I am moving the Class, which is rather specialized, to the end of the week.
Yesterday the New York Times, the written order-of-the-day for the old school left, put out an op-ed admitting, in so many words, the covid lab-leak theory. Check the revealing title: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives“. Some were surprised about this.
I am not. I’ll tell you exactly why these prevaricating no-good slime-pushing would-be tyrants are admitting what the rest of us have been saying for years. Because they are scared for their jobs, their funding, their money, their slipping prestige.
Good. Be afraid. We should take it all away. All of it.
Now you’ve heard me many times call for the ending of government having a direct, and the direct, hand in funding science. But it sounds strange to hear. It doesn’t sound sensible. It sounds impossible. But let the NYT itself convince you.
Gain-of-function is the euphemism. Gain-of-lethality is the truth. Scientists, funded by you, dear reader, monkey with bugs to see if they can make them deadlier. To you. Which you pay for. They do this out of morbid curiosity, from the fiction that having created Frankenstein bugs they’ll be able to find cures for their own creations, cures which they wouldn’t need if they didn’t invent Accelerated Death, and because they have money to spend and prestige to seek. Your money.
They made the covid bug in a Chinese lab, which you partly paid for, and they were sloppy and it got out. That story has been told so many times you’re sick of it. But one item I don’t always emphasize. Why did they panic, when it was obvious to the sober there wasn’t any need?
Because of their Uranus-sized egos, egos pumped to colossal size, funded by you. They said to themselves, “We, being credentialed geniuses, made this terror. It must therefore be the Mother of All Bugs. It will kill everybody. The only thing to do is panic. And lie. Lie are asses off.”
So that’s what they did. And yesterday, the most prominent of the guilty was thrown under the Greyhound. All in an effort, I say, to save what’s left of the crippled system.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.
Op-eds don’t just find their way into the main propaganda source of the old regime. They put this here, now, for a reason.
Read this whole quotation (my emphasis):
The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists, and which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
Government scientists in charge of handing out NIH science grants conspired. The NIH controls almost all medical research, directly or indirectly.
It is worse (again my emphasis):
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.
Consensus in science is a long-running joke, or used to be. And should be on any question of policy, because that is very definition of scientism. There is a “consensus” in “climate change” being the end of the world, too. The worship of Nobel prizes must also end. Having one has not proven to confer immunity from idiocy. What value is some “laureate” spouting off on subjects like this? Not one of the “laureates” had a “degree” in lying to the public.
Again, you’re tired of hearing it, but it wasn’t only these eminences being loosey goosey or being ignorant-but-opining on the facts, it was also officials like the CDC, ours and others, spitting lies about how you couldn’t get sick or pass on the bug if you got the shot, or it couldn’t possibly have any side effect, this being the first in the history of all medicine of achieving a perfect drug. I’m nauseous having to tell it over and over.
And you don’t need to hear it. All of you who were with us since the beginning of the panic know all this, and much more. What’s important, I say again, is not that they admitting it now, when lowlifes like Collins and Fauci are basking in retirement, well fed by your money over these many years. They can weather the black eyes they’ll get from this, because they’re no longer in charge of anything.
The people behind the NYT care about keeping the system as it is. Here the last quotation:
Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses or computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China.
That bit comes well after the sins of others are confessed. It’s nothing more than than “Oopsie: mistakes-were-made.” This minor suggestion, a mere tweak to the system, is supposed to make amends, and prevent future intellectual larcenies. It’s meant to comfort those in power now who are considering de-funding, at least the worst offenders, if not many more.
Trivial funding changes wouldn’t change a thing. Won’t change a thing. It’s my guess de-funding all government science is too radical an idea to embrace. But you never know. We’ve seen a lot of everybody-thought-it-impossible things happening lately.
Come back tomorrow for more direct evidence, about how science funding is used to “prove” everything.
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Briggs, the covid bug was not “made” in a Chinese lab. Instead, the Wuhan lab isolated, extracted, and cultured some existing bugs from an infected bat, some of which accidently leaked out of the lab. The Wuhan lab did not have the expertise or equipment to genetically engineer new strains of viruses.
The problem with overstating the truth is that the establishment scientists used the known limitations of the Wuhan scientists to argue that the covid bug could not have been “made” there, and hence could not have leaked from there. That argument was used extensively to discredit the lab-leak theory, which has since been shown to be correct. However, the lab-engineered theory remains incorrect.
“We were badly misled.” By ourselves.
The easiest person to fool is yourself –Richard Feynmann
“Hide the decline.” – 1999, Phil Jones, government funded climate fear-monger.
@MikeW – What rock have you been hiding under for the past 5 years? Of course the Chinese have the expertise to do this sort of thing. There are hobbyists working at home in basement labs who could make this sort of thing. Especially when they are working hand-in-hand with US virologists, and the entire project is funded by US tax money.
Oh, and by the way, Covid-19 is most definitely an engineered bio-weapon. The spike proteins are a blood pathogen, grafted onto a particularly nasty cold virus. It does not exist in nature. Well, it didn’t until the 2019 leak, anyway.
