In my recent article on ‘The Greatest Story Never Told: German Virology in Wuhan – and Montana‘, I asked:
If you were a detective investigating a crime – for instance, the creation of a supposedly deadly virus (whether it was in fact so deadly is, of course, another matter) – whose behaviour would you find suspicious? The behaviour of those who themselves expressed concern about a lab-leak and were keen on investigating the matter… or the behaviour of those who were dismissive and defensive and tried to shut the conversation down?
The allusion was to the famous ‘Fauci e-mails‘ and the even more famous February 1st 2020 conference call in which a select group of international scientists and public health officials discussed the possibility of an artificial, laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.
As we know from the e-mails, those who were dismissive and defensive and tried to shut the conversation down were the Dutch gain-of-function researcher Ron Fouchier and, above all, Germany’s Covid oracle and designer of the ‘gold standard’ COVID-19 PCR test, Christian Drosten. Those who expressed concern about a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 and were keen on investigating the possibility were a group of Anglosphere researchers led by the U.S.-based Danish virologist Kristian Andersen, who first brought the matter to the attention of Anthony Fauci, and indeed Fauci himself.
Far from appearing like some mastermind or evil genius behind the gain-of-function experiments which many suspect gave rise to SARS-CoV-2, the picture which emerges of Fauci in the e-mails is that of someone who is seriously out-of-his-depth and unfamiliar with the subject matter. (See, for instance, the February 8th email in which he asks whether serial passage in a laboratory could have the same effect as natural adaptation in the wild and admits that “this is not my specific area of expertise”.)
But there is also someone else who expressed concern about a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 and called for an investigation: namely, none other than Ralph Baric, the very American virologist who in the most popular theory of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 is regarded as the very ‘father’ of the virus! Moreover, Baric did not only express concern and call for the matter to be investigated behind-the-scenes. He did so publicly.
Baric is thus one of the signatories of a May 2021 letter in the journal Science which is simply titled “Investigate the origins of COVID-19”. The letter criticised a recently published joint WHO-China study for giving short-shrift to the laboratory hypothesis. “Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident,” the authors noted,
the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely”. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only four of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.
“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the authors insisted.
The other signatories include Alina Chan, one of the most well-known and dogged defenders of the lab-origin hypothesis and co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
Contrast Baric’s public support for pursuing the laboratory hypothesis with the behaviour of Christian Drosten. Not only, as shown in my previous article, was Drosten calling behind-the-scenes, in the e-mails, for the lab-leak theory to be “debunked” and “dropped”, he is also a signatory of the now infamous February 19th 2020 statement in The Lancet, which amounts to a nearly tearful appeal to ‘leave the Wuhan Institute of Virology alone!’
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the authors (also including Peter Daszak and Jeremy Farrar) wrote,
Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. … We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.
Why was Christian Drosten so nervous about the emergence of the lab-leak hypothesis in early 2020 and why was he so eager to put it to rest? Was it merely because of his heartfelt concern for the hurt feelings of the researchers of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)? Or was it because he feared that a serious investigation into the possibility of a lab-leak in Wuhan would ultimately lead to the joint German-Chinese lab in the city, which is co-directed by his colleague Ulf Dittmer and which, unlike the WIV, is located right in the area of the initial COVID-19 outbreak.
As documented here, Dittmer’s virology department at Essen University Hospital had collaborated on publicly-funded research with the WIV for a decade, and Drosten met Shi Zhengli of the WIV and other Institute researchers and officials at a symposium organised by Dittmer in Berlin in 2015. Dittmer, Drosten and Shi can be seen in the below photo from the event.

Dittmer was recently named President of the Gesellschaft für Virologie (Society of Virology), the specialist association of German-speaking virologists. Drosten is on the advisory board of the same organisation.
Why did Drosten not mention the German-Chinese lab in his conversations with Anthony Fauci, Kristian Andersen and his other Anglosphere counterparts in early 2020? At roughly the same time, he was telling the German daily Die Berliner Zeitung that he had heard about the novel virus in Wuhan from virologist colleagues in the city.
