As of March 23, 2020, the CDC website on Food Safety and Coronavirus tells us that "Currently there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food." Yet we are being asked to believe that the original COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan resulted from the exotic appetites of Chinamen eating pangolins from a Wuhan "wet market". There is something wrong with this picture.
Let me get this out of the way immediately: Donald Trump is an idiot and Chuck Schumer is an idiot. Now we can ask the question many people are asking, "Where did COVID-19 come from?"
Unfortunately, there is a high probability that the virus emerged from the research laboratories of the Wuhan Insitute of Virology, research that was in part funded by NIH through a New York cut-out called EcoHealth Alliance Inc. As a consequence, long-time NIAID director Anthony Fauci and certain of his lieutenants in the NIH should be fired--not because anyone will ever be able to prove that they were directly responsible for the pandemic, but because of their disregard for the warnings voiced by the likes of Marc Lipsitch and Tom Inglesby.
Lipsitch is professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Inglesby is director of the Center for Health Security and professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In Mbio (Nov-Dec 2014) republished at europepmc.org Lipsitch and Inglesby warned that
While [research on potential pandemic pathogens] represents a tiny portion of the experimental work done in infectious disease research, it poses extraordinary potential risks to the public.
This warning came in the wake of a spate of accidents at high-risk biomedical laboratories. An April 2012 story from The Scientist explained that
In September 2011, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, presented some shocking results at the annual conference of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza: he and his colleagues had created a mutant version of the H5N1 avian flu virus that could be transmitted through the air between ferrets. Not long after, news began to circulate of a similar creation in the lab of Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fouchier and Kawaoka submitted their studies for publication to Science and Nature, respectively, sparking a heated debate over the potential consequences of publishing such research, whether the risky viruses should have been created at all, and, of course, how comparable work should be regulated going forward.
This was shocking because ferret influenza receptors happen to be very similar to human receptors. On January 20, 2012, Fauci called for a pause in research on genetically altered H5N1 avian flu for 60 days, and then, on July 31 called for researchers to continue the moratorium in order to win "the battle for public support". One year later, on January 23, 2013, Fauci lifted the moratorium. But the problems did not end.
A number of lab accidents occurred soon after the avian flu moratorium was lifted. Notably, (per USA Today on May 28, 2015):
Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
...
Despite those considerations [UNC had lots of lab mice], officials with the NIH called the escapes "concerning." Several of the mice were infected with either SARS or the H1N1 flu virus.
The NIH said that "it appears the measures taken by the University of North Carolina to reduce the likelihood of these events have not been effective" and ordered an action plan to address engineering controls, training and other activities to reduce the risk of escapes.
This, coupled with other events like the discovery of unsecured vials of smallpox and the exposure of dozens of NIH lab workers to anthrax in June of 2014, led to another moratorium into enhanced pathogen research on October 17, 2014.
Clearly, the UNC lab with the escaped lab rats had been working on gene-altering "gain-of-function" research, because shortly after the October 2014 moratorium fell, the head of the lab, Ralph Baric, published "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" in Nature. In that paper they described how they "generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone."
Clearly, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in this research, since this Nature paper lists Zhengli-Li Shi, the director of the Wuhan laboratory, as a co-author.
And clearly, in light of the April 2013 lab escapes, the NIH could see another moratorium coming. And clearly there was time between April of 2013 and the October 2014 moratorium to offshore continuation funding of Baric's research to the Wuhan laboratory through EcoHealth.
Then, on 19 December 2017, the NIH announced it would lift the 2014 moratorium, subject to the "independent expert review process". In the Washington Post on 27 February 2019 (unpaywalled here), Lipsitch and Inglesby criticized the process:
This secrecy means that we don't know how these requirements were applied, if at all, to the experiments now funded by the government. A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services told Science magazine that the agency cannot make the reviews public because doing so might reveal proprietary information. This bureaucratic logic implies that it is more important to maintain the trade secrets of a few prominent scientists than to let citizens scrutinize the decisions of public officials. . . . There is no justification for keeping risk-benefit deliberations secret.
Cui bono?
