Wuhan and Billy Ockham's Razor: a tale of two burgs, or why you shouldn't smoke with Kit Kat bars

  

Now, for the past year and a half it has been the contention of a lot of very smart people that the Covid pandemic absolutely, positively could not have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  This contention could not be true, these very smart people said, and anyone who said it was true was a fool, a dolt, and a poltroon all at the same time, something that it is usually extremely hard to do on any day that isn’t New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras, or St. Patrick’s Day.  What’s more, some of these very smart people can and will keep you from saying such things on the Internet because they don’t want you confusing people and it is important in these serious times to keep from confusing people.  Confused people may do stupid things like criticize men for wearing brown shoes with blue pants, eat hot dogs with ketchup, or start selling life insurance for fun and profit, and the very smart people understand that they must prevent that sort of thing for the good of the country.  There is no telling what can happen when the confused people start asking questions that are not good for them and so it is better for everyone involved that no one ask anything.

 

And now for a slight diversion.  Industry here in our happy little burg has always been near the creek that flows through town.  That’s understandable, of course; our happy little burg is basically a 19th century factory town and 19th century factory towns are almost always located near creeks or rivers; in a time without electricity the water’s flow powered the machinery in the factories.  So, the creek was where the money was back in the day; machinery doesn’t do you any good if it just sits on the factory floor doing nothing because you have no way to make the stuff work.  There were three major exceptions to this rule: the brickyards, which were next to the railroad tracks next to the river, the lumberyard, which is still next to the railroad tracks next to the river, and the fireworks factory, which was not next to the railroad tracks next to the river, but rather two miles away next to the public cemetery near the foot of the mountain (yes, we have a mountain, thank you for asking). 

Fifty years ago, and yes, I find it intensely annoying that I can remember things from fifty years ago, there was an explosion here in our happy little burg.  It was a huge explosion, the kind that breaks windows several miles away and comes with its own mushroom cloud and makes deaf old women wonder what that sound was, and spry old men to think that the Russians were attacking the Air Force base across the river and maybe they should get the doughboy uniform out of mothballs just in case they once again had to defend this our Great Republic from its enemies.  Yes siree, son, the boys of the AEF will show them Commies what was what, just like we showed the Heinies in the Argonne back in ’18.  But the old uniform stayed in mothballs; it didn’t take too long for everyone to figure out what had happened; someone at the fireworks plant was not as careful as they should have been and now the fireworks plant was not there anymore.  Three people died in the blast, including the plant owner, whose head, or most of it, anyway, the firemen found about a half mile away from the site.  His family chose not to rebuild; the insurance paid off the claims of the people whose houses the explosion damaged; and eventually the family sold the site to a real estate developer who built split level houses for people who wanted to live in the country but needed to be a commutable distance to their jobs in the city.

For years afterwards folks in this neck of the woods speculated about what caused the explosion.  There were lots of theories, of course; someone was smoking where they should not have been, there might have been an electrical short circuit somewhere, theories abounded about the how and why of it.  But the one thing no one ever said was that it could not have happened at the fireworks plant. There was a lot of gunpowder at that plant and all it would take for a disaster to happen is someone being careless with a match for just a moment, which is my theory of what happened.  Just thought I’d let you know.

Which is why the virus could not have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology theory seems a bit odd to me.  The Wuhan Institute of Virology experimented on bats and bat viruses and had a known history of being casual with safety precautions.  The first people to catch the virus were people who worked at the institute and the Chinese government sealed off the city of Wuhan to keep the disease from spreading to the rest of China.  And now it turns out that the United States government was paying the Wuhan Institute of Virology to figure out ways to make Chinese bat diseases more deadly and more transmissible to people, which the very smart people who tell me that the virus could not have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology think is an incredibly good thing, for reasons I am not sure I fathom, but then again, I am not a virologist.

But I am a fan of William of Ockham and his very sharp razor, and a good swipe of that trusty instrument tells me that the people who say that the virus could not have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology have a future in selling fertilizer, which is nice, because when the cow flop hits the fan, as it appears to be doing now, they’ll need a way to make a living. I do not think anyone in their right mind will let them play with germs anymore, but then again, Joe Biden is the President of the United States, or so he claims, so anything is possible.