{"id":239851,"date":"2023-07-31T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=239851"},"modified":"2023-07-21T08:23:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-21T07:23:11","slug":"covids-origins-and-the-death-of-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/covids-origins-and-the-death-of-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid’s Origins and the Death of Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public releases the <\/em>Proximal Origin documents. What they show, and why they’re historic.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Racket News<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Jul 2023 – <\/em>Public <\/em>has just published the cache of communications of the scientists who penned the key article, The Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2<\/a>, <\/em>that was used to dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 was caused by a lab accident. Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, and the rest of the staff of Public <\/em>can\u2019t be commended enough for doing the hard work to get this material out \u2014 you can find it linked here<\/a> \u2014 and I strongly recommend that anyone with time read the docs from start to finish.<\/p>\n

If you read the documents up at Public <\/em>like a novel, and follow the chorus-like Slack exchanges between the four key scientists as a drama with a beginning, middle, and end, it\u2019s hard to miss the brutal lesson. Four people whose job was to divine truth through scientific analysis were waylaid by social and political considerations that you can see attacking each of the characters with ferocity, even in their little digital haven of a private chat. With everything on the line, and millions of lives at stake, they were not only unable in the end to say what they really thought, but as my partner Walter Kirn points out, they joined up with a mechanism that worked to suppress and stamp out the very thoughts they themselves first had.<\/p>\n

The problem that\u2019s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri\u2019s The Revolt of the Public<\/a>, <\/em>is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What\u2019s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.<\/p>\n

As these documents show, however, we can\u2019t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it\u2019s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can\u2019t unsee it. That\u2019s what these scientists were risking when they played around with a lie this big: everything. They may not have been evil exactly \u2014 \u201cmore Three Stooges <\/em>than Ocean\u2019s Eleven\u201d <\/em>is how one scientist put it to me \u2014 but their bumbling inability to find their consciences under pressure in the first months of 2020 might end up having lasting consequences, for society and science. In any case, conceding that in media we get lost in the moment a lot and often think what\u2019s happening today is far more important than what happened yesterday, what they have over at Public<\/em> is historic stuff. I hope you find time to discover it for yourselves.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Matthew C. Taibbi is a <\/i>U.S. author<\/em>, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for <\/i>Rolling Stone, author of several books, a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary<\/i>, co-host of <\/i>Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on <\/i>Substack.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 racket.news<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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