Two years later, in February 2022, after the DEFUSE proposal had first been leaked online, Drosten would claim in the German press that if he had only known about it, he would have thought twice about signing the Lancet statement. DEFUSE famously involves Baric’s creation of a chimeric virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 and includes the WIV as partner. Drosten, it should be noted, had recently been accused by the German physicist Roland Wiesendanger of participating in efforts to cover up of the lab-leak hypothesis: an accusation which is borne out precisely by the since published e-mails.
“Some people in the USA, above all, knew about these experiments,” Drosten said testily in his remarks about DEFUSE. “Many scientists, including me, put our hand in the fire for the colleagues in Wuhan [by signing the Lancet statement], but were not informed about these projects.”
But this was easy for Drosten to say. It was no problem for him to throw Daszak and Baric under the bus. The DEFUSE proposal, after all, had been leaked, and, in the meanwhile, a vast cache of documents related to it is publicly available thanks to an American FOIA request. It should be recalled that DEFUSE was not even funded anyway.
But what do we know about Drosten’s own RAPID project, which was fully-funded by the German government from 2017 through last year and which, as shown in my last article, also involved gain-of-function experiments?
What do we know about TRR60, Ulf Dittmer’s Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre, which included the WIV as partner and which received millions of euros in funding from the German Research Foundation from 2009 until 2018? Per his own report available here (p. 7), the below photo shows Dittmer in October 2013 at none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where an assessment of the project in view of further funding was being conducted.

What do we know, finally and above all, about the German-Chinese lab in Wuhan which grew out of TRR60 and which was launched in May 2017, just a two-and-a-half years before the official outbreak of COVID-19 in the city?
Where are the freedom-of-information requests? Where are the vast caches of documents? Where are the detailed funding proposals? Where, for that matter, are the email exchanges between, say, Drosten and German officials or Dittmer and his Chinese colleagues?
Ralph Baric undoubtedly makes a nice scapegoat. But what does Christian Drosten have to hide?
Postscript: Entirely fortuitously, shortly after finishing the above article, what appears to be a full and authentic version of Christian Drosten’s RAPID project grant proposal was made available to me. Oddly enough, given that the funding organisation was the German Ministry of Education and Research – but helpfully for international readers and researchers – the version is in English. It can be consulted here. Thanks @TimRealityDE!
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and find him on Bluesky.
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The air time given to these “experts” is part of the problem. That Devi person is dangerous and annoying to people with any semblance of common sense and perspective and yet she is given a platform to promote unscientific rubbish. As for her public but closed interaction with Bill Gates, the less said about that the better!
What is interesting to me is the apparent lack of questions about who this Devi person is, why she is listened to over others and what she’s accomplished that makes her so qualified to lecture society.
Just another WEF Youth Stormtrooper promoted by the Uniparty for ideological purity.
For goodness sakes man, she’s an anthropologist! How can we not respect that? I gave up on medical doctors a long time ago – fracture an arm, heart flutters, tremors, headaches, whatever the ailment – an anthropologist would always be my first port of call.
Just like the UK’s former and current health minister’s being former bankers, NL’s previous health minister being a primary school teacher – surely these people are the best experts to preach about health and vaccines and the like?
Surely, behavioural psychologists should be the go to experts when you’re ill?
She also seems to be a great pal of Nicola Sturgeon and no doubt contributes to the fact that in Scotland we are still supposed to wear masks in certain circumstances. She appeared from nowhere at the beginning of the Covid business.
That pathetic excuse for a human being has a pal?? Now that’s the scariest comment here today.
More than one I believe but we haven’t seen Jason for a while!
A colleague of mine back in the 70s, when we were both working in what was then a reasonably ethical British pharma company shred this gem with me:
“Expert” – an Ex is a has been and a spert is a drip under pressure.
This has never been more true than in the past few years; first with the climate hysterics, then with the Branch Covidians
And a “Specialist” is someone who lives a narrow field and knows nothing much about the real world outside.