We will probably never be privy to the "trade secrets" promoting research into pathogens with "enhanced pandemic potential", but make no mistake: This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's called "business as usual".
As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic broke, the first "authority" interviewed by popular science reporters was Peter Daszak, the CEO of EcoHealth and de facto principal investigator on a series of follow-on research projects to the UNC research. Inter alia, Daszak's researchers were funded to study "sites of high risk for [CoV] emergence (wildlife markets)" and develop "novel CoV genes".
But as Lipsitch and Inglesby warned, if wet markets are ideal breeding grounds for novel viruses, what are biosecurity level-4 laboratories that specialize in the scientific collection, breeding, and creation of the most dangerous microbes?
When a pandemic emerges from this mix, who would Fauci and Daszak blame? The peasants who run the "wet markets", or their university-trained researchers who create "novel CoV genes" for a living?
Who would the press blame? University-trained researchers, or dirty Chinese peasants in wet markets? Who would the U.S. military blame? The Chinese government, or U.S. researchers from Fort Detrick? Who would Chuck Schumer blame? U.S. pork and poultry producers who want research into pork and poultry diseases (of course with "trade secrets" kept secret)? U.S. pharmaceutical companies, who want vaccine "trade secrets" kept secret? Or Chinese peasants in wet markets?
Me? I blame the U.S. military for first pressuring NIH to conduct research into biological weapons like defense against SARS viruses, for pressuring NIH to offshore it to China, the better to watch what China is doing, and then blaming China for weaponizing SCV2 when the genie popped out of the bottle.
I blame the U.S. pharmaceutical industries for pressuring NIH to conduct secret reviews of enhanced pathogen research to protect their "trade secrets" at the potential cost of a pandemic.
I blame Fauci, Daszak, and much of the biomedical research community for being complicit in all this, and for their weasel-worded "scientific" explainers that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been vectored through lab ferrets, but must have been vectored through civets and pangolins in wet-markets. Or that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been released from a laboratory because it was unlike some previous "ideal" laboratory-created chimera.
I blame the toadying U.S. press for swallowing the line that the Wuhan laboratory received only one-sixth of Daszak's project money even though it is a public record that all six "subprojects" sported nearly identical project descriptions and 60% of the project's published "results" were co-authored with the Wuhan laboratory.
I blame Trump and Schumer for being idiots and wasting their offices to blame each other and China when they should be solving the problems the pandemic is causing.
I blame the Chinese elite. Of course the Chinese government denies the virus escaped from their lab. (Why does the press take this as "proof"??) Unlike Chinese peasants, all the global elite has had ample access to scientific knowledge. Despite the degradation of neoliberal education, the elite have had ample opportunity to learn the precautionary principle.
I don't blame them for creating COVID-19. Nobody will likely ever know exactly how that happened. I blame them for their power-hungry delusions of their own omnipotence. I blame them for not really giving a damn.
Thorstein May 2020 Minor additoins: August 2021
Last Updated: Wed Sep 27 10:43:19 2023 by thorstein
Yes, many have "slandered" Fauci, for example by calling him a Communist, as if that's slanderous. But he has a record of supporting public health policies that very competent public health officials have deemed dangerous.
I see little evidence that NIAID's risky research has brought us any closer to a vaccine or a cure, and too much evidence that Fauci and Daszak's hi-tech bat hunters (or their Chinese counterparts, encouraged, if not directly funded by the U.S.) have only succeeded in bringing a virulent bat coronavirus out of the Yunnan jungles and into human civilization.
This is *precisely* the time when we should be questioning these policies and holding public health officials to account.
Information Clearing House - Particularly valuable for its daily coverage of U.S. military misadventures. A heroic, long-standing effort by Tom Feeley, who has lately been ill. Visit and donate if you can.
The Lever - David Sirota (former Sanders staffer) and team.
Sardonicky - Karen Garcia reads the NYT so you don't have to.
TK News - Knowledgeable about Russia and clear reporting of financial shenanigans by Matt Taibbi and team.
Wall Street on Parade - by Pam and Russ Martens. Wall Street's latest crimes against humanity. Heavily censored by Google/Bing and the MSM.