It's a crazy world. I don't use twitter or fakebook but if I did and said that Fauci was funding the Wuhan lab or some research within it, probably I would be banned for being racist or promoting a conspiracy theory by connecting Fauxci to the Wuhan Lab. Nevermind that four days ago or so, Fauxci himself flat out admitted on TV on camera, that he gave 800K to the Wuhan Lab by giving it to EcoHealth to fund their virus work at Wuhan. Maybe now that all these emails are out, fakebook or others would have trouble banning you for making those claims, but it has been a long slog to be able to even talk about that Wuhan thing in the light of day with Commie Central Planning Committees reading and monitoring all your communications. Fauxci should be in prison. I will figure out what the charge is later. The Commies love that style. Refer to Beria for more on that.
Go read the emails. Fauci states in his email that his understanding is that gain of function research had stopped long ago and questions the validity of information being presented in a Gain of Function pdf document claiming any work has gone on that was reviewed and approved by the NIH. Go read his email carefully including the words "No Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework" (public-private partnership used for funding) and be sure you understand it before pushing fabricated claims.
What’s most unreal about this thread is the COVID fear merchants ARE LOOKING DIRECTLY AT FAUCI’S EMAILS and then telling everyone ‘that’s not what he meant!’ Un fucking believeable.
The origins of Covid: did the virus mutate naturally – or is the Wuhan lab really to blame? Virologists have been adamant that coronavirus began in nature but there appear to be genuine arguments that it leaked from a lab https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-...d-virus-mutate-naturally-thewuhan-lab-really/ Who opened the Pandora's box of Covid? Where did the Covid virus come from? President Biden this week asked the US intelligence community to inquire into the origin of the pandemic, including in particular the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab in China. Given that the pandemic started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which is home to China’s leading laboratory of bat virus research, the possibility of lab escape was obvious from the start. Yet for the past year mainstream media around the world have ignored this common sense possibility in favour of the scenario that the virus jumped naturally to people from some animal host. The dam-burst dissolution of this long prevailing mindset was precipitated by a May 14 letter in the journal Science, in which 18 leading scientists declared that lab escape was a viable theory and should be taken seriously. The stage for the sudden shift in views had been set three months earlier when the World Health Organization sent a team to Beijing to explore the origin of the virus. The team, which the Chinese government hand-picked and led around by the nose, reported that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had escaped from a lab and “likely to very likely” that it had emerged naturally. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese may have hoped for. What became clear in the wake of the WHO team’s conclusions was that the Chinese, after a year of presumably intensive search, had been unable to provide a single scrap of evidence that the virus had emerged naturally. The SARS1 epidemic left copious traces in the environment, including the bat population that harboured the virus, the animal species to which it first jumped, and the 20 or so mutational changes made as it adapted to humans. Strangely, the SARS2 virus has left not a single such trace. For the first time since the pandemic began, the natural emergence scenario began to look a little shaky. Right from the start, there were two plausible explanations for where the Covid virus might have come from. The decoding of its genome in January 2020 showed it belonged to a well known family of bat viruses called beta-coronaviruses. One member of this family caused the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 by jumping first from bats to civets, an animal sold for meat in Chinese wet markets, and from civets to people. A second virus set off the MERS epidemic of 2012 by infecting camels and then people. When Chinese authorities announced that the first cases of Covid had occurred at the wet market in Wuhan in December 2019, it was an easy assumption that the new virus, SARS-CoV2 or SARS2 for short, had followed the same route as SARS1 to becoming a human pathogen. The wet market connection was soon broken – Chinese researchers reported earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly. Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world centre for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that SARS2 had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table. From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favour of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in The Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, calling on readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease. Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true. It later turned out that The Lancet letter had been organised and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr Daszak’s organisation funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This arguably acute conflict of interest was not declared to The Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded: “We declare no competing interests.” Like Dr Daszak, virologists around the world had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years they had been creating viruses potentially more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020. A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on March 17, 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter. Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. Viruses can be manipulated in ways that leave no defining marks. Dr Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know. Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech is far from free. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenged the community’s declared view would risk rejection of their next grant application by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency. The Daszak and Andersen letters were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or said it was extremely unlikely. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged. t Why would anyone want to create a novel virus of greater pathogenicity? Virologists argue they can get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring just how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments but are so obviously dangerous that from 2014 to 2017 the US government placed a moratorium on funding them. