Flopsweat Of Paranoia

The WaPo runs down three "conspiracy theories" about the virus that have circulated primarily in conservative media.  The first theory - that some of my students threw at me back in late January and early February - is that Covid-19 was produced in a military lab and released on purpose.  Missing from this is any explanation of why the Chinese military would want to destroy their own economy.

The second theory is perhaps more plausible, that it escaped from a lab by accident. This could have happened, but there's simply no evidence for it.  The final statement is true, that China hid information about the virus early on. The latter two will likely be Trump's attempt to deflect criticism of the extraordinary death toll in the United States. There very well may have been a lab in Wuhan studying what we now call Covid-19.  There's no evidence of it, but we need to study those viruses, for reasons that should be pretty damned apparent now.  Of course, if they were studying the virus and it escaped, they would - you know - have a bunch of information about the virus because they were studying it.

China trying to hide what happened is a phenomenon we are seeing from all sorts of authoritarian regimes. Putin was trying to bluff his way through it, Iran's death toll is almost certainly a lie. These countries and others are used to lying to their people, and have the apparatus to do so. Trump has Fox and OANN and the sycophancy of one of the two major political parties. That's not nothing.  But he can't control the NY state health department. He can't silence doctors the way China silenced the whistleblowing doctor from Wuhan.

The economy continues to crater. The virus might be levelling off, but that only tempts people to reopen the economy too soon, which could have disastrous results.  Trump and the GOP will have to train fire against someone else to hide their own culpability, and China will be the likely target. Some of it will be accurate and a small bit will be deserved.  But ultimately the virus came here from Europe.  And there's no escaping facts at this time.