After publishing articles that wrongly disparaged anyone who suggests that Covid-19 might be a man-made virus from China, the liberal British medical journal Lancet makes a U-turn by publishing a new article harshly criticizing its prior ones. Closing off the inquiry into a man-made origin was wrong.
“Some unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence suggest that they may have resulted from genetic engineering,” the new article by 16 scientists says. No pathway from bats to humans nor any plausible geographic connection between wildlife and infected humans has been identified, they note.
“More than 80,000 samples collected from Chinese wildlife sites and animal farms all proved negative,” the newly published article explains.
This means another victory lap for Donald Trump. The Never-Trumpers who insisted that Trump was being anti-science were, in fact, the non-scientific ones who misled the public for more than a year.
Dr. Anthony Fauci falsely insisted in May of last year that the evidence “is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” There is no credible evidence supporting Fauci’s statement, as the esteemed scientists demonstrate in their recent article in Lancet.
Fauci should be compelled to explain the basis for his statements against a man-made origin for Covid-19, which remains an enormously important medical, historical, and political issue. Fauci repeated assertions that “everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [Covid-19] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” which he should correct now.
CNN shouted then that “Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus.” It boasted that the “world-renowned infectious disease expert” Fauci had debunked Trump.
“The back-and-forth over where the virus originated—and how—is simply the latest example of how Trump seeks to shape reality to fit his predetermined conclusion,” CNN declared. The real problem, CNN pretended, was that Trump and his supporters do not accept science.
Medical journals and the media continued to demonize anyone who might suggest that Covid was man-made, even calling them “conspiracy theorists.” Lancet printed articles marginalizing anyone who suggests that there was a man-made origin of this virus, allowing name-calling against their hypotheses.
But a few months ago Fauci himself began to backtrack from his prior adamant denials of the likelihood of a man-made origin to Covid. On September 17 Lancet finally published candid research debunking the liberals’ insistence on a wildlife origin.
“There is so far no scientifically validated evidence that directly supports a natural origin,” scientists led by the Frenchman Jacques van Helden wrote. As to the “no evidence” mantra that Fauci and other liberal scientists are so fond of repeating, the reality is that it was their own statements pretending there was a natural origin to Covid-19 which was without evidence.
“Although considerable evidence supports the natural origins of other outbreaks (eg, Nipah, MERS, and the 2002–04 SARS outbreak) direct evidence for a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 is missing,” the honest group of scientists recently announced. “After 19 months of investigations, the proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 is still lacking.”
So it turns out that nothing scientific supported the Never-Trumpers’ criticisms of Trump about the origin of Covid-19. There was no meaningful scientific basis for Fauci to say last year this virus “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”
This year, long after Trump left office, Fauci contradicted himself on this issue, as he has on so many other aspects of this virus. In May of this year Fauci declared that he was “not convinced” that the origin was of natural origin and that he welcomes further investigation, but then oddly said that “certainly” experts “who’ve investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals.”
The Lancet article disproves that, too, by indicating that there is no plausible geographic origin in wildlife for the virus.
Ever since the onset of Covid, Fauci has apparently done nothing with his immense government budget to get to the truth about its origin. General Milley improperly protected China against any American military strike, while comrade Fauci protects it against political accountability for its virus.
Trump was right all along: China should be held accountable for the origin of Covid-19, and liberal attempts to attribute this to wildlife are unscientific. Government funding should end for any scientist who has impeded a vigorous investigation into the origin of this virus.
Real scientists welcome debate rather than censor it. Republicans in Congress have called on Pelosi to earnestly investigate, but predictably she has refused to do so while instead pursuing witch-hunts against Trump supporters.
Never-Trumpers will forever deny that Trump was right about Covid-19 and its origin, and everything else. Rather than Biden and Fauci coddling China, they should be demanding answers from it.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
