China’s Wuhan Lab and the Blame Game by Howard Bloom

For three years, ever since the Covid 19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020, there have been two factions at war over the origins of Covid.  

One group says Covid came from bats in the caves near Wuhan, China. Another group says that Covid was a virus cooked up by the Chinese in their Wuhan Institute of Virology and deliberately spread to the United States. 

What’s worse, they say, America’s National Institutes of Health under Dr. Anthony Fauci financed the research that led to Covid.  

Now the Biden administration has made a move that many supporters of the Wuhan-lab theory may regard as a victory.  The Department of Health and Human Services has notified the Wuhan Institute that it won’t receive any more money from America for at least the next ten years. 

Why?  Because the Wuhan lab snubbed the National Institute of Health’s repeated requests “for laboratory notebooks and other documents” needed to show that the Wuhan Lab was leak proof.  

But there’s a deeper problem underlying the three-year-long Wuhan Lab controversy.  There are many ways to attack a problem.  One is to figure out who to blame.  Another is to figure out a solution. 

Since the Covid 19 pandemic hit the United States, a faction of passionate partisans has focused on who to blame.  

One night a MAGA Republican friend of mine called me in a near panic. “Have you seen what the Chinese have done?” he asked.  “They’re making biological war on us.”  And he implied that this alleged biological weapons attack from China might be the start of World War III. 

Others playing the blame game said that Covid was an act of biological warfare unleashed on us by globalist elites.  Those elites, they said, used the Covid lockdown to turn us into our own jailers.  The globalists allegedly used Covid to get us into the habit of living under a totalitarian system like the tyrannical systems that these QAnon-style thinkers were sure the globalist elites were working to impose on us. 

What does assigning blame lead to?  It gives us permission to hate.  Something we love far more than we realize. 

Groups from subcultures to civilizations come together around permission to hate.  Around agreement on who the group’s villains and bad guys are. 

But one group’s god is another group’s devil.  One group’s good is another group’s evil.  For example, the Jews of the Old Testament were given permission to hate the Canaanites.  They saw the Canaanites’ god—Baal–as a devil.  And it’s likely that Baal gave the Canaanites permission to hate the Jews and to regard the Jewish god, Jehovah, as one of their demons.   

Why is the permission to hate so addictive?  Why is it so delicious that it brings together entire societies?  Because it appeals to parts of the brain that produce dopamine.  And dopamine is the ultimate high.  It’s the body’s equivalent to cocaine. 

What’s more, the blame game is built into almost all animals and birds, not just humans.  Put seven rats on an electrified cage floor with the current off.  Then turn on the current and watch what happens.  The electricity sizzles the rats’ feet with pain.  So the six strongest rats instantly feel out who they are, gang up, and maul the weakest rat.  They use the weakest rat as a scapegoat for their problem.  

Does this stop the torture?  Does it turn the electricity humming through the floor off?  No.

Blame is not the best way to deal with a problem.  Instead, you need to find a solution.  And that is what the Operation Warp Speed program did.  President Trump set aside ten billion dollars for the rapid development of a vaccine.  And the vaccines that emerged were 91% to 95% effective. 

Did the vaccines make a difference?  Before the United States was widely vaccinated, we had over a million deaths from Covid. We had a staggering 26,000 deaths a week.

Since the majority of our citizens were vaccinated, we’ve had only 100 deaths a week.   

So which is better when you’re hit with a problem?  Finding someone to blame?  Or finding a solution?

References:

Riley Griffin, US Suspends Wuhan Institute Funds Over Covid Stonewalling, Bloomberg, July 18, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling#xj4y7vzkg

Andrea Vacchiano, Biden administration suspends funds to Wuhan lab over failure to provide COVID-related info, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-administration-suspends-funds-wuhan-lab-failure-provide-covid-related-info

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Biden Administration Moves to Ban Funding for Wuhan Lab, New York Times, July 18, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/us/politics/funding-ban-wuhan-institute-virology.html

Alexander Strobel, Jan Zimmermann, Anja Schmitz, Martin Reuter, Stefanie Lis, Sabine Windmann, Peter Kirsch, Beyond revenge: Neural and genetic bases of altruistic punishment, NeuroImage, Volume 54, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 671-680, ISSN 1053-8119, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.07.051.

R.F. Ulrich and N.H. Azrin, “Reflexive Fighting In Response to Aversive Stimulation,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, October, 1962, pp. 511-520, especially p. 516.

Chase, I.D. (1974), Models of hierarchy formation in animal societies. Systems Research, 19: 374-382. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830190604

Aaron Blake, Rand Paul and the GOP effort to blame Fauci for the coronavirus, Washington Post, May 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/11/tucker-carlsons-gops-efforts-blame-fauci-coronavirus/

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00

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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV.  One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.  His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American.  He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM.  For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.