In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the science community was right to openly wonder about the Wuhan labs next to the wet market where the disease took the world by storm. A Chinese government researcher had been arrested and found guilty of selling lab animals and everyone with any experience knew that a biosafety rating in America and in China were much different levels even if a the communist government slapped any number they wanted on there.

Suddenly, it became a political issue. A President who had been called xenophobic and racist for saying we should cut travel from China - the Mayor of New York City even told residents to go to a bar for one last drink because the dumb Republican was making him close everything down - was suddenly blamed for not doing enough. Trump ordered a hospital ship out of drydock to rush to Manhattan when COVID-19 cases shot up sharply after the Mayor's election campaign stunt caused so many new infections. He made the career bureaucrats at CDC stop telling hospitals they couldn't have a COVID-19 test unless they first proved the patient had COVID-19.

The CDC, nearly 90% Democrats, complied - and then sent faulty reagents so the tests were useless.



With Democratic operatives and their allies in journalism successfully flipping the narrative - 'Trump hated science and just needed an excuse to blame China' changed to 'Trump caused the pandemic and made it worse doing nothing' - other groups in government began to suppress any talk of China.

There was no pressure to investigate the labs. No concern, outside independent science media like us, that China had wiped out its database of coronavirus samples while denying people were denying even as crematoriums were suddenly running 24 hours a day. The World Health Organisation, which had weirdly denied there was a pandemic at all, was suddenly on board - except flatly refused to allow anyone in the group to allow even the possibility that it might have been a lab leak. And then eventually nodding along when China let them into the lab a year later and said the virus had been caused by America.



It was bizarre. Disease epidemiologists who, unlike their food and chemical anti-science evangelists, had  great deal of trust among the public, went from telling people that for nearly all it was a bad cold and like any respiratory disease we needed to insure that those who co-morbidities were protected, to advocating shutting down the country and telling anyone who didn't wear a mask on a walk they were risking our grandparents' lives. Democrats responded to the Trump administration telling FDA to get out of the way and let companies test a vaccine with more claims he was going to cost lives, this time by releasing an untested vaccine on Americans.

The political stuff worked. President Trump lost his re-election bid and suddenly after 25 years of being vaccine deniers, Democrats were overwhelmingly for them. Likely because President Biden took credit for the vaccine they had opposed a few months prior. Predictably, Republicans became against the vaccine their President had lauded as a breakthrough for the private sector if government would get out of the way. Anyone claiming to be the Party Of Evidence is selling you something, as it has always been.

Meanwhile, it was not really a secret that Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance had been getting money from the Obama administration and sending it to China, but it wasn't important enough for Republicans to care, especially when the experts inside government said gain-of-function research was important. And it is important. Yet paying China to do it...well, that was odd.

Eventually, I knew, and other independent people knew also, the truth would start to come out. And it did. Not only were there people in government protecting China from any potential scrutiny, they were overtly blocking details from coming out. A Congressional investigation - 'witch hunt' according to Democrats - found that Daszak was doing more than preaching calm in the face of panic, but was actively colluding to protect China. Perhaps to keep his involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology hidden.

The problem Democrats face in weaponizing special prosecutors and diseases is that eventually Republicans figure out how to do the same thing. Politicization of science, though, is the same as ever.