Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, best known for taking Britain out of the European Union (Brexit), is releasing a memoir later this month. Unleashed (Collins 2024) offers an interesting item for the bulging “Misinformation” file about COVID. At The Spectator, “Cockburn” tells us,

In 2021, Johnson was adamant that Covid was a result of “demented” traditional Chinese medical practices, suggesting the disease had originated in bats or even pangolins. His new memoir, however, rows back on this theory. “The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, in all its aspects,” he writes, going on:

“It now looks overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was a result of some botched experiment in a Chinese lab. Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replication all over the world.”

It’s quite the thought…

This tidbit would hardly matter except for the fact that a couple of years ago, honest researchers were discredited and censored for discussing this lab leak theory.

It was not pack journalism either. Prominent figures like Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci led the pile-on against the lab leak as a racist conspiracy theory. Today, it is a reasonable inference.

Misinformation flows both ways

And that’s the problem with top down efforts to fight misinformation. It comes from the top as well as the bottom. It’s easy to see why too. If COVID leaked from a lab, ongoing government-funded adventures in biotechnology should be scrutinized much more closely. So it was natural for governments, feeling the heat, to insist that the idea was a racist conspiracy theory.

Incidentally, one public figure who is very much on board with top down control of the internet is Hillary Clinton. Promoting her new own memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained (Simon & Schuster 2024) at CNN, she has said, “Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”

But the dangers do not all come from one direction. Some of the calls are coming from inside the house.