Well that’s the thing of the modern left isn’t it? Never, ever admit you are wrong on anything – ever. And if anybody tries to argue the toss with you, just cry foul and cancel them!
And they wonder why they never get to control the levers of power unless taken with armed force?!
Rewriting the facts?
How very pre postmodern of you.
They’re off to an early start with the revisionism. Ukraine isn’t the distraction they’d hoped for.
They’re going to need a bigger squirrel.
Putin has disappointed by not stopping or being stopped, as TPTB and it’s MSM told us would happen.
The Guardian has described back bench MPs who asked the Government to consider the negative effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions as”libertarian crazies”. That seems quite insane so it is no surprise to see the rag churning out this sort of revisionism. Its readers need reassurance that their hysterical behaviour over the last two years has been rational.
Masks, lockdowns and the notion that humans are walking biological time bombs weren’t nipped at the bud and we will now have to live with these ideas and fight them pretty much for ever.
Absolutely. The hysterical and ascientific response has caused real harm to our society.
But political nutcases so enjoy the wonderfully satisfying feeling of ‘actually doing something’ that mandating lockdowns and imprisoning the elderly gives them.
Just be thankful it seems to distract them from doing what they’d really like to do to us.
Just don’t read the guardian.
it’s free for a reason.
Indeed. It has a very low readership.
Confined to the BBC, school staff rooms and university senior common rooms from what I can see.
It’s startling to see just how few eyeballs are being brought to advertisers by most “major” newspapers or legacy media sources like Sky or GB News.
There are UK WuTube vloggers who regularly thrash all of them in listener or viewer numbers, for tuppence in advertising share (if not demonetised).
And yet these massive media dinosaurs keep lumbering on, paying dozens or hundreds of full time staff, funded by something. It’s almost as though they’re more what you’d call vanity projects, or paid propagandists, than actual businesses
Like the really big dinosaurs of pre history, they have massive appetites which have been fed huge clumps (of our money) by governments and the B&MGF all around the world, to invent, promote and maintain the myth for the masses.
Will it take an asteroid to wipe them out? I wonder.
Paid for by government advertising.
Thankfully. Try “The Light paper” a free paper. thelightpaper.co.ukAn excellent read.All issues available to download as pdf free.
Izal TP was more expensive.
Not as slippery.
The Guardian bought to you by its funder Bill Gates
and the Car sales offshore hedge fund.
I don’t know why anyone bothers reading anything from the Guardian. The paper wouldn’t exist without the vast sums it receives from Gates and the OPP, so is hopelessly compromised in terms of providing a semblance of journalistic objectivity.
LOL! They never say:
Political activists posing as ‘scientists’
And that’s before we talk about ‘climate change’!
Perth MSM are in Sky Is Falling mode because we have 10,000 new cases.
Cases! If the damn virus was half as deadly as they want us to believe you’d never hear a word about cases!
The article articulates perfectly what happens when funding becomes the main goal. You don’t stay on the bottom rung if you start bringing in the cash
Focused protection was tested and considered plausible by the UK’s Pandemic Plan and the WHO ….. until they both abruptly changed tack to copy Communist China.
I seem to remember a tv interview where PM Johnson denied having seen or heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. Which would fit with it being smeared, ignored, cancelled by the Covid Technocrats.
The Guardian. Excuse me for a moment while I laugh hysterically. Ok, I’m back. Where was I. Ah yes, the Guardian. The left. The entire progressive movement. I’d like to sum up my feelings in a single simple pithy statement by the master of hilarious comedy and post-post-modern philosophy, the Maestro, Donald J. Trump: “Everything woke turns to shit”. And there we have it. Also Owen Jones is a whiny brat with a very-punchable face. I don’t mean that as abuse, just a statement of objective fact. And I think I’m done.
Bravo


Sridhar is a Gates funded WEF Young Leader and close friend of Chelsea Clinton. She is a three star general in Lucifer’s Army.
How did she become the go to girl
for advocating measures which inevitably lead to the establishment of the bio security state and the ultimate enslavement of humanity?
