Chinese Military Scientist Applied for Patent For Covid Vaccine Before the Official Acknowledgement That Covid Existed -- and Died "Mysteriously" Weeks Later
Plus: Kill The Cathedral

Trust the experts. As you would a saint, or a living God.

Chinese military scientist 'filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine BEFORE the virus was declared a global pandemic and worked closely with 'bat woman' at Wuhan institute'

* Scientist Yusen Zhou reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine on behalf of China's People's Liberation Army on February 24 2020

* China had only declared human transmission of the virus five weeks prior

* News that Zhou filed a patent for a vaccine so quickly suggests Chinese officials may have known about the virus much earlier than they admitted

* Zhou is also said to have worked closely with the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology

* Some scientists have theorized that the virus was created inside that lab before it inadvertently leaked out

* Zhou died in mysterious circumstances in May 2020 - less than three months after filing the patent

A Chinese military scientist with ties to the United States reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine well before the disease was declared a global pandemic.

Yusen Zhou, who worked for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), lodged the paperwork on behalf of the Chinese political party on February 24 2020, according to The Australian newspaper.

That date was just five weeks after China first confirmed human transmission of the coronavirus.

Zhou is also said to have 'worked closely' with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including Shi Zhengli - the deputy director of the lab who is famous for her research on coronavirus in bats.

Their relationship is likely to strengthen speculation that the virus leaked from the lab and that China was aware that it was spreading between humans long before they alerted the international community.

Zhou mysteriously died less than three months after he filed the patent. The New York Post claims his death was only reported in one Chinese media report, despite the fact he was one of the country's most prominent scientists.

Zhou did not kill himself.

Interesting pushback from Deplorable Jay Guevera:

124 This patent application thing is a nothing burger until and unless the published application adds a LOT more damning information. (It hasn't been published yet; I checked.)

The entire world now is "first-to-file" (the US used to be "first-to-invent," which was changed by the "America Invents Act), and so there is a strong incentive to file a patent application at the first serious glimmering of an idea. Waiting until you work out the details is a recipe for losing priority to someone else.
Posted by: Deplorable Jay Guevara

In other words, just file any old patent filled with bullshit and guesses that might give you some legal pretext to sue upon later, huh?

Here's a very good essay about "The New Clerisy," prosperous NPR liberals (including NeverTrump-type liberal Republicans) as well as doltish, unsuccessful aspirants to the educated, monied class, who have festishized a Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy level of understanding of science into a new, intolerant, angry religion.

And Anthony Fauci is the current pope who cannot be allowed to fall.

Some time during the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats began proudly calling themselves "the party of science."

...

This new science-based identity was congruous with the ascendance of a key demographic within the Democratic coalition, one that would be instrumental in electing and re-electing President Barack Obama. Prosperous, educated professionals, once a reliable, if liberal, Republican voting bloc, had for some time been shifting their partisan allegiance. As the GOP was increasingly drawing in rural and blue collar voters and, accordingly, elevating cultural issues like guns and religion that were imperative to them, the Democrats were burnishing their appeal to urban and suburban college graduates by embracing free trade, emphasizing identity-based issues like abortion and gay rights, and proudly espousing their commitment to expert-driven, technocratic governance. This rebranding from a workers' party to the party of sober, rational, informed wonkiness flattered these new Democratic voters’ self-conception.

Today, in the age of biological and ecological emergency, the Democrats' scientific brand has taken center stage again, reflected in an assertion that has become something of a mantra: "I believe in science." The line is recited by presidential candidates and printed on face masks. It was uttered by the first American to receive the Covid vaccine after FDA emergency use authorization. It had its very own annual march during the Trump years. It’s enshrined in the oath of the "In This Household We Believe" lawn sign.

To political fellow travelers, its message is unmistakable: it's a declaration of the intellectual maturity and independence from groupthink of the left-of-center. Yet in reality, it has come to indicate the opposite. The Democratic Party has become the party not of science, but of fealty to the clerics of science. "I believe in science" has come to mean, "I do not question expert authority," which is as antithetical to the scientific spirit as you can get. The more gravely the line is intoned, the more Orwellian it becomes.

...

The modern scientific research industry is like a cross between a giant perpetual motion machine and a game of musical chairs. Scientific research is underwritten, in large part, by a steady stream of government funding. To keep the lights on in their labs, scientists need to tap into that stream. They do so by designing research projects that conform to whatever the government prioritizes at any particular moment.... The successful scientist is the one who is particularly adept at writing fundable grant applications pegged to some politically salient research objective, and then generating laboratory results that make some sort of incremental progress toward that objective to justify a renewal of that grant funding in the next cycle.

...

Anthony Fauci is the Platonic form of the scientist-technician-bureaucrat, which is why he has held his position as one of the top scientists in the nation for decades and through multiple administrations. As a creature of both science and politics, he has made himself indispensable as an interface between the two worlds and as the individual best positioned to mold the former to suit the needs of the latter. After 9/11, he transformed NIH into the agency at the front line of defending America against the imminent threat of jihadis armed with weaponized plague viruses. He championed "gain-of-function" research, which essentially meant building those superviruses before the terrorists did, the better to find vaccines for them. And once the Islamic terrorist threat faded a bit from our collective memory, he re-tooled this heftily-funded research into humanity's front line of defense against Mother Nature, "the worst bioterrorist." Unfortunately for Fauci, in the process, he may have -- oops! -- created one of the biggest pandemics in human history.

Whoops!

Whoopsie!

A fun article from The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, worrying that if Fauci and the experts turn out to have been wrong about covid's origins, the pillars of the political religion called "Sciencism" (or The Cult of the Experts) will be razed to the ground.

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. "Respect science," admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called "populism."

But these days the consensus doesn't consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come -- not from "populism" at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

...

What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch "norms," the "intelligence community," the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

...

Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

...

The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible -- that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith -- as agreed upon by experts.

***

If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began -- that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost -- there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are "too big to fail," mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 -- all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they're doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

You can drop the ifs. The lab leak hypothesis is the lab leak fact.

Ben Domenech: Biden and Pelosi don't have the real power in the country.

"The Cathedral," as Michael Malice named it* -- the loose but vicious conspiracy of prosperous upper-class liberals and the "expert" cult they worship, as well as the permanent bureaucratic government (and have no doubt, every bureaucrat thinks of himself as an expert) -- has the real power.

I feel like Andy McCarthy should be vouching for the integrity and honesty of Peter Daszack and Shi Zengli any moment now.

I mean, that's all this fucker does. He asks, "But did they get good grades at Dartmouth?" and if the answer is yes, he, like all other "expert" bureaucrats, swears for the honor of his fellow tribal cultist.

* Bourbon Chicken points out that Mencius Moldbug first named the Cathedral. I think he's right. Malice has popularized it since.

Plus: Kill The Cathedral&bodytext=Trust the experts. As you would a saint, or a living God. Chinese military scientist 'filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine BEFORE the virus was declared a global pandemic and worked closely with 'bat woman' at Wuhan institute' *...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 02:06 PM

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