On his Rational Optimist Society Substack, Matt Ridley presents compelling evidence that a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology likely triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s an excerpt:
Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed including – unfortunately and worryingly – in science itself. I can think of few things worse for progress than for the public to lose faith in science, which is why I’ve made it something of a personal mission to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid-19. We need to rescue science’s mission of seeking the truth at all costs, even when it comes with an uncomfortable lesson about the dangers of irresponsible experiments.
As readers may know, I began by thinking a lab leak was unlikely, even impossible, as the source of the virus that emerged suddenly in Wuhan at the end of 2019. But during the late spring of 2020 I saw evidence that this hypothesis was in fact quite plausible and needed investigating at the very least. I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
Yet still the scientific establishment refused to take the hypothesis seriously, let alone investigate it. There are over 20 million people dead, and you don’t want to know why? Imagine if this were their reaction to a chemical spill that killed thousands of people, or a nuclear accident that killed tens of thousands. This killed millions. I tried to get the Royal Society and The Academy of Medical Sciences to debate it, but they refused: too controversial, they said!
Journals like Nature and Science barely touched the topic and even then only to dismiss the lab leak in condescending tones without bothering to engage with the evidence. Science journalists steered clear of the biggest story of their careers lest it annoy their sources. Yet the public, the world’s governments, and the intelligence community all soon came to the conclusion that a lab leak probably did cause the Wuhan outbreak. I found this institutional ostrich act by Big Science deeply disturbing.
In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The journal’s editor promptly rejected it: the reason, it was clear, was that he did not want to rock the scientific boat.
Now I am posting this paper online for all to read. It was composed several months ago so one or two small new items may be missing, but nothing in it has proved wrong. It is written not in my normal style but in dry, scientific prose, with each statement backed up by a source, in the shape of nearly 100 end-note references, so that readers can check for themselves that we have represented the sources faithfully. It deserves to be available to people to read.
To read Matt Ridley and Prof Anton van der Merwe’s rejected paper, click here.
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“First comes the Nudge, then comes the PUSH”. The bureaucrat decides what you need and at first they explain why you should agree with them. They give incentive, like a subsidy or a Free Boiler (for Hydrogen eg). They have advertising campaigns, leaflets, indoctrination in schools etc etc etc. But then when all of that means their agenda is not occurring at the pace they want, next comes the PUSH. You won’t be allowed to choose eg not to have a Smart Meter, and you will be FORCED in law to have one. We are already committed in law to achieve the absurd NET ZERO by any means possible, whether that is getting rid of petrol and diesel, stopping coal and gas, taxing flights and meat and on and on. ————In the past no one had to be coerced into giving up a horse and cart and getting an automobile. No one had to be coerced into getting rid of a filing cabinet and getting a computer. The advantages of doing these things were obvious. They saved time and money. As someone once said “The best government is the one that governs least”. ——Today we have governments that govern the most and therefore what we now have is the worst government”. ——-The governments that think they know best how to spend your money
First Governments nudge then push you
How many politicians could start a successful business from scratch? None. But they would know where to stick a rainbow flag.
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
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I get a feeling that one reason people aren’t fighting back harder against all this technocratic tyranny is that they’ve developed an apocalyptic mindset: I think people genuinely – on some level – believe our civilisation will collapse shortly and vast numbers of people are simply going to die.
Whether it’s our councils no longer maintaining public grassland areas (using the environment as an excuse) or an increasingly panicked-looking state clamping down hard on fiscal freedom and freedom of speech, everything looks like it’s run down and falling apart. It’s like civilisation is holding it’s breath waiting for the axe to fall.
Just wait until July/August when untended grassland catches fire all over the country and they try to blame ‘manmade climate change’ and not ‘manmade consequences of laziness’.
Mad Max here we come!!
It would help explain the accelerated interest in going to the moon in the near future (e.g. by 2030). An endeavour for humanity to be proud of intended to benefit the few?
The interest will be all the greater with the potential fall of the enthusiasm of submarine excursions due to recent events.