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000, Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats. At the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, virologists have been doing exactly these kinds of experiments. The programme is headed by Dr Zheng-li Shi, known as Bat Lady in China because of her intense interest in bat viruses. Dr Shi gathered many coronaviruses from the bats that live in caves in Yunnan in southern China. She then took the spike protein genes from various viruses and inserted them into the genomes of other viruses. The goal was to explore the natural ability of the various spike proteins to attack human cells. As with other gain-of-function studies, the idea was to explore the genetic pathways by which an animal virus might jump to humans, and thus help forestall an impending epidemic. Dr Shi tested her viruses out not on real people but on cultures of human cells or on humanised mice. These are mice that have been genetically engineered to carry in the cells of their airways the human protein that’s the target of the SARS1 and SARS2 viruses. But this programme may have put her on track to create viruses far more infectious than she realised, possibly including SARS2. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety. “It is also clear,” Dr Ebright says, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts [ie. the particular viral backbone] chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” How do we know for sure that this is what Dr Shi was doing? Because, by a strange twist in the story, she was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the US equivalent of the Medical Research Council. These grant proposals, channelled through Dr Daszak, and a matter of public record, make clear that she was testing the ability of various spike proteins to infect humanised mice. In an interview on December 9, 2019, just before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr Daszak talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanised mice. “Well I think… coronaviruses – you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily,” he said. “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.” Dr Baric is a leading coronavirus researcher in the US and had earlier trained Dr Shi in how to create novel coronaviruses by inserting the spike protein gene of one into the backbone of another. He is also a signatory of the May 14 letter in Science calling for investigation of a possible lab leak. “You can engineer a virus without leaving any trace,” Dr Baric said in an Italian television interview last September. “The answers you are looking for, however, can only be found in the archives of the Wuhan laboratory.” “It’s definitely not acceptable,” Dr Shi said of the Science letter signatories’ call to see her records. “Who can provide an evidence [sic] that does not exist?” Not only was Dr Shi generating chimeric viruses – those made from a mixture of two viral genomes and thus potentially having novel properties – she was doing so in what would now be argued were unsafe conditions, even though they were in line with international rules. Despite many photos online of her working in a bubble suit in the highest-level safety lab, known as a BSL4, all her coronavirus work was done at lower safety levels, she said in an interview with Science, including one known as BSL2. Despite the fancy acronym, BSL2 doesn’t require very much. You have to wear a lab coat and gloves, do experiments under a hood, put up a biohazard warning, and that’s about it. “It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard – biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office – that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” says Dr Ebright. There is a long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960s and 1970s, causing 80 cases and three deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. Concern about safety conditions at the Wuhan lab was not, it seems, misplaced. According to a fact sheet issued by the State Department on January 15, 2021, “The US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” Covid Comparing the two scenarios The fact that Dr Shi was manipulating coronaviruses in arguably inadequate safety conditions establishes a plausible case that the SARS2 virus might have escaped from her lab. But this case falls short of proof, which, if it exists, is most likely to be found in the sealed records of Dr Shi’s lab. Thus there is no direct evidence for either the natural emergence or lab escape scenario. In the absence of such evidence, the best approach is to take some salient facts about the pandemic and ask which of the two scenarios provides the better explanation. Here are three such tests: 1. Origin The bats that harbour the closest known relatives of SARS2 live in caves in Yunnan in southern China. If the pandemic had first infected people living round the caves, that would strongly favour natural emergence. But it broke out 1,500km away in Wuhan, at a time of year when bats go into hibernation. Under the natural emergence scenario, it’s hard to see how the virus might have emerged somewhere outside Wuhan, and then popped up in the city without leaving any trace of its real origin. Under the lab escape scenario, explanation is no struggle: researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were cooking up hyper-dangerous viruses in arguably inadequate safety conditions, and one escaped. 2. Natural history Viruses jumping to new hosts usually take a lot of time, and many mutations, before perfecting their adjustment to the new target species. This process has been mapped in detail for the SARS1 virus. But researchers looking for the same process of adaptation in SARS2 made a strange discovery. From the moment it first appeared, the SARS2 virus was almost perfectly adapted to human cells and has hardly changed at all since. This is hard to explain in the natural emergence scenario. But from the lab escape scenario it’s pretty obvious. The virus was being grown in humanised mice, so of course was well adapted to people from the start. 3. The Furin cleavage site Without getting too deeply into the details of the SARS2 virus’s anatomy, there is a small region of its spike protein, called the furin cleavage site, which is coded for by 12 units of its 30,000-unit genome. A virus usually acquires inserts like this by recombination – the accidental exchange of genomic units with a related virus when both invade the same cell. But no other known sarbecovirus – that’s the name of SARS2’s family – has this 12-unit insert. A virus cannot usually acquire, by recombination, an element its family does not possess. The insert also contains entities known as arginine codons, of a variety which is common in humans but not in coronaviruses like SARS2. Proponents of natural emergence argue that the virus could have picked up the insert from human cells after it had jumped to people. Maybe, but no one has yet found the infected human population in which the virus might have evolved this way. In the lab escape scenario, the insert is easy to explain. