China Virus made in a laboratory? The theses of Li-Meng Yan
What Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong, says and doesn't say
The readers of Atlantico Quotidiano already know the story of Li-Meng Yan . We had told it last July, close to an interview with Fox News , in which the researcher from the University of Hong Kong explained the reasons for her flight to the United States. According to her testimony, she had saved herself from the retaliation of the Chinese government, after sharing with some virologists of the motherland information on the transmissibility of Covid-19 between people, at a time (late December-early January) in which the blackout information imposed by the Communist Party was total.
A few days ago Li-Meng Yan upped the ante, making public the result of a research conducted together with three colleagues in which it is claimed that the Chinese coronavirus would be the result of a laboratory procedure, contrary to what is almost unanimously claimed by the scientific community international: here you can find the complete document . There are three lines of argument in support of this thesis. The first concerns the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 (the scientific name of the new coronavirus ), suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus on which two military laboratories in Chongqing and Nanjing were already working; the second refers to the receptor of the Spike protein, in practice the element that allows the virus to take root, which is too reminiscent of that of SARS in 2003, a coincidence that would suggest human intervention; the third concerns furin , the enzyme responsible for lung infection, whose cleavage method, in this specific case, would not be compatible with coronaviruses present in nature. Challenging statements, of course, not corroborated for the moment by other scientific publications, but which at least have the merit of bringing attention back to an issue that has been stuck since the beginning on the rocks of the official Chinese version, that of the origin of a virus that has upset the equilibrium of the planet and whose long-term political and social effects are still to be deciphered. Instead of the debate, however, the machine of mud and censorship immediately started.
The mud comes precisely from Hong Kong, through what until a few months ago was still an independent voice in the Chinese information landscape and which today has to deal with the rules of obedience imposed by the infamous national security law. The South China Morning Post published an article denouncing the link between Li-Meng Yan's work and the Rule of Law foundation, which is headed by tycoon Guo Wengui, accused of corruption by Chinese justice, and Steve Bannon, former Trump's adviser in the first part of his mandate and long considered the guru of an elusive right-wing International whose branches are currently rather undefined. That is enough, however, to discredit a priori the work of the four researchers and to close any leads to an objective evaluation of their conclusions.
Censorship, on the other hand, is the work of that enormous machine dispensing licenses for social presentability that has become the Twitter platform. In a surprising move, frankly even by moralizing and politically correct standards of the company, the 'Li Meng Yan account has been turned off two days after the publication of the report, for violation of corporate policies. What was the infringement in which the researcher committed is not known, given that those responsible for Twitter , questioned, declared that they were not required to give explanations on individual cases. This gross, arbitrary and certainly politically motivated censorship, destined to be classified under the all-encompassing and misleading label of "fighting fake news" , raises a series of questions about the role of social media and the ideological climate that is shaking the very foundations of western society.
From the general to the particular, as in a matryoshka , let's try to enunciate some of them:
– if Twitter or other social media decide to transform themselves from digital platforms for online users to publishers of their own contents, they should expressly declare it, first of all accepting a revision in the rules of use and dissemination of intellectual property;
– in the absence of news in this sense, it is not clear on the basis of which principle the online platforms decide to set themselves up as censors of unwelcome content, nor if they do so on their own initiative or on the basis of inputs received from outside;
– is unclear, however, what are the skills of Twitter censors to decide if a content is appropriate or not: who made the decision to suspend the 'Li Meng Yan account? If it responds to scientific considerations, what are they and who was consulted? If it responds to other types of evaluations, why are they not disclosed, given the delicacy of the subject?
– even assuming all the non-existent premises mentioned above (publishing platform, choice of contents, competence), the problem of discretion remains to be solved: why some contents yes and others no? Why the disclaimer under Trump's tweets and not under Khamenei's anti-Semitic utterances? Why this unpleasant feeling that the "wrong" contents are always and only in one direction and the "punishment" is always administered against certain subjects or political tendencies, sparing others? In short, why do social media increasingly resemble the propaganda of illiberal regimes and less and less like platforms for debate and the free circulation of ideas?
The case of Li-Meng Yan will not cause discussion, the character is not sufficiently known and, above all, the censorship will not arouse the indignation of the many champions of democracy from personal computers , who now have breakfast on bread and anti-fascism. More likely, those who notice it will applaud Twitter's initiative in the name of science, which in this case has long since died, strangled by political propaganda. The problem, however, goes beyond Li-Meng Yan and his paper , even if it were unreliable and superficial. There is a strange idea out there that claims to make democratic practice coincide with revealed, purified, politically correct truth. The goal of reducing fake news can be shared in theory but it is the method that corrupts it: just as the courts of the Inquisition left the accused only the alternative between repenting or ending up at the stake, so the method of truth decided at the table makes freedom of expression a simulacrum of itself. Either you are one of us, or you are nobody.
Democracy (understood as a set of rules, rights and essential freedoms), however, contemplates only a procedural truth, an accusatory judgment, based on the contradiction between the parties, and even on the fallibility of the judge. It is a process that stops when the right to a conflicting opinion is denied.
Surely Twitter never received an order to suppress Li-Meng Yan's account from the Beijing government. It has now become natural to behave in a certain way, the line is drawn, everyone knows what to do when the anomaly is detected. It is precisely this “spontaneity” that should give us the measure of the well in which, almost without realizing it, we are submerging ourselves.
Article published on atlanticoquotidiano.it
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/china-virus-prodotto-in-laboratorio-le-tesi-di-li-meng-yan/ on Sat, 19 Sep 2020 05:45:37 +0000.