Rand Paul introduces Risky Research Act

A U.S. Senate committee has begun hearings on Rand Paul's Risky Research Act, meant to oversee dangerous scientific experiments like the gain-of-function research in Wuhan that allegedly led to the Covid pandemic.. 

Senate Committee Wrestles With Risks and Benefits of Virus Research | MedPage Today | Shannon Firth:

July 11, 2024 - "Lawmakers and scientists debated the best ways to regulate high-risk government-funded virus research during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Thursday. One prominent witness called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research, while another stressed the risks of not pursuing certain kinds of experiments. Meanwhile, some committee members leveraged their time at the dais to grill former public health leaders about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19's origins and to accuse them of complicity in a cover-up.

"'Today, thousands of skilled individuals can create infectious viruses using commercially available synthetic DNA that corresponds to publicly accessible viral genome sequences,' Kevin Esvelt, PhD, of the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, told the committee. He argued that the U.S. needs a 'systemic reappraisal' to define which types of DNA, pathogens, and experiments are safe and which are dangerous. He urged Congress to establish and fund an independent board to determine which laboratories should be granted access to which agents and sequences, to determine when the benefits of 'dual use research' -- that is, research that can lead to either benefits or harms -- exceed the risks, and to assess and determine when disclosing a genome sequence or an experimental outcome 'would cause irreparable harm to national security'....

"Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, testified -- not for the first time -- that the most likely theory of COVID-19's origins was biomedical research followed by an accidental lab leak. 'Unfortunately, the potential national security consequences of conducting the research did not receive full consideration prior to the funding decisions to conduct such high-risk research,' Redfield said. He argued that while some scientists believe gain-of-function research is vital to 'get ahead of viruses' and to develop vaccines and countermeasures, he believes it had the 'exact opposite effect' and blames such research for unleashing a new virus in the world without any means of stopping it. 'In my opinion, we should call for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we have a broader debate and come to consensus as a community [about] the value of such research,' Redfield said.

"Ranking Member Rand Paul, MD (R-Ky.), who has publicly stated for months that he believes that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the result of a lab leak, levied the same allegations of a 'vast COVID cover-up' and of federal funding being used to support gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 'You don't need to be convinced that COVID-19 virus originated from a lab leak to recognize the imminent need for oversight mechanisms,' he said. 'The mere possibility that the virus could have emerged from such risky research should be more than enough to prompt decisive action.'

"On Wednesday, Paul introduced the "Risky Research Review Act, which calls for creating an independent oversight board to review high-risk life sciences research and issue 'binding determinations' related to federal funding. Redfield heartily supported the bill, as did Sen. Roger Marshall, MD (R-Kan.), who declared that it would 'save tens of millions of lives.' And Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he still needed to review the document but was likely to back it."

Read more: https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/washington-watch/111059

Does It Bother You?': Rand Paul Questions Ex-CDC Director About Gain-Of-Function Research | Forbes Breaking News | July 11, 2024:

Little known about second virology lab in Wuhan

The scientists who did the most in 2020 to have the lab origin of Covid dismissed as a "conspiracy theory," says journalist Robert Kogon, form a group connected with a little-known German-Chinese virology lab, based in Wuhan and partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which also may have been conducting the same gain-of-function research.   

Germany's Role in What Happened | Brownstone Institute | Robert Kogon:

March 15, 2024 - "The ‘story of the decade,’ ‘smoking gun,’ ‘case closed.’ The story of US-funded – or, as the case may be, even not funded – gain-of-function research on coronaviruses has been widely presented in recent weeks as the solution to the riddle of Covid: not only the nearly definitive proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a laboratory, after all, but also the nearly definitive demonstration of whodunnit. The Americans did it, of course.... Anthony Fauci, the funder of the research; Ralph Baric, the ‘designer’ of the virus; and Peter Daszak, the albeit British head of US-based EcoHealth Alliance, who directed the research. They merely needed a little help from one hired-gun Dutch virologist in the person of Vincent Munster, who made Baric’s virus transmissible at Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana before it was shipped to Wuhan. And the rest is history.

"But what about all the German connections to virus research in Wuhan which I have documented ... and which involve not just German funding for virus research in Wuhan, but indeed a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, which – unlike the Wuhan Institute of Virology – is located right in the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city?

"It is all the more remarkable that these German connections are being ignored given that the supposedly ‘American’ story of the creation and release of Covid-19 points right back to them: namely, to a German or, more exactly, German-Dutch coronavirus research nexus, which has played a key role in the Covid-19 response and at whose centre we find none other than Christian Drosten ... the German creator of the notoriously hypersensitive and unreliable Covid-19 PCR test which was the very basis of the declaration of a pandemic. 

"Let us start with what is invariably described as Anthony Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab, where Vincent Muster is supposed to have made Baric’s virus design transmissible. The headline of a Daily Mail article even describes it as a 'Fauci-run' lab. Well, although indeed a NIAID research facility and to that extent connected to the former NIAID director Fauci, the actual director of the facility itself is the German virologist Heinz Feldmann. 'So what?' – you might say. There are 80 million Germans. True enough. But there are not 80 million Germans who have conducted virus research with Christian Drosten.... 

"[I]n addition to Feldmann and Drosten, there are two other notable authors of the above-cited 2011 Ebola virus paper: Vincent Munster, Feldmann’s employee at the Rocky Mountain Lab ... and Stefan Pöhlmann, a virologist based at the German Primate Centre in Göttingen. Like Drosten, Pöhlmann took part in the famous February 1st 2020 conference call with Anthony Fauci on a possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2. As will be seen momentarily, it was precisely what might be called the ‘EU crew’ around Drosten, and including Pöhlmann, which would attempt to beat back the lab-leak hypothesis in the discussions with their Anglosphere counterparts, both on the call and in emails which followed.... 

"It should be recalled from the FOIA’d ‘Fauci emails‘ that after the spectre of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was first raised with Fauci by Kristian Andersen, Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust would arrange for the famous February 1st conference call, bringing in a German-Dutch team of coronavirus experts to discuss the matter with their dismayed Anglosphere colleagues. The concerned Anglosphere scientists were Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, Edward Holmes, and the Danish virologist Andersen, who is, however, based at Scripps Research in California. All of them suspected that the virus had a lab origin or were even convinced that it did. Even Farrar, who has been dismissive about lab leak in his public statements, said he was '50-50' between lab leak and natural origin behind the scenes. 

"But it was members precisely of the German-Dutch ‘EU team’ who are reported to have lambasted Andersen and his Anglosphere colleagues on the conference call and who would continue to urge, in subsequent correspondence, that the matter be, in Drosten’s words, 'dropped.' We have already noted Heinz Feldmann’s connections to the two German members of the EU team, Christian Drosten and Stefan Pöhlmann. The other two members of the team were the Dutch virologists Marion Koopmans and Ron Fouchier. Koopmans is head of the Erasmus University Medical Centre’s department of Viroscience and co-author of Drosten’s controversial PCR-protocol paper [which]had been published by the EU-funded journal Eurosurveillance just one week before the conference call. Fouchier is ... Koopman’s deputy at the Department of Viroscience of the Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam. He is also co-author of the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 paper.... 

"[W]hat does that have to do with Vincent Munster’s alleged concoction of SAR-CoV-2 at Feldmann’s (not Fauci’s) Rocky Mountain Lab? Well, Munster is Fouchier’s student! Fouchier was the co-director of Munster’s PhD thesis (as can be seen here), along with Ab Osterhaus, who is perhaps the key historical figure in the formation of the German-Dutch virology nexus. Osterhaus was the head of the Viroscience Department at the Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam until 2014, when he was succeeded by Koopmans. The 75-year-old Dutchman presently leads a ‘One Health’ working group at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover....

