Tag: Wuhan

government transparency international affairs

The Age of Deference

Angela Merkel, Germany, Wuhan, Covid, virus, lab leak

We knew from the beginning that Wuhan, China, was not only ground zero for the coronavirus epidemic, but that there was an Institute of Virology there, and that the disease could have broken out of its lab. But it took a few months for my first report, and about a year passed before I delved deeper into the evidence for the “lab leak” hypothesis.

In December, the House Subcommittee investigating the subject concluded that there was evidence for a lab leak and none for a zoonotic origin of the disease.

Throughout the period, corporate news sources barely covered the story, despite its obvious importance and inherent interest. Instead, they covered for the culprits, the better to push a “vaccine” that was more novel than the “novel coronavirus” itself.

Journalists seemed immune to acknowledging, for example, “the man the media missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. Years before the leak, the doctor publicly boasted about using a Chinese lab to engage in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. And yet, he was placed on the World Health Organization team investigating the Wuhan situation!

Meanwhile, the CIA waffled.

Now we learn that German intelligence reported to then-Chancellor Angela Merkel favoring the lab leak hypothesis.

In 2020.

“Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published,” explains the BBC. “According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.”

The “spy agency,” as the BBC neatly puts it, “assessed the lab theory as ‘likely,’ although it did not have definitive proof.”

And, as Dr. John Campbell notes, neither Merkel nor her successor came clean with any of this.

Dr. Campbell finds his resulting loss of trust has a bright side: “it’s made me re-evaluate many, many things.”

“The age of deference,” he concludes, “is past.”

All of our major institutions failed the pandemic test.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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Tags Angela Merkel, covid, Germany, lab leak, virus, Wuhan

national politics & policies public opinion

The CIA’s Mutating Opinions

Post author By Editor
Post date February 3, 2025
8 Comments on The CIA’s Mutating Opinions

As January closed, the CIA changed its story on the origin of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus.

But was it big news?

Most people had given up any hope of finding a natural origin, and evidence favoring the virus’s creation in Wuhan, China — partly funded by U.S. taxpayers courtesy of Big Pharma bureaucrat Dr. Antony Fauci — has been clear for a very long time.

So the CIA saying it now “believes” that COVID-19 was leaked from the Chinese lab looks, suspiciously, like a convenient change of opinion upon the beginning of the 47th presidency.

New beliefs for a new president!

Note that the CIA certainly offers plenty of reasons to make light of the turn.

The agency expresses “low confidence” in the new opinion.
The spokesman admits that no new evidence was behind the shift.
The spooks say they continue “to assess” both theories of coronavirus origination.

Very political.

The change of mind looks like this: the CIA had pushed the natural origination story because it had an agenda, and Americans have largely given up on that agenda. Left pushing a wet noodle, the CIA now tries to recover some of its cachet — or prevent further erosion of public opinion in the institution — by siding with the once-derided belief.

And the “low confidence” warning is there to allow mainstream news media to downplay the story. The whole thing smacks of propagandistic manipulation rather than honestly informing the president, Congress, the Pentagon, or the American people.

Oh, and what of that agenda?

Let’s just say that the agency always seeks to keep us ill-informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

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Tags China, CIA, cover up, covid, Wuhan

Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

The cited research papers, still un-peer-reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-the-market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-gun type evidence for gain-of-function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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bat!

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

COVID Cover-Up Criminal

On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance.

What did Fauci do?

He worked mightily to discredit the idea.

That is, he engaged in a cover-up.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-assertions from Fauci.

The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service.

There’s really little question that gain-of-function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law.

Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.

But everyone knows that cover-ups imply criminality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Death By Definition?

“What we’re alleging is that gain-of-function research was going on in that [Wuhan] lab and NIH funded it,” Sen. Rand Paul told Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 37 years and the chief medical advisor to the president, at a Senate hearing last week.

Paul contended that Fauci had lied to Congress by claiming “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH did indeed finance such activity in that lab.

But Fauci denied that research met the official definition of “gain of function.”*

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” the senator asked incredulously.

“That is correct,” replied Fauci, before adding, “And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Many scientists,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “think Paul actually does know what he’s talking about. One of them is Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert Richard Ebright, whom Paul quoted as saying this research ‘matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research.’”

The dispute pits Kentucky’s junior senator, concerned over what actually happened, against the bureaucrat, wiggling out from the bad odor of a terrible policy by, apparently, redefining terms.

Mere logomachy.

“What everyone can now see clearly,” suggests Rogin, “is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.”**

“Fauci is arguing the system worked,” the columnist maintains. “It didn’t.”

The senator has officially referred the matter of Fauci’s fibbing to Congress to the Justice Department for possible (but unlikely) prosecution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Any kind of animal virus that occurs in nature, that infects animals only, if you recombine it or mutate it or adapt it in the lab with other viruses so it has characteristics that change it from being an animal-only virus to being a virus that now can infect humans, that you’ve gained in function, you’ve gained pathogenesis or you’ve gained virulence — you’ve made it more dangerous,” Sen. Paul explained to Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “Without question this is what happened in the Wuhan lab.”

** “According to an intelligence fact sheet released by the Trump administration and partially confirmed by the Biden administration,” Rogin also points out, “the WIV took our help and used it to build another, secret part of the lab, where they worked with the Chinese military.”

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Transparency with Chinese Characteristics

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 23, 2021
3 Comments on Transparency with Chinese Characteristics

China, Covid, censorship, secrecy, Wuhan, lab, research, transparency

Chinese government officials are shocked, shocked — no wait, make that “extremely shocked!” — that the World Health Organization (no less) proposes “to further investigate whether the coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan.”

“We are asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-general, “especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic.”

But yesterday, at a Beijing news conference, the vice minister of the Chinese National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, shared his feelings that “this plan revealed a lack of respect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. We can’t possibly accept such a plan for investigating the origins.”

Instead, Zeng suggested searching for “signs of natural transmission … and the possibility that the virus may have first spread outside China” … or perhaps chasing after wild geese.

“[S]everal Chinese officials asserted that the W.H.O. inquiry got it right the first time,” explained The New York Times, “and that there was no evidence to justify renewed checks of the labs.”

“Renewed”? That supposes that labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously been inspected, forensically, and the personnel interviewed — not to mention a ton of essential evidence on the virus shared and analyzed. None of that has happened.

The joint WHO-China investigation was no such thing. It was a transparent* scam to dismiss the lab-leak theory as “extremely unlikely” without scrutiny. Even the head of the W.H.O. publicly backed away from its own finding, declaring that more investigation was needed.

Only major U.S. media still buy Chinazi gaslighting …

… or express surprise that the genocidal mobsters running China won’t cooperate in holding themselves accountable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* No doubt, this marks the absolute zenith of transparency for the Chinese Communist Party.

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art: transparent / floater