German Secret Service: Yeah the Covid conspiracy theorists were right – Gript

According to recent reports in two major German newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit, German foreign intelligence suspected as early as 2020 that Covid came from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, putting it at 80-90 percent likelihood that that’s where the coronavirus in question came from.

And so, irrespective of anything else, those castigated at the time as conspiracy theorists for believing just such a thing seem to have been proven right once again, or their beliefs vindicated at the very least.

“Once again,” because there’s been a rolling wave of institutions and people in recent years admitting that which five years ago would have had them pegged as peddlers of misinformation – a most dangerous time to be doing so, when your every word and tweet, never mind breath, was attributed the power of altering the course of pandemic response adherence, and risked contributing to the death of someone, somewhere.

Then-FBI Director, Christopher Wray said over two years ago, at the start of 2023, that the FBI “has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”. For quite some time now, eh? That would probably take its suspicions back into the pandemic heyday.

Likewise, to criticise lockdowns, certainly in Ireland, was viewed by many in polite society as being akin to choosing to kill the vulnerable. Almost constantly, anything less than full compliance to the letter of the rapidly-changing law was portrayed as actively undermining “public health” and jeopardising the health system itself. This narrative, as critics pointed out, was egregiously one-sided, in that it didn’t seem to pay any heed to the obvious harms lockdowns were doing on far more levels than the physical, although that too.

Cue the post-pandemic era and that view has also been vindicated, one of the most significant contributions coming from Johns Hopkins, whose meta-analysis of lockdowns and their effects found that they “have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted”.’

Now obviously, in the spirit of those thankfully-distant times, I must confess that I’m no epidemiologist or public health expert, and so far be it from me to have the final word on the issue. But what I, like every reasonable person, can (and did) say is that these were never fringe views and should never have been treated as such. And yet they were, like so many others.

That phenomenon in particular, authorities of various kinds treating obviously reasonable positions as fringe and extremist, was supercharged during the pandemic, and it’s obvious why: public institutions were put to the test as never before in living memory, and many more people than usual found them wanting. What better way to discredit the detractors than to decry their views as dangerous and illegitimate? It can be no coincidence that it was also during the pandemic that the phrases misinformation and disinformation entered into the public lexicon like never before, fully seized upon by politicians and pundits alike.

The net effect of all of this was to mainstream a framing, like never before, of them vs us, establishment vs the people, the controllers vs their would-be subjects. That narrative, though many things have happened since then, has never gone away, and in fact has only grown.

How couldn’t it, when reports such as that with which I began make known that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office commissioned the aforementioned intelligence report, but didn’t publish it? Claims that it’s not incumbent upon political leaders to make known the contents of intelligence reports are somewhat undermined by the fact that Germans who espoused the view that Covid originated in a Chinese laboratory were being decried as conspiracy theorists, and worse, without protest from those who apparently knew better.

The Covid pandemic was a multi-faceted phenomenon, the full effects of which we’ll probably never understand, but what can be said is that it took a sledgehammer to the already weakening foundations of public trust and societal cohesion. I use weakening intentionally there, as I am a believer in the notion that Covid didn’t really introduce anything absolutely new into the modern world.

But without it, perhaps it would have taken until the 2030s or the 2040s to see the turbulence of the 2020s. No student of history would say that any particular happening is inevitable, but it can be reasonably concluded that the handling of the pandemic was also going to put a pep in decline’s step.