A Memorial

This marks a year from the death of George Floyd, in that same year 965 others who were killed at the hands of Police, some known some not. We need to know their names as well.

And with that I will say that Police Reform in some States has moved forward while the federal reform promised has stalled as the issues surrounding the rise of gun violence, crime and physical assaults on people of color and of faith has risen as well, making everyone still angry, still afraid and still looking for answers.

I don’t think anyone in this country reads anything. I have said that my loathing of Millennials leads me to have a cognitive bias towards that Generation as they are very demanding of safe spaces and in mandating change yet few of them seem to have ever read a history book, picked up a newspaper or read a journal that covers said issues in detail. To note I was discussing Feminism and a young millennial declared Camile Paglia, her Feminist idol, (a farce given her views she is not), so when I referred her to an current article about Camille Paglia, who is now Trans and still not a Feminist, (odd) said: “That is a lot of words could you just sum it up for me with the important part.” I refused and said, “Try reading, you may learn something.” Not the first time I have had that discussion with that group, proffering articles and magazines and knowing that they are tossed aside upon my departure. The young man keen on getting into my pants was discussing this very issue of Police reform and I gave him an article from the NYT to review. He never discussed it and then wondered why I was not ever going anywhere with him. Truly what would our convos other than him touching my hair or commenting about me getting laid would we have? Oh yeah the part about what he wants on his sammie after he is done servicing me.

And with that the barometer of how I feel about sex and sexuality is my own and I would never presume, just like my own Atheism, that anyone has to agree with me nor even understand its history, but just treat me with respect and know that I have come to these places with full knowledge and time spent working through it. This folks is what is called “my truth.” And for many all of this is an ongoing learned process through encountering others not like you, reading and more importantly taking the time to do the work. Name me three millennials who do. Yeah, me neither. So the protests for George Floyd, were in my mind for all the thousands who have come before and since.

And with that we now are coming to day 438 of Covid Theater, the drama never ends even as we begin to resume to normal. There will be mass evictions I suspect and despite the demand for employees we are seeing fewer return to the work force by choice due to the low wages and crappy working conditions that existed prior to the pandemic. The exodus from the cities will continue and the debate about a centralized workplace will also be examined as this is not simply a light switch that turns back on. Even Biden is considering making some Government positions to permanently remain off site. Again he never ceases to amaze me each day.

And what about Covid itself, will we ever get the answers and the truth about the virus? Yes and no. We still have quite a large failure on the part of the Trump Administration to acknowledge their failures regarding this among many, don’t look for a January 6th commission anytime soon, so it will largely become a project I suspect for scholars to analyze with regards to the mistakes and severity of it all in decades to come. But the real truth, the origin of the virus itself is coming to light. I early on communicated with a Biology Professor who was sure that it was not Zooinotic and that it was an airborne flu-like virus that was almost random in the way it affected individuals who contracted it and at that point they were unclear as to the length and distance it traveled and remained in air. Since then we have decreased the space between people from 6 to 3 and the time frame was once considered 30 minutes now due to variants sits at 15. The CDC has finally acknowledged it is airborne and admitted well into the pandemic it was not tactile, that asymptomatic transmission is possible and yes folks being outdoors is the least likely way to contract Covid. Poor ventilation, air circulation, veracity of the virus in the host and close, prolonged contact is the source which again months spent on cleaning and other bullshit means, such as temp taking and erecting barriers did nothing to actually STOP THE SPREAD.

There is now clear information coming out that the lab in Wuhan as early as November 2019 had cases of two workers with the same symptomatic illness and in turn hospitalized. This is from Pro Publica’s research and collection of information regarding Covid.

