The U.K.’s Members of Parliament returned from their summer holidays last week to give the final nod to the Energy Bill 2023. It is a leviathan piece of legislation in every sense of the word. It is 427 pages long. It has 15 parts and 330 separate provisions (many of which have lots of sub-provisions), not to mention another supplementary 22 schedules. Its full title alone consists of 130 words. It covers everything from the licensing of carbon dioxide storage to hydrogen grid trials to offshore energy production. And in every aspect it aggrandises the power of the State and gives sweeping executive authority to Government ministers. As law-making, it is a travesty. As policy, it is inexcusable. As an illustration of the indefensible way in which Western societies are coming to be governed, however, it is exemplary.
Explaining the substantive content of the Bill in full would take a long time, and it is not my intention to do that here. (There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the complexity of the Act and its consequent opacity to the lay reader and sheer unwieldiness for the commentator is deliberate. But that’s a subject for another post.)
Instead I wish to highlight some key features, and explicate what the Bill tells us about how we are currently governed and are likely to be governed in the future. I will also elucidate the negative consequences of this governing style. To achieve this, I’m afraid that I will have to touch upon a subject which even most legal philosophers think of as arid and sterile, namely the morality of law. But before doing this, let’s back up and sketch out the changing nature of law in modernity.
From Rules to Regulation
Once upon a time, law could be thought of as primarily consisting of rules that are applied to facts. Bob intends to kill, and kills, Graham; he has committed murder. Sarah’s contract with Chris was entered into on the basis of a misrepresentation, and therefore the contract can be rescinded. Etcetera. This is how laypeople still tend to think of law, and it is how law students are still generally taught: ‘thinking like a lawyer’ means being able to approach a set of facts concerning a dispute, and apply legal rules to determine the likely legal outcome.
Rules, of course, still exist, are still created, and are still applied. But the fashion, really ever since the birth of the administrative state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has been to deploy law in a more regulatory way. Legislatures legislate, not primarily to make rules for ordinary people to follow, but to delegate power to administrative agencies or technical experts (or politicians advised by such agencies and experts) to make ad hoc, flexible rulings; to issue guidance and recommendations; to publish codes of conduct; to give and revoke licences; and so on as and when they see fit – often with a very wide discretion.
Roger Brownsword, an eminent legal scholar, gives us a useful shorthand for understanding this change, describing it as the transition from “Law 1.0” to “Law 2.0”. It represents, in essence, a move away from law understood chiefly as comprising rules per se, to law understood as policy. Legislation is not created simply to order the conduct of otherwise free citizens. It is created in order to give effect to governmental purposes. It is used not to make clear rules, but to delegate the authority necessary to effect desired changes of some kind within the economy or society, usually to the state’s ever-growing administrative bureaucracy (but also to private companies).
This is a plausible way of describing the history of legal developments over the past century and a half or so. And it has been frequently observed by people concerned with such matters that modern governance is a matter of – as Foucault put it – “tactics rather than laws”:
[Modern governance] is not a matter of imposing law on men, but of the disposition of things, that is to say, employing tactics rather than laws… I think this marks an important break… the end of government [is] to be sought in the perfection, maximisation or intensification of the processes it directs, and the instruments of government will become diverse tactics rather than laws.
The medieval concept of the sovereign as the upholder of the law (and, indeed, of good governance itself as being a matter simply of upholding the law), has thus gradually eroded over the course of modernity such that we are in the position in which we now find ourselves, with law simply being a tool to help the state manage society. It is not that laws are no longer made – legislation is still enacted and enforced – it is just that the point of legislation is no longer merely to make rules but to achieve purposes. And this very frequently means that legislation essentially delegates executive power to technicians, managers and what are inevitably referred to as ‘stakeholders’.
The Energy Bill 2023 is in many respects an example par excellence of the ‘Law 2.0’ mode of governance. To take one example, Part 5 of the Bill will when enacted create something called the Independent System Operator and Planner, a legal person (“likely a company“), which will do all sorts of vaguely-defined but important things, like “co-ordinating and directing the flow of electricity onto and over transmission systems”, “carrying out strategic planning and forecasting in connection with… the conveyance or supply of electricity [and] the conveyance and supply of gas”, “providing advice or information” to Government ministers, and so on. And the Bill also mandates that it shall do these things in view of three requirements: to achieve Net Zero, to secure energy supply, and to promote economy and efficiency. In other words, the Bill creates an independent entity (“likely a company”, remember, meaning it will have limited liability) with sweeping powers and wide discretion to regulate electricity and gas supplies as it sees fit in line with certain objectives.
