The two most famous British medical journals are The Lancet (founded in 1823) and The BMJ (founded in 1840). The Lancet – which is arguably the more famous of the two – has come under criticism in recent months for publishing a letter that dismissed the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”.
Now the Editor-in-Chief of The BMJ has written a surprisingly bold editorial, which is titled ‘Covid 19: We need a full open independent investigation into its origins’. Referencing a longer BMJ article by the science journalist Paul Thacker, she notes that “suppression of the lab leak theory was not based on any clear evaluation of the science.”
She goes on to say, “We don’t know which theory is right, but a lab leak is plausible and worthy of serious inquiry.” And she concludes by calling for a “a full, open, and independent investigation.”
Thacker’s article, which is much longer, examines the role that scientific journals and journalists played in shaping the now-punctured narrative that COVID-19 couldn’t possibly have leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
The story begins with the aforementioned Lancet letter, published in February of last year. That letter, it subsequently transpired, had been organised by Peter Daszak – president of EcoHealth Alliance – who has funded controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak’s letter helped to stifle debate on COVID origins for more than a year. As the molecular biologist Richard Ebright told Thacker, ‘conspiracy theory’ is a “useful term for defaming an idea you disagree with”. Ebright, incidentally, blames not only The Lancet, but also Nature and Science – the world’s two preeminent scientific journals – for suppressing the lab leak theory.
As an aside, Nature’s role in suppressing the lab leak has been covered extensively by the journalist Ian Birrell. As he notes, “Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial reasons.”
Returning to Thacker’s article, he suggests two main reasons for the “U turn”, whereby the lab leak went from “conspiracy theory” to plausible hypothesis. The first is that Trump lost the election. Because Trump had endorsed the lab leak theory, Thacker argues, “Daszak and others used him as a convenient foil to attack their critics”. (So much for guilt-by-association being a logical fallacy.)
The second factor is that the WHO investigation into COVID origins, which had gone looking for evidence of zoonotic spillover, came back pretty much empty handed. “More worryingly,” Thacker notes, “members were allowed only a few hours of supervised access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
In the final part of the article, Thacker documents the various media outlets and “fact-checking” organisations that have scrambled to retroactively cover their anatomy. For example, Vox added a correction noting, “Since this piece was originally published in March 2020, scientific consensus has shifted.”
Thacker’s article offers a case study in what happens when scientific journals and journalists neglect their duty of independence, and instead become purveyors of an official narrative. It is worth reading in full.
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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Amused to see that Paul Staines is apparently in favour of freedom of speech, given the comments system used on Order-Order that’s so pathological that it censors such vile unacceptable hate language as “dirty”, “damn”, and the name “Paul Staines”.
I was blocked there long ago.
Off topic but does anyone have the graphic or stats about how only 833 under 50s have “died solely of covid”? It was posted BTL recently but I can’t find it.
Hope this is helpful – https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/only-6183-people-died-solely-of-covid?r=2mnu5&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Desperately needed in Sturgeon’s Dark Fiefdom!
No doubt Blair is smugly content with the the results of his “devolution” designed by Globalists to wreck the UK – it seems to have worked a treat !
Looking forward to the event tonight!
Best wishes to all those involved. Anything / body seeking to protect freedom of speech deserves and needs support.
“Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.”
Yay! Free Speech!
Breaking one of my rules but…
Hey EF,
Fuck Off.
Careful, I can smell that ban coming for you!
Thanks, but he is an utter waste of space.
Your free speech is not violated by the site having rules
Yes. This comment led me to write the following response to another of your posts.
Reply to Hugh
No, she was a censor who believed everyone except her had no brain at all.
Your ‘both ways’ doesn’t exist, she was a totalitarian.
Reply to Moist Von Lipwig
From the person who said that this site having rules doesn’t curtail freedom of speech?
I hadn’t heard that she was in favour of banning opinions. Merely upholding parts of the Obscene Publications act that she considered important. Why shouldn’t people object to swearing on tv before the watershed (for example)?
