Noam Chomsky and DNI

Not that Noam Chomsky and DNI have much in common.  Just they have all commented on COVID-19.  Noam Chomsky has written or been interviewed extensively, often at https://truthout.org/.  For someone at 91 with a frail appearance recently, it is remarkable he still possesses a sharp mind and solid grasp of recent developments.  There are a couple of errors and simplifications, which have no effects on his reasoning and conclusions.  Better to read his words than here.

AP reports that The US intelligence (DNI) concluded COVID-19 was not man-made (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-intelligence-agencies-conclude-coronavirus-not-manmade_n_5eab0c2dc5b6adfb2d786592).  It is no scientific value why this is even a topic.  There has never been any evidence COVID-19 was man-made, and ample that it was natural.  And then as a drowning man clinging onto a sinking ship, DNI said it was still checking if the virus was leaked from a lab.  Since all known bat CoVs are quite different, the lab must have captured tons of bats without publishing anything for years.  If that were the case, and assuming leaks, which is by itself an extremely low possibility, we should have had many CoV outbreaks already.  And if what most researchers are correct, between bats and humans there is an intermediary mammal host, maybe a pangolin, then it is more comically to think lab studying bats also has a pangolin or any other exotic animal in it.  The only thing “linking” COVID-19 to a lab is there is a lab 13 km from the market where most of the first cases could be traced to.  But if one applies the same criterion, plenty of other infectious diseases, like flu, AIDS, etc, can be linked to labs, universities, and research institutes nearby as well.  Searching “HIV man-made” will yield plenty of results, but it doesn’t mean it should be taken seriously.

How COVID-19 started is a scientific question which can take years to answer, if ever.  A recent chain of transmission in the Heilongjiang Province, China, might be telling.  There, a patient, who got it from someone else, went to two hospitals for a different condition, and infected directly or indirectly over 50 people.  It is the biggest outbreak in China in April.  The origin was believed to be a student coming back from the US, who had no symptoms, tested repeatedly RNA negative, but later Ab positive.  So the cluster cases around the Wuhan market in Dec 2019 could happen similarly, when someone infected many people by pure chance. 

But how the virus became what it was is another, separate question.  A likely scenario is humans got a similar CoV from bats or pangolin or something else.  A while or years later it evolved to become the COVID-19 virus, and after countless rounds of transmission, who knows when and where, a carrier fatefully went to the market in Wuhan.  Most victims have no or mild symptoms similar to cold and flu, so without the market connection, during the height of a cold season, it would be hard to identify a new disease.  So the market might not actually mean anything in terms of COVID-19 origin, just like the aforementioned hospitals.

The continuous attention to the Wuhan lab serves only political purposes and is a testament of how the populace is constantly being manipulated by the media and powerful.   As Isaac Asimov said: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  Not exclusive to the US, other places like China are not immune, either.  Only the extents and circumstances vary.