"Neither Koopmans nor Pöhlmann appear to have played an active role in the conference call. As the FOIA’d emails and the related Slack messages make clear, 'Christian' and 'Ron' led the charge. They would keep the pressure on in the subsequent email exchanges, ultimately getting Andersen and his Anglosphere colleagues to recant their original theory and to endorse precisely the opposite theory, i.e., that of a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2, in their now infamous 'Proximal Origin' paper....

"Now, if you were a detective investigating a crime – for instance, the creation of a supposedly deadly virus (whether it was in fact so deadly is, of course, another matter) – whose behaviour would you find suspicious? The behaviour of those who themselves expressed concern about a lab leak and were keen on investigating the matter – including, nota bene, none other than Anthony Fauci, who even suggested contacting the FBI! – or the behaviour of those who were dismissive and defensive and tried to shut the conversation down?

"'Didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory and, if we could, drop it?” Christian Drosten asked with notable irritation in a terse February 9th 2020 email to the other members of the group: 'Who came up with this story in the beginning? Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?' Do these sound like the words of an innocent man? Not much, especially if we consider that before this email emerged thanks to an American FOIA request, Drosten had insisted in a sworn statement to a German court that he 'had no interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a certain direction. In particular, I had and I have no personal interest in ruling out the so-called laboratory thesis.' No interest in steering the suspicion in a certain direction?! How is that consistent with 'Didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it'?

"Drosten, as discussed in my ‘Why Fauci, not Drosten?‘, has links to the German-Chinese virology lab in Wuhan and its German Co-Director Ulf Dittmer. As seen in the below photo, a 2015 German-Government-sponsored virology symposium in Berlin brought together not only Drosten and the bat coronavirus specialist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV], but also both the German and the Chinese Co-Directors of the German-Chinese lab, Ulf Dittmer and Dongliang Yang, and both the then- and apparently even the current Directors of the WIV to boot! 

a) Wang Yanyi? b) Shi Zhengli c) Christian Drosten d) Ulf Dittmer e) Dongliang Yang f) Chen Xinwen. 

"The [WIV] Director at the time, Chen Xinwen, is the small, buck-toothed man with the blue tie in the photo. The young woman with the long black hair in the lower left-hand corner appears to be current WIV director Wang Yanyi, although Wang is not listed as a participant in the event programme. 

"In January 2020, moreover, Drosten told the Germany daily Die Berliner Zeitung that he had learned about the supposedly novel virus in Wuhan from virologist colleagues in the city before any infections had even been officially reported!

"If a virus engineered in Montana is supposed to have somehow gotten to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even though the WIV was not even a part of the US-funded CREID project which is alleged to have made the connection, why could it not have gotten to the German-Chinese virology laboratory on the other side of the Yangtze? (Moreover, the CREID project – which is in fact more a network than a project – was not even launched until 2020: several months after the official start of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.)

"As the below map from Science magazine makes clear, the campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology are in fact nowhere near the area of the initial cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan. The German-Chinese lab, by contrast, is right in the cluster. It is located at Union Hospital, designated by number 6 in the map. The Chinese co-sponsor of the lab, Tongji Medical College, is located virtually at the very epicentre of the outbreak: roughly one kilometre to the north of Tongji Hospital, which is designated by number 5 in the map.... 

[W]hat do we know about the research which was being conducted at the German-Chinese virology lab in Wuhan itself? Not much. In September 2021, one Reinhard G. used a website dedicated to posing questions to German parliamentarians in order to ask the German member of the European Parliament Christian Ehler whether gain-of-function research was being conducted at the German-Chinese lab. Ehler is chair of the EU Parliament’s Panel on the Future of Science and Technology (STOA). Reinhard G. did not receive an answer. Ehler’s team merely noted that they did not know.

"But why are no German journalists or commentators, many of whom have shown great interest in DEFUSE and CREID, demanding to know? 

"The DEFUSE proposal was not funded. The CREID network is funded by the US Government, but the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not part of it and it only got underway well after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan. The German-Chinese lab was launched in 2017 and it is funded by the German Government. It grew out of a German-Chinese joint virology project, TRR60, which was publicly-funded for a full decade from 2009 to 2018 and which, as I have shown here, proudly featured the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a partner.

"Why should the world not know as much about the German-Chinese lab and TRR60 as it knows about DEFUSE and CREID? Where are the Freedom of Information requests? Why is the German Government being spared them? If anyone asked, at least it could say no, which would be revealing in its own right. We know that the German Government funds gain-of-function experiments, because none other than Christian Drosten was coordinator of a multi-part publicly-funded RAPID project which includes them.... Stefan Pöhlmann was, incidentally, Director of one of the RAPID sub-projects.

"Of course, if one only has US information, one will end up telling a US story. But if a foreign power really did have a hand in the escape or release of an engineered virus in Wuhan, then prima facie Germany is the far likelier suspect."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/germanys-role-in-what-happened/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Why the "lab leak" question is still important

Why we should not "move on" from discussing the Covid pandemic in general, and the lab leak hypothesis in particular. 

Ureem 2805, Wuhan Institute of Virology, 2018. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

by George J. Dance

This February, four years after the first Covid cases were reported in North America, the resulting pandemic appears to be well and truly over. Those four years divide neatly into two halves. The first half was notably goverened by a climate of fear, in which governments imposed numerous totalitarian mandates and restrictions, some blatantly illegal and all without due process of law, but all with overwhelming support from a panicked citizenry. Then, at the beginning of 2023 (as I'd predicted), enough people had finally had enough; public support for Covid mandates and restrictions melted away, and many (not all) of those mandates and restrictions have since been ended. Covid may be killing more people in 2024 than it did in 2020, but by and large people have lost their fear of it; as the cliche has it, they have "moved on" 

The blog has also moved on to a degree; after being virtually all-Covid most of those four years, I have made it more about other, more current issues. But I intend to keep reporting on the virus and the pandemic. The pandemic has passed from current events to history, but in my opinion history is even more important than current events; because it is history that we learn from. If we do not learn from the Covid pandemic, and all the mistakes that were made in it, we are destined (as Santayana put it) to repeat those mistakes. Which is why I intend to keep thinking and writing about the Covid pandemic, no matter how many "moved on" people, including many whose judgement I respect, would prefer that I stop. 

That goes double for the "lab leak" story: the ongoing debate over whether the SARS2 virus originated "zoonotically" or from another animal species, or whether it was delibertately designed by scientists and then escaped from a laboratory. It is not only the "moved on" who object to discussing that; many people still active in debating other aspects of the pandemic have their own objections, including many whom I call "Covid libertarians" (those, like me, who opposed lockdowns and other mandates.  

One prominent example is Michael Senger, a writer whose Covid writings I have excerpted here since 2021. His worry is that saying Covid came from a labe reinforces the idea of SARS2 as a "bioweapon," which makes both the 2020-2022 climate of fear, and the resulting restrictions and mandates seem justified. I agree that; we should make it clear that SARS2 was in no way a "bioweapon". A disease that kills just the very old and the very sick is simply not an effective weapon of war. 

Another Covid libertarian is John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Politics, whose objections I featured here last spring under the headline "Covid origins debate distracts from main issue." His worry is is that the lab leak debate takes the focus off debating Covid mandates and restrictions, which is where it belongs. Fair enough. We should not make the "lab leak" our main concern. But I disagree that we should stop discussing it. For whether SARS2 had a zoonotic or laboratory origin is an important question that needs an answer. One crucial lesson we must learn for the future depends precisely on how we answer that question; we will learn the correct lesson only by reaching the correct answer.  

