The Chairman of a Lancet-affiliated panel of scientists looking into the origins of Covid says he has disbanded the commission because of its ties to Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance who proposed in 2018 to use U.S. money to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. MailOnline has the story.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that he was concerned with the links to Daszak, who led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June.
Daszak, who lives in New York, devoted his career to championing so-called ‘gain of function’ research to engineer coronavirus to be more deadly to humans, arguing that it was the best chance to detect and prevent a global pandemic.
Shocking documents released this week revealed his 2018 proposal to help the Wuhan Institute of Virology engineer bat coronaviruses to be more deadly, by inserting genetic features that are similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2.
There is still no conclusive proof as to whether Covid, a coronavirus linked to bats, first jumped to humans from a wild animal or in a lab setting.
But from the early days of the pandemic, Daszak has made every effort to paint the lab origin hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory”, including masterminding a letter in the Lancet that established a veneer of scientific consensus that natural origin was the only possibility. …
Several members of the disbanded Lancet task force have collaborated with Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects in the past.
“I just didn’t want a task force that was so clearly involved with one of the main issues of this whole search for the origins, which was EcoHealth Alliance,” Dr. Sachs told the journal.
Sachs said a new Lancet Covid Commission would continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022, but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns, including risky laboratory research.
It comes just days after the release of bombshell documents showing Daszak’s 2018 funding request to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeking $14.2 million to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.
The proposal, titled Project DEFUSE, was leaked to independent researchers with the DRASTIC research team.
In it Daszak requests funding for an elaborate project to genetically enhance coronaviruses and inoculate bats in Yunnan, China in the hopes of stopping new viruses jumping from bats to humans.
The funding request was denied by DARPA, but the proposal reveals a shocking line of research that could have conceivably been carried out independently by Chinese members of Daszak’s team, who included the infamous ‘bat woman’ Shi Zhengli.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: In a further blow to its reputation, the latest issue of the Lancet has a bizarre cover describing women as “bodies with vaginas”. Apparently, editor Richard Horton thought this would endear him to female scientists. MailOnline has more.
The Lancet was accused of sexism and dehumanising women after it editors used the term, which was written in an article titled ‘Periods on Display’, on the journal’s front cover in an attempt to be inclusive to trans people.
The article, which was published on September 1st, examines an exhibition exploring the taboos and history of periods at the Vagina Museum in London and sees the writer use the word “women” but also use the term “bodies with vaginas”.
The quote, which was then used on the journal’s front page, read: “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.”
However the move to display the quote on the journal’s front cover has been met with criticism, with some academics calling it “insulting and abusive” and a “misguided pursuit of woke points”.
Meanwhile others said they had cancelled their subscriptions with the peer-reviewed medical journal – which was founded in 1823.
It comes just months after critics lambasted Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust after it told staff to use terms like “birthing parents” and “human milk” rather than referring to “mothers” and “breast milk”.
Worth reading in full.

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Airfield runway temperature measuring sites are where they are for a reason. The engine performance and therefore the aircraft performance on take off needs to be calculated using the actual temperature of the air ingested by the engine, it doesn’t care how that temperature was created. If you’ve ever sat in a passenger aircraft in a hot part of the world waiting for the temperature to drop a degree to allow take off at the current aircraft weight, that’s why.
If you went 5 km out into the country, the temps were about 36C. Putting an electronic temp; reader, beside a greenhouse, airfield, highway, ventilator shafts, airplanes, cars, and in the midst of an urban area is not science but fraud. A bloody joke all of it.
The margin of error argument is a weak one. Margins of error can go either way, so the climate freaks could also claim the readings might be too low.
The fact that the measurements are taken next to sources of heat like airports and that the “record” readings were for only a few minutes, suggesting a heat blast, make for much more compelling arguments.
Are reasonably priced measuring devices available which store th rsulkts and / or output via (say) bluetooth for further analysis. I am sure many readers would be interested in helping with an alternative tmprature measuring exrcise, albeit with no history.
I have a system which cost less than £150 on-line. The key thing is that it links via my wifi to the Wunderground web site, recording all data every few seconds. I can view historical records of temperature, pressure, wind direction and speed, humidity and precipitation. It also has a map which shows similar stations in my vicinity so I can check whether my temperatures are consistent with others.
My system is mounted on a 5m pole some metres from the house.
Mine is made by Youshiko but others are available.