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/28/global-health-disruptors-the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation/
https://www.younggloballeaders.org/new-class?utf8=✓®ion=a0Tb00000000DCLEA2
This unpleasant series of Guardian articles matters a lot. Why? Because although the Guardian’s readership is small, it includes a very significant proportion of people who have a very significant (and disproportionate) influence on public policy in the UK – for instance senior civil servants, academics, NHS leaders, senior lawyers.
DS should commission a series of articles by scientists, statisticians & medics (not polemicists or journalists) taking down these articles one by one. Because the Guardian articles – misleading as they are – will have a really pernicious effect if not properly challenged. There’s a reason they’re banging this drum so loudly at this stage.
People who read the grauniad should get a P45.
Should put a self sign p45 in the Grauniad for anyone reading it.
It is the house magazine of Common Purpose.
a virus was very timely for the Guardian, it was about to go under, still got the begging bowl
A massive percentage of their readers are teachers.
Unfortunately they are the ones mainly responsible for educating kids.
Perhaps this goes a long way into explaining why there seems to be a dearth of critical thinking amongst the young.
Kids are not taught to challenge anything at school – and when they get home, well, there’s always the BBC.
No offence taken;
I sort-of agree and I am one. Certainly agree that critical thinking is discouraged by most teachers and most certainly by the system itself. Because of exams, there’s more critical thinking in primary school than there is in Key Stage 4 or 5.
Any child asking a question is likely to be ignored or told to stop interrupting, because any child, bright enough to ask a question, is going to be more intelligent than a teacher pushing the big narrative.
Your point is well made. A friend has just retireed after 26 years as a science teacher at a grammar school. What is he going to enjoy most about retirement? “Not having to bite my tongue when talking about so called climate change”. It’s all about the approved narrative.
This sets the scene for all of the covid inquiries etc.
At a fundamental level the basis for all of the responses will be taken as fact; lockdowns work, facemasks are great, vaccines are effective, etc etc.
The discussion will only be on the detail — were our lockdowns a bit too harsh, a bit too late; did we encourage the wrong type of facemask or muck up procurement of PPE; etc etc.
What is needed is analysis at a fundamental level, that’s not frightened to say that an aspect of the response was a complete and utter disaster that ended up causing immense harm (including deaths) to the population that’ll continue to have impacts for years.
I’d like one question to be asked above all about any of the individual aspect of the covid threat response — were decisions made early on about the covid response, whether NPI or medical, that were then maintained throughout (at least until vaccines came) because it suited the people in charge (and did they try to justify this by using the ‘public confidence’ argument — which is always what politicians use to suppress information about how they’ve seriously mucked things up).
Well as you know, like climate change, the science is settled. It said so on the BBC, or was it The Guardian?
The immunocompromised continue to be used as a reason for others to mask up – it’s doing them no favours, they shouldn’t be circulating at all if they are that vulnerable, at best it’s giving them a false sense of security.
Well take it from me, as someone who takes an arthritis drug and has a slightly compromised immune system, I’m tired of being used as an excuse to prolong this nightmare. I haven’t once worn a mask, neither did I hysterically socially distance, sanitise and all the rest. I’ve hugged people and lived normally, only taking the precautions I’ve always done which affect no one. I do NOT expect anyone to have do anything to “protect” me. And the fearful narrative-followers are shocked! I’ve been on the receiving end of comments like “you should stay at home!” And “you SHOULD wear a mask to protect you!” The funny thing is all those people bleating about their safety and what everyone should do, have all been ill, all testing to make SURE it is covid, whereas I haven’t been ill once.
I twice tried to hug or shake hands and was rebuffed. A very offputting experience …
I was last ill in 1977 – that one was ‘Russian flu’ – and mysteriously I’ve been unaffected by this bug too. Maybe I’ve caught the right kind of coronavirus colds in my 68 yrs of life … who knows.
You tried to hug or shake hands with the wrong people. Have you a SITP near you? If so, and you pop along on a Sunday morning, you’ll meet wonderful free thinkers who are always happy to hug, smile and shake hands.