First, consider what it would mean if the zoonotic hypothesis is correct. Advocates of that hypothesis often weaken their case by insisting that the virus jumped species when and where it was first detected, at a Wuhan wet market in December 2019, which we know now cannot be correct: there is copious evidence that SARS2 was circulating as early as October 2019. Nor have scientists ever found the animal virus that jumped over to humans. But that is not enough to rule out the zoonotic claim completely. 

For most of this century epidemiologists have warned of a killer virus jumping species. Most of those warnings have come to nothing. But now, suddenly, all those warnings have proved prescient; a killer virus has arrived. And if one virus can do it, why not others? Why not a super-killer virus -- the "Disease X" the World Health Organization has been warning of -- next time? Or the next? Whatever the case, we seem to be at the mercy of any number of Disease X's, any of which could jump species and decimate the human race at any time; and it i 

But virologists offer us a way to escape that fate. They will go out into the wild, collect the worst viruses they can find, and genetically modify them to infect humans. The next steps would be to select the best candidates for Disease X, develop vaccines for them, and proceed to mass vaccinate the world's population. That way we can immunize everyone against tomorrow's killer virus today. When and if Disease X does hit, it is hoped,  it will encounter a population already fully immunized against it. 

The name for this program is "gain of function research". Many noted epidemiologists support gain of function research -- notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, who for years funded it through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Fauci is passionate in defending gain-of-function, and appears sincere in his belief that it could literally save mankind. 

Now, consider what it would mean if the lab leak hypothesis is correct. There were two labs in Wuhan engaged in bat research: the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) across the river, and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) just down the street from the wet market. Neither one (to repeat) is known to have conducted bioweapon research. Howeever, it is documented fact that the WIV was engaged in gain-of-function research on bat coroniviruses, funded by Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Institute and ultimately (despite earlier contradictory statements) by Anthony Fauci's NIAID. Once again, we do not have samples of the virus; but it is reasonable to think those could have been destroyed or confiscated when the Army took over Wuhan at the end of 2019. 

We also know that Wuhan was experiencing a surge of influenza in the fall of 2019. As noted, SARS2 kills and hospitalizes mainly the very old and very sick; laboratory workers being neither, it is possible that it could have circulated among them undetected for the next few weeks. It is also plausible that it could have spread to their colleagues at the Wuhan CDC, and from there to the wet market down the street (which was the first superspreader event). 

Such are the implications of the rival hypotheses. Either millions suffered and died during the Covid pandemic because scientists failed to undertake gain of function research, or they suffered and died during the pandemic because scientists did undertake it.  Either gain-of-function research is our best defense against a killer virus, and should be encouraged; or it poses a bigger threat of a killer virus, one, and  should be severely limited if not banned outright. 

We have to choose one path or the other; what we must do is carefully check and debate all the evidence, and come to the best possible answer. What we cannot do is simply "move on" and leave the question unanswered. 

COVID came from the Wuhan lab and accountability is needed to ensure that we never fund this again | Rich McCormick | January 11, 2024:

New documents point to lab origin of COVID virus

Newly-released documents strengthen — perhaps conclusively — the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins. 

The Story of the Decade | City Journal | Nicholas Wade: 

January 25, 2024 - "New documents ... obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, provide a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA.... The probative weight of the recipe is that prior independent evidence already pointed to SARS2 having just such a six-section structure. The documents ... include drafts and planning materials for the already-known DEFUSE proposal, an application to DARPA, a Pentagon research agency, for a $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses. The new recipe is in striking accord with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted the SARS2 virus had been generated in exactly this way. Three researchers — Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen — noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with a pair of agents known as restriction enzymes and so had probably been synthesized and assembled in this way.

"Restriction enzymes, made naturally by bacteria as a defense against viruses, are an invaluable tool for biologists because they cut DNA at specific points known as recognition sites. These sites occur randomly across the genome, so a natural virus treated with a restriction enzyme will be cut into pieces of different sizes. However, researchers who want to synthesize a virus from scratch in order to manipulate its parts more effectively will often rearrange the recognition sites so that they are evenly spaced. This allows short chunks of DNA, all of roughly equal length, to be synthesized chemically and then strung together in a complete viral genome. Bottom line: if your virus has evenly spaced recognition sites, it’s a pretty good bet that it was made in a laboratory.

"Bruttel and his colleagues guessed that a commonly used pair of restriction enzymes, known as BsaI and BsmBI, might have been used to assemble the SARS2 virus’s genome. When they examined the structure of SARS2, they found that the recognition sites used by these enzymes were indeed evenly spaced across the genome, marking it into six sections. 'Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,' they wrote..... The small group of virologists who adamantly oppose the lab-leak hypothesis attacked the paper as 'confected nonsense' (Edward Holmes) and 'kindergarten molecular biology' (Kristian Andersen). The recipe in the new DEFUSE drafts, however, closely resembles the one posited in the Bruttel article in saying that new viruses would be constructed from six sections of DNA synthesized in a lab. The documents even include a form for ordering the BsmBI restriction enzyme....

"Discovery of the new recipe certainly strengthens the possibility that the regular spacing of BsaI and BsmBI recognition sites in SARS2 is the signature of synthetic origin...., Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who had called the 2022 paper 'noteworthy ... but not decisive,' now says that the evidence in the new documents 'elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun'.... 'Game over,' wrote Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, noting that every suspicious feature of SARS2 is explained by the methods called for in the DEFUSE proposal documents....

"The DEFUSE proposal was authored by Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, with partners including Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. The grant proposed to 'introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites' into SARS-related viruses, a procedure that could have led to the creation of SARS2, with its distinctive furin cleavage site.... [T]he authors planned to synthesize eight to 16 strains of SARS-type bat viruses, selected for their likely ability to infect human cells. The goal was to use them to make a vaccine to immunize bats in regions that military troops might have to enter. The researchers were well aware of the risk that their work would set off a pandemic. 'Also, we MUST make it clear in proposal that our approach won’t drive evolution the wrong way (e.g. drive evolution of more virulent strain that then becomes pandemic,' says a planning memo....

"[W]hen DARPA declined to fund the project, the Chinese members of the group may have decided to find their own financing and go ahead unilaterally.... Daszak, the project leader, had planned in any case to have much of the work undertaken by Shi’s team in Wuhan, even though it meant deceiving the Defense Department into thinking the bulk of the research would be done by Baric in the United States.... Daszak is a research manager, not a virologist, and perhaps did not fully understand the consequences of this decision. The DEFUSE project, if undertaken by Baric, would have gone forward in the second-highest level of safety conditions, known as BSL3.... Shi worked on SARS-related viruses mostly in BSL2 labs, which have minimal safety requirements, though she did test the viruses on humanized mice under BSL3 conditions.

"When SARS2 first appeared in the world, it had all the unique properties that would be expected of a virus made according to the DEFUSE recipe. Instead of slowly evolving the ability to attack human cells, as natural viruses must do when they jump from animals to humans, SARS2 was immediately infectious to people.... SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family. The DEFUSE proposal called for inserting one.... Despite intensive search, no precursors for SARS2 have been found in the natural world. Given the 2018 date of the DEFUSE proposal, the researchers in Wuhan could have synthesized the virus by 2019, accounting perfectly for the otherwise unexplained timing of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as its place of origin. It all fits.