The Emergence of Law 3.0
You will be with me so far. And if this kind of thing was all that the Energy Bill 2023 did, it would not be particularly noteworthy. It would simply be another depressing example of the way in which decisions of the most profound political importance are nowadays determined not by our elected legislatures, but by a penumbra of technical ‘experts’ and managers, acting either directly (through agencies and regulatory bodies) or through ‘advising’ Government ministers who then issue rules accordingly.
But this is not all that the Energy Bill 2023 does, and here we come to a fresher development in the relationship between law and the state. Importantly, Brownsword has recently been suggesting that we are rapidly advancing into the next iteration of law – Law 3.0 – in which law becomes essentially self-executing through technology and, indeed, the very exercise of subjecting human conduct to rules becomes subsumed by technological management. Here, the creation of rules itself will become seen as archaic, with technology providing us with better – more efficient, more rational, more effective – forms of justice than those available to the flawed system of law which we currently respect. The end result (the apotheosis of Law 3.0, as it were), will be the merging of technology with law, such that the requirement for rules to exist will disappear and human conduct will be more or less entirely managed by technology.
The example Brownsword uses – and it is an example used almost everywhere in the literature on this topic – is that of golf carts. We are invited to imagine the following scenario: a golf club buys in a new fleet of golf carts for members to use. But members keep driving them on the greens. The golf club could make it a rule for members not to drive on the greens, but, of course, there is no guarantee that such a rule would be complied with. Would it not be better, those referring to this scenario typically suggest, if there could be a technological solution instead? Would it not be better if the golf club just bought golf carts which, through the awesome power of digital tech, automatically stop working if they are about to go on the greens? Would that not be more efficient, and would it not achieve a more perfect result than simply making a rule?
The golf cart example is often invoked, one suspects, because it seems so benign. Who could object, the implication seems to be, to such a neat solution? Nobody would be harmed by golf carts which simply can’t be driven onto the greens. And everybody would benefit because there would be 100% achievement of the desired end. What would be the problem with this?
As is so often the case when blithe, abstract reasoning of this kind meets the real world, however, and we start to think about the implications in detail, the idea of law’s final union with technological management is revealed to be a genuinely terrifying prospect. This is because it will have two inevitable sets of consequences.
From Golf Carts to Energy Smart Appliances
The first set of consequences is bad enough, and will be obvious to anybody who has been paying attention. We already inhabit a scenario in which legislatures chiefly govern by authorising administrative agencies, regulative bodies, quangos, licensing authorities and so on to issue decrees and edicts as they see fit or to advise Government ministers to do likewise. Now imagine that said administrative agencies, etc., can make such decrees and edicts self-executing through technology, thus rendering non-compliance not simply illegal but impossible.
The tyrannical implications of such a mode of governance are so obvious that it really ought to go without saying. Golf carts are one thing, but given that our future seems to be populated almost exclusively by ‘internet of things’-connected ‘smart’ artefacts (fridges, cars, mobile phones, TVs, watches, even doors), and given the apparent lack of any principled limit on the purview of government in modernity, things begin to look increasingly dystopian when the implications of Law 3.0 are properly thought through.
And sure enough, sections of the Energy Bill 2023 give one pause when considered in the light of all this discussion about the union of technological management and law. Consider, for example, Part 9 of the Bill, which allows the Secretary of State to make regulations about something called “energy smart appliances and load control” (with this type of regulation being referred to as an “energy smart regulation”).
What is an “energy smart appliance”? Well, it’s “an appliance which is capable of adjusting the immediate or future flow of electricity into or out of itself or another appliance in response to a load control signal” (clause 234 (2)). What’s a “load control signal”? It means “a digital communication sent via a relevant electronic communications network to an energy smart appliance for the purpose of causing or otherwise facilitating such an adjustment [i.e. to the immediate or future flow of electricity]” (clause 234 (4)).
