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We’ll get to Fauci and his Machiavellian ways. But to begin, a brief overview is in order.
I strongly believe Covid-19 came from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that Fauci is at least partially complicit. He funneled American taxpayer dollars into the WIV by using EcoHealth Alliance as a middleman, funding needlessly dangerous chimeric virus experimentation, a kind of “research” that's a matter of abiding controversy among the international scientific community.
Can I prove any of this?
Nope.
But I've done a lot of reading about the pandemic. Four books (yes, people have already written books about it; I recommend this jaw dropper, if you're in the market for one), hundreds of articles and stories and interviews, dozens of studies. A whole bunch of crap.
Am I saying I’m an expert?
No, I’m not saying I’m an expert, people.
But it’s not like I’m some partisan jackal in a tin foil hat ignorant of what I'm most assured and always on the prowl for proof of what I want to be true, either.
If you must know, I started “looking into” all the ado on March 11th when they cancelled the damn NBA games right as they were about to tip off. This was a few weeks after the first confirmed case in the U.S. was announced (if you’ll recall, it was that lovely chap from Washington state who'd just returned home from a nice little sojourn in Wuhan of all places, for Christ’s sake).
Thenceforth, it was like that episode of The Office where Dwight can’t help but follow the red wire Jim unspooled. You just sort of keep going, I guess.
But here’s something I want to underscore: One need not be a bona fide internet sleuth to note the TITANIC coincidence that the whole shit show just happened to begin LITERALLY RIGHT DOWN THE ROAD FROM THE WORLD'S PREEMINENT RESEARCH LAB ON NOVEL CORONAVIRUSES.
(In fact, what most people don't know is that there are actually two virology labs in Wuhan that sampled thousands of coronaviruses from the area where Covid-19's nearest known progenitors are found, over 1,200 miles away from Wuhan. And the second lab? It's about 300 meters away from the wet market where wild animals were sold that Beijing has claimed the virus originated from.)
(Skip ahead to 3:10)
“Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania! What do you think happened?
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean…”
“It’s the f****** chocolate factory!”
Is that colossal coincidence the only thing I’m going off of?
No. No, it is not. In fact, the evidence (or “coincidences,” as the mainstream media continues to assert in its on-going quest to dismiss the blaringly obvious as some right-wing, racist, xenophobic dog whistle) that practically screams the virus came from the lab is now of a most comical plenitude.
You don’t need to have politics in mind when considering this whole where-the-hell-did-the-virus-come-from-because-it’s-killed-millions-and-maybe-we-should-make-sure-it-doesn’t-happen-again-if-in-fact-it-was-created-in-a-lab-and-oh-yes-perhaps-someone-should-be-held-accountable-as-well affair to see the forest for the trees.
All you need is a little humility and a willingness to acknowledge that…
There are people out there much smarter than yourself who know a lot more about particular subject matters than you do.
It would behoove you to see what they have to say about things you don’t necessarily understand or would like to know more about.
You should take whatever they say with a grain of salt and consider any ulterior motives that might be lingering beneath the surface.
You should cross reference with other sources of information and think critically about what’s true, or at least most likely to be true, and carry on from there.
Case in point:
Here we have one Tony Fauci, expert extraordinaire and patron saint of neurotic liberals everywhere, claiming that “the evidence says the coronavirus could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” In other words, Fauci is saying that the virus has a zoonotic origin, meaning its genesis was natural, and that it’s not possible it came from the Wuhan lab. Fair enough. (Note: This was a claim he made many times until he no longer could. If you’re inclined to argue that Fauci “didn’t know enough” at the time he was making these claims and that he would have said otherwise if he had, keep reading.)
And then here we have a guy named Dr. David Asher, a former state department official tasked by the Trump administration to lead a probe into the origins of the coronavirus, who said, “We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci's NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19. The data disproportionately stacked up, as we investigated, that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source.”
Hmm. Okay. Well, what happened to this David Asher guy? How come we didn’t hear more about his probe?
Because the Biden administration aborted the probe as soon as it got the chance. Something to do with “concerns over the reliability of the findings.”