Exactly our situation, as a family, with an immunocompromised child. And we are all unvaccinated as well, wryly amused to see all the vaccinated people catching covid again and again and again. Original Antigenic Sin in action. Kier Starmer must be due yet another dose…
More like a Scicilian Embolism for his part in our troubles.
Of the clap??
There’s Labour’s new election mantra :
” Clap for Kier”!
Their real problem is that they believe it does any good, especially with the junk worn by the general public.
more than 2,000 people have died directly as a result of a Covid jab. The MHRA itself says these figures could be only 10 per cent of the actual numbers. Maybe people like my uncle, 95, died 2 weeks after his jab, and my aunt who had dementia died 2 weeks after her jab. How would we know? The bottom line is that excess deaths are on a par with a bad flu year when they said the flu jab had been the wrong one.
The MHRA say “could be” because they have no idea. They AREN’T bothering to investigate in any detail, the possible vaccine-related deaths.
Nothing can be proved without a post mortem
And how many of those have there been? Anyone heard any results from any of them?
No post morgen, no proof it was the vax.
QED. Big Pharma wins again.
Politicians in the clear, with money in envelopes.
Taunton hospital refused to do autopsies on sudden deaths.
All deaths covered by plausible deniability.
Most deaths in the public arena now described as, “died suddenly” or “natural causes” and followed by… silence.
Not so long ago the death of any public figure would have attracted full and even ghoulish detail and attention in the MSM. They would have insisted on their readers/viewers right to know.
But no MPs or senior civil servants have suddenly dropped dead since vax I got started. Does this suggest –
1) they are remarkably or unusually healthy?
2) they didn’t get the jab designed for the sheeple?
3) they haven’t been jabbed at all?
Just asking, not starting a conspiracy. Honest.
Certainly not 1), most unlikely to be 2) so the answer has to be 3)

The Guardian’s fantasy pull out and keep Covid Pandemic Jubilee Souvenir Special is reminiscent of red top Royal Wedding Funeral Forelock tugging Full Colour Freebies of the Past. Will all school kids get a souvenir Zero Covid Guardian mug or a Chinese made badge saying Don’t be an Agenda
Benderto treasure in a shoe box until the crystal in your palm goes red. it’s rather a desperate mass formation puff piece. The Guardian storytellers and academic contributors are preaching to their zombie public funded flocks, who are unfortunately starting to hear other disturbing and long suppressed narratives. The Guardian agenda is the journalistic equivalent of cuddly Herr Fritzl ‘Nothing but devastation and stupidity up here, mein liebling. We’re all safer downstairs. Work from the Cellars keeps me safe…’Meanwhile anyone who went on a London march last year will remember the uplifting and joyful presence of the Tyburn Nuns on their steps. A great article in Conservative Woman describes something of a run in they are having with the Vatican, now rebranded as the religious wing of Pfizer Moderna. Hope you can read it.
Excellent article in TCW on the Tyburn Nuns and their upcoming battles with the Satanic Church of Rome.
Grauniad – lies.
In other news, sun rises in the east, more at 11.
On immunity and rewriting history, the WHO changed the definition to something like ‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.
Given that the covid vaccines are now admitted to be gene therapy and do nothing to confer immunity, will the old definition be reinstated?
Grauniad “wrong about everything, all the time”.
I take it these people have never heard of influenza. Or ever looked at the stats for how many can die in a year from it. Imagine the numbers within 28 days of a +ve flu/cold test. These clowns are ideologues and zealots who literally couldnt care less about facts and figures. They will never change their opinions. They are control freaks and the types of people who are causing untold misery around the world. I wish I didnt have to live around them (a massive majority being lefties and remainers imo)
Liars lie. It doesn’t help when the heads of most governments and their henchmen and women are past masters of the dark arts.
The man who expects high standards of honesty and propriety from Harvard academics has doomed himself to a lifetime of disappointment.
