Who was behind the lab leak cover-up? I asked this question on Saturday, noting that the cover-up began, not at the Fauci teleconference on February 1st 2020, as is usually supposed – after that meeting Fauci wrote to his Government colleagues to say he was initiating a neutral investigation to see “where that leads” – but at the February 3rd teleconference convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).
I’ve since been reminded that, although the first draft of the NASEM letter was anti-lab-origin, the final version actually sent to the White House (below) was neutral on the matter.
“The experts informed us that additional genomic sequence data from geographically- and temporally-diverse viral samples are needed to determine the origin and evolution of the virus,” the National Academy Presidents wrote.
The initial draft circulated following the teleconference had stated: “The initial views of the experts is [sic] that the available genomic data are consistent with natural evolution and that there is currently no evidence that the virus was engineered to spread more quickly among humans.” But this strong statement was gone from the final version.
It appears that the anti-lab-origin language was shot down by some of the scientists in the group, who were much more open to the possibility. Dr. Trevor Bedford in particular said in his feedback that there was a “lot” of evidence favouring a lab origin. “I wouldn’t mention binding sites here. If you start weighing evidence there’s a lot to consider for both scenarios,” he wrote.
The erasure of anti-lab-origin statements from the final letter indicates that this meeting as such was not the source of the lab leak cover-up. Equally, there were people involved in that meeting who plainly did want to suppress any discussion of the possibility.
Most notably, shortly after the teleconference, one participant, EcoHealth Alliance Director Peter Daszak, emailed another, Ralph Baric, the U.S. virologist who had collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronavirus gain-of-function work, to begin to organise the infamous Lancet statement, published February 19th, that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”.
Was it the failure to carry the day with the NASEM letter that led Daszak and Baric to initiate the Lancet statement? Or would they have done that anyway? It’s hard to say. But either way it becomes clear who in that meeting was most desirous of pushing this agenda forward.
Based on these backroom goings-on, it would appear that the cover-up wasn’t ordered by anyone as such. Rather, it seems to have been driven by some well-connected scientists like Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric who were personally connected to the scientific work at the centre of suspicions. Others not directly implicated went along with the suppression to varying degrees, some of their statements differing in public and private.
Kristian Andersen is a particularly fascinating case study. The Scripps microbiology professor’s worry that the new virus looked engineered was what had brought about the Fauci teleconference in the first place. He got in touch with Farrar, who got in touch with Fauci, leading Fauci to ask Farrar to convene the group. Eddie Holmes, one of the group, later said they excluded Baric from this group because they wanted a “proper investigation”. “We decided not to invite Ralph Baric just because he was too close to the WIV. … We wanted to make it a proper investigation.” During their discussions Fauci told Andersen that if he thought it came from a lab he should write a paper. Andersen drafted Proximal Origin and included the possibility of a lab origin (albeit via serial passage rather than direct engineering, which Andersen was dismissive of) and submitted it to Nature; Fauci, Collins and Farrar notably all signed off on this paper. When it was rejected by Nature (courtesy of an unnamed reviewer who seems to have been of the Daszak and Baric persuasion) for not rejecting lab origin firmly enough, Andersen robustly defended the inclusion of the possibility. Yet he then wrote it out of the final version published in Nature Medicine, and since then has not publicly defended a lab origin, though privately emails have shown his suspicions continued at least for several more months. Nonetheless, by 2022 he was putting his name to studies claiming (spuriously) to show “dispositive” evidence that the Huanan wet market was the source of the (natural) outbreak.
Farrar is another intriguing case. Initially writing that he was “50-50” between natural and lab origin, at around the same point in mid-February he managed to both sign off on the first version of Proximal Origin, which allowed for a lab origin, and sign the Lancet letter condemning a non-natural origin as a conspiracy theory! 50-50 indeed.
The Lancet statement and ‘de-labbed’ Proximal Origin then became the go-to basis on which the suppression of all lab-origin talk was justified.
There’s no sign, then, that the cover-up was a directive from the top, at least not originally. Rather there was a well-connected group of conflicted and implicated scientists who carried off an extraordinarily successful effort to convince others that there is nothing to see here, and even if there is we should ignore it for the greater good – to avoid “great potential harm to science and international harmony”, as NIH Director Francis Collins put it. This, it is worth adding, was despite, not because of, the efforts of U.S. security services to promote a lab origin from January 2020 onwards, probably as a way of implicating China, raising public alarm and justifying emergency measures.
This doesn’t excuse those who conspired in the cover-up of course. It doesn’t mean that none of them are guilty; to the contrary, it means they all are.
