MURDOCH'S COVID EXPERTS

Yesterday, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed titled "The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak." The op-ed was cited in an editorial in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and in a Fox News story ("‘Damning’ Science Shows COVID-19 Likely Engineered in Lab: Experts").

The authors of the piece were Steven Quay and Richard Muller. Who are they?

Neither is a virologist. Quay is a doctor, entrepreneur, and self-promoter who runs a company called Atossa Therapeutics focused on breast cancer treatments. He repositioned himself as a COVID-19 expert and wrote a quickie book called Stay Safe: A Physicians Guide to Survive Coronavirus, later retitled COVID-19 Survival Manual. It does not seem like serious work:

Amazon pulled the book from its Kindle store at one point last summer, before putting it back on sale.

Quay is a firm believer in "one weird trick" medicine:

And here's the home test he recommends for diagnosing COVID:

Sure, that's all you need to do! Who needs lab work?

Richard Muller is a physicist, not a doctor or a virologist. He was once a well-known (and Koch Foundation-funded) climate change denialist. He changed his mind -- but went on to become an advocate for natural gas and fracking.

“Well, I totally don’t support the old kind of fracking, but I think clean fracking — in which you just fine the hell out of the companies if they spill anything or upset the water tables, they can fix it up. Compared to developing really cheap solar, developing really clean fracking, I think, is relatively straightforward.”

Just fine them! Yeah, that'll work.

So there they are: Murdoch's totally trustworthy experts the origins of COVID-19.