Trotskyites and The Wuhan Lab Leak

The World Socialist Website (WSWS) is a communist advocacy organization whose articles are frequently republished by Google News. One might wonder why Google News considers the WSWS newsworthy, given that the Trotskyist movement is a branch of Marxist socialism based on the ideas of Leon Trotsky. From their website:

The WSWS is the online publication of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its affiliated sections in the Socialist Equality Parties around the world.
The standpoint of this website (WSWS) is one of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system. Its aim is the establishment of world socialism. It maintains that the vehicle for this transformation is the international working class, and that in the 21st century the fate of working people, and ultimately mankind as a whole, depends upon the success of the socialist revolution.

Their recent article, based on an interview with the infamous Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and an analysis of COVID origins , titled “The Wuhan “lab leak” fraud and the institutionalization of anti-science: An interview with Dr. Peter Daszak”, does not constitute an analysis. It is advocacy dressed up as certainty. It does not persuade by evidence. It persuades by smear tactics, omission, framing, and repetition of claims that no longer hold up against the current public record.

The author identifies as a physician but has no bio or according to PubMed, any peer-reviewed publications. He does not list his education or workplaces. His writing often reflects his anti-American ideology and relies on selectively presented facts rather than balanced public health assessments.

Start with the foundation of the article. It presents Daszak as a persecuted scientist, “censored” and cast out without cause. That is simply not true. He was formally debarred by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for five years after a documented process and a two-year-long Congressional investigation into his wrongdoings. He was given multiple opportunities to respond. His submissions were reviewed. You cannot erase the very well-researched Congressional report and call it arbitrary. This is an example of dishonest narrative construction. Otherwise known as a lie, based on propaganda.

From there, the article builds a familiar story: the lab-leak hypothesis is a fraud, the science is settled, and dissenters are cranks or political actors. That story might have held in early 2020. It does not hold in 2026.

The most basic problem is that the article ignores where the U.S. government has actually moved. The intelligence community remains formally divided, but that is only part of the picture. The FBI and Department of Energy have leaned heavily toward a lab origin. The CIA has now shifted in that direction. A House Select Subcommittee, after a two-year investigation, concluded that a laboratory origin is the most likely explanation. The White House itself now states plainly that COVID-19 likely arose from a lab-related incident tied to research in Wuhan.

The WSWS hit piece on Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the NIH and Acting Director of the CDC, waves away the entire body of recent U.S. government assessments and replaces it with the claim that the lab-leak hypothesis is “devoid of evidence.” That is not a serious position. It is willful blindness.

The second premise is more subtle and more misleading. The article places significant weight on the WHO and the 2021 WHO-convened origins study, as if that settles the matter. But even the WHO does not make those claims now.

The early WHO reporting on the origins of COVID-19 was not neutral science. It was shaped, constrained, and in key ways compromised by conflicts of interest, limited access, and political reality. The conclusions were never as clean or as authoritative as they were presented.

Start with the structure of the investigation itself. The WHO did not walk into Wuhan as an independent body with full access. It negotiated its entry with the Chinese government, operated under jointly agreed terms, and relied heavily on data, interviews, and site visits controlled by Chinese authorities. Even the majority of the scientists tasked with the investigations were from China. That alone should have imposed caution on any firm conclusion.

The WSWS article presents “weight of evidence” as if it means “case closed.” It does not. That missing information from China is not a minor detail. It is the entire problem.

Which brings us to the third and most glaring omission: China’s role. The article treats the evidentiary record as if it were complete and transparent. It is neither. WHO has repeatedly stated that China has not provided critical early data, including genetic sequences, animal-sampling details, and information on work and biosafety conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S. intelligence community has said the same in its own language: Beijing has hindered the investigation and resisted sharing information. If China were truly innocent, don’t you think they would have been glad to cooperate with the WHO or other nations to discover the truth?

Any honest discussion of origins in 2026 has to start there. We are not arguing over a clean dataset. We are arguing over a partial record shaped by systematic non-cooperation. The WSWS piece cites an early WHO report as an authority while quietly ignoring WHO’s own more recent statements about missing data and early selective reporting. This is structurally misleading.

