This week has marked a big turning point in the Covid-19 saga. What we were told, what we firmly believed – that the authorities were ‘following the science’ as the basis of every policy and restriction – has been shown to be, well, not quite the whole truth and nothing but.
The biggest revelation has come from emails, finally released this week and made available to the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, showing that scientists on both sides of the Atlantic shut down any public information that the Covid virus had been manipulated in the laboratory in Wuhan and had inadvertently escaped.
These emails, first ‘released’ after Freedom of Information requests in 2021, had most of their contents gutted, and it was only demands from the Congressional Oversight Committee that forced the US government to hand over the unexpurgated contents.
According to Viscount (Matt) Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, writing in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, as far back as February 2020, Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, arranged a meeting with senior virologists from Britain and the US.
Unfortunately, also present in the meeting were Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, who heads up the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The emails released this week show that three of the five virologists present believed that there was clear evidence that this was a gene-manipulated Frankenstein virus.
Nevertheless, writes Ridley, the conclusion ultimately published by these scientists in a subsequent paper in Nature Medicine was: ‘we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.’
Two other scientific articles quickly followed, in The Lancet and in Emerging Microbes and Infections, also crushing the manipulated virus theory.
I say unfortunately about Collins and Fauci because Collins argued in one of the released emails to Sir Jeremy that any public announcement about a genetically manipulated virus escaping from a Chinese lab would be devastating.
As he wrote, a ‘swift convening of experts in a confidence inspiring framework (WHO seems really the only option) is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’
This was echoed by a Dutch virologist named Ron Fouchier, who told the group that any further public debate about this would ‘distract top researchers from their active duties’ and ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general.’
Like the Nature Medicine article, the Lancet letter emphasized that the idea of a Wuhan lab escape was nothing more than a ‘conspiracy theory.’
‘We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health,’ the letter portentously announced.
What the Lancet failed to disclose for 18 months, says Ridley, was the conflict of interest among several of the authors, including Peter Daszak, who Ridley claims ‘secretly orchestrated’ support for and publication of the letter.
Consequently, he pressured some 15 of his fellow scientists to sign the Lancet letter.
Later emails showed that Collins wanted to intensify efforts to ‘put down this very destructive conspiracy.’
Now, just follow the breadcrumbs.
Daszak is the head of EcoHealth Alliance and his work focuses on the theory that animal viruses can jump species, largely because of ecological change. His biography claims that he was responsible for ‘identifying the bat origin of SARS.’
EcoHealth’s stated objective is ‘directed by the conviction that disease outbreaks are not just predictable, but preventable.’
The idea is that if you create these manipulated viruses in a controlled environment like a lab, you can then prepare yourself for a pandemic and have a solution – like a vaccine? – readily to hand.
Daszak just happens to be a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Late last year, it was none other than Daszak who was chosen to head up the WHO investigation team that visited Wuhan. Daszak returned, exonerating the lab and still putting forward the ‘bat-eaten-by-a-pangolin-and-sold-on-the-wet-market’ theory of how Covid started.
By the time Covid hit, the US had poured some $42 million into this ‘gain of function’ animal-to-human manipulated virus research. It was first carried out at a facility at the University of North Carolina, but then President Obama, viewing such genetic manipulation as unethical and potentially dangerous, with the possibility of these Frankensteins escaping, closed down the North Carolina research in 2014.
After that, research was concentrated at . . . the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
With Daszak’s connections to the WIV, increasing evidence points to the possibility that EcoHealth was being used to funnel research funds to Wuhan and that the ultimate funder may have been. . . the US National Institutes of Health, with whom Daszak also has close ties.
And here’s another breadcrumb. After the Wuhan lab leak was crushed, Fauci used his powerful influence among the media to shut down any discussion of alternatives to the vaccine (such as holistic and some drug-based solutions being successfully used by doctors around the world).
This includes ridiculing scientists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, all of whom argued against wholesale lockdown and vaccination, and in favor of focused protection of the vulnerable.
It should be noted that Fauci holds more than 50 vaccine patents.
Both the Lancet (which now regrets publication of that letter) and Matt Ridley, a highly respected science writer who has written on genomics, feel that they’ve been had.
Based on those three original articles, says Ridley, he argued for a long time that Covid couldn’t have been started in a lab.
It was only after examining the emails and working with other scientists, who didn’t quite buy the wet-market scenario, that Ridley finally discovered the truth.
Yes, it’s a very bad day for science.
But these revelations, horrendous though they are – that a team of scientists concocted conclusions primarily to keeping a lid on a scientific calamity on an unimagined scale – are simply the natural end result of a medical system long corrupted beyond repair.
In the US, the very regulatory agencies that supposedly keep us safe are allowed to own patents of the drugs they are supposed to regulate.
The pharmaceutical industry, in turn, has been sanctioned not only to populate agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, but also to become the media’s largest advertiser.
Two of the tentpoles supposedly safeguarding the public’s health are completely compromised.
Covid has simply exposed this vast conflict of interest in bold relief.
Stay tuned for more unraveling, as more of this evidence, at long last, begins to see the light of day.
Because once it becomes public, all of us can do something about it.