the Covid pandemic that has killed nearly 4 million worldwide originated in a Wuhan China virology laboratory, 2) was the result of “gain of function” research designed to create a virus transmissible to humans 3) undertaken in pursuit of a vaccine that could counteract any such future disease, 4) research financed in part by the U.S., including Dr. Tony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 5) generating the virus that accidentally leaked from the lab to Wuhan’s population, then the world. To suppress this lab leak theory, U.S. scientists advanced an alternative story -- the virus jumped naturally from bats to humans.

The Wuhan lab theory has gained credibility since we learned that three lab workers came down with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, prior to January 2020 reports of cases in Wuhan’s general population. The theory has led Thomas Frank, liberal author of the political book What's the Matter with Kansas?, to write in the left-wing Guardian, “What if this crazy story turns out to be true? The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions” in science.

Frank adds:

In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

The result might be, says Frank, “that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story,” with us finding “the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.”

Frank is also alert to the “astonishing conflicts of interest” displayed by scientists such as Fauci who had money invested in the Wuhan labs while functioning as the leading expert on where the virus began. Frank notes that conflicts of interest “always” bring down “the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.”

Frank quotes fellow liberal author Nicholson Baker, who wrote that the Covid disaster:

may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic. Except there was.

These words come from the mouths of liberals!