I still say campaigning for standards of basic decency is not necessarily the same as being anti-free speech. She was campaigning about analogue t.v. and radio broadcasts which are easily accessible to the general population, rather than something, for example, available via mail order. For me, that makes all the difference. Absolutely there should be different standards for a private members club than for things done in public, i.e. a tv broadcast which may be watched by half the country.
She was campaigning for censorship.
She gave so much publicity to what she campaigned against, Alice Cooper sent her flowers for the career boost he received from her.
https://edernet.org/2022/03/15/mary-whitehouses-pursuit-to-stop-alice-coopers-song-schools-out-from-airing-on-british-media/
“During the twentieth century, a moral activist and former teacher named Mary Whitehouse waged a battle against the BBC. According to Whitehouse and her group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the network continued to show content that damaged the public.
She expressed her displeasure with Doctor Who for teaching youngsters how to make bombs. She voiced her displeasure with comedy characters that used the phrase “bloody.” She expressed her dissatisfaction with BBC coverage of the liberation of concentration camps (“It was destined to shock and offend,” she stated, describing the coverage as “extremely off-putting”).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/26/ban-this-filth-ben-thompson-review
“Should the BBC’s function be to improve public morals? Or should freedom of expression, even if that involves broadcasting a once-great rock’n’roll guitarist’s wretched foray into the innuendo-laden novelty single genre, always be paramount? And was the “My Ding-a-ling” imbroglio really the right forum for these issues, as old as Plato and still vexed, to be debated?
The then-director general, Charles Curran, thought not. “‘My Ding-a-ling’,” Curran had written to Whitehouse on 21 November 1972, “begins with such a clear account of the contraption in question including bells, that although the possibility of a double entendre was recognised, we decided that it could be broadcast … We did not think it would disturb or emotionally agitate its listeners and we believe that the innuendo is, at worst, on the level of seaside postcards or music hall humour.” That phrase, “contraption in question including bells”, is surely worth the licence fee alone.”
“The exchange was typical of the collection of letters that Ben Thompson has so astutely assembled and comments on so drolly in this book. Here, the bottomless capacity for affront of morally upright, often evangelically Christian, middle England clashes repeatedly with the patrician disdain of those men (and they were overwhelmingly men) who ran the culture industries, be they telly, theatre, cinema, magazines or pornography. Thompson ingeniously suggests that Whitehouse shared much with her punk contemporaries – both were socially excluded, both rebelled against establishment values they detested. Mary as a punk rocker? Not quite. But both she and Johnny Rotten knew how to needle grandees and relished the experience.
But here’s the twist. At the end of his Ding-a-ling letter to Whitehouse, Curran wonders “whether the record would have remained in a high position in the charts for such a long time without the publicity attendant upon the publication of your comments.” Intriguing point. Perhaps Whitehouse, far from cleaning up society, was instrumental in bringing about the nightmarish scenario she prophesied.
Certainly her complaints could have unintended consequences. On 21 August 1972, Whitehouse wrote to the BBC’s head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, complaining about Top of the Pops giving “gratuitous publicity” to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”. “Because of this millions of young people are now imbibing a philosophy of violence and anarchy … It is our view that if there is increasing violence in the schools during the coming term, the BBC will not be able to evade their share of the blame.” Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers in gratitude for the publicity her campaigning brought him.”
“Mary Whitehouse didn’t only fight against the BBC. During the 1980s, unsurprisingly, she was affronted by and complained about Channel 4’s output. “I am glad to see the home secretary’s unexceptional reply to your unnecessary letter,” wrote Jeremy Isaacs, C4’s chief executive, in 1984, responding to some dyspeptic jeremiad. She also took on the pornography industry: “Thank you for your letter concerning our bookstall at Crewe Station,” wrote John M Menzies on 28 May 1984, after Whitehouse complained about finding a pile of Knave magazines at a level where “almost any child could see and pick it up”. “Our policy … is not to sell these magazines to children.”
