Mick Hartley

Some good points from Juliet Samuel in the Times this morning, on the Covid lab leak theory and the (successful) attempts by leading virologists to shut down debate early on:

Sometimes, I do a thought experiment. What would have happened in January 2020 if the world had quickly become aware of the real possibility that the deadly new cold virus circulating in China, rather than being of natural origin, had been engineered and leaked from a virology lab?

Perhaps you think, naively, that nothing would have played out differently. Humans, however, are fearful, emotional and highly moralistic creatures. As the astronomer and novelist Fred Hoyle once put it: “Lives lost through an ‘act of God’ are regretted … but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency.”

My guess is that governments and populations would have reacted far more quickly to the prospect of a potential bioweapon heading our way, making earlier and more vigorous attempts to contain or avoid it and being less likely to downplay it as hopefully just a bad cold. Diplomatically, the Chinese government would have been in the fight of its life, in which its malign and untrustworthy nature would have become indisputably obvious.

Would we still be buying Chinese phones, cars and solar panels on such a scale and welcoming its scientists into our universities? Would prestigious lords and bankers and ministers still be advocating loudly for Beijing and its interests? I doubt it.

But none of this happened. Why? Largely because a coterie of prominent scientists in the US and UK made it their business to kill the lab leak theory with as much force and speed as possible. Most shockingly, they did so even though in private many of them agreed it was entirely feasible.

In this they were aided by prominent British scientific journals such as The Lancet, which published a hugely influential letter from scientists in February 2020 denouncing a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”. The journal then took 16 months to acknowledge a major conflict of interest by one of its key signatories. In the meantime, the lab theory was consigned by most experts and governments to the realm of crackpot misinformation.

None of the people involved in this debacle have lost their jobs or even their respectability. Far from it: this week the Financial Times published a glowing profile of Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, which made only a glancing reference to the journal’s Covid activism. Horton was seemingly not even asked about the matter.

He boasted that, because of his great financial acumen, The Lancet’s corporate owner gives him the “editorial freedom” to pursue an unabashedly political agenda. It might have been interesting context to know that in 2015 Horton received a “Friendship Award” from the Chinese government, that in 2017 he wrote a bizarre column to mark Xi Jinping’s address to the Chinese Communist Party congress in which he stated that “medicine has a lot to learn from Marx”, and that The Lancet has a substantial presence in China.

Lancet editor Richard Horton, besides that February 2020 letter, has a long history:

In May last year [2020], its editor-in-chief Richard Horton appeared on the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television to praise how ‘tremendously decisively’ the Chinese Communist party had handled the pandemic. He also penned multiple editorials about China, including one entitled ‘Covid-19 and the Dangers of Sinophobia’. This did mention ‘the case against China’, including ‘the repression of the Uighur people’ and ‘belligerence towards Taiwan’. But it went on to write these off as mere ‘perceived encroachments on liberties’, concluding that, essentially, we should all just get along: ‘a pandemic is a moment for conciliation, respect, and honesty between friends.’…

Alas, some of the most famous stories of scientific fraud have originated at the Lancet during Horton’s tenure as editor.

The best-known is, of course, that of Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor who managed to get an almost entirely faked paper on autism and the MMR vaccine published in the Lancet in 1998. It wasn’t retracted for 12 years, all the while allowing the worst anti-vaxxers to claim that their ideas had been taken seriously by a prestigious journal.

No less disturbing is the case of Paolo Macchiarini, the flamboyant surgeon who was apparently able to transplant artificial tracheas into human patients. Many of those patients ended up dead, the operations a dangerous failure, but Macchiarini claimed in the Lancet (and elsewhere) that the surgery had been a success.

Other Lancet scandals haven’t concerned outright fraud, but highly questionable research that nonetheless got through the filter. Critics of the Iraq war were re-energised when, in 2006, the journal published a paper estimating that more than 650,000 excess deaths had been caused by the war and subsequent occupation. This seemed almost unbelievable, and indeed other studies found a far lower toll. The authors of the Lancet study were heavily criticised for their methodology — surveying specific parts of Iraqi cities that would have likely had higher tolls, thus inflating the figures — as well as for failing to be open and transparent about important aspects of the research.

Also:

He published a letter in Lancet in 2014 from a number of pro-Palestinian activists which the Israeli Ministry of Health characterised as “bordering on blood libel". Some of the letter’s authors were later revealed to have links to antisemitic groups. Two had shared a video of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, railing against Jews and Israel. One author had forwarded a message claiming that Jews and Zionists were behind the Boston marathon bombings. Horton announced in response that while he “deeply regretted” the “completely unnecessary polarisation” the letter caused, he stopped short of condemning the letter itself, and kept it up on The Lancet’s website. And refused to publish a rebuttal. In fact, as shown here, the Lancet under Horton has quite a history of publishing anti-Israel propaganda.

Back to Samuel:

Unfortunately, the love-in with China is not the only form of rot that is plaguing science. There is also its enthusiastic embrace of extreme progressive ideologies, in which research is seen to be an activity that should happen in the service of “social justice”.

As university administrators have embraced the all-encompassing ideology of victim “intersectionality”, science has been caught in the net. Bizarre political language (in which women become “bodies with vaginas”, as The Lancet infamously put it in 2021), un-meritocratic hiring practices, race workshops in place of lab work and the slow icing out of colleagues who don’t conform to the prevailing fashions are all diluting the claims of scientists to be the Olympian guardians of truth.

Ah yes, the Lancet again – jumping, predictably enough, on the gender band-wagon.