What does this Part of the Act therefore seem to entail? Well, without going into vast detail, it seems to empower the Secretary of State to make regulations concerning the sending of load control signals to energy smart appliances (which do things like “refrigeration”, “cleaning tableware”, “washing or drying textiles”, and “heating”) in order to adjust the flow of electricity to them, and to control who has a licence to send such signals. Yes, if you’re keeping up: this appears to create the legal infrastructure to permit the Secretary of State (advised, of course, by the ‘experts’) to issue regulations concerning the flow of electricity into fridges, dishwashers, washing machines, and so on, and to delegate the issuing of load control signals themselves to approved licensees – presumably utility companies.
The explanatory notes to the Bill suggest this will be done to “help consumers save money on their energy bills” by “shift[ing] electricity usage to times when it is beneficial for the energy system” and thus “smart[ly] and flexib[ly]… control consumption”. Sceptics may wonder if this is the only reason why it will be done – and will also have their eyes unavoidably drawn to clause 237 (5) of the Bill, which will “allow enforcement authorities to impose requirements by written notice on persons to… make appliances compliant with energy smart regulations” (i.e., to ensure that their dishwashers, washing machines, etc. can receive load control signals). These sceptics may, if they are capable of parsing modern Parliamentary drafting, also have their eyes drawn to to clause 235 (4) (c) and clause 236 (3) of the Bill, which seem to give the Secretary of State the power to ban the sale of non-smart appliances.
Why would the Secretary of State need to ban the sale of non-smart appliances if their only purpose was to “help consumers save money on their energy bills”? Why would he or she need to require people to make sure their appliances are “energy smart”? I won’t insult your intelligence by spelling it out, but I don’t think “helping consumers save money on their energy bills” is the end of the story.
Setting aside the substance of the Bill itself, what I wish to emphasise here is its character. If Parliament wished to legislate in order to control energy consumption through clear rules (“each household may only use X number of kWH of electricity per day”) that might be authoritarian, but at least it would be clear – and at least it would then be subject to open debate. But that would be to govern through the creation of quaint old Law 1.0. We’re now in the era of Law 3.0, and we don’t even see rules of general application appearing at all. Instead we see legislation delegating authority to a Government minister to appoint licensees to issue “load control signals” to “smart appliances” on a “smart and flexible” basis in order to control energy consumption. The law, in other words, will self-execute through the technology itself, and non-compliance will become impossible – because our machines themselves will simply respond to the load control signals which they are sent. (And because we will have to use such machines, because the sale of others will be banned; ironically, we see here a vestigial role for Law 1.0 after all.)
The substantive purpose of the legislation is not really the issue here. You may agree entirely with the goal of reducing carbon emissions and you may agree with the goal of achieving ‘Net Zero’ by 2050. I reiterate: the problem is the indefensible way in which all of this is being realised – surreptitiously, and through what is effectively executive power wielded by unaccountable managers deploying technological methods which cannot be gainsaid and which are designed to achieve 100% compliance through making non-compliance physically impossible.
Law’s Inner Morality
This is just the first negative consequence of the deployment of ‘Law 3.0’, though. The second is, to my eye, worse, and it concerns the effects of all of this on human subjectivity and indeed on our capacity to act ethically in the first place. To explicate this, we need to turn briefly to the subject of what the legal philosopher Lon Fuller, writing in the 1960s, called ‘the “inner morality” of law.
Fuller, like many postwar legal theorists, was interested in the phenomenon of law exercised within the context of totalitarian regimes. The curious thing about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was that, for all that they were brutal dictatorships, they still had the trappings of functioning legal systems: constitutions, courts, judges, advocates and all the rest. This raised a vexed question. We normally think of ‘the rule of law’ as a good thing. But Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, while appearing to have legal systems, hardly resembled the kinds of states that we think of when ‘the rule of law’ is mentioned. How, then, does one distinguish between societies which are governed by the rule of law from societies which are governed by purported legal systems but which are in fact oppressive and authoritarian?
Fuller’s answer was that law had an “inner morality” – which was distinct from matters of “external morality” (such as whether a given law had a morally right or wrong outcome). He asked us first to consider eight ways in which a lawmaker could “fail to make law”. These were:
- Producing no rules at all or making only ad hoc decisions
- Failing to make rules public
- Using retroactive rules
- Producing unclear rules
- Producing contradictory rules
- Producing rules with which it is impossible to comply
- Changing rules too often
- Deciding cases in such a way that outcomes bear no relation to the rules
Failing to make law, in these terms, was a violation of law’s inner morality, and a legal system which regularly and consistently failed to make law in any or all of these ways was therefore not to be thought of as comprising laws at all, but something else. And since legal systems in autocratic and totalitarian regimes very often violate law’s inner morality in these ways, this is why we are qualified to distinguish their purported laws from those which prevail in states where law’s inner morality is generally upheld.
