A leaked exchange of private messages among key scientists has shed light on a sinister cover-up regarding Covid’s origin. The quartet, funded by major organisations, misled the public by claiming a natural origin, while privately admitting that the virus could have been developed in a lab. Ian Birrell, in UnHerd, takes a deep dive into a scandal rocking the scientific community. Here’s an excerpt:
“What happened to Oppenheimer damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory,” wrote Kai Bird, author of the biography on which Christopher Nolan’s new film is based. “Yet too many of our citizens still distrust scientists and fail to understand the scientific quest, the trial and error inherent in testing any theory against facts by experimenting. Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”
Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence – and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.
This is, one prominent U.S. biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 – barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organisation had declared an international emergency.
Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged – and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid – just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.
Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that SARS-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research – along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication – even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.
“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist – although he admitted that he was “worried” U.S. diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by the Washington Post, “might have something”.
It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the U.S. infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed its “evidence” – as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organisation’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.
It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest U.S. science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then Director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1st involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K. Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab – and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “wild west” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.
As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two U.S.-based authors – Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans – to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.
Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in the Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial U.S. funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.
The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” – as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GoF escape” – a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the U.S. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.
The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”
Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.
Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the first thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”
Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be – even for a graduate student – to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.
Worth reading in full.
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Conflicts around the world created by the US so countries have to buy expensive US LPG, LNG and weapons.
Cui bono.
Follow the money.
Apparently the UK could buy Iraq/Iran oil at 50 dollars a barrel – instead of the current 100 dollars a barrel bought from India who buy it from er, Russia.
USA gets some for free by looting Syria.
And massive profits by selling their LPG to the EU – (but just think of all the wonderful CO2 emitted).
If only Putin hadn’t blown up his own pipeline.
For the gormless out there the last sentence is sarcasm.
Your barking up the wrong tree. We get 50% of our gas from the North Sea and most of the rest from Norway, and the remainder from the USA. America has much lower energy prices than ours because of fracking. We have astronomically high prices because of The Climate Change Act and the pursuit of Net Zero. If you want to understand high prices you must look to our pandering to the UN and it’s Sustainable Development policies that seek to lower the standard of living of the prosperous west because they think our lifestyles are “unsustainable”. The USA mostly resists that but under the Democrats of Obama Biden and Harris if she wins in November, the USA will be drawn more into this Eco Socialism.
Conflicts around the world started by the US have pushed energy prices through the roof for many countries, I’m not just talking about the UK.
You are preaching to the converted when it comes to the bogus climate change debacle and the costs involved.
Please give examples? What conflicts, and were they necessary or not?———Since 2008 when Miliband gave us the Climate Change Act electricity prices have risen 300%. This is due to combination of massive subsidy to renewables paid for on consumers bills and also the link between gas prices and electricity prices since a lot of electricity is produced using gas.
——If I were you I would not give this current eco socialist Labour Government pandering to UN/WEF agenda’s around climate an easy ride by blaming America for the current state of affairs. Our absurd Energy Policies are what are mostly to blame for our current predicament.
List of U.S. attempts to overthrow governments (* indicates success) since 1949:
China 1949 to early 1960s
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953 *
Guatemala 1954 *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64 *
Iraq 1963 *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70 *
Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
Ecuador 1960-63 *
Congo 1960 *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64 *
Dominican Republic 1963 *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964 *
Indonesia 1965 *
Ghana 1966 *
Chile 1964-73 *
Greece 1967 *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971 *
Australia 1973-75 *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76 *
Jamaica 1976-80 *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82 *
Grenada 1983 *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987 *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90 *
Panama 1989 *
Bulgaria 1990 *
Albania 1991 *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 *
Iraq 2003 *
Haiti 2004 *
Somalia 2007 to present
Honduras 2009
Libya 2011 *
Syria 2012
Ukraine 2014 *
https://davidswanson.org/warlist/
Yeah well what about British oil and gas (onshore and offshore) and British coal and British nuclear power? Yeah, let’s blame the Russians. Nothing to do with stupid/evil policy choices going back decades.
Upwards of 300 years of coal beneath our feet, plus shale gas, plus oil and gas and nuclear.
As a minimum we should be fuel independent.
It’s simply tragic
Weren’t you, me and tof just talking about this the other week? Ha! Never in a month of Sundays will the people of the North East adhere to such absolute codswallop. These Woketards can haddaway an’ shite! And I don’t know how they’re able to bring sexism into it as ”pet” is very much a unisex word. Honestly, do these people have anything between their lugs or just bubble and squeak?
”Geordies have slammed Newcastle University for urging researchers to bid ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’ after bosses deemed the slang term sexist.
