Uncovering the Truth
Thinking about the script
On the set of one of her movies, the late Raquel Welch1 remarked 'I was just thinking about the script...' To which the Director quickly replied 'You were thinking? Don't'. Now we are all Raquel, constantly instructed to emote rather than think. What passes for news consists of fine-tuning our feelings, to ratchet-up our anxiety-level, hate the enemy of the moment, and tune-out any disquiet about the way officialdom is handling the endless series of manufactured crises. Not being stars in the Hollywood firmament, our acting skills are often stretched to the limit by rapid-fire jump-cuts from one version of reality to its opposite.
Case in point: Covid as a product of malevolent nature versus covid as intentionally lab-fabricated bio-weapon. For three years (March 2020 - March 2023) every scientific, media, and governmental resource was directed toward making us feel nobody was responsible for this global pandemic. It just happens every 100 years or so. It's inevitable. Sooner or later, we were told even before it happened, it's going to happen again. In scenarios and rehearsals, the necessity for drastic restrictions on freedom would occur -- don't be surprised, don't object, and don't think. Just do as you're told2.
An intentionally fabricated bio-weapon might engender quite different feelings, not well-adapted to going along passively with restrictions on freedom or recommended remedies. We would naturally demand to know who fabricated it, who financed it, who authorized it, and who would be held accountable for it. We would naturally be skeptical of anything recommended by those responsible. We would certainly not be inclined to 'follow the science' of the mad scientists who had inflicted a global plague on humanity. Not knowing who or how this was done, we might be more inclined to search for answers from independent sources not beholden to the scientific establishment. That set of feelings was of course precisely what the natural-origin story was designed to counter. Regardless of the truth of the matter, natural origin was all we heard for three years, lab-origin ridiculed as a 'conspiracy theory'3.
The Lancet Condemns Conspiracy Theories
The Lancet, most prestigious of medical journals, set the tone as early as February 2020: 'We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.'
Later it was disclosed that this statement had been written by EcoHealth Alliance Director Peter Daszak. Daszak's organization was the cutout or money-launderer for routing NIH funds to the Wuhan Lab. Having recruited his EcoHealth and other colleagues to sign it, out of an abundance of caution, Daszak persuaded University of North Carolina viral researcher Ralph Baric to omit his signature 'because it might look self-serving'. Indeed. Despite Daszak's and other signatories continuing involvement in NIH-source funding of the Wuhan Lab, they wrote 'We declare no competing interests' (feigning complete objectivity, in other words).
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. 'I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,' Redfield told Vanity Fair. 'I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science'.
Energy Department Rejects Covid Natural Origin
The U.S. Energy Department, which operates laboratories with bio-tech expertise, verified, as of March 2023, that the covid-19 virus (SARS-CoV2) originated in a laboratory, specifically the NIH-funded laboratory operated by the Communist Party of China (CCP) in Wuhan China. This assessment is probably made by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which had long resented being gagged by other agencies. Several intelligence agencies don't fully agree, perhaps due to their lack of confidential sources in China. However, a Senate Committee Report in October 2022 rejected the notion of natural origin because A) No intermediate animal had been found, B) SARS-CoV2 was not found in any of the animals in China's animal farming industry, and C) Low genetic diversity of the earliest SARS-CoV2 samples. Had the Senate Committee members known then, they might have added the fact that three Wuhan Lab researchers had fallen ill with covid in November 2019. It is highly unlikely that the source of their infection could have been anything other than the virus in the Wuhan Lab that they were adapting to infect humans.
Dr Fauci's emails reveal that he knew as early as January 31, 2020, that the covid virus was lab-engineered. On that date, he received a message from Dr. Kristian Andersen advising him '[O]ne has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson] and myself all find the genome inconsistent with evolutionary theory.' Fauci immediately told his deputy Dr Hugh Auchincloss 'you will have tasks today that must be done'. How gratifying it must have been for Fauci to issue peremptory orders to an Auchincloss, scion of one of the oldest families in America.