Why did this matter so much, though? What’s so good about being governed by legal systems which have rules, where the rules are public, where they do not apply retrospectively, where they are clear, where they are not contradictory, etc.?
Here is one of those occasions in which it is beneficial simply to quote the man himself, in a passage of prose which ought to be reproduced as the compulsory PC desktop background of every legislator in every democracy in the world:
[Legal morality] cannot be neutral in its view of man himself. To embark on the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules involves of necessity a commitment to the view that man is, or can become, a responsible agent, capable of understanding and following rules, and answerable for his defaults.Every departure from the principles of law’s inner morality is an affront to man’s dignity as a responsible agent. To judge his actions by unpublished or retrospective laws, or to order him to do an act that is impossible, is to convey to him your indifference to his powers of self-determination.
Governing human conduct by rules, in other words, is to treat the people who are subject to the rules as conscious, free-willed, sensible agents who are capable of understanding the world around them and accepting responsibility for their decisions. We are capable of knowing, for instance, the speed limit on a given stretch of road, and we are also capable of making the decision to go faster in full awareness that there may be negative consequences of doing so – which we accept. The speed limit does not compel us: we can choose to abide by it, or not. And this, most crucially of all, means that we have moral agency. We can choose to do right or wrong.
Fuller would not have put it in these terms, but he would therefore have agreed with Foucault’s observation that “freedom is the ontological condition of ethics”. Acting ethically requires the freedom to choose. If one does not have the freedom to choose, because one is compelled to act morally, then one’s moral conduct is not really moral at all. One is simply robotically doing what one is told, and one is in moral terms therefore indistinguishable from a robot. It seems tautologous to point out that this denudes us of one of the central characteristics – perhaps the central characteristic – of humanity: the capacity to choose to act morally, or not.
Law 3.0 was a development which Fuller could not really have foreseen. And it therefore introduces a ninth way of failing to make law to his list: one can fail to make law by making it impossible not to comply, through the deployment of technology. And in its way, this is the worst affront to the dignity of man out of them all, because it destroys the very conditions of moral agency. I reiterate: if one does not have the freedom to choose, because one is compelled to act morally, then one’s moral conduct is not really moral at all. The Energy Bill 2023 is therefore not only bad law because it is unclear, because it mostly delegates authority to make ad hoc decisions rather than rules, and so on. It is bad law because it seeks to automate compliance.
I would say that this has the effect of putting the subjects of the law into the position of children, but this would be to underplay the affront considerably. Children’s conduct (provided they have good parents) is subject to rules which are clear and understandable and with which they have the choice to comply, and children – as any parent knows – are masterful negotiators, adept at carving out exceptions to rules as required. Really, it puts the subjects of the law more into the position of rats in a Skinner Box, and here Fuller was prescient in warning us that once the inner morality of law is routinely violated, social order would have to be enforced through other, behavioural means: “Instead of telling men to be good, we [will] condition them to be good”, and instead of “judg[ing] a man, we [will] act upon him”. The mode of lawmaking which the Energy Bill 2023 exemplifies is one in which our legislators create the conditions for us to be simply acted upon.
We are not going to like where that leads. Having our energy consumption governed through ad hoc micromanagement of the electricity flow to our compulsorily purchased energy smart appliances on a moment to moment basis is dystopian enough. I invite you, though, to consider the other areas of life – both public and private – which are currently likely being eyed up by our legislators for the Law 3.0 treatment. It’s not about, and never has been about, mere golf carts on greens. It is about the fusion of law and technology in every sphere of our lives, and everything that will entail.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The existence/origin of the virus doesn’t matter: it’s the lockdown that has trashed our civilisation.
The lab origin is key to discrediting both “The Science” and the people who did the trashing.
No it really isn’t: lockdown never made sense irrespective of where the virus came from. It was a political decision, not a medical one.
Exactly, and the Wuhan leak blows the political motivations wide open.