Our idiot former Prime Minister, writing in the Mail, was talking about the people on that tragic submarine being pioneers, risking it all to expand human knowledge; just proving he’s lost all grip on reality. These were tourists, not so much visiting an undersea graveyard as invading the graves.
I can get with commercial manned space exploration and exploitation: it should have been our priority since the 1960s. Every ill in our society comes from the navel-gazing that happens when a society stops looking outwards: most of our societal problems were sorted decades ago, especially in the West, only for fascist left wing academics to create new problems (micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation and the like) to sow new divisions.
I hope we see lunar bases, lunar factories and lunar space ports to set us on journeys to the other planets. It’s an outward-looking adventure. And, if we’d get our minds of this Net Zero crap, we have an unlimited supply of gas we could scoop in vast ships from the atmospheres of the gas giants to power the Earth forever.
Can you give us a cost-benefit analysis on transporting natural gas from Jupiter? It doesn’t seem to work for replacing Russian pipelines with US liquified gas, which is somewhat closer than the gas giants.
While I understand the sarcasm, Jon, my point is that the human race is being sold a crock that we have finite resources and that the planet is dying. There’s enough out there to fuel us forever, when the time comes.
Dom75———–You are mostly correct. The greatest resource on earth is ——-Humans. But modern environmentalism which is actually old fashioned environmentalism hijacked for political purposes is —–Anti Human. ————–Humans will find solutions to all problems if left free to do so. But manufactured crisis are rather more difficult to solve and is like farting against the wind.
Absolutely. All the technologies being used in this net zero/ death of civilisation agenda is old hat. If had been cost effective or had any operational efficiency it would have been used in the past. Any new technology would have to fit their agenda and also their tax and regulatory systems, and more importantly be paid for by the tax payer (inc green levies) in subsidies.
Hate to break it to you, but we never went and never will. Something called radiation. Another thing call rocket power and fuel.
But it does distract the peasants from real issues.
I think it’s a realisation that there is little one can do against the awesome power the state has accumulated.
Our only weapon is our own personal non compliance with whatever indignities they try to inflict on us.
It will all collapse under the weight of its inconsistencies and absurdities or not. And there’s not a whole lot anything most of us can do except refuse to comply as much as possible.
An hour or so ago, Neil Oliver on GBN made the same point, with a bit of history as to what happened with private tenement rent price inflation during WW1 in Glasgow. In effect, the tenants (mainly women with their husbands being at war) got together and refused to pay extra, and the following political changes there.
Sensible Environmentalism—Patrick Moore | UKColumn
I’ve only watched the first half so far but he points out that “doomsters” are ever present. e.g.the Crusade in 1097 onwards.
“manmade climate change” or man/arsonists?
An excellent read, thank you. The administrative man views the world as if painted by numbers, not an association of individual brush strokes, but fails to understand the function of either.
*Warning* Contender for Most Warped Thing You’ll See All Day award incoming…
https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1672564471443881986?cxt=HHwWhIDQhc6hkrYuAAAA
And there is a clip three down which is rather brutal.
” we can derive some of the features of the German Administrative Man from our five examples. He appears to live in cities or at least in towns, not in the countryside. He’s certainly an apartment dweller, and he’s more likely than not to rent. He’s actually somewhat well-off, but not wealthy; he’s older and probably not in the best of health. He leads a fairly withdrawn, local life, with limited interest in public events.”
That’s exactly what Schwab and the WEF are trying to create with their 15 minute ghettos; building back better (for them) and denying ownership of anything to the “peasants” they intend to control.
Sad but beautiful description. I was a Whitehall civil servant once and thought I was doing my bit to improve the world. When I left in the mid noughties I had come to realise how incompetent, self-serving and deluded most of those who got to the top were. As others have said, all we can do is resist, develop grass-roots institutions (particularly for wellness and learning) where we can and watch the overbloated state implode.
Interesting that these Germans haven’t realised that their ideas don’t work, with the U turn on Coal. How muich will it take to do the same here, because Germany is (was) in a similar position the the UK with power availability. Plan are afoot for power cuts regularly this winter. They will kill thousands, but that appears not to matter.