As noted by Representative Jim Jordan,
'First, Dr. Fauci knew that American taxpayers had helped to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.
'Second, Dr. Fauci knew this research funding did not go through the government’s required safety review process — a process known as the P3 framework.
'Third, Dr. Fauci knew that the virus 'looked…engineered' and seemed to be 'inconsistent with evolutionary theory'.
Conflicting Motives
A thicket of denials and censorship by officials, scientists, and medical journals, taking their cue from The Lancet, delayed recognition of this now-acknowledged fact. Scientists, though eager for recognition of their unprecedented accomplishment, suddenly became concerned about the optics of taking responsibility for a global plague. The CCP also wished to take credit, primarily to add this bio-weapon to its arsenal of death and destruction to visit upon the West. This was probably not the kind of trade relationship the U.S. State Department had in its rules-based mind for democratizing China. A very different scientific and cultural exchange ensued, transported by infected people dispatched onto airplanes from Beijing and Wuhan bound for U.S. and European capitals in January 2020. But the CCP shared with the scientists a desperate desire to conceal the lab origins of its virus, fearing image problems lest it be known they had intentionally inflicted a plague on humanity, however unintentional the initial release may have been.
So a series of fanciful stories, each one more absurd than the last, sprang forth to obscure the fact that the virus was made in a laboratory through research expressly dedicated to adapting it to infect human beings. Why would scientists do such a crazy thing? The motives of scientists are not always transparent. Intensely competitive and career-driven to be first with any new discovery, they are often reduced to begging for grant money from officials whose largesse can be either career-boosting or career-ending, depending on whim. One such bureaucrat was Dr Anthony Fauci, who until December 2022 presided over a colossus of tax-based funding, answerable to no one and reviewable by no one. Adapting viruses to infect people was one of his priorities. This was the specialty of Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina,
who received numerous NIH grants to pursue his calling until colleagues objected. Ignoring warnings from prominent biologists that such lab-made human-adapted viruses were certain to escape, and swatting aside attempts by two presidents (Obama and Trump) to stop such research, Fauci devised ways of offshoring the research, laundering the money through a cutout ironically named the Eco-Health Alliance. Its Director, Peter Daszak, provided this service in return for a percentage of the total grant. The fourth member of this Gang of Four, Shi Zhengli, a k a the 'bat lady',
did the actual lab work in the Wuhan Lab, under direction from Baric and Fauci. The CCP took over the Wuhan Lab in mid-January 2020 when it realized the military implications of the research, namely its potential use as a devastating bio-weapon.
In an interview with Science, Shi Zhengli explained her methods: infecting civets and humanized mice (mice with human ACE2 receptors) with chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses4. The results of these experiments indicated that SARS-related bat coronaviruses could infect and cause severe illness in humanized mice. NIH later stopped funding the Wuhan Lab for failing to produce its laboratory notes and other records relating to these other experiments.
The National-Security Rationale
From the U.S. national-security perspective, the essential rationale for investigating and developing means of adapting viruses to infect humans is that if China, Russia, and other countries are developing bio-weapons, then the U.S. must likewise do so, both to threaten retaliation and to defend against bio-attack. 'If the other guys are doing it, we have to do it too. We know it's crazy, but we cannot be left defenseless'. The validity of this rationale is undercut by offshoring the research to a laboratory in China (which was done to escape U.S. scrutiny). The Chinese military moved quickly to take over the Wuhan Lab, sending a team of military scientists led by China’s top virologist and biochemical expert, Major General Chen Wei, to set up operations inside the Wuhan Lab in mid-January 2020.
Especially after the Wuhan Lab was taken over by the CCP and the Chinese military, the U.S. national-security rationale would seem to have disappeared entirely. This shows why judgments about research propriety and priorities should not be left to scientists and bureaucrats; they can only be judged in terms of the full range of their consequences, which go well beyond the scientists' careers and research interests. Among many other problems, research involving adaptation of viruses to infect humans is inherently both defensive and offensive -- there is no way to differentiate defensive and offensive uses.