She tried to stiffen the established church in what she thought should be its homophobic resolve: “Will you state publicly and quite specifically,” she wrote to the Bishop of Southwark on 22 June 1979, “whether you are endorsing the practices of mutual masturbation common among some homosexuals, and whether you expect the church to do the same and whether you see such practices as the will of God.” “Yes, I jolly well am and jolly well do,” replied the bishop. I’m kidding. If only he had.
She demanded politicians revise obscenity laws. That prompted a reply from David Mellor, home office minister in 1983, arguing that her proposal that depictions of explicit acts of human urination or excretion be banned would outlaw “a picture of a baby urinating in a nappy advertisement; or a photograph of the mannequin in Brussels which serves as a fountain”. Similarly, Mellor argued, the NVALA’s proposal to ban depictions of mutilation, flagellation or torture would ban King Lear, certain religious paintings, and the films of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Nicholas Nickleby.
She campaigned against blasphemy and homosexuality, especially when, as in James Kirkup‘s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name”, they came together. Whitehouse privately prosecuted Gay News’s editor, Denis Lemon, in 1977 for publishing Kirkup’s necrophilic account of sexual assault on Christ’s crucified body. After Lemon’s conviction for blasphemous libel, she received a letter from the clerk of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church Synod, informing her of its unanimous motion thanking Whitehouse “for your unflinching stand against Sodomites in a recent court case”.
For Whitehouse, taking offence and imputing mucky motives to those who didn’t share her worldview weren’t so much tactics as irrepressible ways of being. In 1990, she was sued for libel by Dennis Potter’s mother. During an interview with Dr Anthony Clare on his Radio 4 series In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, Whitehouse had claimed that Margaret Potter had “committed adultery with a strange man and that the shock of witnessing this had caused her son to be afflicted” with the skin disease psoriasis. Whitehouse thereby confused a storyline from Potter’s The Singing Detective with the playwright’s life. No doubt her misdiagnosis and jejune psychosexual analysis was prompted by her loathing for Potter’s TV drama, which she believed had “made voyeurs of us all”. Similarly, perhaps, TV made Whitehouse a voyeur, though sometimes not a discerning one.”
Yes. I heard about the “Alice” Cooper business (vile toerag, even if he was on Top Gear), and some of the other stuff. She’s entitled to her opinions though at the end of the day. And if people don’t defend their culture, it will not survive – a point not lost on the Russians.
Besides, are some of the liberal woke fascists today very different.? And as for you satanists…
Remember that in the 1960’s the BBC was engaged in a biased campaign of subterfuge which helped result in changes which have since led to the deaths of millions of children. The BBC, who push minority views when it suits them, and other times refuse to give voice to minority views they consider beyond the pale, all the while posing as an impartial public service broadcaster. Of course there was going to be pushback.
Alice Cooper is a Christian.
This one elementary fact blows your flatulent balderdash completely out of the water.
Mary Whitehouse is the kindred spirit of today’s woke Maoists.
As for Satanists, I’m not one so your accusation is entirely the work of your imagination.
Mary Whitehouse didn’t defend ‘her culture’, she demanded witless, mindless, brainless conformity, something Russia has had centuries of, with the result being centuries of absolute monarchy, three quarter of a century of Communism, a religion that worships the omnipotent state, followed by the socialist dictatorship of a former Communist secret police officer who hasn’t essentially changed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed.
Russian culture has long worshipped death, the evidence speaks for itself.
Your anti-culture is the hatred of man’s mind.
Alice Cooper is in no way vile, he’s essentially an actor, comparable to Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, his shows are theatre, fantasy.
By contrast, Mary Whitehouse, in her quest to obliterate the individual human mind, was the villain from ‘Inherit the Wind’ in drag.
Her spiritual father was William Jennings Bryan and her effect was to give publicity to what she most hated, thereby ensuring it became far more popular than it would have been without her truly cretinous intervention, such was her mindlessness that she couldn’t comprehend that people didn’t take to have Nanny tell them she knows best.
We’ve just had two years of Mary Whitehouse in full control in Scotland.