"Both Beijing and Washington have covered up information about the origin of SARS2. Washington’s obfuscation has been aided by the puzzling inability of its 17 intelligence agencies to discover documents in the U.S. government’s own possession, and by a mainstream press too opinionated and ignorant of science to understand the story of the decade. U.S. responsibility lies in having allowed two senior health-research officials, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, to promote gain-of-function research (enhancing natural viruses) for years without adequate safety oversight or scientific consensus.... [But] the bulk of the blame for the pandemic surely rests with Beijing. No one but China is responsible for regulating the safety of virology research at Wuhan. Chinese researchers apparently chose to race ahead with a project that DARPA, perhaps because of the manifest risks, had refused to fund. When the virus escaped its lax containment, if that is indeed what happened, the Chinese government did everything possible to bury the truth. But that truth is enciphered in a place where, once decoded, no one can hide it: the genetic structure of the SARS2 virus itself."

Read more: https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-documents-bolster-lab-leak-hypothesis

Read Bruttel et al paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1

WHO Expert Member Peter Daszak Seen Boasting Of Manipulating Killer Virus In China In 2016 | India Today | June 9, 2021:

Three Wuhan gain-of function researchers were first known Covid cases, say reporters

The earliest known Covid-19 cases were gain-of-function researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, says a report authored by three independent journalists.

COVID-19's 'Patients Zero' May Have Been Wuhan Lab Scientists, Report Finds | Reason | Robby Soave: 

June 16, 2023 - "The first three people [known] to contract COVID-19 were scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), claims a new report — a finding that could confirm the lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins.... 

"The report — authored by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag, and published on Substack — names Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu as 'three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2' in fall 2019.  Not only did these three scientists work at the WIV, but they worked specifically on gain-of-function research; Hu in particular was considered a 'star pupil' of Shi Zhengli, dubbed the 'bat woman' for her work studying coronaviruses in bats. 

"'Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,' molecular biologist Alina Chan told the Substack authors. "He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him'....

"The findings have not yet been confirmed by other journalists, though several government agencies — including the FBI and the Energy Department — have stated that the lab leak is the most likely theory of COVID-19's origins. In February, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News that COVID-19 most likely resulted from 'a potential lab incident in Wuhan, China.'

"In March, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation requiring the federal government to declassify all intelligence relating to the pandemic's origins. The deadline for declassification is June 18, which means whatever information caused the FBI to reach its determination should become publicly available in a few days."

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/06/16/covid-19-patients-zero-wuhan-lab-leak-shellenberger/

REPORT: Wuhan Lab Workers FIRST Covid Infections | Counter Points | Breaking Points | June 14, 2023:

Read report: https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19?r=58hqy

Fauci exonerates himself for pandemic response

In an extensive interview with New York Times magazine, Dr. Anthony Fauci says that "something clearly went wrong" in the U.S. coronavirus response — but not in his part of it. 

Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview | Spiked Online - Cockburn: 

April 26, 2023 - "The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse..... Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that 'only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.' Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot ... then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose.... Even if you assume he meant 'fully vaccinated' with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.

"He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.' Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on.... 

Anthony Fauci, 2007.Photo by NAIAD.
CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

"Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed: "[A]ll of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence." Let’s unpack that marvelous trickery.... 

"[T]he DNI reported in 2021 that 'most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered'. The first wrinkle ... is that this assessment is from 'most agencies' and is 'low confidence.' The second wrinkle is that 'two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way'.... 

"Further, his definition of a lab leak is comically oversimplified. For Fauci, the [only] way it could be a 'lab leak' is if [a] scientist caught the virus from some natural source and then infected his or her colleagues....

"Fauci complained that 'I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations [lockdowns],' that he only 'gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.' If he did not want to be the 'personification' of pandemic policy, then maybe he should not have played into the panegyrics — like going on the cover of InStyle magazine.... Fauci can’t claim to have been a mere bystander — he knew very well that his and the CDC’s recommendations were taken and used to enact a very particular set of policies.... Public health must deal with the public — shocking, but it’s true — and that means there is an interface with policy.... [Y]ou cannot simply make the calculations and run; you have to make the calculations and then mold them into recommendations that are workable for the society to which they will be applied. That did not happen, not because of maliciousness, but because of human error. That is all people want Fauci to admit....

"By far the most irritating for Cockburn, though, is the moralizing and grumbling about the public’s skepticism of the public health establishment and its recommendations. At the beginning of the condensed interview, Fauci mentions the 'smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country'.... Fauci is at the epicenter of the crisis that caused that very 'smoldering anti-science feeling.'

"Take the mask debacle. At the beginning, in March 2020, Fauci argued that masking was unnecessary, that 'there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.' The argument — which, it turns out, was correct — was that masks were not effective enough to wear. Underlying that contention, though, was what those in government felt was a noble lie: the masks were not recommended ... because they wanted to make sure healthcare workers had access to them, primarily the N95. Then, all of a sudden, the guidance did a 180 and masks were not only protective, but mandated. Even when evidence began to pour in that cloth and surgical masks were not effective enough to warrant mandating them, nothing changed. This is why there is a crisis of trust, a 'smoldering anti-science feeling'; it is not so much anti-science as it is skepticism of government claims to science.

"And then there was the lockdown policy. The doctor said in the interview that 'somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there.' Why was that the case? It happened because the public health establishment failed to communicate.... [T]he public health institutions paired those warnings with policy recommendations that said the contrary. Why was he suggesting that students still be masked mid-2021? Why were the teachers’ unions so involved in crafting school reopening processes?... [I]t was this kind of behavior that helped produce an 'anti-science feeling' in the country; it was a lack of honesty, a lack of consistency and the appearance of foul play. 

"Does Fauci deserve all the blame? Of course not — but nor does he get to exonerate himself either. Apparently, though, he does not feel he has anything worth exonerating himself of. When ... asked ... if the idea that gain-of-function research may ... have had some relation to Covid-19’s origins, weighed on him, the doctor was both defensive and dismissive. 'Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that NIH-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins. Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine', he added.... Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who 'don’t like to be told what to do,' or the 'independent scientists' — and rarely his own." 

Read more: https://thespectator.com/topic/anthony-fauci-laughable-nyt-interview-covid/

Covid origins debate distracts from main issue

The debate over the origins of COVID19 distracts from the more important debate, over whether pandemics can or should be "used by the political, expert and medical classes as a pretext for taking our #freedom," argues author John Tamny.

Regardless of Virus Origins, Freedom Is the Answer | Brownstone Institute - John Tamny:

 March 10, 2023 - "As seemingly everyone who’s been following the political tragedy that was and is the coronavirus well knows, the Department of Energy now confirms with a low level of confidence that the virus was inadvertently leaked from a lab in China [see video below - gd]. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps understandably, this conclusion has many gloating.... At the same time, this focus on the origins of the virus is a total distraction that politicians, scientists and doctors (including Fauci) have to be loving....

""[T]he virus’s origins really don’t matter. Lest the crowd that has long been properly anti-lockdown forgets, pathogens are as old as mankind is. Since they are, the accenting of where they come from is to completely miss the point. Instead, the always and everywhere expressed view should be that [this] reality should not be used by the political, expert and medical classes as a pretext for taking our freedom. Freedom is precious, and authoritarians can’t have it regardless of a pathogen’s origin or its presumed lethality.

"Indeed, while even the New York Times reported with great consistency in 2020 that the virus in a death sense was most associated with very sick, very old people in nursing homes, the accent on the previous truth by the anti-lockdown crowd similarly missed the point. And it missed the point dangerously. That is so because a focus on statistics or anecdote as a reason for not locking us down is to suggest that if the coronavirus or some future pathogen were truly lethal, politicians would have the right to lock us down.

