Hello, darkness, it's our old friend Tom Cotton, for whom there is no conspiracy theory dumb enough or no science solid enough for him to deny over and over and over again.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Cotton referred to the Chinese as the "Chinese Communist Party" more than once as he worked very hard to promote the idea that China created the virus in a lab without actually saying the words out loud. Because if he said the words out loud he would remove any doubt as to what a fool he actually is.
"The Chinese Communist Party is still lying," Cotton told Maria Bartiromo, referring to their claim that they've contained the virus. "Back in January i knew this virus had the potential to become a worldwide pandemic for two reasons: Not because I'm a scientist or epidemiologist but because I could see one, how the Chinese Communist Party was lying and two, the dramatic extreme measures they were taking like locking in 75 million people into their homes and apartment buildings. Those two things simply did not line up."
The only true thing he said there was that he's not a scientist. He's actually not too bright at all, or he would understand that the locking-down was EXACTLY what was needed to contain the virus, and that's precisely what didn't happen here because His Hero Trump was too full of happy talk about 15 cases, blah, blah.
He went on to accuse the Chinese government of lying about containment in spite of the fact that they've disclosed the concerns they have about cleared virus survivors testing positive again.
And of course, he blamed the pandemic on China. Here's a fact for him: The head of the CDC, Dr. Redfield, testified to Congress that he had a conversation about the virus with his Chinese counterpart on New Year's Eve. Perhaps someone could read this New York Times article to Tom Cotton, outlining how exactly Donald Trump and his merry band of incompetents botched the response while Trump was doing his song and dance in front of the networks about how it would just "disappear."
They haven't found "Patient Zero" yet, but that didn't stop Cotton from feeding a conspiracy theory to Fox "News" viewers.
"We don't know where it originated but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that and we also know that just a few miles away from that [Wuhan] food market is China's only biosafety Level IV super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases," he said.
If Tom Cotton actually believed in science, he would know something he doesn't: Climate change is helping new viruses to emerge. From LiveScience:
For the past 15,000 years, a glacier on the northwestern Tibetan Plateau of China has hosted a party for some unusual guests: an ensemble of frozen viruses, many of them unknown to modern science.
Scientists recently broke up this party after taking a look at two ice cores from this Tibetan glacier, revealing the existence of 28 never-before-seen virus groups.
Investigating these mysterious viruses could help scientists on two fronts: For one, these stowaways can teach researchers which viruses thrived in different climates and environments over time, the researchers wrote in a paper posted on the bioRxiv database on Jan. 7.
"However, in a worst-case scenario, this ice melt [from climate change] could release pathogens into the environment," the researchers wrote in the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. If this happens, it's best to know as much about these viruses as possible, the researchers wrote.
Instead, what Tom Cotton did was to turn genuine scientific research into a conspiracy theory. Unable to deal in facts, he turns to a fiction and hate-mongering to feed Fox "news" viewers' worst instincts.
That network is poison and a menace. They should be shut down, along with irresponsible Senators who use a pandemic to try and muscle other countries.