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site,” writes Dr Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. At least 11 such experiments have been published, including one by Dr Shi. And the human-preferred arginine codons are routinely supplied in lab kits, so would be used by anyone who synthesised the 12-unit insert in the lab. “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.” So who was at fault? The lab escape scenario explains the facts above rather more easily than does natural emergence. So let’s ask whose actions should be scrutinised, if the virus did indeed escape from a lab. The first in line are Dr Shi and her colleagues. They were generating dangerous viruses in low level and arguably unsafe conditions. True, they were following the same international rules as are used by virologists everywhere. But they should have made their own assessments of the risks they were running. Second in line for rebuke are the Chinese authorities, who have done their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and their responsibility for it. Third are virologists around the world who knew better than anyone the dangers of enhancing natural viruses but couldn’t resist the temptation. Their assurance that the benefits were real and the risks containable were premature: the benefits have been inconspicuous and the risk, if SARS2 indeed escaped from a lab, catastrophic. What should happen now? The Chinese authorities have been under no pressure to open up their records because, until now, the world’s media have complaisantly accepted the natural emergence scenario. China would cease to get a free ride if credible scientific bodies like the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, either separately or jointly, were to appoint expert groups to examine both scenarios of origin. A strong conclusion by these and other institutions in favour of exploring the virus’s origins would for the first time put the onus on China to cooperate. Given the nature of authoritarian states, China is unlikely to yield easily to the emerging new view of the pandemic’s origin. But the prospect of becoming the world’s pariah for the foreseeable future might go some way to deter further stonewalling. Nicholas Wade has worked on Nature, Science and the New York Times. He is the author of Where Covid-19 Came From, forthcoming from Encounter Books Related Topics
Fauci backed virus experiments ‘despite pandemic risk’ https://www.theaustralian.com.au/wo...k/news-story/3c604681cfcbfeda88bac25e372a1b8a America’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, argued that the benefits of experimenting on contagious viruses – manipulating and heightening their infectious potency – was worth the risk of a laboratory accident sparking a pandemic. In previously unreported remarks, Dr Fauci supported the contentious gain-of-function experiments that some now fear might have led to an escape from a Wuhan laboratory causing the Covid-19 pandemic, calling them “important work”. An investigation by The Weekend Australian has also confirmed Dr Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, did not alert senior White House officials before lifting the ban on gain-of-function research in 2017. Writing in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012, Dr Fauci acknowledged the controversial scientific research could spark a pandemic. “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? “Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. “It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.” In the paper, Dr Fauci also writes: “Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily. This is a valid concern.” Dr Fauci has led the US response to the outbreak but is now facing serious questions about his role in funding the radical experiments being conducted inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A forthcoming book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, documents increasing concerns that a leak from the Wuhan lab – and not natural spread via an animal in a wet market – could have sparked the Covid-19 crisis that has up-ended every nation in the world and killed 3.4 million people. Dr Fauci on May 11 reversed his position on whether Covid-19 had leaked from the WIV, and said he was now “not convinced” the virus had developed naturally and authorities needed to find out “exactly what happened”. Gain-of-function experiments – often with bat-derived coronaviruses – centre on manipulating, splicing and recombining viruses potentially into strands of highly infectious and little understood diseases. This type of research carries such a risk of causing a pandemic that the Obama administration paused funding for gain-of-function experiments in 22 fields in 2014, including those involving SARS, influenza and MERS. US President Joe Biden this week ordered a fresh US intelligence inquiry into whether the virus had originated at the laboratory, while WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said his team’s inquiry into the origins did not sufficiently examine an accidental laboratory leak. The NIH has come under significant criticism in recent weeks over funding WIV research relating to change-of-function, which Dr Fauci denies. Earlier this month, he told a US Senate hearing that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the WIV”. Yet papers published as late as last year in American peer-reviewed academic journals that include WIV researchers – including its prominent virologist Shi Zhengli – disclose that work on coronaviruses had been funded by at least three NIH grants. At the time of Dr Fauci’s paper, there was a voluntary ban on gain-of-function research related to highly infectious influenza viruses. He asked what would happen if the experiments were conducted by a lab not subject to adequate safety regulations. “Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations,” he wrote. Dr Fauci wrote that virologists needed to respect “that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.” “We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialogue about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place,” Dr Fauci wrote. “Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.” Dr Fauci added: “Granted, the time it takes to engage in such a dialog could potentially delay or even immobilize the conduct of certain important experiments and the publication of valuable information that could move the field forward for the good of public health,” “If we want to continue this important work, we collectively need to do a better job of articulating the scientific rationale for such experiments well before they are performed and provide discussion about the potential risk to public health, however remote,” he wrote. In December 2017, the National Institute of Health, of which the NIAID is a part, announced it would resume funding the gain-of-function research. Multiple Trump administration officials told The Weekend Australian Dr Fauci had not raised the issue of restarting the research funding with senior figures in the White House. “It kind of just got rammed through,” one official said. