A pity

The biggest scandal is the way the establishment, led by the NYT, rallied behind China:

Yet the Times, according to two well-placed sources, refused to investigate the biggest story of our time. Instead, senior editors are alleged to have suppressed efforts to probe the virus’s origins, and the Times led the charge to dismiss any questioning of the WHO’s now-discredited line as conspiracist or even ‘racist’.

‘It was considered a conspiracy theory,’ confirms a second Times insider who was in a senior position on a different section at the time, and also proposed an investigation. ‘It was untouchable everywhere. The fact that Trump embraced it, of course, also made it a no-go.’

‘The idea was considered dangerous,’ my first source agreed. They suggest that the Times’s editors weren’t motivated by domestic politics in an election year, or even by a hatred of Donald Trump that ran so deep as to dispose them to trust the WHO and the Chinese government over the Trump administration.

In the years before COVID-19, revenue from China was an integral part of the Times’s business model. The paper received millions of dollars from Chinese government-controlled outlets, especially China Daily, and published ‘advertorials’ pushing the Chinese government’s line. The Times wasn’t alone in doing this — though few outlets anywhere in the West went all-in, as the Times did in 2012, when it launched a Chinese-language edition and, soon after that, a luxury magazine.

In November 2019, it emerged that China Daily had failed to disclose to federal authorities millions of dollars in payments to US outlets including the Times and the Washington Post. In August 2020, the Times quietly scrubbed the China-funded advertorials from its website. Still, in October 2020, the Times ran an op-ed by Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong’s Executive Council, justifying the repression of anti-government protests in the Hong Kong SAR.

Who else benefitted from China’s largesse?

“I think what the last few years have shown is that American politics has always been insane – it’s just that now we can see it in glorious technicolour because the lid has been lifted.”

The last half decade has been utterly illuminating for many reasons, Brexit, Trump and now Covid. Each of those has revealed truths about Western society that had been present but invisible (or ignored by anyone who could have articulated them) for many years, probably decades.

Article on Unherd :

https://unherd.com/2021/08/did-the-new-york-times-stifle-lab-leak-debate/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=bbdd2e0884&mc_eid=24988e186d

While I’d like to find out the truth, it seems unlikely it will emerge. In China the authorities have no interest in an open investigation, while in America not only is there the absurd partisanship to obstruct an investigation, but also I wonder if there’s willingness to expose the extent of the funding and control from America.

A lab leak cannot be just dismissed, as lab leaks do happen – the last person to die of smallpox caught it via a lab leak in the UK.