House hearing on coronavirus turns into debate on racism.
Science author Nicholas Wade appeared before a Republican panel on the origins of the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, but his controversial 2014 book on race and genetics, “A Troublesome Inheritance,” was the focus of much of the discussion. Democrats noted that the book had been endorsed by the notorious racist and antisemite David Duke, as well as other white supremacists.
This led to a tense exchange between Wade and Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., who argued that Wade’s presence was an affront to any legitimate inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. Mfume was “appalled that this hearing now gets layered over with the issue of race.”
The committee’s leading Democrat, Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, used his opening statement to discredit Wade, saying, “His participation hurts the credibility of this hearing.” Wade is a proponent of the hypothesis that the coronavirus was the product of a laboratory accident in China, but his past writings on genetics and race seemed to frustrate his attempts to focus the conversation on the pandemic.
Wade’s 2014 book attempted to reestablish the link between race and genetics, which by then, many had come to discount. He ventured into some of the more unseemly regions of what had once been known as scientific expertise. Wade tried to describe distinct racial groups, which he argued emanated from Africa, Europe, and East Asia. He then tried to explain how these three groups developed distinct genomes and how those differences shape their respective cultures. However, those explanations led to some highly suspect assertions, such as that Jews were uniquely “adapted to capitalism,” a classic anti-Semitic trope. People of African origin, meanwhile, had a “propensity to violence,” according to Wade’s analysis.
Mainstream reactions to the book were harsh. The New York Times called “A Troublesome Inheritance” “a deeply flawed, deceptive and dangerous book” that would give license to racists, while the Southern Poverty Law Center accused Wade of trafficking in “fringe racist theories masquerading as mainstream biology.” In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, 139 scientists accused him of “misappropriating” research to make discredited arguments. They declared that “there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.”
Wade made news again with the arrival of the coronavirus, emerging as one of the first science writers to argue against the plausibility of the prevailing view that the pathogen had originated with an animal before entering the human population, most likely at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Wade laid out the case for the so-called lab leak theory in a lengthy Medium post in May 2021.
The article remains an important milestone for other skeptics of the official Chinese narrative. Still, many scientists believe the virus originated in animals before jumping to humans.
Wade strenuously defended his record and his book on Wednesday. “This was a determinedly nonracist book. It has no scientific errors that I’m aware of. It has no racist statements. It stresses the theme of unity,” he told the lawmakers seated before him.
However, his Democratic critics remained unconvinced, while some proponents of the lab leak hypothesis expressed frustration on social media that the important question of how the coronavirus originated was being eclipsed.