As an aside, I don’t believe in lockdowns at all, but a leak probably justifies them more than a natural origin for the simple reason that one might assume a man made virus to be potentially or actually much more dangerous and unprecedented in its effects. That’s assuming you didn’t already know its effects which it seems, given what’s coming out, they may well have done.
All helps to uncover the nine pathetic lies as outlined by Yeadon.
Novelty, lethality, lack of prior immunity, lack of existing treatments, efficacy of testing, asymptomatic transmission, efficacy of masks, efficacy of lockdowns, danger of variants.
They knew the effects of said virus perfectly well by 19th March 2020, 100%, when they downgraded the severity level of Covid19 officially on the gov.uk website, citing low overall mortality rates as the reason for the downgrade. So you might be able to make a case for applying some caution up to that point, in theory, when they might have been able to say they had genuine concern, because an IFR of 3.4% was being bandied around, but as soon as it was established that “the virus” was no more lethal than common flu, which they definitely did know by 19th March 2020, there was no longer any justification fdor any further measures.
19th March 2020 was just before the first lockdown. We’re still living the nightmare, in a more advanced form, 15+ months down the line.
This is a fundamentally important but often overlooked fact which blows the government narrative out of the water. It is something everyone should work to promote to people who believe in the government narrative, because you can show them the gov.uk webpage which still has the announcement of it being downgraded up for all to see. I presume it serves some kind of legal purpose.
Status of COVID-19
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK. There are many diseases which can cause serious illness which are not classified as HCIDs.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
Our last warning if we heed it and if it’s not too late.
No. Mark my words, the Collapse of the Lab Leak Theory will show you that people are sheep and they’ll quickly forget that the mainstream media lied to them for so long and persecuted anyone who told the truth. The mainstream media took hold of the narrative by filing a Freedom of Information Request for Fauci’s emails and they’ll take the story anywhere they like from now on.
2 + 2 = 5 and we’ve always been at war with Eurasia. And men can have babies as long as they don’t participate in women’s sports. Any more. Or something.
If President Trump had been shown evidence of the lab leak by US intelligence then they would have shared this intelligence and all knew there was this possibility. I do feel if it turns out to be true, which it is certainly looking the case, the suppression of this by scientists raises what else have they suppressed and who can actually be trusted. Scientists and experts clearly can’t be trusted.
And did some use this to bring down the president of the USA? And all those people who have tried to say anyone questioning China is racist and all that Chinese money invested in western economies and western research? The implications seem huge. Many have been moving away from google, Facebook etc but now will there be a real movement away from them to more independent platforms.
Back last May people commenting here did raise the possibility that the government thought they were dealing with a bio weapons attack. But none of this means that the pandemic preparedness plan should have been jettisoned for lockdowns.
It came from Chimerica.
Natalie Winters in The National Pulse highlights a NIH hosted conference in 2011 at which CCP scientists (no other sort in China and perhaps even Chimerica) spoke of the lack of regulation in China (as an advantage perhaps).
While speaking at the event via telephone, Yuan Zhiming repeatedly emphasized that his lab and China lacked any meaningful regulation of dual-use research.
“There’s no regulation in China, there’s no regulation on the identification of some dual-use research, and there’s no regulation on the classification of research or the classification of information,” he explained.
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/nih-hosted-wuhan-lab-director-asserting-no-regulation/
“no other sort in China”. And what are communists famous for? I suspect it’s not truth. We desperately need more truth in science and medicine.
(And nothing anti-Chinese people btw. We have nothing against the real Chinese government in Taiwan, or the brave democracy activists in Hong Kong).
Not as if we weren’t warned.
by the lights of perverted science …
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
“Engineered mice with humanised lungs”? v What the hell?
Tolkien had it right with his opprobrium towards crossing man with orcs. Biological experimentation is going to be an absolute nightmare this century, I fear.
I’m sceptical
They can squash trends and news if they want to (Biden Jnr)
This is being allowed
Why??
I’m sceptical too. Not much of a bioweapon! Most people who die ‘from covid’ are elderly with comorbidities. And the virus still hasn’t been isolated and purified. But if they are saying that the virus is an escaped bioweapon then they can keep ramping up the fear element, and it is this ramped-up fear that is really the weapon.
Just because it escaped from a lab doesn’t mean it’s a bioweapon – as I understand it, they were doing research into viruses in the Wuhan lab – research which may be of questionable wisdom due to leaks, but nevertheless research, not weapons manufacturing.
