Archive for 2022

SCIENTISTS BELIEVED COVID LEAKED FROM WUHAN LAB — BUT FEARED DEBATE COULD HURT ‘INTERNATIONAL HARMONY:’

Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.

Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.

Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.

“I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature – accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

Related: Bombshell Project Veritas Exposé Poses Urgent Questions for Fauci and the Entire Pandemic Response.

THE ATLANTIC, WHERE MORE AND MORE WRITERS ARE FED UP WITH COVID PANIC PORN: Two Years Is Long Enough. “Personally, I don’t need an immediate license to party like it’s February 2020, but I want some indication from lawmakers and medical experts that restrictions won’t last forever. For any country without the discipline, collectivism, and surveillance technology of China, the zero-COVID dream is over. Two years is long enough to put our lives on hold.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The zero-Covid dream isn’t working out for China, either, which in practice is a lot less disciplined and collectivist than Western intellectuals’ fantasy.

ROGER SIMON: Guilty Conscience? CDC’s Walensky Lets the COVID Cat Out of the Bag.

Was it a guilty conscience that prompted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to tell the world on “Good Morning America” on Jan. 7 that 75 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred among those with four or more comorbidities?

If it wasn’t, it should have been.

Four or more? What would the percentage have been for those with a mere two or three comorbidities? Eighty-five? Ninety-five? Ninety-eight?

It couldn’t be more obvious that COVID-19 was a serious danger most of all to those who were very sick in the first place. The obese also had concerns, although that is rarely mentioned because not politically correct. And, alas, sometimes the recently vaccinated.

For that, we all had to be injected, masked up, locked down, and isolated for two years. And they say Jan. 6 is a scandal?

Global corporations have participated in this madness for their own power-hungry reasons, firing their unvaccinated employees. Our large medical institutions have behaved abominably, often motivated by greed or fear of losing government subsidy.

But worst of all by far is what has been done to America’s children as a result. The past two years—and continuing now in many venues—have been the worst case of child abuse in human history.

Unfortunately, that’s not as hyperbolic as it sounds. Think about the numbers and the size of the populations involved.

The pervasive retardation and attendant neurosis of America’s young, indeed millions throughout the world, because they have spent their early developmental years wearing masks and separated from each other, trapped in their homes, staring at computer screens, will be felt for decades to come.

Suicides and suicidal ideation have escalated among the young. What does that say about their futures, not to mention ours? A generation of substance abusers looms.

As a bit of battlefield prep for the midterms, the DNC-MSM has started to turn against Walensky and the CDC: The media suddenly notices the CDC is clueless.

#RESIST: A reader sends this sighting from Richland, Washington. I hope the guy comes back for his hat.

SHOCKER: Fauci Was Told Privately by Key Scientists That COVID-19 Natural Origin Was ‘Highly Unlikely,’ Newly Unredacted Emails Confirm.

Top U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, scrambled in early 2020 to respond to public reporting of a potential connection between COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

This response, which included a secret Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference, was loosely detailed in previously released and heavily redacted emails. Those emails strongly suggested that Fauci and a small group of top scientists sought to promote the natural origin theory, despite having evidence and internal expert opinions that pointed to the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab.

Unredacted versions of some of the emails made public by lawmakers on Jan. 11 further confirm this.

The newly unredacted emails, released by House Oversight Committee Republicans, confirm and illustrate a pattern of lies and coverup. From the emails, it appears the effort was spearheaded by Fauci himself but also involved his boss, recently retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, as well as Jeremy Farrar, the head of the British Wellcome Trust.

It was previously revealed that at least two scientists, both of whom had received funding from the NIH, had told Fauci during the teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID had come out of a lab.

The most significant new revelations in the unredacted emails come from two of these scientists, Robert Garry and Mike Farzan, who both noted the difficulties presented by the presence of a furin cleavage site in the COVID-19 virus—a feature that would later be cited as the defining characteristic of the virus.

Farzan, an immunologist who in 2005 discovered the receptor of the original severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, sent his post-teleconference notes to Farrar, who then shared them with Collins, Fauci, and Lawrence Tabak—top officials at the NIH. In those notes, Farzan wrote that he was “bothered by the furin site” and had difficulty explaining it “as an event outside the lab.” Farzan noted that it was theoretically possible the virus’s furin cleavage site could have arisen in nature but that it was “highly unlikely.”

The furin cleavage site is the defining feature that gives COVID-19 the ability to easily infect humans and has long been puzzled over by scientists, since no such site has ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS-related coronaviruses.