"No thanks, which is once again why this focus on what the New York Times acknowledged way back when, what the CDC routinely acknowledged about those dying with the virus (remember 'comorbidities'?) since 2020, and what the DoE softly concludes right now is such a mistaken way to fight the battle. It is because it puts such a low price tag on freedom. Almost as bad, it hands the argument to those who have a need to trample on the rights of others. Think about it. As I argued in my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked, the more lethal any virus is the more that political action is wholly superfluous. If a virus is killing indiscriminately who among us seriously needs to be forced to be careful?

"Ok, but what if we don’t know the lethality of a spreading virus? Freedom is the answer once again. It’s precisely when fear is greatest and knowledge is least evident that freedom becomes most crucial. Indeed, free people do more than produce the economic resources that scientists and doctors require to come up with cures for what might be harmful or lethal. Equally important, free people produce information. By making different choices amid a spreading virus, free people teach us what behavior is most associated with sickness, death, or neither. In other words, lockdowns don’t protect us; rather they threaten our health by concealing essential information. 

"Please think about this with what happened in 2020 top of mind. By locking us down, politicians and experts didn’t just wreck businesses, jobs, and living as we knew it up until then; they also blinded us to how to best deal with a spreading virus that they claimed was a huge threat to us. In that case, thank goodness the virus wasn’t remotely lethal for the vast majority of us.

"Still, the lockdowns were tragic. That they correlated with increased depression, alcoholism, job loss, business failure, and reduced classroom learning is a known and horrid quantity. Worse, and as logic would dictate, all this force logically didn’t improve our well-being or save lives. The taking of freedom never does.

"In which case, let’s not compound the errors of the past by focusing on the origin of the virus leak. Once again, viruses are a part of life, thus making origin irrelevant. Much worse, this focus on what’s irrelevant is exactly what the politicians and experts want us to do. If we waste time worrying about the where, we forget what the political and expert class did to us not too long ago.

"In short, the lockdowns were the true tragedy of 2020 and beyond, not something that is old as mankind. Let’s please not change the subject from what really mattered then, and matters now."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/freedom-is-the-answer/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

US House Republicans investigating Covid's origin

House GOP asks Fauci and dozens of health officials to testify in investigation into Covid origins | CNBC - Spencer Kimball:

February 14, 2023 - "House Republicans have asked former White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony to testify before Congress as they launch a new investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The GOP leaders of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Committee on Oversight and Accountability sent a letter to Fauci on Monday requesting a transcribed interview. Fauci said in November that he would cooperate with any oversight hearing in the Republican-led House.....

"'Fauci ... was the public face of the U.S. pandemic response during the Trump and Biden administration. He stepped down from his posts at the White House and at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December.

"House Republicans also sent letters requesting testimony from EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins. EcoHealth Alliance provided funding, which originated at NIH, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses. The inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department found that EcoHealth Alliance received about $8 million in funding from NIH during 2014 through 2021, according to a report published last month. About $600,000 of that money went directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the threat posed by bat coronaviruses.

"The study of bat coronaviruses at the virology institute in Wuhan, China, the city where the pandemic first began, has raised suspicions among some scientists and investigators that Covid-19 could have escaped from a lab. But Fauci, Collins and many others have maintained that a natural origin in which the virus spilled over from bats through an intermediate animal into people is more likely....

"In 2021, President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to provide their analysis on how the pandemic began. Four agencies assessed with low confidence that the pandemic began through natural exposure, while one assessed it was the result of a lab accident. Three other agencies could not agree on either explanation.

"House Republicans on Monday also sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines requesting classified briefings with seven intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also sent a letter to Health Secretary Xavier Becerra requesting interviews with more than two dozen U.S. health officials.

"Republicans, who won control of the House with a narrow margin in last November’s midterms, had vowed to launch several investigations into the pandemic’s origins, the federal response, and how taxpayer money was spent."

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/14/gop-asks-fauci-to-testify-in-investigation-into-covid-pandemic-origins.html

"Viral: The Origin of Covid 19" with Matt Ridley | Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, December 1, 2022: 

Coronavirus likely leaked from lab, US GOP Senate report concludes

Bombshell Senate report concludes that COVID 'most likely' leaked from lab - as lawmakers point the finger at Beijing | MailOnline - Connor Boyd: 

October 27, 2022 - "The Covid pandemic was most likely the result of a lab leak, according to a bombshell Senate report. Policymakers said there was 'substantial' evidence of an accident at a research facility — while evidence for a natural spillover is 'still missing'. The interim report concluded that China 's unwillingness to cooperate or open up the lab in question meant it 'no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt'.

"GOP members of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions reviewed hundreds of studies into the origins of Covid and interviewed 'several dozen' experts over the past 15 months. Writing in the report, they conclude: 'Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident'.... But 'the lack of transparency and collaboration' from China 'prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion', the senate committee adds....

"[T]he report found there had been at least six research-related incidents involving Covid at biosecurity labs in China, Taiwan and Singapore. It also cites claims the 1977 H1N1 flu outbreak was the result of a research-related incident, which remains a theory but has the backing of many scientists. "The committee writes: 'In short, human errors, mechanical failure, animal bites, animal escapes, inadequate training, insufficient funding, and pressure for results can lead to an escape of virulent pathogens, which could, in turn, infect animals and humans and lead to a release of a virus from a lab.'

"Questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology located just eight miles away from the wet market where early cases were clustered - remain unanswered. Chinese officials were found to have wiped crucial databases from the lab and stifled independent investigations into the facility. Researchers who fell ill with a mysterious flu-like virus months before the official Covid timeline were silenced or disappeared. 

"The WIV specialized in dangerous viruses and one of its chief scientists was nicknamed the 'Bat Lady' for her extensive work on coronaviruses like Covid. It received funding from the [U.S.] federal Government to conduct gain-of-function research, which involves tinkering with viruses to make them more infectious or deadly to get ahead of future outbreaks. WIV researchers actively sampled bats in Southern China and mainland Southeast Asia where the SARS-related coronaviruses most similar to SARS-CoV-2 have been collected and identified. Viruses collected from these regions are up to 97 per cent similar overall to the Covid virus that spread around the world.

"The Senate report found staff at the WIV wore 'inadequate levels of personal protective equipment while handling bats' after analyzing film and photo footage years before the pandemic.... The lawmakers behind the report detailed evidence of biosafety and mismanagement concerns at the high security biocontainment labs, which had an expansive collection of coronaviruses including more than 1,400 samples of bat viruses from the wild....Efforts by the WIV to bolster their biosafety protocols were repeatedly stymied by what officials called the 'stranglehold problem,' which meant a lack of access to advanced foreign biosafety technologies and materials....

"The committee also enumerated the unique qualities of the coronavirus and the way it spread early on in the pandemic that suggests the pathogen was not a product of natural spillover. 'A research-related incident is consistent with the early epidemiology showing rapid spread of the virus in Wuhan, with the earliest calls for assistance being located ... near the WIV’s original campus in central Wuhan,' the report said....

"Scientists who support the theory that the coronavirus jumped from animals to humans argue that an intermediate host was probably necessary to increase the virus’ chances of being able to infect and replicate in humans so effectively. But scientists have yet to identify that intermediate host, which authors of the report said pokes a hole in the zoonotic spillover theory. The senators concluded, 'Advocates of a zoonotic origin theory must provide evidence ... as was demonstrated for the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak. There needs to be verifiable evidence that a natural zoonotic spillover actually occurred, not simply that such a spillover could have occurred.'"