Interesting. What did the probe find?
Many things. None of which conformed to Fauci’s narrative. Like, for instance, what Asher learned from biostatisticians when he inquired about the probability that Covid-19 came from nature and not from a lab. The answer he was given? Approximately 1 in 13 billion.
Now, is this by itself proof that Fauci was lying or being misleading? Does it suggest conspiracy? Of course not. But it should make you want to know more. It should make you question and apply some healthy skepticism.
Let’s say that you decide you want to know more and therefore keep reading. You come across this very long, but very well done exposé in Vanity Fair (not exactly what you’d call right-wing, mind you) on the government’s internal debates concerning the origin of Covid-19. And whilst reading, you come across this little nugget:
“In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.”
The Furin Cleavage Site Anomaly
The virus probably escaped due to any number of reasons, most likely the egregious lack of safety standards at the WIV. The important thing to note is that the kind of research that created the virus — known as “gain of function,” which is essentially what they call messing around with random, dangerous viruses and trying to make them even more lethal to humans in an effort to “predict and prepare” for pandemics, ironically enough — is very controversial and banned in the U.S. specifically because it's needlessly dangerous.
Within the first month of the pandemic it was already clear this particular coronavirus contained a little something called a “furin cleavage site,” a feature never before found in any of the other hundreds of coronaviruses out there in the wild and which made this new virus preternaturally contagious among humans. So unusual was this discovery that some scientists remarked the virus looked like it might’ve been created in a lab.
What exactly is a furin cleavage site?
You’ve probably seen some variety of this ominous-looking image of Covid-19. Those little red things are called spike proteins, and they’re the key to how the virus is able to enter human cells. Within these little red spike proteins, right in the middle, lies the furin cleavage site. What makes this so abnormal is how perfectly placed the furin cleavage site is, a positioning that allows the virus to cleave human cell membranes and infect the cells. It’s almost as if the virus was specifically designed to be extremely infectious to humans.
No other coronavirus has this oddity. And, coincidentally, adding a furin cleavage site to a virus to increase its pathogenicity is a long standing gain of function practice.
“But Dr. Fauci said they weren’t doing gain of function stuff at the WIV! He said so when he testified in front of Congress!”
Yup, that he did. And when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul suggested that Fauci had lied to Congress, Fauci stated that the research doesn’t actually “qualify” as gain-of-function, even though it’s literally the very definition of gain-of-function research—something that even The New York Times has seen fit to print.
Pressed further, Fauci later said he couldn't be certain whether Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab ‘kept their word” and “avoided using U.S. funding” to conduct alteration experiments that may have led to the Covid-19 outbreak, and that “there’s no way of guaranteeing” what the $600,000 given to the lab was used for; he insisted it was gifted for “a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronaviruses.”
Another “Coincidence”
A funny thing happened on October 20th, not long after Senator Paul and Fauci faced off: The NIH admitted it had funded gain of function research at the WIV.
Specifically, the research involved testing different spike proteins on coronaviruses.
Coincidentally, on the very same day of this admission, the definition of “gain-of-function” was changed on the NIH website. Prior to October 20th, the website said that gain-of-function research “describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent.”
The definition appeared under the title “Gain-of-Function Research Involving Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”
“The subset of GOF research that is anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans, has been the subject of substantial scrutiny and deliberation,” the website previously said.
But on October 20th, the day the NIH made the admission, the page that had defined “gain-of-function” was removed from the website. That page is now titled, “Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”
Concealment Implies Guilt, No?
To say that Fauci would be heavily implicated if the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab is a gross understatement.
But what's ironic is that if he’d just been forthright about what he knew and when he knew it and informed government officials that the NIH had been using American taxpayer dollars to fund the kind of sketchy research at the WIV from which Covid-19 likely originated, it's unlikely he would’ve faced actual consequences. After all, even though he was the one to fund the research, and even though he effectively ignored the U.S. moratorium on gain of function experimentation by outsourcing it to arguably the shadiest and least trustworthy country in the world that also happens to be a staunch adversary, and even though the Department of State had specifically warned that safety standards in specifically that lab were woefully insufficient and that such negligence could very well prove disastrous in the not too distant future (Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and professor at Rutgers, described the lab standards as “reckless Indiana-Jones-style adventurism” that raised serious concerns over accidental infection), it's not as if Fauci or any other American for that matter allowed the virus to escape. It was China. I mean, I imagine that most people wouldn't have a problem being angry at China.
