Elder Advice has long thought there is an unreasonable focus on the New Testament at Christmas time, what with the endless talk of mangers and Magi, angels and animals, blinding starlight, sheep and shepherds. Jesus Christ, it’s all a bit much. So any opportunity to cite the Old Testament is welcome.
It came Christmas Eve when one of my favourite clients, a research scientist and virologist, resurfaced for the holiday season.
Stay with me.
While the rest of us have gone back to business and to sleep on the issue, he has been doggedly continuing study of the origins of the COVID -19 pandemic so that we are better prepared for the next time. Because, as Elder Advice mused in June, 20201, “… another Chinese wet market bat-shit crazy bat consumer is incubating COVID-20 as we speak. And we need to be much better prepared for the sequel with much more widely considered, narrowly targeted, and effective responses.”
Anyway, the client asked whether, in light of the evidence now available, I now subscribed to the Wuhan lab leak or the zoonotic origin story.
The lab leak theory, of course.
Unlike many in these toxic times, who have succumbed to the contagion of confirmation bias, and are now immune to facts which challenge opinions that have mutated into beliefs, Elder Advice is prepared to change his mind when presented with cogent and compelling evidence.
We all no doubt recall the original speculation, that the CoV-2 virus originated in bats and made the leap to humans as a result of some intimacy that Elder Advice cannot now unsee. Anyway, it turns out that later studies confirmed that the first crossover event was to an intermediate animal host. Strong evidence that Malayan pangolins were such hosts came as early as 2020 in a paper by Xiao et al which reported the presence of a SARS-CoV-2-like virus named “Pangolin-CoV” in a number of Malayan pangolins collected in South China. and demonstrated high sequence identity between Pangolin-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 genes. Earlier this year however, a team of virus experts from University of Arizona, University of Sydney and the Scripps Research Institute, found genetic evidence that COVID-19 may have originated from the illegal trade of infected raccoon dogs in Wuhan. Which makes the answer to the question: “Who let the dogs out?” far more important.
Pangolins or raccoon dogs, it is strangely comforting to think that the interspecies intercourse that may have transmitted the virus to humans was with a pangolin or a racoon dog rather than a bat. Elder Advice is unsure why, but it does. Anyway, all that evidence supports the zoonotic transmission scenario, but Elder Advice is unconvinced.
After all, the Old Testament is clear on the subject. Moses himself, who is believed to have written the Book of Leviticus, was certainly alive to the issue. And more than a little obsessed with it:
Leviticus 20:15 “If a man lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death, and you shall kill the animal.”
And do not think for a moment that if you are a woman you got a pass. The Old Testament is all about gender equality when it comes to this subject:
Leviticus 20:16 . “If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”
And because repetition was important when instructing people in biblical times - not like now, when telling people something once is invariably enough:
Leviticus 18:23 “And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion.”
There must have been some seriously alarming behavior during that exodus from Egypt. Indeed, Exodus 22:19, which Moses is also reputed to have written, warns: “Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death.” and makes that uncomfortably clear. Obviously, there was a pressing need to persuade shepherds to just watch their flocks by night. And nothing more.
Granted, Leviticus contains other admonitions about olde tyme sexual misconduct. Leviticus 18:22 “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination”, is but one example. But there is no instruction to put the participants to death. Nothing compared to the consequences of coveting thy neighbour’s ass - the livestock kind.
All of which is to say that the “zoonotic” (a word of which Elder Advice has grown inexplicably and increasingly fond) theory of the origin of CoV-2 is clearly wrong. Surely, it requires no leap of faith to conclude that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a result of extraordinary incompetence. After all, in 2023 alone, we have been treated to innumerable displays of human ineptitude every single day of the year.
The alternative would be to accept the premise that Chinese people have not read the Old Testament. Which is clearly preposterous.
Elder Advice 64