So, first we were fed the fish-market story, that somehow in the noxious brew on the floor of the Huanan market near the Wuhan Lab, a virus propelled itself from one unknown species to another, infecting humans. The market was closed down, reinforcing the credibility of this origin story, which was soon exposed as fishy. No sooner was that done than a series of other animals -- pangolins, snakes, monkeys, birds, bats -- was trotted out onto the world stage to serve as reservoirs for the virus until it could be passed to humans. Ebola had originated from eating monkey meat, and AIDS had originated from intercourse with monkeys, bird flu had infected humans, and pangolins, snakes, and bats were thought to have some unspecified role in the infection of humans with SARS-1. So these stories seemed plausible until researchers painstakingly tracked down the suspected routes of transmission, and drew a blank. A late entrant into the natural-origin sweepstakes was contaminated frozen food; after several more months had elapsed chasing down this story, it too was rejected.
The key item of missing information, like Holmes' dog that didn't bark, was -- and remains, more than three years later -- the identity of the intermediate animal. Viruses that succeed in transgressing species barriers on their way to infecting humans generally do so through one or several intermediate species. This is because their particular characteristics of shape, form, method of replication, virulence, and affinity for particular types of cells are species-specific. A long, multi-generational evolutionary sequence of many many adaptations, under host-animal circumstances favorable to such adaptations, is required for a virus to 'jump' from one species to another. It is certainly not an everyday occurrence: Success in this endeavor by random chance is vanishingly rare.
This is why a virus emerging from nowhere, already perfectly adapted to adhere to human epithelial cells, and capable of proceeding rapidly through the human respiratory system, aroused suspicions about the credibility of officials' natural-origin assertions. This sort of instant adaptation simply does not occur in nature.
Why Now?
Why is the lab-origin truth officially admitted now? The emergency is over, there will be no more lockdowns or mass house-arrests. Forced vaxing is on its way out. It is still, as of March 2023, CDC-'recommended' for children and babies whose covid survival rate is 99.997%, but this is merely to relieve mRNA suppliers of legal liability by putting it on the Childhood Vaccination List. One of the most fervent advocates of natural origin, Fauci, retired in December 2022, and is now engaged in efforts to rehabilitate his image by publishing learned papers admitting that the vaccines he promoted for three years actually don't work very well. The results of the actual
medical experiment to gauge compliance are in, and 69 percent of both global and U.S. population received one or two mRNA shots. As Alex Berenson has noted,
the number of mRNA doses administered in the U.S. peaked in April 2021 and has fallen precipitously since then to nearly zero in February 2023.
For all of these reasons, the natural-origin mythology has outlived its usefulness. Its purpose was to conceal or obscure the responsibility of scientists, bureaucrats, and officials for inflicting a plague on humanity. Whether that obfuscation can continue constitutes the next chapter of this saga.
Hollywood actress Raquel Welch died February 15, 2023. Her films explored ancient civilization (One Million Years BC), the human bloodstream (Fantastic Voyage), and hisorical drama (Three Musketeers), among many others.
'Do as you’re told’ featured prominently in an October 2019 pandemic simulation sponsored by Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. As noted in the Timeline, the exercise assumed a global pandemic taking the lives of 65 million people, and economic devastation. On the basis of these projections from a Gates-financed modeling organization, organizers call for governments and health-sector companies to prepare for a pandemic through greater 'public-private cooperation'. What this meant in practice was lockdowns, mass house arrest, and forced vaccination with an experimental gene-hacking drug. || Source
Cohen J. Wuhan. (Jul. 31, 2020). Coronavirus Hunter Shi Zhengli Speaks out. Science. 369(6503):487-488
I hope it passes and Biden signs it.
I guess the outcome depends upon who's writing the saga...