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11362165/Covid-likely-leaked-lab-explosive-Senate-says.html

Senator probes $100M+ Chinese gift to Harvard

The vice-chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee is questioning a $115 million donation to Harvard University from a Chinese company, shortly before Harvard researchers condemned and dismissed the theory that the COVID19 virus leaked from a Chinese lab.

Rubio Presses Harvard on Potential $115 Million Quid Pro Quo to Cover Up China’s COVID Origins | U.S. Senator for Florida, Marco Rubio (press release):

June 16, 2022 - "U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) sent a letter to Dr. Lawrence Bacow, President of Harvard University, regarding a potential quid pro quo agreement in which officials from the real estate company, Evergrande, which has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, donated $115 million to Harvard Medical School in exchange for access to influential American virology experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who were studying the origins of COVID-19. Just days after Harvard received the donation, Harvard-linked virology experts, some of whom had previously hypothesized that the virus may have been engineered in and leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, privately and publicly condemned and erroneously discounted the possibility that the virus may have emerged as a result of a research-related incident at the state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology.... The full text of the letter is below." 

Dear President Bacow: 

Harvard University is regarded as one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the world. This adds credibility to any endeavor that bears its name. Accordingly, you, along with the entirety of Harvard’s faculty and staff, have a weighty responsibility to ensure that this credibility is not misused to further purposes at odds with the university’s mission, or worse, those that are detrimental to the interests of the American people. 

It has come to my attention that in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, you, Harvard Provost Alan Garber, and Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley facilitated what would become a concerning relationship between Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Chinese property developer Evergrande. According to reporting by The Spectator, these interactions apparently shaped two subsequent developments: 1) a donation by Evergrande to Harvard Medical School to the tune of $115 million, and 2) a decision by U.S. scientists and public health officials, including Dr. Fauci, to publicly dismiss the possibility that the novel coronavirus emerged as a result of a research-related incident, likely at the state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology, after these same scientists and officials had discussed this very hypothesis in private and deemed it plausible. 

While The Spectator did not characterize the situation in precisely these terms, the coincidental timing of these events suggests the possibility of a quid pro quo, whereby Harvard officials, in return for a large donation from Evergrande, contacted American public health officials to convince them that Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) preferred theory of the origin of COVID-19 was the only theory that should be seriously considered. The CCP’s outreach to Harvard through Evergrande is consistent with the CCP’s past attempts to influence decision-making in other countries, including the United States, through non-traditional means as well as influential actors in the private sector and civil society. While Evergrande is ostensibly a private company, the laws of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) make it clear that all companies are required to comply with CCP directives. The Australian government has rightly declared that “there is no such thing” as a “private company” in the PRC. Given Harvard University’s long history of working in China and interacting with PRC officials, I would expect that you and others in the university’s leadership would have seen Evergrande’s outreach for what it was: a CCP attempt to obscure the origin of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and absolve itself of responsibility for having caused the worst pandemic in a century. 

As Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a member of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, I have a responsibility to the American taxpayer to ensure that recipients of federal funding, like Harvard, are not complicit in the CCP’s malicious attempts to subvert the interests of the United States, including the search for the origin of COVID-19. As such, I request your prompt response to the following questions: 

1. Did you, or other members of Harvard’s administration, contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or other law enforcement agencies with concerns about Evergrande’s attempt to contact Dr. Fauci through Harvard? 
2. When Evergrande Founder and CCP member Xu Jiayin contacted you in January 2020, he reportedly asserted that there had been no interaction between the National Institute for Health (NIH) or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and their counterparts in the PRC. Were you not aware that Dr. George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese CDC, had not only been in contact with Dr. Robert Redfield, the U.S. CDC Director, on multiple occasions since the beginning of January but that Gao had also refused support offered by the United States? 
3. When Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley contacted Dr. Fauci on February 2, 2020, had Evergrande already communicated its intent to pledge $115 million to Harvard Medical School? 
4. Please provide, publicly, the terms of the donation made by Evergrande to Harvard Medical School. Did Evergrande condition this donation on any specific action by Harvard or Harvard faculty? 
5. Please disclose the details of the meeting between Evergrande and Dean Daley mentioned in Dean Daley’s February 2nd email to Dr. Fauci.
6. Please disclose the full contents of the redacted email from Evergrande’s Chief Health Officer, Dr. Jack Lu, to Dean Daley that was included in the February 2nd email. 
7. Please provide a full accounting of how Harvard spent the $12 million of the $115 million donation it has received from Evergrande. Can you detail whether any of that money went directly to the Harvard Medical School leadership? 

 The United States has entered an era of great power competition with the CCP, a regime that has explicitly called for the displacement of the United States as the world’s leading power. It is incumbent on all Americans to be vigilant against the CCP’s attempts to weaken the United States and our institutions, including our educational institutions. Based on Harvard’s previous interactions with Evergrande and, by extension, Beijing, I can only assume that Harvard is either ignorant about the threat of the CCP at best or actively supporting our principal adversary at worst. 

Thank you in advance for your prompt response to these questions. 

Read more: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/6/rubio-presses-harvard-on-potential-115-million-quid-pro-quo-to-cover-up-china-s-covid-origins

Fact-checking a Covid-19 fact-checker

After Microsoft affiliate NewsGuard did a 'fact-check' on the American Institute of Economic Research and the Great Barrington Declaration, AIER did one of NewsGuard using its own published standards. NewsGuard failed.

Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers? A Report on Media Censorship | American Institute for Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness:

August 11, 2021 - "The advent of fact-checker journalism may be wearing out its welcome. Perhaps the increasing politicization of American life is a contributor to the downward spiral of the fact-checking profession that is primarily run by politically engaged reporters, not expert specialists in the subjects they assess.... Not that any one group of experts should have the authority over the truth either. Self-appointed media gatekeepers are a ticking time bomb of political censorship, waiting to be unleashed when the temptations are too great and the necessity for impartiality is even greater. With White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling for collusion between social media companies and the government to censor 'misinformation', this threat seems to be as close as ever.... 

"This brings us to a relatively new, but powerful company known as NewsGuard, which claims a partnership with Microsoft and gleaming spotlights in major outlets. Its staff and board boast powerful connections to the government, finance, and the media. According to an Op-ed in Politico written by NewsGuards’ CEO, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites’ trustworthiness. This new strategy is aimed at discrediting the very source that alleged misinformation or disinformation may come from. NewsGuard publishes lengthy 'nutritional labels,' rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance and outlining its reasons for giving certain ratings.... After receiving a recent request for comments on a 'fact-check' article by NewsGuard regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration, we decided to investigate the rise of the fact-checking phenomenon itself, including this strange new company’s own performance in evaluating the content of other websites. 

"We soon discovered that NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate. NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary – particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic – reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content. Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites....

"A revealing example may be found in NewsGuard’s treatment of the 'lab leak' hypothesis for Covid-19’s origins. Media coverage of the lab leak theory – which posits that the pandemic originated through the accidental infection of workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were studying coronaviruses in bat populations – has changed dramatically in recent months after a closer examination of evidence led several scientists to lend it credence.... For over a year prior to these recent developments however, NewsGuard aggressively 'fact checked' and penalized other websites for even raising the possibility of a lab leak. Some of the most aggressive attacks came from John Gregory, NewsGuard’s 'Deputy Editor for Health' policy and also the primary correspondent in AIER’s exchanges with the company.... According to a statement that the company sent to AIER:

NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory,” or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false. NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels....