Diversity chiefs labelled the Tyneside lingo ‘patronising’ in an equality and inclusion toolkit issued to researchers.
Their seven-page guide instructs readers to ‘avoid… terms, such as girls, pet, or ladies’ and asks that groups are referred to as ‘friends or colleagues’ instead.
The advice appears in a section named ‘Talking about Gender‘ which says: ‘Sexism can often be subtle in conversations, and we can all be guilty of it without realising.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13761925/Fury-Newcastle-University-urges-staff-drop-Geordie-nickname-pet-word-bossy-theyre-sexist-locals-slamming-call-totally-stupid.html
“And I don’t know how they’re able to bring sexism into it as ”pet” is very much a unisex word.”
I lived in Sunderland for four years. Most of my friends at the time were Mackems, lads and lasses and yes “pet” was unisex. What the numpties fail to understand was that the use of the term “pet” also carried connotations of warmth and friedliness which is and always will be way beyond the cold formalities of friend / colleague. In the North West the equivalent to “pet” would be “love” but it is not quite as warm as “pet.”
“These Woketards can haddaway an’ shite!”
Exactly Mogs. Destroy the language and the culture goes with it.
I cannot compete with the poetry of “haddaway an’ shite!” so firk off will have to do.
And the relevance of this to energy pricing is? Maybe in the wrong thread here…
Thanks Hardliner. And in which thread should the topic go?
Yes …. but then the Globalists/Americans/EU wouldn’t be able to control us.
I hear on TV news dumb socialists supporting Net Zero absurdity saying “we must do this as we have to avert the climate crisis” and other such utter garbage. We must not do this at all as long as the rest of the world is mostly not doing it, and we certainly should not be doing it at brake neck speed by 2030, which apart from being utterly stupid is absolutely IMPOSSIBE. ——For a start there are about 25 million gas boilers in the UK. In 5 and a quarte years from now anyone who thinks we can replace all of those with heat pumps needs certified, and the first person in the mental ward should be Miliband.
Aren’t they guessing? After all, the oil prices seem to be lower than the recent peak values. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/brent-crude-oil
But we do not get our gas from Russia. That only accounted for 3% of our gas. 50% comes from our own reserves in the North Sea, which our silly governments want to stop, and the majority of the rest comes from Norway and then the USA.
——I suspect that what will happen with this Labour Eco Fundamentalist Government is that all of the renewable subsidies that have been in the past added to our electric bills will now be added to gas bills instead so as to encourage us away from gas and coerce us into getting heat pumps. This is going to make gas prices very high and people very cold, especially the poorest and pensioners stripped of their winter fuel allowance. ——It is a bare face lie that Labour tell when they say they will make energy prices lower, and another bare faced lie when they say renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels.
Money talks. Here are the tariff rates at my place now in p/kWh units:
Night rate electric: 20.70
Day rate electric: 30.29
Gas: 6.95
The net effect of that is that gas is a lot less expensive for heating (even using things that are less efficient), notwithstanding the marketing text that the firm issues, in favour of environmentally friendly sources. Years ago, night rate electric was roughly 1/3 of the day rate, so it’s that one that has been jacked up so far.
Add to that the fact that we do not have enough generating capacity to meet our current needs let alone an increase in electricity demand. And MiliTwat will not be delivering any additional unreliable energy generation beyond what is already in progress because the lead times will see out the next 5 years.
Watch out for “variable pricing” via your smart meter if you have one, which will seek to charge more based on demand and if the wind isn’t blowing. It won’t be just day or night time rates. It will be rates depending on availability of electricity as we move away from reliable sources like coal and gas. Or as the head of the National Grid (Steve Holiday) said a few years ago “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”——-He meant if it happens to be windy.
I think we get a large percentage of LNG from the USA. If Trump fails then Harris/Biden plan to ban all fracking which is where most or all of our gas is coming from.
We need to be less NIMBY and get on with our own fracking.
Why? Net Zero.
We are not paying for energy being produced and consumed, we are paying for intermittency. That means we are paying for energy that is not being produced or cannot be used.
Plenty of errors. As pointed out below, the UK uses very little Russian gas. Also omitted is the fact that gas prices were on the rise months before the special operation to liberate the 4 eastern oblasts began. As countries awoke from Covid, demand for gas shot up as it was desperately needed to keep the grids going in the face of a couple of years more unreliable generation added, reliable generation retired and the industry having slowed down production in the face of reduced demand and anti-industry ecofascism. It is of course true that prices will keep slowly edging up because the more unreliable generation you add to your grid the more expensive it becomes, as well as closing your own reliable generation and relying on other countries to supply at times of high demand when unit prices are high. This will continue for at least a decade.