In This House, We Believe Science Is Real - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
In This House, We Believe Science Is Real
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“We Believe” sign, Phoenix, Arizona, March 20, 2021 (Rosemarie Mosteller/Shutterstock.com)

The lab-leak hypothesis not only poses questions to an authoritarian regime unaccustomed to answering them but to a field whose metamorphosis from scholarly discipline to God replacement witnessed it become more comfortable with issuing declarative sentences than hearing interrogative ones.

In this house, we believe science is real.

“Could they have come from our lab?” Shi Zhengli told Scientific American she initially thought after hearing of a new coronavirus. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researcher, whose nickname, “Bat Woman,” stems from her passion for studying coronaviruses emanating from the cave-dwelling mammals, now harbors no such heretical thoughts. “I’m sure that I did nothing wrong,” she explained to the New York Times earlier this week about the origins of COVID-19. “So I have nothing to fear.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting gain-of-function experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” Zhengli insists. Observers long before the COVID-19 outbreak noted matter-of-factly the gain-of-function research undertaken at Wuhan. Still, many insist that a more logical explanation comes from human consumption of a bat (despite an aversion so strong to eating winged rodents that it extends to any animal that rhymes with it), or that the jump from bats to humans came through the intermediary of a wet market, a theory pushed by the Chinese government before its Centers for Disease Control disowned it.

In this house, we believe science is real.

“I don’t know how the world has come to this,” Zhengli wondered in a text to the Times, “constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

The outbreak starting in the same city that hosts the controversial laboratory, a U.S. intelligence report of three Wuhan researchers becoming so ill in November 2019 as to seek care, shocking footage showing bats inside the WIV contrary to the group’s denials, and the peculiar genetic fingerprint of the virus all suggest to some that man scapegoated bat by pinning the disease responsible for nearly four million lives lost on a villain out of a Bram Stoker novel. But the lab-leak supposition falls on the fact that people vocationally committed to the search for truth never lie, make mistakes, or engage in unethical laboratory practices, right?

In this house, we believe science is real.

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” Oliver Wendell Holmes opined in 1927’s Buck v. Bell, which affirmed the wave-of-the-future forced sterilization laws prevalent in a majority of U.S. states and boosted by research from the Supreme Court justice’s Harvard alma mater. “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

“The present study of untreated syphilis is of great importance from a scientific standpoint,” Raymond Vonderlehr, for years the leading figure behind the Tuskegee experiment and an early director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in persuading a World War II draft board to exclude a number of draftable black men from syphilis treatment. “It represents one of the last opportunities which the science of medicine will have to conduct an investigation of this kind.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

The Nobel committee awarded its prize for medicine to protester-turned-professor-turned-progressive-politician-turned-brain-scientist Antonio Egas Moniz in 1949 “for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy [i.e., lobotomy] in certain psychoses.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

The zeal to discover can expose the wise man as the fool if not tempered by morals and caution. But scientists these days are too smart — just ask them — to share Victor Frankenstein’s lament of “how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”

In this house, we believe science is real.

Daniel J. Flynn
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.   
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