Early in the pandemic, President Donald Trump and some scientists speculated about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created and accidentally released by Chinese virologists doing some sort of research. That hypothesis was quickly and vehemently dismissed by the scientific establishment, which noted that the genetic makeup of the virus showed no signs of human tampering. I encouraged several ProPublica reporters last year to poke around on a slightly different theory: What if the beginnings of the pandemic were the result of a lab accident in which scientists studying the characteristics of coronaviruses inadvertently became infected with a wild virus and spread it to others. Lab leaks are far more common than one might think and have occurred in the U.S. elsewhere. Our reporting turned up some officials who shared that suspicion. But none could offer any direct evidence that it had happened. This situation is among the least favorable arenas for investigative reporting — a debate in which all sides are drawing conclusions from minimal evidence released by a foreign government renowned for its tight control over information. The credibility of the lab leak theory wasn’t helped by the breathless coverage by Trump-supporting media outlets that took as given China’s culpability. We moved on, but, partly based on my experience reporting on germ warfare, I continued to believe that a lab accident was one possibility among many that would explain the pandemic’s origins. In the year since, theories about the virus originating in a lab have gained traction, even among those who initially doubted it. A growing number of scientists feel China was less than transparent in its recent dealings with a visiting World Health Organization team that was attempting to gather evidence on the beginnings of the pandemic. In a May 14 letter to Science magazine, 17 prominent researchers from around the world called on the WHO to look more closely at the lab theory. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” they wrote. “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.” Days later, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, one of America’s most respected epidemiologists, added his name to the letter. “There just aren’t any answers yet, one way or the other, about how the coronavirus that’s now ravaging the world began,” Lipsitch told WBUR, a Boston radio station. “What we are saying is that the existing evidence has not ruled out a laboratory origin, nor has it ruled out a natural origin. And there’s really no positive evidence, either. It’s just pretty much a lack of evidence right now.” The absence of facts fueled a frenzy of internet speculation, a fair amount of which has focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a government-funded lab. To conspiracy theorists, it cannot have been a coincidence that China happened to be doing research on coronaviruses just a few miles from where the pandemic broke out. The head of the institute, Dr. Shi Zheng-li, reminded me of many of the dedicated scientists I interviewed for the book “Germs.” Press accounts portray her as someone deeply committed to the battle against microbes. After China was hit by the SARS coronavirus in 2003, Shi led teams of researchers into caves to capture and take samples from bats that might be harboring more dangerous strains of the disease. When an inexplicable outbreak of pneumonia struck Wuhan in December 2019, she worried that a coronavirus had somehow escaped her lab. She told Scientific American that she frantically reviewed records about the genetic makeup of her samples. Li said she was enormously relieved when she learned that SARS-CoV-2 was only 96% similar to its nearest relative at the institute — decades of evolution away from a match. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said in her interview with Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.” The Chinese came up with the now well-known theory for the origin of SARS-Cov-2. It began in bats and jumped to an intermediate animal that was sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Questions quickly arose about that narrative. Chinese authorities had destroyed all of the animals at the wet market soon after the outbreak began, and researchers have never been able to identify the intermediary animal that transmitted the virus to humans. Then, the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper that poked another hole in the wet market theory. It reported that nearly one-third of the people initially treated in Wuhan hospitals, 13 of the first 41 patients, had no link to the market or to one another. The uncertainty about the origins of the pandemic have only deepened over the past year. More facts emerged about Shi’s training, including that she worked with scientists who spliced together coronaviruses, creating the same sort of chimera viruses the Soviet germ warriors were experimenting with back in the 1990s. The 2016 paper documenting that research is now a central element in some of the online conspiracy theories. It had what turned out to be a prescient title. “SARS-like” coronaviruses, it warned, were “poised for human emergence.” The likely source? Chinese bats. As ProPublica President Dick Tofel likes to say, investigative reporting always begins with a question, not an answer. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. intelligence reports that three members of the Wuhan institute had become sick in November 2019 and required hospital care for unspecified illnesses. The head of the institute, Shi, has said that all of her lab workers tested negative for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, a result some analysts viewed with skepticism given the prevalence of the virus in Wuhan. The history of germ weapons shows that even eminent scientists can misread the evidence. In the early 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist, disproved allegations that Hmong anti-Communists in Laos had been attacked by a mysterious Soviet chemical weapon known as “yellow rain.” Meselson and a colleague’s inquiry showed it was bee feces. On the other hand, Meselson backed the Soviet cover story that an outbreak of anthrax in the town of Sverdlovsk was due to consumption of contaminated meat. It turned out to be an accident at an anthrax factory. After the fall of Communism, Meselson was allowed to investigate in Russia and concluded that it was indeed a leak from a weapons facility. So where does that leave us? As I’ve watched the theories about the pandemic’s origin wax and wane, I believe more strongly than ever that reporters should begin their research agnostic and remain skeptical as new facts come to light. No story is ever really over. Certainly not this one.

We are a long way from ever knowing the full truth behind the origins of the virus and if it was intended to be a biological weapon, but never in the history of the globe has a virus done this much damage to as many countries at a single moment as Covid has.

I was reading Salaman Rushdie in the Post and he said this: We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

As I wrote in the post Chrysalis, I am not sure as we emerge from our cocoon’s we are able to fully grasp the seriousness of this pandemic and for those who are still afraid they will continue to be. Those who never took it seriously, never will and so on. I am at odds with most people in the best of times so my contrarian nature found myself living my best life during the early days of the pandemic. Perhaps because I was armed with scientific facts and a knowledge of history, and a well developed sense of personal responsibility I thrived. It was only in the waning days of winter with the endless cold that I became despondent, and with that dropped my “No Compromises” mantra to try to make friends with a Millennial! What was I thinking? But today that is behind me and the light is ahead of me. I believe in the power of science but not of medicine as those are two different worlds to me. The Medical Industrial Complex once again proved to me that it is as dangerous and deadly as any virus and that they are staffed and manned by incompetents whose idea of care is charging more and making you believe that you need it. This is one thing that too must change to go forward. But we shall.