The fledermaus theory of the WuFlu

 Democracy dies in darkness, but stealth editing thrives there. That's Orwell 101 - although one assumes whichever of Bezos's woeful hacks was ordered to do it was unaware of his literary antecedents, or self-respect would have required him to seek alternative, less pitiful employment. Nevertheless, as you'll know if you heard my serialization of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that was literally Winston Smith's job - to go into the archives and rewrite past editions of the newspapers to conform to the needs of the present. And to ensure that versions of the past less helpful to the regime get, in one of Orwell's many brilliant coinages, "memory-holed".

Our chaps haven't been memory-holing quite as long, so they're not as smooth and assured about it as Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth. Commissar Zuckerberg's Facebook will now permit you to suggest that the ChiCom-19 may have "escaped" from a lab - in contrast to the rules a week or so back, when so much as raising the possibility got your account vaporized. Wikipedia isn't quite so quick on the uptake: as I write, the lab-leak origin of the WuFlu still comes under "Covid-19 misinformation" as a theory used "to stoke anti-China sentiments". But presumably the lads are modifying even as I speak.

Gee, it's almost like they all got the same fax from head office. So what was a fortnight back a conspiracy theory that could not be mentioned is now acceptable in polite Zuck-policed society. Not because any new proof has emerged one way or the other: there has always been more evidence for a Covid lab leak than for the bat theory, not least because the relevant bats live a thousand miles from the Wuhan wet market.

When you boil it right down, the fledermaus theory of the WuFlu rests mainly on "scientist" Peter Daszak. Mr Daszak is this season's omnipresent British subject: He is to bats what Christopher Steele is to Russians; his job is to maintain them as the McGuffin.

So, on the one hand, Peter Daszak is the US government's principal middle-man (via the "non-profit" EcoHealth Alliance, which he heads) for funneling American tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His principal research activity for the last decade has been coronavirus gain-of-function projects with Shi Zhengli, the lady who heads said institute in Wuhan.

On the other hand, Peter Daszak was also the only "American" member of the team the WHO sent to China to "investigate" the source of the virus. He was the organizer of the letter from twenty-seven virologists to The Lancet saying ChiCom-19 was of natural origin. And he was the "expert" relied on by Zuckerberg to ban lab-leak chit-chat on Facebook.

In none of these activities did he disclose his conflict of interest - that the institution he was absolving was his principal business partner, and run by his closest professional colleague, who has denied, risibly, that any of her employees ever got sick from the WuFlu, and certainly not in the fall of 2019.

So, if you're one of those who appealed to Zuckerberg to let you have your Facebook page back, well, good luck with that: That's like appealing your alimony to a judge who's dating your ex-wife.

Why we should welcome the lab leak theory

When you give it some thought, this makes a lot of sense.

 If SARS2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 — came from nature then, logically, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again. And again. And again. And next time, it could all too easily be worse. Our best recourse, then, is clearly to study potential zoonotic pathogens in the lab. It could even be argued, as it has been by many researchers, that we should enhance these infectious agents to discover their vulnerabilities so that next time, we’ll know just what to do.

How else could we discover what we’re up against? After all, if SARS2 came from nature, then the biologists who were furiously studying its close relatives were, if anything, too slow and too cautious to protect us. The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab. Indeed, we would be forced to redouble our efforts before SARS3 catches us off-guard.

If, on the other hand, SARS2 emerged from a lab, then the lesson is the opposite. Covid-19 would be, at the bare minimum, the direct result of our failure to heed prior warnings about the possibility of such an accident. Lab leaks are not uncommon, so making already dangerous viruses even more dangerous is a recipe for disaster. If, therefore, we want to avoid a pandemic from happening again, obviously we would need to curtail this research.

 

This is why the corrupt press is so worried

New study claims Chinese scientists created COVID 19 in a lab https://t.co/6VR9wKbZjA via @MailOnline

— AntifaBook.com (@JackPosobiec) May 29, 2021

The Media Discovers the Wuhan Virus Origin

Joe Biden is investigating this *brilliant* new hypothesis that a Chinese laboratory may have been the origin of the virus.

