Today really just one photo and a bit more words. The virus news made me first gasp and then study the matter.

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I was astonished, to put it mildly, when I found out a few days after the fact (thanks to Suzanne) that now the public opinion is that the virus indeed escaped from the lab. Funny, not funny that.

First I had a look at the documentary “76 Days”, which is how long the Wuhan lockdown lasted. As you can imagine, it is immersive and not an easy, but important viewing. It concentrates on one hospital and does not go into the why. No time for that.

Then I went to the source. It was the article by Nicholas Wade in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (not my usual reading matter) that made the world pay attention.

Not that the many who suffer, including those in India who recovered from Covid-19 but were then hit by the terrible black fungus necrosis, nor indeed all the dead care who opened the Pandora’s box – people or nature (and just like that we stopped being nature) – but it’s important to determine it for all the rest of us.

My poem is entirely made up of sentences and phrases from the article, including the title and the introductory quotation, only the last line is mine. Thank you, Nicholas Wade. The truth is palpable.

(If you wish to learn more, here is a recent debate with the author and the editor-in-chief.)

On the Right Track

                                                           “Truth is the daughter not of authority but time.”
                                                                                                            ~Francis Bacon

Coronaviruses –  
you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily.

Humanized mice?
Infectious clone technology?

In vitro and in vivo infection experiments?
Spillover potential?

This work never should have been funded 
and never should have been performed.

But the case, however substantial, 
falls short of proof.

Evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.

Evolution is always producing results 
that may seem unlikely
but in fact are not.

A bristling array of implausibilities,
outright false 
or designed to misdirect and mislead.

Fruitless run-around.
Pure baloney.

Why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, 
and its cousin viruses don’t?

Virologists around the world have been playing with fire.
But the power to create new viruses was too tempting.

Anyone who rocks the boat runs the risk.
Maybe good behavior is rewarded.
 
“If this research was so dangerous, 
why did you fund it, 
and on our territory too?”

A Wuhan lab 
cooking up novel viruses 
of maximal danger 
in unsafe conditions
could eventually displace 
the ideological insistence 
that whatever Trump said 
can’t be true.

But all that is a story for another time.
Readers will form their own opinion. 

Did we do anything right?

In response to Patrick Jennings’ Pic and a Word Challenge #273: Right

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This day in my blogging history

• 2014: Before the beginning of years

  There came to the making of man

  Time, with a gift of tears;

  Grief, with a glass that ran; (By Algernon Charles Swinburne. Read on)

  

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