“Trust the science”.

Except that science is not an impartial and objective force. It’s a consensus created by fallible people who are neither impartial nor objective. The methodology of science can be used to strive for impartial and objective results by fallible folks, but that assumes that they actually want impartial and objective results, rather than those results which serve their social and political agendas.

Speaking of that, there’s the lab-leak theory.

Why couldn’t it be discussed before this? Trump, obviously. 

Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged.

 “At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,” she said.

NBC spins this as President Trump “politicizing” the idea. Except that suppressing the lab-leak theory politicized it by people who demand that they be trusted because they’re above politics. To state the blatantly obvious, they’re not only not above politics, but politics drives them.

Since the media is the lens here, the obvious thing not being stated here is that even if they had come forward, they wouldn’t have been believed. The media would have smeared them, Big Tech would have deplatformed them, and the only news programs that would have booked them would have been FOX News, OANN, etc. Before long they would have been accused of enabling extremism and forced out of whatever positions they held. So they waited until it was politically safe to talk about it. Much like Jon Stewart and so many others did.

Just as a few years from now it may actually be safe for people working in American journalism to call Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi racist hacks. But it’s not safe now. And so there are people who will buckle down, do what they’re supposed to, and wait their time.

Journalism is a whole lot less vital than epidemiology during a pandemic. And the only thing this story reminds us is that the experts, even the ones with legitimate degrees, are answering to political directives, not some abstraction known as ‘the science’.

Is science being suppressed for political reasons? Yes. And they’re not shy about admitting it.