This is FAR more plausible than that racist Trumpian conspiracy theory about how the virus originated in a laboratory in China.https://t.co/OtpvXDlv72

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) May 29, 2021

How the Media Lied About the Origin of the Wuhan Virus to Hurt Trump

 This is a great thread by Drew Holden about the Media lying about the Wuhan virus escaping from the Wuhan Virology Lab because they hated Trump and anything that came from the Trump administration had to be attacked.

It's also a great example of why the Media is both distrusted and hated by people who have the ability to think for themselves.  Imagine believing that a deadly virus coming from Wuhan, finding out that Wuhan is the home of a lab that experiments on ways of making viruses deadly, and then insisting that the lab - the same lab that works with deadly viruses  - could not be the source of the virus killing millions throughout the world could not possibly be the source.  That it's a "conspiracy theory."  

🧵THREAD🧵

The idea that Covid-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China has gained mainstream traction of late.

It can be easy to forget that, a little over a year ago, the idea was derided as a vile, senseless conspiracy theory.

Let’s revisit. ⤵️

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021

@SenTomCotton took much of the initial heat for suggesting this as a possibility back in January.

Here’s what the @nytimes had to say about his “fringe theory” that “lacks evidence” and which “scientists have dismissed.”

Apparently those concerns have been un-dismissed since. pic.twitter.com/u61hJGI7Mj

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021

Read the whole thing. Some excerpts:

Do we know for certain how the pandemic started? No, and it isn’t clear that we ever will. I tried to give a lot of leeway on this one given that.

But as you can see, the narrative was strong, the dismissal of other ideas was near-religious, and now it’s as if it never happened.

Events like this do infinitely more to undermine America’s faith in experts and the media than anything Trump could ever do or say. And it’s all both self-inflected and avoidable. 

But too many people can’t seem to help themselves. And whole industries suffer as a result.

And, from a Drew Holden tweet from April 21, 2020: I have a sneaking suspicion some people are gonna look real silly for writing off the idea that coronavirus could‘ve come from a high-tech virology lab, run by a secretive autocratic regime, overseen by a bat expert studying coronaviruses, in the city where cases first appeared. twitter.com/MiriamElder/st…

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

 

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel. is busy covering up. [fixed that for the author] ...

Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature....

“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris....

From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment....

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money....

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells....

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by the NIAID....

the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing....

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise....

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said....

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

EXCLUSIVE: 99% chance COVID-19 was lab-made, scientists call out the WHO

Xi Jinping’s China did this

The corrupt, criminal regime wasted 40 days blocking information while it crushed domestic dissent and ensured COVID-19 would become a global pandemic....

 The world is watching. People in China no longer stand alone. Many are no longer fearful. They have already started publishing firsthand accounts of the CPC’s orchestrated cover-ups and monumental failures, revealing the rotten core of Chinese governance.

In defending the struggle for democracy and human rights in China, the international community must stand in solidarity with the people of China in seeking to unmask the CPC’s criminality, corruption, and impunity.

The community of democracies must undertake the necessary legal initiatives — be they international tort actions as authorized by treaty law, or the utilization of international bodies, like the International Court of Justice — to underpin the courage and commitment of China’s human rights defenders. This is what justice and accountability is all about.

Suddenly, the Chinese lab origin theory of COVID-19 becomes more than a baseless right-wing conspiracy myth

The point is not that this proves that the virus originated in the lab. Rather, my interest is the overwhelming media narrative that emerged to deny that this was a credible potential source. That narrative emerged around the time that the media was hammering Trump for his use of “China virus” and “Wuhan virus.” That criticism was enhanced by the argument that the virus developed naturally. That could still be the case but it never seemed rational to me to discount the lab theory.

What is most amazing is that, if the Chinese allowed this virus to escape and then arrested doctors raising the alarm over the spread, it would be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime: a world pandemic caused by human error. Millions have been infected and thousands have died. If the cause was negligence by a totalitarian nation (that ignored warnings and punished doctors), this would be a story of the century. Suddenly magazines care saying that they are now thinking about the “unthinkable.” Yet, it was never truly unthinkable was it?

The media only allowed themselves to report on this to "prove" that Trump should have know about this earlier.