It Was Never About a Virus

In a just world, everyone involved in this would go to prison:

On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?

“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.

This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.

Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.

Fauci’s posture—dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it—set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.

But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci’s and other officials’ behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.

The recently disclosed private communications, first reported by Public and Racket, lay bare that the “highly qualified” authors of the paper that Fauci had asserted in April 2020 likely disproved a lab leak—what became known informally as the “Proximal Origin” paper—actually had extensive uncertainty about the virus being the result of a natural event. This was grossly at odds with what became their published position.

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According to the House subcommittee’s report, since the commentary’s publication, it has been regarded as “the single most impactful and influential scientific paper in history” and “has been accessed 5.84 million times.” Government officials, the media, scientists, and many others referred to it as indisputable evidence that the lab-leak theory was a conspiracy and that anyone who brought it up was a conspiracist and a racist. The Chinese Communist Party welcomed the commentary as scientific backing to insist that Covid-19 originated in nature; thus, the CCP was not responsible for the 15 million Covid-related deaths and millions more suffering during the pandemic. ...

Yet through the Herculean efforts of a determined few, including journalists such as Ian Birrell, the volunteer group DRASTIC, and the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the public has now learned that the paper wasn’t an objective scientific inquiry but rather the result of coordinated efforts between them and public health officials. The most troubling aspect of the paper is that although the authors denounced the lab-leak theory publicly, they privately doubted their own conclusion and worried that there was growing evidence contradicting their assertion.

According to the House subcommittee’s report, on Jan. 31, 2020, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and adviser to President Donald Trump on the pandemic, requested Kristian G. Andersen, a scientist working at the Scripps Research Institute, to draft a paper aiming to “disprove the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The next day, on Feb. 1, Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust (now the chief scientist of the World Health Organization), convened a conference call. Participants included all five scientists who later authored the “Proximal Origin” paper: Fauci, Director of National Institutes of Health (NIH) Francis Collins, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K. government’s chief scientific adviser until recently. Due to Fauci’s repeated nudging, Andersen began to draft a paper rejecting the lab-leak theory.

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Pfizer Under Question

Watch as I question Pfizer representatives last night in a Senate Hearing.

The company was very reluctant to attend the committee hearing and also reluctant to supply a straight answer, automatically falling back on their 'safe and effective' mantra to… pic.twitter.com/PZmJ7yiW9l

— Malcolm Roberts 🇦🇺 (@MRobertsQLD) August 4, 2023

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The federal government has destroyed more than 14 million unused and expired doses of COVID-19 vaccines so far this year, with four million more doses set to exceed their shelf life by 2023’s end, amid dwindling vaccine demand.

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“The wiretap was calculated to intimidate Detective Grus and her family – but all these ‘Urgent Emergency’ wiretaps during the Freedom Convoy backfired.

 The wiretaps served only to galvanize Canadians and strengthen the legitimacy of protest against governments that overstepped their authority and power.”