The WSWS has argued that anyone who disagrees with them on the origins of the Covid-19 virus is an anti-Chinese racist. The racism of the WSWS’s own position has shone through though, thanks to the testimony of a brave scientist that, at great personal risk, challenged the lie that the virus either naturally evolved in nature, proven untrue by hard science, or leaked accidentally from a lab, also unlikely given the conditions of virus samples in labs and the security procedures in place. Neither of these theories correspond to the known facts or address the political context of the virus’s destructive success in infecting the human population without the need for any intermediary human or animal hosts in which the virus could evolve or stabilize. The virus mysteriously emerged fully formed.

Regardless of their opposition to the scientific view based on real evidence and their dependence on the coverup of conflicts-of-interest at the expense of the exploration of hard science, the WSWS should not resort to racist attacks. They have now crossed another line, in order to create a base of support for their opposition to science. They have inspired racist attacks against Chinese people, calling them “race-traitors” for questioning the honesty or the devotion of the Chinese government to its people. These racist attacks must end immediately so that scientists can safely debate the scientific evidence without fear of reprisal from the nano-bureaucracy and its political allies. The WSWS must apologize immediately and break off any secret or unwritten deal it has with the Chinese government to pursue these racist attacks on science and democracy.

The New York Times reports on the experience of Dr. Alina Chan of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard: “The attacks were so fierce that Chan worried for her personal safety and started taking new precautions, wondering if she was being followed and varying her daily routines.”

“There were days and weeks when I was extremely afraid, and many days I didn’t sleep,” the respected scientist said.

The WSWS and its racism bear direct responsibility for these attacks on science. It owes the public an immediate apology and a retraction of the hateful statements condoning racism as a means of sabotaging science. The WSWS cannot accuse scientists of being race-traitors for not supporting the Chinese government. It must defend the rights of scientists to point to evidence that disproves its own theories. New evidence should give them pause and force it to change theories since scientific facts contradict its present theory. It should not give rise to an implicit support for racism, evidenced by the obsession with quoting well-known racist Nicholas Wade while ignoring experts in the field such as Dr. Alina Chan and Dr. Li-Meng Yan, all the while claiming to fight the “race-treason” of Dr. Chan and Dr. Yan. This racist filth poses a real danger to scientists from elite institutions and to the Trotskyist movement. A real confrontation must take place to defend democracy and intellectualism against these reactionary attacks, forcing them back into their caves of backwardness for all eternity.

This would involve putting forward facts such as information about the growth of a Chinese oligarchy with no respect for the Chinese working class, the transfer of finance capital from the US to China creating a partnership that destroyed economies throughout the world, and the objective unity between the US oligarchy and the Chinese oligarchy who share more in common than they do with the workers of their own nation or race. Within this context, a trade war between the US and China would appear to be the first stage of an actual war in which the most destructive weapons in history decided the outcome while fulfilling the underlying requirement, the physical elimination of the “excess” productive capacity, produced both by the exploitation of the working class and the accumulation through exploitation, of unprecedented amounts of privately-owned capital. This requirement stands above all other considerations because capitalist states must elevate the rate of profit on new investments in order to remain useful to their capitalist ruling class masters.