Speaking of public.substack.com, they say there is evidence that three scientists engaged in “gain of function” lab at the Wuhan institute of virology were the first to be infected by Covid-19. Matt Taibbi also covers this story.

This narrative holds together logically for me. There is still the problem however that I don’t trust U.S.-based reporting about China. I’m not saying everything we hear is an outright lie, I am saying there is a whiff of propaganda in the air that taints every news story so it is hard to tell truth from half-truth.

Even if this is true, there is the question of whether the research was for civilian or military purposes and who funded it (some reporting suggests the U.S. government played a role). It’s hard for me to buy the idea that this was a bio-weapon because it doesn’t seem to have been a very good one. Is a good bioweapon one that initially did not spread all that fast and kills less than 1% of people it infects, skewed towards the elderly? And one that no vaccine was yet available to the party that supposedly created the bioweapon? If there is anything suspicious, it is that the U.S. government pretty much had the vaccine technology developed and just had to figure out how to commercialize and distribute it. Even though this seemed excruciatingly slow when you lived through it, similar processes in the past took decades that this time around were accomplished in a year or so.