Viral, a new book about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, investigates whether it was a naturally occurring virus that jumped from animals to humans… or a lab leak. The Daily Mail has published an extract in today’s paper in which the authors describe the role of citizen journalists in discovering the truth that the mainstream media wasn’t interested in.
In the city of Bhubaneswar, India, a man known as ‘The Seeker’ was rifling through a Chinese website.
It was May 18th, 2020, and he was responding to a tweet by an American scientist speculating about the origin of the virus ripping its way across the planet.
And, using login details he’d found online, he was searching through a digital anthology of academic work.
Then, suddenly, he stumbled on a medical thesis which reported how, in 2012, six men fell ill after clearing out piles of bat guano from an old copper mine in Yunnan, in south-western China. Three of the men had died.
The doctors suspected the men had caught a virus that originated in bats, and the case had been investigated by virologists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), more than 1,000 miles away.
The Seeker, a slim 30-year-old with shoulder-length hair, has been accused variously of working for the CIA or Indian intelligence services. But the truth is rather less dramatic.
“I learned how to make search engines work for me,” he told us. “It was more madness than method.”
Motivated by an interest in finding out how the pandemic began and skilled at trawling the internet for clues, he began communicating on Twitter with a group of other internet ‘sleuths’ from around the world – all pursuing the same question: where did the virus that causes COVID-19 originate?
Soon, some of the sleuths had coalesced into a loose confederation known as DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). And more key findings were quick to follow.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A U.S. intelligence report claims that the lab leak theory is probably correct, given the dangerous nature of the experiments being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the lax biosecurity protocols. The FT has more.
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Sadly, monetary expenditure doesn’t matter when it comes to “saving the planet”. It’s more important to be seen to be “doing the right thing by the environment” regardless of the cost. OK, the population may be saddled with crippling taxes, OK, the economy might crash, OK, society might crumble under the pressure, but we’ll be able to hold our heads up high as a nation and say “We did our bit by reducing the world’s carbon emissions by 1%”. And then sit back and realise that all the pain it’s inflicted on us has had no effect on the climate after all.
Yep, you got it in one.
Cost per house? “We do not have an accurate cost per property to provide this information”
This is a lie, obviously. They must have paid invoices for equipment and installation. Ergo, the cost is grossly disproportionate to any alleged benefit.
Weasel words – ‘We don’t know accurately the cost per property because we know we can’t just add it all up and divide by eight because some properties had PV and some had thermal solar panels. Therefore, it’s technically true that we can’t give an accurate cost per property.’
The fact they’ve refused suggests they’ve spent more than £60,000 x 8 = £480,000. If not, they’d be patting each other on the back about the massive savings they’d made.
I hope the information commissioner does not back the refusal of the FOI request on the basis that revealing the costs would be too controversial.
Yes, they lie.
Or it was paid to a few councillors mates?
Milton Friedman’s 4th way of spending money illustrated perfectly. Spending other people’s money on other people means you are not interested in either price or quality. Government spending in a nutshell – just spend it.
172 years? Nonsense. It’ll only take 12 years (if energy prices increase at 50% per year).
Exactly the same as my council. The only eco-focused properties in the borough are those built by the taxpayers’ £££s. No intention to find out if it’s value for money.
Such standards are classed as “nice to have” where private housing is being proposed, despite the declaration of the climate crisis. Hypocrisy writ large.
It isn’t supposed to be monitored they make the momey upfront because the agenda is purpose built to funnel money that way to the appropriate parties. They did well out of it. Never mind that it is fading now they are pulling money out and making money on the way down just look at electric cars.
This is par for the Net Zero course. Net Zero was waved through parliament with no discussion of cost/benefit. There was no debate and no vote. The Political Class have imposed this on us all under the false pretences of a climate crisis in order to comply with the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Our governments are simply local administrators implementing globalist mandates, and taking their instructions from the UN/WEF. We are simply an inconvenience to them and any concerns we have are brushed aside.
All dead but we pay anyway. Can you even conceive of a way that we would get the lost money back from the last forty years. The best we can do is stop it and never allow it to happen again.
I can conceive that if they re-introduced gladiatoral combat, with the Uniparty clowns who gave us all this crap and the eco-profiteers who paid them, scrapping with hungry tigers and lions, the ticket sales would make a very big contribution to the lost money.
And hugely enhance public jollity.
I think we have to be a bit more aggressive in our response to this sort of obfuscation. When people complete these schemes, and refuse to reveal their results, we should be saying, very loudly indeed, that the only possible reason is that they have failed. And asking not what the results really were, but why they refuse to admit failure.
With Socialists it’s money no object so long as it’s not their own.