"AIER’s own experience with NewsGuard revealed a similar pattern of carelessness and misrepresentation by Gregory and other writers for the company. Gregory contacted us on behalf of NewsGuard in early June 2021 requesting comments on several articles relating to Covid-19 pandemic policy and the Great Barrington Declaration. AIER’s Phil Magness obliged the request by offering to answer his questions in good faith, but quickly discovered that they carried heavy political biases arising from Gregory’s own personal beliefs about Covid-19, healthcare policy, American politics, and related subjects.

"In one such example, Gregory asked a prejudicial question that attempted to implicate AIER with showing partisan political biases in our publications: 'We also note that AIER.org refers to itself as nonpartisan. Why then do its articles routinely criticize Democrats'.... Gregory’s question, however, selectively cherry-picked only two articles on our site where we criticized Democratic politicians. It made no mention of the many examples where AIER has similarly criticized Republicans.... Gregory’s questions displayed a similar pattern of conflating normative policy positions taken by individual authors on AIER’s website – essentially opinion articles, and all properly identified as such – for positive or empirical claims, which could then be 'fact checked.'.... When Magness replied to Gregory by calling attention to the difference between normative and positive arguments as well as the editorial diversity of external contributors to our daily publications, he ignored the distinction....

"Even more problematic was NewsGuard’s portrayal of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), signed at AIER in October 2020. Gregory’s synopsis of the GBD contained numerous false and misleading claims that were brought to the attention of his company almost immediately after their publication. Repeating a charge from another website, Gregory wrote that 'none of the three [GBD authors] had published peer-reviewed research about the COVID-19 pandemic at the time they authored the declaration.” This claim is false. GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was part of a team of scientists from Stanford University that conducted one of the first wide-scale seroprevalence studies of Covid-19 at the outset of the pandemic [published] in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2020. When contacted by AIER about this error in his article, Gregory ... appended it with a snide denigration of Bhattacharya for being 'listed as the seventh author” on the study (Bhattacharya was in fact a principal co-author but was listed last, as per a convention with how some medical journal articles identify senior ranked investigators. Bhattacharya was also a primary media contact about his study’s findings at the time of its release).

"NewsGuard’s depiction of the GBD contained other clear misrepresentations of its contents and positions. For example, Gregory wrote that the GBD 'argued that restrictions meant to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, such as face masks … should be eliminated for people considered to be at lower risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.' The text of the GBD makes no mention of face mask policy though – only lockdowns and similar restrictions on schools and businesses. NewsGuard did not respond to multiple requests from AIER to correct this erroneous characterization...

"In an email to AIER, NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill stated 'when we make judgments about health care sites…we rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts.' This is not the case with their assessment of the GBD. Rather than quoting scientific experts, NewsGuard’s review of the GBD relies primarily on a statement by former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock – a politician who has no formal scientific or medical training. In a passage quoted by Gregory, Hancock stated that 'the Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get covid, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true…we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covid, even if everyone caught it.' Hancock’s statement, however, is at direct odds with mainstream science on immunology. The World Health Organization specifically defines herd immunity as the combined total of immunity acquired by vaccination and by natural infection and recovery. Although it differs from the GBD authors on how to most effectively reach this point, the WHO does not dispute the existence or attainment of herd immunity itself.... 

"Hancock’s statement, cited as authoritative by NewsGuard, further contended, “The second central claim [of the GBD] is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That is simply not possible.' This is not a scientific statement, but rather Hancock’s own political opinion. A detailed plan arguing for the feasibility of focused protection measures was published by the GBD authors to accompany the Declaration itself. More importantly, the scientific literature on Covid-19 mitigation documents clear evidence that the success (or failure) of a country to 'shield' its nursing homes through a focused protection strategy is a primary factor in its overall mortality rate. A study by John P.A. Ioannidis in the journal BMJ-Global Health compared the nursing home shielding ratios of several countries, concluding that they 'varied markedly in the extent to which they protected high-risk groups.' Contrary to Hancock’s political claims, Ioannidis concluded: 'Both effective precision shielding and detrimental inverse protection can happen in real-life circumstances. COVID-19 interventions should seek to achieve maximal precision shielding.”

"When asked by AIER about their continued reliance on Hancock as a source despite the scientific misinformation contained in his assessment of herd immunity as well as his overall lack of scientific qualifications, Gregory responded that it 'was and is relevant to explaining the views of those who criticized the Declaration.' Neither Gregory nor NewsGuard responded to follow-up questions about how they reconciled this position, the political nature of Hancock’s comments, or Hancock’s lack of scientific credentials with Brill’s assertion that they 'rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts' in the subject matters they evaluate.

"In addition ... Gregory included links to further readings about the Declaration from an extremely dubious source: 9/11 Truther and conspiracy theory blogger Nafeez Ahmed of the Byline Times website. Between October 2020 and the present, Ahmed has promoted a flurry of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about the GBD, including a false allegation that it was secretly financed by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch in apparent coordination with the British Ministry of Defence and – strangest of all – the proprietor of a resort hotel located in Wales.... When asked about NewsGuard’s promotion of links to Ahmed’s blog, Gregory ... stated that Ahmed’s claims were not used to calculate NewsGuard’s ratings and were only included to provide a 'history' of the GBD. It did not appear to concern Gregory that Ahmed’s 'history' was an unreliable conspiracy theory of his own imagination.... NewsGuard has not altered or removed the links to Ahmed’s allegations despite its promotion of documented falsehoods about the origins and funding of the GBD. Even more astounding, NewsGuard currently rates Ahmed’s blog with a score of 82.5/100, giving it full credit for “gathering and presenting information responsibly.” This pattern evinces a clear double standard in which NewsGuard promotes sources that do not appear to meet their own published minimum standards for reliability and uses them to denigrate the credibility of AIER and the GBD.

"In sharp contrast to the generally disparaging approach he took to covering the GBD, Gregory holds other websites that attack the GBD in high esteem. In one example, Gregory extended a score of 87.5/100 to CovidFAQ.co, a website set up by a group of pro-lockdown activists in the United Kingdom. CovidFAQ is a joint project of conservative member of Parliament Neil O’Brien, 'neoliberal' activist Sam Bowman, and academic Stuart Ritchie. Pro-lockdown UK political strategist Dominic Cummings recently referenced their work as part of a 'decentralised' political campaign to discredit the anti-lockdown movement and the GBD, which he proposed while serving as an advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In his article for NewsGuard, Gregory credits CovidFAQ for “not repeatedly publish[ing] false content.” The website’s track record is at clear odds with Gregory’s assessment.

"In January 2021, CovidFAQ published a lengthy attack on the GBD that contained multiple errors and misrepresentations of the Declaration’s contents. In one example, the authors of CovidFAQ claimed, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given an answer' to how they would implement a focused protection strategy in place of lockdowns. In reality, the GBD website contains a detailed 1,800 word plan for implementing focused protection. When AIER’s Phil Magness alerted CovidFAQ co-owners Stuart Ritchie and Sam Bowman to this error in January 2021, the website’s editors modified the text to read, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given anything approaching an adequate answer' to how they would implement focused protection (emphasis added). Rather than a factual correction, CovidFAQ’s change inserted their own editorial commentary expressing disagreement with the GBD’s published focus protection strategy as a way of disguising CovidFAQ’s earlier misrepresentation.... Gregory’s NewsGuard rating of the CovidFAQ website specifically linked to CovidFAQ’s deceptive edit about the GBD, and described it as having met 'NewsGuard’s standards for regularly issuing corrections.'