Farzan, like scientist Kristian Andersen, who has received funding from Fauci’s NIAID, works at the Scripps laboratory. As was already known from previously released emails, Andersen had privately told Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020 that the virus looked engineered. Andersen would later spearhead Fauci’s efforts to promote a natural origin narrative. . . .

In layman’s terms, Farzan concluded that the pandemic likely originated from a lab in which live coronaviruses were passed through human-like tissue over and over, accelerating virus mutations with the end result being that one of the mutated viruses may have leaked from the lab. Farzan placed the likelihood of a leak from a Wuhan lab at 60 to 70 percent likely.

The emails indicate that Farzan was cognizant that the Wuhan lab conducted these types of dangerous experiments in Level 2 labs, which have a very low biosecurity standard. This fact was later admitted by the Wuhan lab’s director, Shi Zhengli, in July 2020. Notably, since the start of the pandemic, Farzan has received grants totaling almost $20 million from Collins’s NIH and Fauci’s NIAID.

Do tell.

Plus: “Garry’s privately stated view is even more remarkable because only a day earlier, on Feb. 1, 2020, Garry had helped to complete the first draft of the Proximal Origin paper that promoted the idea that the virus had originated in nature. That paper became the media’s and the public health establishment’s go-to evidence for a natural origin for the COVID virus. It was published online on Feb. 16, 2020, and firmly excluded the possibility of a lab leak.””

WE ASKED IF HE WAS AN UNDERCOVER PROVOCATEUR AND HE SAID NO, THAT’S IRONCLAD EVIDENCE YOU NUTJOBS!

Related:

Plus:

They aren’t telling us because the answers would make them look bad, and undercut the story they’re trying to sell.

ABOUT THAT BRAIN CELL THAT ‘LEARNED TO PLAY PONG:’ It’s an amazing development, to be sure, but there’s a lot more to the story than is being reported.

ALEX BERENSON: If you are a vaccine company executive, it’s time to slam the brakes.

People will be angry when they figure out that they’ve been conned into taking vaccines that didn’t work. But most of them won’t be furious, especially since Omicron appears much milder than earlier variants. Zero efficacy probably won’t destroy Pfizer or get anyone indicted.

But side effects might. People will be FURIOUS if they think they been conned into taking vaccines that didn’t work and potentially hurt them, or their parents, or their kids.

Right now the rate of reported serious vaccine injury is just low enough that the companies and vaccine fanatics can argue it’s not real, it’s a statistical artifact, the VAERS reports are fake (they’re not), etc. The third dose appears to be changing that equation somewhat.

Who knows what future doses will bring? Nobody, including Albert Bourla, though his scientists may have shot up enough mice and monkeys to give him a better idea than the rest of us.

Read the whole thing.

CHINESE COMMUNISTS LIED AND HONG KONG DIED: A terse, accurate title.

In late December, the Voice of America reported that Hong Kong’s Dec. 19, 2021, election had “almost completely eliminated pro-democracy voices from the former British colony’s Legislative Council” — colloquially called the Legco.

VOA’s evidence: pro-Beijing candidates and their local allies took 89 of the council’s 90 seats.

I prefer the word “took,” for in this faux election “won” is a propaganda deceit.

In March 2021, the process of choosing Legco members changed. Chinese Communist Party selection replaced election. Seventy seats were “reserved for candidates picked by influential members of industry groups and by a committee of Beijing loyalists.” That’s VOA’s careful description.

Translation: the CCP installed cronies and operatives in the Legco. They are puppets and propagandists for the CCP dictatorship, not democratically elected representatives of Hong Kong’s now dispossessed citizens.

Check it out.

RELATED: A belated post. 2022’s Four Strategic Challenges. There are more than four, but these are big ones.

Challenge No. 1: Imperialist powers hellbent on recovering lost empires (and fulfilling the grandiose dreams of their current leaders.)

Very related to Hong Kong. Check out the other three.

DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND IMPORT ANOTHER: Dems Know They’re Finished Without Illegal Immigrant Votes. “The real problem for the Dems is that most people outside of the bigoted, hyper-liberal coastal bubbles (and Chicago) aren’t interested in what they’re selling.”

SPOILER: YOU’RE THE TERRORIST. Justice Department creates domestic terrorism unit. “The testimony of Matthew Olsen, assistant attorney general of the department’s National Security Division, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday came less than a week after the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Some lawmakers believe that was an act of terrorism and those responsible should be given additional federal terrorism charges.”