Facebook has announced that comments proposing Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan laboratory will no longer be labelled as a “conspiracy theory”.
Our great and good overlords across social media and the political spectrum have belatedly come to the realisation that Covid-19 may have indeed leaked from a Wuhan laboratory tasked with developing coronaviruses.
Imagine my shock that purported experts like Anthony Fauci have now conceded that the virus may not have originated in a wet market after all, but from the very place those darn conspiracy theorists pointed to all along, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci even admitted yesterday that the Chinese lab received grants from the US National Institute of Health to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans, yet another conspiracy theory proved true.
There’s something ironic about a vast array of supposed experts and politicians, whom the world has heard endlessly condemning conspiracy theories, now forced to give credence to what they had consistently dismissed as fictitious lies, misinformation and quackery.
One can’t expect however that these experts will ever be held to account for some of the scaremongering they engaged in, such as insisting many more multiples of people would die without lockdowns, a claim the experience of countries like Sweden proved false with lower excess deaths than most of locked down Europe.
The establishment hold too many levers of power to really be forced into paying a price by their bed-fellows in journalism the world over.
The reality is that age-old schoolyard tactics of demonising, deplatforming and silencing opposing experts and theories has been a constant feature of the non-debate around Covid-19.
The tactics employed by most media outlets and politicians effectively sideline the very people who are now being proved correct in their analysis of the origins of Covid-19.
Whilst Irish and international media browbeat people into conformity with what they implied was a scientific consensus about Covid-19, that veneer of trust and credibility has taken a considerable hammering with the latest news.
It turns out the real conspiracy theorists are probably those who insisted Covid-19 originated from a wet market.
The irony of mainstream media outlets and tech giants continuing to warn about misinformation will not be lost on the masses, I hope.