Left Wing Media Refuses To Accept COVID Reality
It's been five years since the start of the COVID pandemic, and the left wing media refuses to accept reality.
You'd think, after years of "experts" being embarrassed and discredited in every conceivable way, that their media partners would have developed some level of humility as to their original assumptions. For example, putting their unshakable faith in people like Anthony Fauci on masks, COVID vaccines, school closures and the lab leak. The same Fauci who now claims he did "nothing wrong," after causing unspeakable damage to society, children, and trust in the medical profession.
But those who work in legacy media outlets have no humility, capacity for rationality, or self-awareness. And that's how you get the latest in a long line of thorough reality denial from the Los Angeles Times.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
LA Times Columnist Can't Handle That His Political Party Was Wrong
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times has been one of the most extreme, and wrong, commentators on COVID. A business columnist whose political ideology is all consuming, Hiltzik grew famous during the pandemic for his malicious opinions.
You might remember the column from 2022 he wrote, headlined: "Column: Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary."
This column, written after it was abundantly clear that vaccinated people were contracting COVID, getting severely ill, and in fact, dying from the virus, contains this phrase in its URL: "why-shouldnt-we-dance-on-the-graves-of-anti-vaxxers."
In this disgraceful, anti-reality article, Hiltzik said that mocking those who died with COVID is acceptable, because they didn't listen to his delusional advice.
"It may be not a little ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind," He wrote.
"But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled."
This is not a sane person with a grasp on reality. And he's back for more.
News broke this week that the CIA had assessed with "low confidence" that SARS-CoV-2 had leaked from the Wuhan lab. This assessment has been shared by the FBI and other government agencies, along with any number of other scientists and researchers who've examined the virus and its unique characteristics not found in nature. While not necessarily new, and short on details, it was further confirmation that the most likely source of the pandemic was gain-of-function research in Wuhan conducted in unsafe conditions resulting in a lab leak.
It also broke Hiltzik, yet again.
He's back with a new article, lying and misrepresenting yet again because his political party was wrong.
"Not a speck of evidence has emerged showing that the COVID virus leaked from a Chinese lab. So why does a just-released CIA statement claim that it did? Blame politics," the subheading says.
There are, of course, many, MANY specks of evidence showing that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. The only reason that this wasn't widely accepted and acknowledged in 2020 is because scientists and left-wing politicians were concerned about jeopardizing their funding and connections to China. Ironically, we can blame politics for it taking this long to acknowledge the lab leak.
He went further, saying it's "…certain that the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab will persist, despite the absence of any evidence to support it."
Hiltzik blames Trump, naturally, and Republicans for following facts and evidence instead of bowing to his political party.
"As I've written before, this fact-free claim periodically receives a shot of life-extending plasma from credulous news organizations, congressional Republicans, and former and current Trump acolytes," he says.
His obvious paranoia about being proven wrong extends to why he doesn't trust the CIA's conclusion. Because they didn't spell out, in exact detail, for simpletons like him, why they made that assessment.
"To begin with, there were no ‘details’ in the CIA statement explaining the basis for its conclusion. The CIA didn't offer any evidence or explain what prompted its assessment, or reassessment.
Let's be clear about something: No scientifically valid evidence has ever been produced to support the theory that the COVID virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory. All that exists is conjecture, innuendo and speculation, most of it based on the circumstance that the first COVID cases were identified at a wildlife market in Wuhan, miles from a government virology lab."
This is nonsense. Fact-free fiction. He wasn't done.
"But no evidence has ever emerged of an outbreak in that lab or its vicinity, while copious epidemiological evidence exists for its outbreak at the Huanan market, where people bought and sold critters known to be susceptible to COVID," he writes.
Completely false. There is no epidemiological evidence for its outbreak at the Huanan market, and copious evidence for it being connected to the Wuhan lab. Even Ralph Baric, a scientist at the University of North Carolina, who works on coronaviruses and has extensive experience with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said there is no possibility that the Huanan market could be the source of the outbreak, because the genealogical tree points to an origin well before the market outbreak.
As researcher Matt Ridley explained, "There was indeed a surge of cases in and around such a market in Wuhan in December 2019. But even Ralph Baric, the world’s leading coronavirologist, dismisses this argument: ‘People who say that those were the first cases, no chance. The family trees of the virus’s variants make clear that the first infection almost certainly happened much earlier, some time between July and November 2019.'"
Not to mention that there is only one animal species who regularly traveled from where these viruses are typical located back to Wuhan. Humans.
"These kinds of viruses are found a thousand miles away from Wuhan," Ridley continued. "That’s the distance of London to Rome. We know of only one animal species that regularly travelled that route, carrying lots of viruses. That animal was the scientists themselves. In the 15 years before the pandemic, they collected over 16,000 bat viruses from all over southern China and south-east Asia and brought them a long way north to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak were in the freezer of the WIV."
Scientists in the Wuhan lab were also conducting risky gain-of-function experiments in unsafe conditions, as repeatedly pointed out by western researchers, who complained privately but refused to speak up publicly. Can't risk angering China, can we?
The Wuhan lab in particular also quite specifically spelled out, as we've now learned from EcoHealth Alliance documents, that they intended to use gain-of-function to create a virus like SARS-CoV-2.
Hiltzik is purposefully ignorant of these facts, because acknowledging the lab leak means accepting that the political left was wrong. That the scientists who came out in favor of natural origin did so for their own selfish purposes, not because they were "following the science," as incompetent frauds like Hiltzik religiously repeat. He has no other choice but to contiously appeal to his ideology's authority, as he does again shortly afterwards.
"As 41 biologists, immunologists, virologists and physicians observed in August in the Journal of Virology, the unfounded lab-leak hypothesis ‘stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2,’ the virus that causes COVID."
This is what it's all about: Hiltzik and his political partners in the scientific community are obsessed with protecting themselves, their profession, and their party. It's not about finding the truth, it's about ensuring that their research funding continues, that Fauci and his Democratic Party aren't forced to admit they lied about the lab leak, and that they can maintain their unearned sense of superiority as science followers.
Hiltzik is just a symptom of a broader underlying cause: a contempt for facts and reality that make his party look bad. And mocking his incompetence and angrily prolific reality denial is ghoulish, yes, but absolutely necessary.