The problem with these guys is that they’re convinced to belong to a master race to whose members the usual, human limitations don’t apply: As group, they’re infallible. Individual members of this group may well make errors, however, regardless of the problem, there’s always a correct solution which can always be determined without errors and implemented without principal flaws and which will always come from group itself. Because of this, its members have the universe(climate?)-given right to do with everyone else whatever damn well pleases them and said everyone-else with their pesky, private consideration are hereby unkindly ordered to hold their tongues about that.
This idea is obviously fundamentally incompatible with that of a pluralistic society, where nothing anyone is really convinced of can ever truly be taken for granted because each and every of its members is prone to both errors of judgement and of execution, ie trying to do the wrong thing or trying to do the right thing in a wrong way. It’s as obviously fundamentally incompatible with the notion of human rights all people are equally entitled to. The inferior species humans must not have such rights as this would limit what the master race humans may to do them in order to execute their masterplans.
Considering that pluralistic society and human rights are the cornerstones of so-called democracy, these people are necessarily anti-democrats at heart and seek to subvert the democratic process in order to overcome democracy itself. But only in the true best interest of the people, so, that’s ok then.
It’s the Guardian … where it is 1st of April every day.
Based on Will’s synopsis, it would appear that this Spinney woman is even more demented than the Devil Sridhar herself.
Get these two lunatics into their padded cells and let them rattle on to their heart’s content.
It’s the Grauniad’s version of spaghetti trees
Grahamb’s first sentence is the key when he puts the word experts into quotes. They are and always have been the wrong experts. An anthropologist commenting on clinical matters? Where are the expert clinicians? It remains a bone of contention with me that even now the narrative largely excludes what really matters – if you get severe Covid-19, are you going to get the right treatment? Indeed even earlier in the evolution of infection, are you going to get the right investigations that will confirm or deny that you are in the process of becoming seriously ill? Anthropologists and statisticians can’t possibly answer these questions so it’s time for the media to ditch them and approach the right experts. As a (retired) specialist in the management of immune-mediated illnesses I put myself forward once more. Meanwhile I recommend Mark Woolhouse’s book “The Year The World Went Mad” for an honest and readable insight into epidemiology.even if there isn’t anything about clinical management.
Bottom line: if an infection doesn’t make you seriously ill it doesn’t signify.
If your immune system doesn’t get challenged by new bugs then it goes to sleep and will fade away. Then you really are in danger.
Masks, vaxxes, lockdowns will kill you sooner than a non-existent ‘virus’.
If the conclusion is that it is because some countries did not conform to the zero covid policy. Then in essence this article is pushing the new centralised WHO world pandemic control plan which is global control through the back door. The new world order is strong at the guardian.
It is sad indeed that these idiots and charlatans continue to be fed the oxygen of publicity whilst real facts are blocked.
Unusually, both MacKenzie and Spinney have science degrees. Obviously however, they have both forgotten what they have learnt in favour of producing political tripe. As to be expected from the Grauniad.
Buckets of ready cash, payable in any bank anywhere on the world, is a great amnesiac.
You could do something useful with this paper. Cut it into squares and hang it on a nail in the toilet.
Or shred it up and add it to a compost heap.
“Every man has his price. For some it’s money, for some it’s women, for others glory. But the honest man you don’t have to buy – he winds up costing you nothing.”
The many people whose age or medical condition makes them more likely to die if [infected], or who have suppressed immunity – perhaps only because they need an arthritis drug – cannot take ‘personal responsibility’ for avoiding Covid if they must return to the office, surrounded by maskless people exercising their ‘individual freedom’ to exhale asymptomatic Omicron.”
I find this is so condescending and more fearmongering BS. This is me! immunocompromised because of an arthritis drug. Did anyone consider people like me before covid? No, of course not, and why should they? I do not need or want anyone restricting their own lives and freedoms for my benefit. It’s my problem always was and always will be. I never wore a mask and I haven’t had the vaccine. Figured I’m already injecting myself with poison once a week!
Hanage is one of those who goes running/jogging in a mask and posts on Twitter that he’s doing so for the benefit of mankind.
Shridar should be right at the front of the queue when retribution is dished out!
The Guardian Rewrites the Facts
This is a headline?
Oh, I get it! April fools!