Covid's Origin Story

Two great thinkers weigh the evidence

At first, we were told that the SARS virus that causes Covid-19 jumped from an animal in a Wuhan wet market to a human. There was a fair bit of heated discussion around this but then, lo and behold, it became dogma because Trump dared to question this theory. He suggested that it might have come from The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab where they play a game called Gain of Function. In this game, scientists deliberately make a virus more virulent, more dangerous, more infective, just so they can study the results. All in the name of protecting you, of course.

But because the bad orange man had floated this idea, the corrupted MMM told us that it couldn’t be true. They went out of their way to make this idea suspect. But the speculation refused to die, so something needed to be done. The US government duly launched an ‘official inquiry’ and alas, they decided that they could not say with confidence what actually happened. They had suspicions that the Chinese did indeed have a lab leak at that Wuhan Institute and so infected the world, but because the Chinese helpfully yanked their database about the viruses being ‘studied’ at that lab, they would never really know for sure. And so, everybody went on with their Covid ruined lives and shelved this issue. But not for good. Like a certain virus, the Covid origin story just kept evolving and gosh, some weird people still wanted to know the Truth. Imagine that. And then Jordan Peterson decided to take it on.

I admit that for a while I stopped paying attention to JP because it was clear the man had suffered and wasn’t actually saying a lot of things that interested me. But that was yesterday. I am thrilled to see that JP has fully recovered and is now more brilliant, concise, and magisterial than ever. Especially when he is in conversation with someone from a different branch of science, Matt Ridley, who is possibly more brilliant than he is. This podcast is long and makes enormous intellectual leaps, but if you want to actually grapple with this story, I urge you to take the time and listen. Maybe in instalments, while ruminating on what was said. Heeeere’s Jordan and Matt!