Mark Beef

Though I'd sensed something was off for years prior, COVID was the first time I realized academia had been completely leveraged as an epistemic support system for one party. If there's a crisis and the choice is between sticking to previously stated theoretical principles, versus serving the party, academics will serve the party. For example: there was a very obvious "Latourian" way to analyze the whole saga of COVID, emphasizing runaway incentive dynamics in the grant system as a way to understand the disease origins; intra-institutional political-jockeying among different scientists as a way to understand why some "finding" about origin, spread, treatment, and relationship to other social problems became Settled Truth one month and Debunked Pseudo-Science the next; what to make of masking as public health policy vs sociopolitical performance; what to make of "biopolitical" revolts like the Canadian truckers... Well, despite Latour being one of the hottest names to cite in the humanities and social sciences during the 90s, 00s and 10s, academics--including the the ones who'd built their whole careers as "Latourians"--weren't doing *any* of that! Basically they were just nervously hitting "refresh" on the NYT main page to tell them what COVID opinion this month would make them "members in good standing" of the party coalition, and then attaching their authority ("as academic experts") to that opinion. Academics were downstream of the NYT and the NYT was downstream of DNC deliberations about what side of highly contentious and ambiguous debates regarding masking, flight cancellations, lockdowns, vaccines, origins, protests and rioting, etc etc, to get on in order to best position itself against Trump. Nobody was really supposed to say anything that wasn't implicitly useful for Biden. The doubly servile partisan role academics were being asked to play--and the eagerness with which most embraced this role--was shocking to me. And the consequences have outlived the crisis. It REMAINS the case that academics cannot write an insightful account (historical, sociological, etc) of COVID. It's 2026, and it remains the case that *even* having to acknowledge in published writing that there's a very good chance the disease came from lab (with support from a US grant) completely scares almost all qualified academics away from writing about the topic. And how can you write about COVID "as history" or "as sociology" if you're scared to discuss origin?

I am in Special Housing Unit (SHU). My water faucet is broken. I am not allowed bottles of water in SHU. I have nothing clean to drink. My only water comes from the shower, warm and from a brown and filthy faucet. It has given me persistent stomach problems. The water I am drinking is not clean, I am an American. Innocent until proven guilty. But I am forced to drink poisoned water. Where are my rights?

2/9 Jan. 26, 2020. Fauci writes in his diary: "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." That is January of 2020. The wet market was already off the table in his own private notes.