Peter Daszak received over $100 million from the government, mostly to develop viral weapons, despite bans on the development of such weapons in government-funded research labs. Now, the WSWS formed a close working relationship with this “scientist” or DARPA, DTRA defense contractor. In so doing, they support his campaign to endlessly repeat the anti-democratic and chilling phrase “conspiracy theory” to justify physical attacks on scientists to silence them and ban their research. Many of Daszak and his peers’ experiments occurred in China or in Fort Detrick, where the press had to accept a censorship regime that prevented all the data from coming to light, as well as silenced science with military NDA contracts. Daszak’s known Malthusianism^1,2,3,4,5 only adds strength to this argument and proves his motive. One article he co-wrote begins with this paragraph:

There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic – us. As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity – particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.

https://www.ipbes.net/covid19stimulus

And ends with this paragraph:

Responding to the COVID-19 crisis calls for us all to confront the vested interests that oppose transformative change, and to end ‘business as usual’. We can build back better and emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient than ever – but to do so means choosing policies and actions that protect nature – so that nature can help to protect us.

https://www.ipbes.net/covid19stimulus

Continuing in this vain of argument, they have taken the research of Worobey out of context to lie about its conclusions, while calling once again for more nails for more coffins to silence the growing scientific consensus that more research is needed to discover the origins of the Covid-19 virus. Worobey himself never called his research “a nail in the coffin,” and he stressed that it does not disprove the lab-origin theory. As many scientists point out, it proves that the WHO team, which included Daszak despite conflicts of interests, made critical errors in its early chronology of the outbreak. Another of Worobey’s own studies, which he has not renounced, argued that the virus’ mutations demonstrated that the origin occurred in mid-November rather than December 8th, further proving that the Wuhan market represented a superspreader event and not an origin point.

The decision of the WSWS to continue to lie, arguing that no scientific support exists for the lab-origin theory or gain-of-function origin theory, attests to their wholesale abandonment of a scientific approach to socialism. Defending scientific research falls to the lab-origin proponents, as they pose the question to the other side, where is the animal population that has the Covid-19 virus? Why has it not been discovered nearly two years after the first detection of the virus? The answer will only emerge in the course of a struggle against imperialism and its defenders within the scientific establishment.

As partners of forum.permananent-revolution.org, Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner, the WSWS has shown their approach comes from hostility to the masses, attraction to state agents making tens of millions in state weapons-development contracts, and an ideological approach openly favoring “Utopianism” over Marxism. This Utopianism translates, in practice, to censorship of the wider world to develop an anti-Marxist Bonapartist Cult, exhibited by their open chauvinist adoration for Thomas Jefferson and the bourgeoisie responsible for the secession from the British Empire of its American colonies. Their success in partnering with the nobility to subdue the growing urban proletariat and slave-rebellions through the foundation of a bourgeois republic, “Jeffersonian Democracy” for the “yeoman farmer” with a “Manifest Destiny” the legend goes, did not prove Marxist theory but proved the necessity of Karl Marx’s theoretical work to argue against the imperialist theories and states of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte. The utopianism of Jefferson’s ideas on democracy shows through in the dystopian regime North has established to silence debate over SEP views and policies. This explains Andre Damon’s calls for more nails for more coffins to silence the scientific community in general and its representatives within the socialist revolution, Democratic Power.