But so yes, back in the early months of the pandemic I fell down a rabbit hole when it kind of dawned on me that the guy in charge of our response (lockdowns, restrictions, mandates, etc.) had some seriously troubling ties to the WIV that the media apparently had no interest in covering. It was almost like they were protecting the guy. Before long, Fauci was being outright lionized.
When it became clear that Fauci wasn’t especially fond of Trump, Democrats and their media handmaidens rallied to portray him as a symbol of authority, an expert whose public standing was integral to our continued health and safety, a valiant foil to the bad orange man and his mean tweets and his lack of respect for The Science™.
Ergo, all criticism and scrutiny of the bad orange man’s noble adversary, he of the Keebler Elf resemblance resigned to indentured servitude within the depraved bowels of the Trump administration itself, was officially off the table.
I think Tony Fauci's acolytes and sycophants now find themselves stuck in the awkward position where acknowledging one lie means having to acknowledge all his lies, and that’s no fun. The thing is, though, retrospective falsification — the unconscious distortion of past experiences to conform to a person's needs in the present — is de rigueur within the bubbled world of our left-tilted mainstream media, so it's unlikely they change tunes.
Fauci’s House Of Cards?
A letter recently appeared on the website for the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Although dated January 11th, it wasn’t posted until Tuesday of this week. It makes me wonder if Fauci's house of cards is perilously close to collapsing.
Dear Secretary Becerra:
We write to request a transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Excerpts of emails we are making public today (see enclosed Appendix I) reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things: (1) the potential that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute Virology (WIV) and (2) the possibility that the virus was intentionally genetically manipulated. It is imperative we investigate if this information was conveyed to the rest of the government and whether this information would have changed the U.S. response to the pandemic. . .
Unfortunately, thus far, HHS and its subordinate agency have hidden behind redactions to shield these emails from public scrutiny. We call on you to immediately lift these redactions and produce the email communications to Congress. Further, considering the import of the above questions, we request Dr. Anthony Fauci be made immediately available to sit for a transcribed interview. Please respond by January 18, 2022 to confirm.
I went ahead and listed in bullet point format the most important takeaways, but the letter can be read in full here.
N.B. - Although the letter has an appendix that includes the emails referenced within, these emails are still in redacted form; the Department of Health and Human Services only allowed committee members to view the (unredacted) emails in person and take notes/transcribe them by hand.
January 27, 2020: Despite claiming otherwise on multiple occasions, Dr. Fauci knew NIAID had funded EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting. Dr. Fauci also knew that NIAID worked with EcoHealth to craft a grant policy to sidestep the gain-of-function moratorium at the time. This new policy allowed EcoHealth to complete dangerous experiments on novel bat coronaviruses—with very little oversight—that would have otherwise been blocked by the moratorium.
February 1, 2020: Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss Covid-19. It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that Covid-19 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.
February 4, 2020: Only three days later, four participants of the conference call authored a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and sent a draft to Drs. Fauci and Collins. It is unclear what, if any, new evidence was presented or if the underlying science changed in that short period of time, but after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief Covid-19 was the result of a laboratory leak.
April 16, 2020: More than two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that the Nature Medicine article—which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit—did not squash the lab leak hypothesis and asks [sic] if the NIH can do more to “put down” the lab leak hypothesis.
April 17, 2020: After Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure, Dr. Fauci cited the Nature Medicine paper from the White House podium likely in an effort to further stifle the hypothesis COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Great piece! I hope more people will read it, particularly those not yet entrenched in an ideological box that prevents them from absorbing and analyzing information that might be new to them and not necessarily what they prefer to hear.
America is gone, what remains is a cabal that manipulates and lies: media, academy , government and corporations. Good article,it captures much.