The article also leans heavily on the claim that certain features of the outbreak, such as multiple early lineages linked to the Huanan market, make a lab origin essentially impossible. That is rhetoric, not science.

And then there is the fallback: attack the messengers. Dr. Bhattacharya is dismissed as someone who “played epidemiologist.” Ridley is reduced to a caricature of class and background. This is not accidental. When an argument relies on discrediting people rather than engaging with evidence, it signals weakness. The irony is that this tactic is used to avoid confronting the uncomfortable reality that official institutions, not just “fringe voices,” have moved toward the lab-leak hypothesis. Read what the WSWS writes about Dr. Bhattacharya and fume, as I did:

Bhattacharya, a physician and health economist who played epidemiologist during the pandemic to promote mass infection, and Ridley, a coal baron with a history of climate change denial, are not Galileo. They are the inquisitors—backed by the power of the state and the Trump administration’s dismantling of public health. As Morris concludes: “These are not the heirs of Galileo. …
The difference is that this time, the Inquisition has the keys to the NIH.”

For the record, Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, economist, and, for many years, a professor at Stanford University. Trained in both medicine and economics, he focuses his research on public health policy, infectious disease epidemiology, and the economics of healthcare. Bhattacharya has also studied population health, aging, and government responses to health crises. He has a strong publication record in all of these topics.

Matt Ridley is a British science writer, journalist, and member of the House of Lords. He is the author of several popular science books, including The Rational Optimist and Genome, which explore evolution, innovation, and human progress. Ridley has written extensively on genetics, economics, and the origins of COVID-19, and has been a prominent voice arguing that a laboratory-related origin of the virus is plausible.

There is also the issue of Peter Daszak’s statement in the written interview. What comes through most clearly from Daszak’s own statements in that article is a pattern of overreach and omission. He leans heavily on absolutes, claiming there is “zero evidence” the Wuhan Institute of Virology had a progenitor virus and treating the lab-leak hypothesis as if it has no credible scientific basis, when even U.S. intelligence agencies now lean in that direction. He inflates supporting evidence for zoonotic spillover into certainty, arguing that market-linked lineages make a lab origin effectively impossible, which goes well beyond what the data actually show.

At the same time, Dr. Daszak recasts the scrutiny of his own work as a “fabricated controversy,” omitting the fact that he was formally debarred after a documented review process, not simply targeted at random. Perhaps most telling is what he leaves out: no acknowledgment of his direct ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its gain-of-function research program, no recognition of missing data from China, and no engagement with the shift in U.S. government assessments. The result is not a balanced defense, but a narrative built on falsehoods.

Finally, the article collapses multiple distinct questions into one. It treats the absence of proof of a genetically engineered bioweapon as proof that all laboratory-associated scenarios are disproved. These are not the same thing. A lab-associated incident could involve a naturally occurring virus, field sampling, or adaptation work, including gain-of-function, and not be a bioweapon. Blurring those distinctions allows the author to claim victory on one front and declare the entire debate over.

Put all of this together, and the pattern is clear. The article dismisses Daszak’s debarment and malfeasance, ignores the shift in U.S. government assessments, launders the WHO’s qualified statements into false certainty, and soft-pedals the central problem of Chinese non-transparency. The author and Daszak then smear those who are working to investigate the true origins. It replaces a complex scientific issue that leans heavily towards a laboratory leak with a fabricated, clean ideological story. A storyline that exonerates the CCP.

There is credible, well-founded data, grounded in intelligence and congressional investigations, to conclude that a laboratory-associated origin is the most likely explanation. And the absence of key data is not incidental. It is the defining feature of the problem.

That is the honest state of play. The WSWS article does not reflect that reality. It tries to close the case by force of rhetoric. In doing so, it reveals more about its own commitments and conflicts of interest than about the origin of COVID-19.

The WSWS operates from a rigid anti-imperialist, communist lens. In practice, that means reflexive and exaggerated skepticism as well as a hatred toward U.S. intelligence, Western institutions, and even America itself, combined with a tendency to frame global conflicts as narratives driven by American power.

And when you run that framework through questions like the origins of COVID, something predictable happens. The conclusions often land in the same place as CCP messaging. Similar ideologies, different motivations, same endpoint.

My question is, why does Google continue to publicize this communist propaganda rag?

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