"NewsGuard concluded its assessment by repeating a false story from October 2020, claiming that the GBD’s signature list contained fake names such as 'Dr. Johnny Bananas” to inflate its signature count. This story misrepresents the products of an intentional hoax by pro-lockdown journalists including the aforementioned Nafeez Ahmed to flood the website with false signatures. In reality, 'Dr. Johnny Bananas' and similar hoax submissions were removed from the GBD website within a few hours of their discovery. An audit of signatures conducted by AIER found that false names amounted to only 0.1% of total signatures on the GBD prior to their removal, with the largest cluster of false names deriving from Ahmed’s hoax campaign on October 9th. NewsGuard did not include any of this context in its article, nor did Gregory permit AIER an opportunity to comment on the misinformation contained in its account of the false signatures.

"To briefly summarize, NewsGuard’s coverage of Covid-19 policy and the GBD in particular suffers from a recurring pattern of frequent errors that warrant correction, reliance on fact checkers and other figures who lack qualifications to make scientific assessments, biased depictions designed to disparage or undermine the scientific credibility of the petition, and the promotion of false information from dubious secondary sources.... NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as 'experts' on the subject in question. Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word. As their liberal use of Hancock to evaluate the GBD illustrated, many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods....

"If we’re going to be on this topic, we might as well check to see if NewsGuard is a reliable website by its own standards. Indeed, with its partnership with Microsoft and its roster of accomplished staff, the public should understand what kind of organization this is. To test how NewsGuard holds up to its own rating system, we subjected its website and practices to the same criteria it uses to evaluate other sources. The results reveal a website that preaches a very different standard for others than it adheres to in its own work.... 

"NewsGuard applies a 100-point scorecard to the websites it rates.... Our Rating of NewsGuard: 36.25/100. This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate.

"The truth is best sought through the marketplace of ideas where reason and evidence are the weapons of choice. When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags. NewsGuard’s behavior illustrates the tired idea that, during events like Covid-19, we should simply do as we’re told and not question the government or its experts. On this matter, they have shown themselves to be either unable to appropriately moderate public discourse or act as little more than cheerleaders for favored political figures and their preferred policy approaches to Covid-19. It wouldn’t be a stretch if they happen to be both."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/who-fact-checks-the-fact-checkers-a-report-on-media-censorship/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

World Health Org wants Covid's origin investigated

WHO reverses stance to recommend deeper probe of coronavirus origins in China. China insists lab-leak theory is a lie | MarketWatch - Ciara Linnane:

June 10, 2022 - "The World Health Organization [WHO] has reversed its stance on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and is now recommending a deeper probe into whether it was caused by an accident in a laboratory in China. Coming more than two years after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, and after at least 6.3 million deaths worldwide, the move may surprise critics who accused the agency of being too quick to dismiss or downplay the lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive....

"Just last year, the WHO said it was 'extremely unlikely' that COVID came from a lab, and more likely it jumped to humans from an animal such as a bat. In March 2021, WHO released a report about COVID-19’s origins following a highly choreographed visit by international scientists to China. 

"Now in a report released Thursday, WHO’s expert group said 'key pieces of data' to explain how the pandemic began were still missing. The scientists said the group would 'remain open to any and all scientific evidence that becomes available in the future to allow for comprehensive testing of all reasonable hypotheses.' Jean-Claude Manuguerra, a co-chair of the 27-member international advisory group, acknowledged that some scientists might be 'allergic' to the idea of investigating the lab-leak theory but said they needed to be 'open minded' enough to examine it.

"Investigations by the Associated Press found that some top WHO insiders were frustrated by China during the initial outbreak even as WHO heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping. They were also upset over how China sought to clamp down on research into the origins of COVI9.

"WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sent two letters to senior Chinese government officials in February requesting information, including details about the earliest human cases of COVID-19 in the city of Wuhan. It’s unclear whether the Chinese responded. The experts said no studies were provided to WHO that assessed the possibility of COVID-19 resulting from a laboratory leak.

"China responded Friday by calling the lab-leak theory a politically motivated lie.... Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also rejected accusations that China had not fully cooperated with investigators.... Zhao also called for an investigation into 'highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina' in the United States, where China has suggested, without evidence, that the U.S. was developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon."

Read more: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/who-reverses-stance-to-recommend-deeper-probe-of-coronavirus-origins-in-china-china-says-lab-leak-theory-is-a-lie-11654865073

US NIH funded Wuhan gain of function research

NIH acknowledges US funded gain-of-function at Wuhan lab, despite Fauci’s denials |  Fox News - Andrew Mark Miller:

October 22, 2021 - "The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research on bats infected with coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used on the funding. 

"In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a 'limited experiment' was conducted in order to test if 'spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.' The letter states that the laboratory mice infected with the modified bat virus 'became sicker' than mice that were given the unmodified bat virus. The official, Lawrence A. Tabak, accused the New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, who funneled funds to the Wuhan lab, of not being transparent about the work that was taking place.

"Gain-of-function [GOF] research involves extracting viruses from animals to artificially engineer in a laboratory to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has repeatedly denied any NIH money went to such research in Wuhan, but his organization has given millions of dollars in grant money to the EcoHealth Alliance which funneled at least $600,000 to Wuhan coronavirus research.

"Fauci has testified before Congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to Congress and even requested a criminal referral from the Department of Justice. In his questioning of Fauci at a Senate hearing this summer, Paul cited a paper on research about bat coronaviruses and said that U.S. money had essentially gone to the hazardous and controversial research – an assertion Fauci strongly objected to. 'I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement,' Fauci said when pressed by Paul on previous testimony from the doctor that the U.S. did not fund gain of function research in Wuhan. 'You do not know what you are talking about quite frankly, and I want to say that officially.' Pau[l] responded to the [Tabak letter] news on Twitter saying that 'I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.'

"A new book from an investigative Australian reporter says that Fauci reportedly misled the Trump administration on gain-of-function research in China. 'Fauci’s public persona as a cautious, careful medical professional is contradicted by his central role in kickstarting exceptionally fraught gain-of-function research in the United States after the ban introduced in the Obama era, along with his role in funding coronavirus research in China in unsafe laboratories. ... that intelligence agencies suspect may have sparked the pandemic,' Sharri Markson details in her new book, What Really Happened In Wuhan.  In September, leaked documents obtained by private research group DRASTIC 'completely contradict' claims made by both China and Fauci about the reality of gain-of-function research being done inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have caused the coronavirus pandemic, according to a former State Department COVID-19 investigator.... 

"Fauci's NIAID told Fox News in a statement that the doctor has been 'entirely truthful.' 'Gain of function is a broad term,' the statement said. "The research that requires increased oversight under the HHS P3CO Framework is that which is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer or use potential pandemic pathogens resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence in humans (ePPP). Drs. Collins and Fauci have made clear in numerous public appearances that the research in question did not fit this definition, and nothing in the last research progress report changes that fact.... 

The experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing to see if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.... The research plan for the grant was reviewed in advance of funding and was determined ... not to meet the definition of enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (ePPP) research because the bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.... NIAID reviewed the progress report and has determined that the research described in the progress report would not have triggered a review under the HHS P3CO Framework because the bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans."

Read more: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nih-acknowledges-us-funded-gain-of-function-wuhan-lab-despite-faucis-denials 

After blogging and rereading this story, I remembered that up until December 2019 Sars-Cov-2 had "not been shown to infect humans" either; meaning that if GOF research had been done on the coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (either in its own labs or at the Wuhan-Hubei Center for Disease Control) it would not "have required increased oversight" under NIAID's interpretation of the HHS P3CO Framework either. - gd