"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed," wrote the great journalist, I.F. Stone.
I first encountered I.F. Stone's admonition on a large wall poster in a hall some feet away from Erwin Knoll's office at The Progressive Magazine in 1985.
Stone's statement seemed both inspiring and obvious.
This week, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), is revealed as having self-consciously lied about how the Pandemic began.
Emails released by members of a U.S. House committee reveal Anthony Fauci worked with virologists and U.S. government officials in early 2020, musing on formulating strategy to examine COVID 19 origins, and the efficacy of ways of countering "voices of conspiracy" asserting the possibility of an accidental Chinese lab leak of the COVID 19 virus.
"Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum," read a Feb. 4, 2020 email from former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Fauci and other NIH officials.
The conspiracy theory is the contention that Chinese government scientists secretly bio-engineered a Coronavirus that subsequently was unintentionally released into the world to catastrophic consequences.
Help put down is the not the same as explain what the science says.
Currently, there are 312,173,462 confirmed cases and 5,501,000 deaths and climbing, according to the World Health Organization.
This is not to assert that public health advice and measures advocated by United States public health officials are not valid. We should, roughly: Get vaccinated and boosted, wear a mask, and get tested.
The emails do reveal Fauci and public health officials disregarding the fact the Chinese government is a hyper-secret State that routinely acts destructively, brokering no dissent as it veers into totalitarianism, emitting routine lies.
Further, the obvious plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis was acknowledged in the same emails in which Fauci and his colleagues decided to publicly dismiss what likely occurred in China.
Reports Maia Hibbett and Ryan Grim in The Intercept:
The [U.S. House Members] letter, signed by James Comer, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, but were heavily redacted when published in June 2021. The redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020, telephone conference between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci; his then-boss, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins; and several of the world’s leading virologists. The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden at the time.
Oversight Committee staff were able to view the full emails 'in camera,' which means they could physically look at them and take notes but couldn’t take copies with them. The information released Tuesday for the first time reveals the content of notes taken on the February 1 call.
On that call, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry told Fauci and Collins the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan lab. It might have been genetically engineered, the transcription of Garry’s notes suggests, but this now seems unlikely. Another possibility, put forward by Farzan, was that it could have been evolved in the lab through a process known as serial passage.
Work since Feb. 2020 by independent intellectuals and scientists around the globe on COIVD 19 origins devastates the Chinese-American government public consensus that natural, non-man-made explanations must account for the emergence of the Pandemic. (Vanity Fair; Origins of SARS-CoV-2; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).
To disagree with the consensus is to engage in "conspiracy" talk, an elite U.S. research community now led by Fauci assures us in well-publicized statements in The Lancet (Feb 2020) and Nature (March 2020), an effort referenced in the emails released this week.A May 5, 2021 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists feature, The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, suggests looking closer and considering the evidence, without apology to the moment's consensus, and Fauci's dismissal.
Writes Wade:
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.
Now, even Fauci tacitly admits publicly that dismissal and dishonest ridicule of the lab leak hypothesis is no longer a sustainable position, as Jack Brewster details in a chronology of Fauci statement in Forbes, published June 16, 2021.
See also Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti in Breaking Points below:
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The work of DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), an independent group of itinerant intellectuals and scientists, instructs as an example of promoting rational examination of hypotheses on the origins of COIVD 19.
An outline follows.
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SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis
Laboratory Hypothesis Leak Overview
Guest Post by Andrew Tuntable, Ph. D. atuntable@gmail.com @atuntable
DRASTIC and other groups have uncovered substantial evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by the leak of the virus from a laboratory in Wuhan. This evidence together with many references is described in this paper:
SARS-COV-2 Laboratory Leak Hypothesis
In summary, the evidence is:-
The bat coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the world’s leading bat coronaviruses laboratory. (Not proof, but certainly of interest.)
Wuhan is over 1000 km from the relevant bats. The bats were not traded in the Wuhan wet markets.
The virus arose suddenly, fully functional, with no known human or animal precursors. This is unlike SARS-1 and MERS.
The virus is a chimera (a mixture) of two different viruses. Chimera’s can arise naturally, but are also often engineered in laboratories.
The virus also contains two different powerful adaptations at the same time, an effective spike protein and a furin cleavage site. This is why it is the most infectious coronavirus in 100 years.
The WIV and the Eco Health Alliance proudly published their earlier results on genetically engineering chimeras based on coronaviruses. They have also submitted grant proposals to add furin cleavage sites to coronaviruses.
It was discovered that in 2013 six bat guano miners became ill with a SARS-like virus, samples of which were sent to the WIV. This could have been the precursor to SARS-COV-2. The WIV had said the miners had a fungal infection.
The WIV conducted coronavirus research at biosecurity levels 2 and 3, not high security BSL-4. A US government report had raised concerns about their biosecurity practices in 2017.
Lab leaks are not uncommon and have happened in many laboratories around the world.
There is some evidence that workers at the WIV became ill in late 2019.
More importantly, the Chinese government has removed data and has angrily thwarted any proper investigation. They refuse to disclose whether the WIV was studying a SARS-COV-2 like virus.
There does not appear to have been any attempt to trace the contacts of the earliest cases by looking for long lived antibodies.
The Chinese government has still not found any natural precursor after an extensive search testing over 80,000 samples.
There are no credible rebuttals.
The weight of this evidence shows that the virus escaped from the WIV beyond reasonable doubt.
This is important because this technology has become much more accessible to laboratories around the world, often with minimal oversight. Advances in technology could enable future genetically engineered viruses to be far more infectious and virulent than SARS-COV-2.
(Permission to use this cartoon is granted with attribution.)
This is what must not be allowed to happen. Students from existing laboratories setting up their own laboratories around the world and conducting dangerous Gain of Function research with inadequate safety precautions.
The next engineered virus could be even more infectious, have a longer incubation period, a higher mortality rate and, like HIV, attack the immune system. It could be far more dangerous than SARS-COV-2.
Full Paper here.