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Everything about the WHO is suspect.
it always makes me shake my head when you hear people and the media say “india has had more deaths than the UK and scare people with supposed high figures” well yes, but india has different factors, i.e. the population of at least 1.4 billion, india’s hygiene and sanitary conditions are considered worse than a lot of Weston countries and also the general health conditions and diseases are also poorer. When the Who and the media spout big figures and ignore the many other factors it really is disingenuous.
Interestingly, you would think Covid would have had a bigger impact on California’s large homeless population.
Two articles on the WHO figures today. On one hand we are to take the data about Sweden seriously but not the data about India. Personally, I’m taking it all with a large pinch of salt.
Indeed, we seem to be picking cherries and sour grapes somewhat arbitrarily.
Except that the data for Sweden is far more likely to be accurate than the guesstimates for India
The Indian’s secret was vindaloo.
Vindaloo takes no prisoners.
More objectively likely, or more helpful to our preferred narrative?
The deaths in India need to be adjusted in order to fit in with The Science (the computer models).
They are having similar problems with the recorded global temperatures, turns out the weather is a climate change denier, they will cancel the weather’s Twitter account asap.
The WHO seems like a bigger version of the EU – out of touch, irrelevant, and a law unto itself.
The WHO is significantly worse. It’s an unelected gremium of so-called public health experts with the ambition to dicate government policy globally down to the level of who is when allowed to talk to whom and how people must dress in public. This is based on the notion that globally acting health bureaucrats get to decide which human acitivies are essential and which aren’t and can thus be harmlessly prohibited. Considering that people’s lives are usually tighty coupled to there jobs, this basically means grouping people into essential and inessential ones. The essential ones are allowed to work. The others are supposed to remain at home on often meagre government handouts financed by printing money or accumulating debts.
And it gets more evil than that: The WHO would also like to see universal, mandatory COVID vaccination. Even in the best case (which is far from the actual case), a vaccine will always kill some people. Hence, forcing people to get vaccinated is equivalent to decreeing that some of them are so inessential that it’s ok to put them to death by injection.
Lead by a terrorist…
What could possibly go wrong?
Still the most fundamental aspect of this is that no new pathogenic virus was properly isolated from any sick individuals in China, there was no proof of a new virus that caused a new disease.
When you look into the topic it turns out that virology is a complete joke of a science.
What they call isolation really is a fraud, they don’t isolate anything, they simply mix a sputum sample from a sick patient, mix it with monkey kidney cells as a cell culture host and then starve those cells and poison them with nephrotoxic antibiotics, when the kidney cells die they cliam that it but be virus wot done it.
From there they let a computer analyse all the gentic debris from the toxic soup and get the computer to piece together every possible combination that these bits could convievably make up, they then declare one of these made up sequences to be the new virus.
This is why they have an endless number of variants, the computers can generate endless different possible combinations and the virologists can keep claiming which ever ones they like as being significant.
The whole thing is a colossal fraud as are the vaccines that are claimed to combat these claimed viral infections.
Don’t fall for the “viruses don’t exist” scam either. There is pathogenic contagion that we call viruses, they just understand very little about them. The part they really don’t like to talk about is “terrain”, the health of the individual plays a much bigger part in how successful a virus is than any vaccine.
When humans play god disaster often follows.
Matthew Syed has written an absolutely appalling article in the Sunday Times using the WHO estimates to ‘prove’ how reasonable the UK government’s actions were/are. He also has a swipe at this website and all who ‘sail in her’ ( calling it by its old name).
I commented, needless to say my comment has been removed. The Times doesn’t like the truth. Goodness knows what the interweb will be like with the ‘on-line harms’ legislation.
the online harms bill ensures access to100% state viewpoints at all times, no exceptions.
VPN.
I didn’t realise we had been namechecked. I always assumed we were too small for anyone to notice. Evidently not. Excellent – a swipe shows we’ve hit a nerve and got people worried.
Yes, Syed accuses us of cherrypicking data!
Gave me a good chortle after what we have seen with government statistics.
Mark Woolhouse, a senior government scientist wrote a book about the Covid debacle; appropriately titled “The Year the World went Mad”. He concludes that the lockdowns were not necessary.
They’re just finishing the job.
They exaggerated the risk people were facing from a new pathogen and they are now exaggerating the total deaths. They are writing history, in preparation for the future and leaving no lose ends:
– The virus was super dangerous
– Lockdowns, masks, tests and vaccines saved us.
– Millions still died because we were slow to act.
– In the future we must act very quickly.so that we don’t have 15 million deaths.
