Where Did COVID Come From?

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At the Unz Review, Ron Unz discusses Sen. Rand Paul and Covid, taking time to note his own (Unz’s) extensive investigation of the origins of Covid. He concludes:

Different individuals focus on different issues. I lack Paul’s medical expertise and unlike him, I only had slight interest in the bitter public health disputes that were his central focus, so all my verdicts on his conclusions, whether positive or negative, should be taken with a large grain of salt.

But I think the opposite situation applies with regard to the origin of the Covid virus. That topic had been my central focus from the earliest days of the outbreak, while towards the beginning of his book Paul emphasized that he had little interest in that issue and had merely followed and apparently accepted the mainstream media coverage for the first sixteen months of the epidemic prior to May 2021:

I read news reports of scientists that concluded COVID-19 came from animals just like SARS and MERS had. I didn’t give it a second thought, that is, until I came across Nicholas Wade’s amazing article on the subject, self-published on Medium.com.

However, I think Paul may be glossing over some important facts in his account. As a conservative/libertarian Republican, he surely must have noticed the enormous wave of “Covid conspiracy theories” that dominated his ideological sector of the Internet almost from the moment the Wuhan outbreak began. As I explained in my original April 2020 article:

Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name. Instead, overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump’s impeachment and the aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran. But towards the end of that month, I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge, a popular right-wing conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon, began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an article in the NYT on those “fringe conspiracy theories.”

Indeed, exactly 200 pages after describing his initial lack of interest in the Covid origins issue, Paul denounced the Washington Post for having “blasted” Sen. Cotton in February 2020 for suggesting that Covid had leaked from the Wuhan lab, arguing that his Republican colleague had been vindicated by the publication of Wade’s seminal article in mid-2021:

Even the Washington Post—not famous for introspection and self-correction—reversed course…The Post had smeared Cotton’s suggestions as “conspiracy theory”—the standard left-wing attack tactic where facts be damned and name-calling is sufficient.

Thus, Paul was almost certainly well aware of the widespread early claims among right-wingers that Covid had leaked from the Wuhan lab, but he had apparently dismissed that idea at the time, instead accepting the uniform mainstream media narrative that Covid was a natural virus. So when he later discovered that he had been hoodwinked by a media propaganda-bubble and many of the scientists whose public statements he had taken at face value had privately believed something very different, he naturally reacted by becoming a leading proponent of the lab-leak theory, which he regarded as the only alternative. But as I have repeatedly pointed out, there was actually a third possibility, almost totally ignored by both the mainstream and alternative media:

For more than 30 months I have emphasized that there are actually three perfectly plausible hypotheses for the Covid outbreak. The virus might have been natural, randomly appearing in Wuhan during late 2019; the virus might have been the artificial product of a scientific lab in Wuhan, which accidentally leaked out at that time; or the virus might have been the bioengineered product of America’s hundred-billion-dollar biowarfare program, the oldest and largest in the world, a bioweapon deployed against China and Iran by elements of the Trump Administration at the height of our hostile international confrontation with those countries.

The first two possibilities have been very widely discussed and debated across the Western mainstream and alternative media, while the third has been almost totally ignored…

However, since none of his staffers, colleagues, or media sources had probably ever considered that excluded third possibility, Paul seems to have entirely missed the important early clues that briefly appeared during the first year of the outbreak. Although these items were reported in the mainstream media, they quickly vanished and were forgotten. Therefore, they might easily have been missed by anyone not already primed to recognize their significance.

As a physician and an important elected official, Paul was naturally focused upon the horrific consequences of America’s Covid epidemic and the controversial public health measures intended to control it, so he cannot be blamed for missing some of those crucial news items that I eventually made the centerpiece of my own analysis. I was hardly surprised that none of the important facts emphasized in my original April 2020 article were mentioned anywhere in Paul’s 500 page book.

Read more here.