Ah yes —–Temperature. The first thing to mention is that all temperature is LOCAL You can record a temperature anywhere you put a thermometer at a given time. The second thing to mention is that temperature is not an amount of anything. It is a value. The third thing to mention is that adding two or more temperatures together and calculating some kind of “average” will give you a number, but that number is NOT a temperature. It is just a statistic. ————One more very important thing. We often here about “global temperature” or the “average global temperature”. But the Earth is not in thermal equilibrium so there is no single number that can represent the temperature of earth. So this idea from UN bureaucrats that we should try to limit global warming to 2C is absurd. There is an infinite amount of temperatures on earth and you can record one wherever you put a thermometer. The top of the mountain, the bottom of the ocean, high in the sky, low on the ground, under a tree, above a building, on a sheet of ice, under a sunbeam etc etc etc. ——Averaging all of those infinite amount of temperatures does not provide us with a temperature. It is just a mathematical construct. So ultimately there is no such thing as a “global temperature”. ————All of this is important when considering the alleged global warming (and the hundreds of billions spent on it). But it also reveals the absurdity of looking at a supposed 40C temperature at one place in time in one tiny area of the world somewhere in England and then trying to claim that this is an example of that alleged global warming, even if that temperature reading was 100% accurate, which it probably is not given the accuracy problems of thermometers in boxes that at one time a hundred years ago might have been in an empty field but now are surrounded by tarmac and concrete.
Hear bloody hear.
In my day job I take special time to explain and demonstrate the differences between data and information.
An average of n temperature readings from different locations isn’t a statistic, either. It’s a just number generated by applying an algorithm for reducing the amount of random error in subsequent measurements of a single quantity to a situation it isn’t suitable for as there’s no single quantity being measured. A temperature reading taken in my garden (Reading, Fobney Street) and a temperature reading taken somewhere in Antarctica are not two different approximations of the same quantity differing only in the amount of error in the value.
I call it a “statistic” or a “mathematical construct”. You choose to call it a “number generated by an algorithm………..”—-Ok fair enough , but one thing we can both say is that whatever that number is that is arrived at by doing an average, whether mean or median etc, it is NOT a temperature, and that is the main thing. Temperature is a Field.——— So when it comes to the alleged global warming there is no single number that represents the temperature of earth, and bureaucrats claiming they can regulate the earth’s temperature by tweaking some CO2 knob are pulling the wool over eyes for political purposes, but then you already know that.
The simplest analysis to prove the nonsense of so called climate science is the best and you have done that here. Well done! I would add try doing an experiment to prove that there is an average temperature. Take two cups of water at 50C and mix them together to get a total temperature – boiling water. That is the science of Greta and Attenborough.
Umberto Eco tenets of fascism:
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference.
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
“humankind is suddenly driven into a doom-laden frenzy over worries that climate breakdown stalks the entire planet,”
I fail to see the point in adopting the language of idiots.
How can – climate break down?
Simplicity itself — imagine some moron^wclimate change experts predicts months of dry weather at the end of August and next week, it starts raining, raining and raining. That’s obviously a climate breakdown, ie, the climate ceased to function as it was supposed to.
Not to mention, there was an RAF Typhoon landing at that time give or take a minute. There were actually two flying together but the second one went around a few times and landed around 20 minutes later. The accuracy of the FlightRadar24 data isn’t so good at very low altitudes at all locations, so we can’t be precise on the exact landing time.
In Australia too, our Bureau of Meteorology has been busy moving temperature gauges to airports, expunging old unhelpful measurements from the record books (old high temperature records suddenly “disappear”), and changing the measurement goalposts, so that a 1 second temperature surge becomes the official daily maximum, rather than a 10 minute period.
And record cold temperatures are also “deplatformed”.
The temperature in our garden during the hottest part of last summer was 36.5c, which is bloomin’ hot, but quite a way off the touted 40c. We live in a rural area surrounded by farmland – not much tarmac!
Incidentally, I have had a fallout with a family member over ‘global warming’. Apparently I am a bad person because I ‘don’t believe’ in global warming (I wasn’t allowed to explain that it’s anthropogenic climate change that I doubt). This branch of the family are devoted and fully vaccinated and boostered covidians and are extremely woke (they thought digital currency and the possibility of carbon credits being connected to expenditure was a good idea). I find it funny, in a sad way, that you can know someone for nearly 70 years and then discover that a) you don’t know them at all, b) you have nothing in common and c)they are idiots. Yes, there is a ‘belief’ system with both global warming and covid, and, in the minds of some, denying their existence or seriousness is close to heresy. Bonkers.
The thermometer at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens was also used to claim 40C record and the previous year too I think. What is not mentioned is that the gardens house a large concrete building which is the Dept Of Biology and nearby is a major development of housing blocks near the station. None of those would have been there when the gardens were created but i bet no allowance has been made for this.
This is an interesting video I came across by accident on YouTube. A very reasonable discussion of the climate scare by a professor of climate science who gets no funding from the oil companies: https://youtu.be/qJv1IPNZQao
There is nothing new about this. All genuine scientists have been pointing this out for years. It doesn’t even need a science background, common sense is enough. Does anybody remember the Stevenson’s Screens in every park?