That’s the story they are going with and they have the force of international institutions, the corporate media, national governments and major corporations to make sure their version is firmly established.
Even with their bloated estimates of death the claimed virus was still a damp squib, but they have injected billions of people with their poisons so their work is done.
They have left an enormous number of loose ends, and they will unravel. We just have to keep pulling on them.
One of the best articles I’ve seen linked to by DS is this one which concerns itself with the Italians kick-starting the covid scam in the West.
If you read it, pay close attention to the section that talks about how the main mechanism of the fraud, the test kit, was developed in Italy in cooperation with the communist Chinese.
It wasn’t long ago MI5 admitted the communist Chinese has infiltrated Westminster.
“In the words of Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate Covid models that sent the world into a tailspin:
A single sentence said it all – I will never forget it.
The fact that Ferguson felt so secure in uttering it says it all really – that his position, and that of those he advised was unchallengeable, and that he can have had so little cop on to let the cat out of the bag like that in a televised interview – so what does that say about the quality of his modeling?
Great article BTW. You are right – one of the best DS has linked to
‘The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible’…
Are they talking about India or the UK?
And where was the header picture taken – West Bromwich or Bethnal Green?
Countries with reliable reporting systems, if not with reliable reporting, are showing mostly little above average, or even below.
Nobody in authority tells the truth.
What is also highly suspicious is that the evil cretinous scientists are claiming the spike in hepatitis in children may be linked to pet dogs.
Let’s ignore the fact the world has been forced to lockdown over the last two years while politicians (and undoubtedly the scientists themselves) partied and carried on with their lives as normal.
No they need a scapegoat and they want to destroy another joy we have in our lives.
I’ve meanwhile read a couple of arguments that keeping of pets should be prohibited because it would be to damaging the the climate.
Yes it’s quite clear the great reset includes stripping us of pets. Well they can fuck off with their fraud. I will be buying a pup within the next few months.
Can’t heklp but suspect they are taking the lead from China, where pets have been killed byt “the authorities” when forcing their owners into quarantine.Presumably they saw that it was yet another effective way to demoralise people.
I’m sure you might remember in the early days of the covid scam, the dodgy scientists were talking about pets being carriers of covid. Such warnings fizzled away from the scientists poisonous lips, but the memory remained.
Maybe they realised this was one step too far too soon and didn’t pursue it.
Maybe it was the first nudge, while the hepatitis theory is the second nudge, and perhaps the third nudge will be the final one where they’ve effectively granted themselves permission to confiscate our pets ‘for our own safety’.
They will have deemed the public suitably brainwashed by this point to be more willing to give up their beloved dog.
Do you think the famous dog owners among TPTB will be “giving up” their dogs? or having them forcibly taken from them?
The WHO has made healthcare in the 1st world countries worse, they should stick to countries who actually need them
What we had here may have made developed country healthcare worse than typical care in India or Africa.
Anyone involved in the flogging of the fake vaccines is lying. Don’t believe a word they say and do not get any more jabs. You put your health and life at risk with this poison.
Anything these monsters want is for certain not anything you want.
Indeed; all in accordance with the UN policy of population reduction.
Recent BBC Article on Excess Death – Explained from the DATA!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oq8-mOldEg
Remember, whatever nonsense they try to impose upon us in the future:
JUST SAY NO!
Highly suspect organisation produces highly suspect data. Well, that’s a surprise – NOT
The WHO is clearly one of our enemy within. Anything that they publish is to be treated with suspicion and extreme scepticism. A truly evil organisation; same as the UN and WEF.
Thank you for an excellent article.The WHO figures is based on a model which is absurd for countries with reliable real world data.Look at the Nordic countries with reliable data and Sweden with the world’s oldest and also the world’s most reliable death data.How many non discovered deaths of covid in a country with the most reliable death statistics did WHO find with their model? So many that they said Sweden was highest in the Nordic countries.
Nordic countries don’t need WHO estimates.They have real data.See below age stand. adjusted excess mortality.Sweden below Denmark,Finland(both LD the latter more so)and Norway lowest.
Do you believe Nordic raw data or WHO model?
‘He who pays the piper plays the tune’….Gates has his song sheet and the “terrible” pandemic narrative must be kept uppermost in minds.
India used Ivermectin to treat Covid patients so it’s very important to the WHO that India is identified as having one of the worst outcomes from the Scamdemic.
The WHO has to punish India for using Ivermectin and undermining the “WHO Official” view that Ivermectin doesn’t work.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but didn’t Japan also se ivermectin?
But they still believe China on 5,000 deaths???
Doesn’t make sense.
But having said that none of the ‘rona crap makes any sense.