And that’s not even getting into the mRNA “vaccine” that was patented before the leak.
For around 20 years (2000-2020) I lived in China. I visited many “wet markets” and saw many exotic critters being offered; venomous snakes, marmots, crocodiles, hedgehogs, even Chinese giant salamanders!
Though they might have been there, I never saw any bats.
Brian, having never been to China, I never even heard the term, “wet markets”, until COVID broke out. It’s also where I and I’m sure a huge percentage of the population that was paying attention ever even heard of a pangolin. I think the initial outbreak story was of infected pangolins being sold/slaughtered at the wet market in, of all coincidental places, Wuhan, where China also just happened to have a virology lab right across the street. Not sure if they ever made clear how a pangolin got infected by a bat cold virus…
This is an area in which I do not suffer Gellmann Amnesia – so..
1 -GOF motivation: not “morbid curiousity” – back in the 1980s the Soviets were known to have developed some very nasty bio-weapons so the American dream became one of building a process that would automate and expedite everything from sampling a bio-weapon’s dna to producing both an effective counter-agent and a vaccine. Understand GOF and you can (in most cases) do this.
2 – NYT motivation: Ukraine. Vide the NYT’s close cousin: wikipedia on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_bioweapons_conspiracy_theory
Turns out the russians were right and Trump et al are pushing levers under those rocks as I type. Ooops – and, you, know ( I assume) that this research was funded by the US to circumvent American law by the same people whose pardons are now in question.
3 – Panic motivation: you may want to read my “A Brief History of Covid19” – https://winface.com/node/32 from 2022 and looking better all the time.
While the public and your readership may or may not be “tired of hearing it,” until some of these people are in prison, it should be repeated loudly and often. It’s been five years since March 2020 and none of these people have paid paid any price for their perfidy and their weaponization of the coof panic. The vax passports, the lockdowns, the putting covid positive people in old folk’s homes, the beating of protestors and many other evils perpetrated on the public.
Until large numbers of these people pay a price, a steep price, this is going to happen again, only worse.
Why admit to a lab leak? Because it is a limited hangout to obscure the better explanation that it was released on purpose. It allows people to tell themselves that “Yes, there are irregularities” but to then accept the more comfortable lie that our scientists are accident prone, than the more plausible explanation that our leaders are trying to kill us. Why should we think our leaders are trying to kill us? Well, there is the fact that they have said more than once that there are too damn many of us and they want us dead. And if this were merely OOOPSIE! incompetence, they would have gotten some things right just by accident. Instead, their record of bad decisions is so perfect as to be unlikely an accident. To repeat. They. Got. EVERYTHING. Wrong.
• Wet market origin—wrong
• Transmission of the disease—wrong
• Asymptomatic spread—wrong
• PCR testing—wrong
• Fatality rate—wrong
• Efficacy of early treatment—wrong
• Safety of off label alternative drugs—wrong
• Lockdowns—wrong
• Community triggers—wrong
• Business closures—wrong
• School closures—wrong
• Quarantining healthy people—wrong
• Impact on youth—wrong
• Hospital overload—wrong
• Plexiglass barriers—wrong
• Social distancing-—wrong
• Outdoor spread—wrong
• Masks—wrong
• Variant impact—wrong
• Natural immunity—wrong
• Vaccine efficacy—wrong
• Vaccine injury—wrong
They flipped the metaphorical coin at least twenty times. Do we see a pattern here?
The most virtuous thing to do would be to hang the 77 Nobel laureates for crimes against humanity and the NYT employees and burn to ashes the NYT building. Also cancel, censor, dox, and defund the 31 scientific societies and their members and their institutions. Also public whippings are in order for all public oafficials who shut down schools, churches, businesses, and forced masks on everybody. If there are no punishments, the crimes will be repeated.
My fantasy is to see Fauci doing that forced bent-over perp walk like they do at the El Salvador prison.
I am glad that I wasted little time and jumped to the conclusion of the New York Time opinion piece “We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, ….”
@McChuck, you are correct that the Chinese have genetic engineering capabilities, but the Wuhan lab did not. It was a second-tier bio-lab, which is one of the reasons that its viral containment procedures were lacking. Its gain-of-function (lethality) measures consisted of culturing viruses from sick animals in human cell nutrients to favor bugs that could thrive in human bodies. The resulting human-compatible viruses might become vector candidates for human vaccines, e.g. for HIV, which is what NIH was funding.
You over-estimate the capabilities of artificial genetic engineering. Certainly, amateur hobbyists in basements can’t do it. Even elite genetic engineering labs are limited in what they can produce. That’s why NIH funded labs like Wuhan to hunt for sick animals in bat caves to try to extract naturally occurring viruses. Genetic analyses have shown conclusively that the covid-19 virus is one of these naturally occurring viruses. That’s another argument that establishment scientists initially used to discredit the lab-leak theory. You unintentionally buttress their argument when you try to maintain the lab-engineered theory.