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the (National Security Council) staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.” The Weekend Australian has also confirmed that neither Mike Pompeo, the then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, nor National Security Council member Matthew Pottinger, was briefed. The experiments are also opposed by prominent scientists, including the Cambridge Working Group of 200 researchers which issued a public warning in 2014. “Accident risks with newly created “potential pandemic pathogens” raise grave new concerns,” the group’s letter read. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. “An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.” And Steven Salzberg, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in 2015 said the benefits of gain-of-function research were “minimal at best” and they could “far more safely be obtained through other avenues of research”. “I am very concerned that the continuing gain-of-function research on influenza viruses, and more recently on other viruses, presents extremely serious risks to the public health,” he wrote. Dr Fauci did not respond to queries. What Really Happened In Wuhan by Sharri Markson will be published by HarperCollins in September and is available for pre-order from Booktopia now.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...lways-credible-theory-did-scientists-dismiss/ The Wuhan lab leak was always a credible theory - so why did scientists dismiss it? In silencing all mention of the theory at first, professors have shown just how political they can be In Dominic Cummings’ ideal society, government would be run by a select band of scientists who, in times of crisis, would be awarded dictatorial powers. Just what a hellish place this would be is demonstrated by the evolution of the theory that Covid might have a man-made origin. Scientific method might be designed to tease out objective truth, yet scientists are foremost human beings who, like everyone else, are infused with political opinions, not to mention emotions of jealousy, rivalry, revenge and all the rest. When a deadly novel coronavirus emerged in a city where there just happens to be an virological research institute known to work with coronaviruses, to collect them from obscure caves and – as was confirmed in a 2017 paper – even to engineer viruses, common sense might suggest that this be taken seriously as a possible origin of the outbreak. Yet this did not happen. On the contrary, the opposite occurred. In March last year a round robin letter appeared in the Lancet - signed by 27 scientists, including Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust - dismissing the theory that Covid could possibly have had anything other than a natural origin, and denouncing anyone who dared entertain it. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.” The use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was telling. The possibility that Covid is manmade - or might be a natural virus which escaped from a lab - does imply that there is a cabal of scientists in the Chinese Communist Party secretly engineering a deadly virus to unleash on the world in a bid for global domination. Somewhat more likely is that it was a cock-up: a laboratory accident of the kind which has happened many times before, with SARS and with the world’s last fatal outbreak of smallpox in Birmingham in 1978. Yet the inference from these 27 scientists, and from others, was that anyone who believed the emergence of Covid was anything other than a natural event was a fruitcake - or, worse, someone of malign intent. Any scientist with a dissenting opinion was silenced. Angus Dalgleish, a professor of Oncology and vaccine researcher at St George’s Hospital in Tooting says that journals refused to consider a paper he wrote last year observing that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 - the virus which causes Covid 19 - showed signs of man-made genetic sequences. What made it especially difficult, he says, was that the man-made theory had been expounded by Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State. “No scientist was willing to get into bed and agree with Trump,” Dalgleish says. In other words, what ought to be an objective process - a journal assessing the quality of science, aided by a peer-review process - was subverted by partisan politics. Trump was a bad man, and therefore anything he said must be treated as the embodiment of evil. How things have changed now Beelzebub has been forced into retirement. This month 18 scientists signed another round robin letter, this time to Science magazine appealing that the theory Covid came to us by means of a laboratory accident should not be dismissed. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s chief adviser on infectious disease, who previously dismissed the lab escape theory, supports an investigation into the theory of human origin. The farcical World Health Organisation inquiry, which dismissed a lab accident as implausible but took seriously the idea that Covid came to China via frozen food imports, is widely derided. It turns out that Peter Daszak, who drafted the Lancet letter and who runs an organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance, has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had an interest in it not being blamed for what would surely be the world’s most expensive accident ever - something which wasn’t clear when he added the words “we declare no competing interests” to the letter. Of course, the lab escape theory remains just that. There is still a possibility that the virus got to us naturally. We don’t yet know and we may never do. But there is a moral to the story: beware scientists who try to declare a consensus. It might be tempting to think that a group of people who have been trained to think objectively must be right when, en masse, they settle on a point of view. But it is a dangerous misconception. A dictatorship of scientists would be no better than any other kind of dictatorship. No system of government is perfect, but we can be grateful for having one in which scientific advisers are on tap but never on top.
We get it. Protect Fauci at all cost so that Xi's little bitch, Beijing Biden, can kiss Xi's ass and not hold China accountable for the virus that killed millions of people.
Amazing...non responsive bullshit. A...did fauci and NIH or his diszak ever fund it? B. were they still funding the Wuhan lab? C. Is money fungible? D. Was Xi conducting gain of function research on Coronavirus. F. Did you ever warn us Covid was infectious and deadly?