Anyway, releasing a virus as a weapon that kills billions isn’t a very smart idea, as it will kill your own citizens and your export markets.
No, you need a bioweapon that causes just enough disturbance to be seen as a novel threat, but not one that takes out police and government.
You want to reorganise society not destroy all the profitable bits.
Indeed. I don’t think that’s what they did, but it has worked out like that. I do think that once it leaked they cottoned on pretty quickly to how well the theatre worked.
Tell the average person in the street that the virus was made in a lab and that this was known and covered up
They will be more scared, not less
And they will blame the Chinese, or the Americans, depending on their political persuasion
I don’t see how this helps us. The subtlety that it shows a pattern of deception will be lost on most people. The basic lies that need to be exposed – that covid was an exceptional public health emergency and that the lunatic measures taken and the dodgy vaccines were needed – will remain unaffected.
I always thought that Sars-cov2 was lab created because I had done a fair bit of research into virology prior to this and was horrified to see how gain of function experiments were being done. Relatively benign animal viruses (that only transmitted between animals in restricted ways, like when sheep rub their eyes together) were being aerosolised.
Most of the funding for this research was coming from Homeland Security and the Department of Defence.
The virologists themselves, though they purport to be doing medical; research must all have security clearance to work in these labs.
https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/is-there-a-role-for-the-biological-weapons-convention-in-oversight-of-lab-created-potential-pandemic-pathogens/
Research by Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Madison, Wisconsin marked the beginning of a “research enterprise” aimed at creating mammalian-airborne-transmissible, highly-pathogenic, avian-influenza live viruses. Such viruses could be transmitted through the air, similar to seasonal human influenza. Through November 2018, 14 laboratories have been identified in this enterprise.
These viruses are examples of lab-created potentially pandemic pathogens that bring up questions reflecting real concerns: Should details of this dual-use research be published? Could lab-created potentially pandemic pathogens be accidentally released from a laboratory into the community and seed a human pandemic? Could they be employed as biological weapons?
The probability of accidental release into the community from one of the laboratories in this research enterprise is uncomfortably high. For these and other lab-created potentially pandemic pathogens, just one laboratory-infected researcher could seed a pandemic. Concern over a pandemic from a research enterprise laboratory release should rival our grave concern over a natural pandemic; the likelihood of both is similar. Furthermore, a laboratory worker with hostile intent could introduce a potentially pandemic pathogen into the community.
Chimeric mice are routinely used in laboratories to test the effect of these new viruses or toxins. So the mice are used in the experiment, but they contain tissues that have been humanised so the researchers can see exactly how the toxin would work in a human.
I do not think there can be much doubt that the Sars-Cov 2 virus was well understood before it was released.
Whoever did it knew it would be sufficiently different to create an emergency, but not so pathogenic it would cause massive deaths – and they would not want the army and all essential workers dropping dead en masse.
Another point is, that Sars-cov-2 has an exact tropism for human cells and cannot infect bat cells. Quite apart from the signs that the spike has been artificially modified, the exact tropism for human cells and its inability to infect its purported animal host, with the absence of an intermediate host – these make the claims that it is our intrusion into natural habitats that is causing animal viruses to jump utter rubbish.
A fascinating article, thanks. Such essays are one of the best things about this site.
If the virus did indeed come from a lab, especially if it was engineered, then the consequences for public faith in science and experts will indeed be incalculable.
But isn’t there an even bigger scandal on the horizon, ready to dwarf the lab-leak theory? What if the Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin based treatments are indeed highly effective against covid-19, as is increasingly be plausibly claimed? How are ‘The Science’ and the Medical Establishment, as well as the media censors, going to explain why they supressed this?
An accidental lab leak is one thing. But the deliberate suppression of cheap and almost risk-free treatments for the resulting disease is on a whole larger scale. How many deaths could that have caused? And who pays the penalty?
And looking beyond that, I can’t help spying a cloud – as yet no bigger than a man’s hand – which may pass quietly, or may not. What if the vaccines do indeed entail serious medium- and long-term side effects? And hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people have been injected with the stuff? Including a very large proportion of the adult populations of Western societies, and – if ‘The Science’ gets its way – the children as well?
Heaven only knows what we’ve done.