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Willful Blindness to Wuhan Coronavirus
When I first heard about the coronavirus outbreak, the fact that it emerged in a city with a controversial virology institute was beyond suspicious. My initial mental model for the incident was Chernobyl — a catastrophe caused by brutal totalitarian rule. Yet there was a massive crackdown on any mention of a laboratory incident. Seeing that Fauci was directly linked to the crackdown, while also having pushed forward gain-of-function research via EcoHealth Alliance in an end run around the carefully written regulations and review process, disgusted me.
As if this were not bad enough, it turns out the intelligence agencies were directly involved in this cover-up/disinformation operation (hat tip to Ed Morrissey at HotAir). The intelligence community ignored their own experts in the National Center for Medical Intelligence, who concluded it was man-made and pushed aside the FBI for coming to a similar conclusion.
The real question to ask here is why. Why was it so crucial to view the Wuhan Coronavirus as having a natural origin? Were our bureaucrats so devoted/bought & paid for by the PRC? Was it a massive status quo bias refusing to rock the diplomatic boat? I understand why people are seeing a grand conspiracy here, even if I’m not ready to take that particular leap.
What do you think?
Published in Science and Technology
Avoiding blame, of course.
I had read about the FBI being pushed aside, but I thought their opinion was that it was a lab leak, not necessarily that it was man-made. I realize there can be a grey area between the two. I had better start reading more carefully.
Whatever we think, it is worse.
I said in another conversation some months ago that it’s like a Tom Clancy book plot. The highest paid, longest tenured government employee arranges for dangerous viral research outside the US, in direct violation of strictly established protocols. The virus breaks out and kills millions. A cover up that aids the communist Chinese government is aided and abetted by federal employees from multiple agencies for years, and no one is held to account.
We lived though it and it’s still hard to believe that no one but the innocent have paid a price.
If you on going full Clancy, add in a vaccination later discovered to cause genetic mutations and the offing of the offspring of the vaccinated. With that, you could go full evil circle.
When the realization we had a problem occurred, staying at home a few days made sense. However, once the Draconian “safety” measures (along with their penalties) were implemented, I knew something nefarious was going on . . .
There is abundant evidence that the Wuhan Flu was deliberately developed, most likely as a prototype bioweapon, by expert virologists at the Wuhan Virology Institute, with the support of our own government via Dr Fauci and EcoHealth. This evidence would be adequate to persuade any open minded jury. The only question that remains is whether the release of the virus was deliberate, as I believe it was. By seeding the Wu Flu into northern Italy, the CCP effectively defeated the western powers without having to fire a shot.
Purchasing America’s upper class was the best investment China ever made.
When it all started, my first thought was that it had been manufactured and purposely released. Let’s see, a sickness that everyone would catch but get over quickly, most would have no or mild symptoms, but it would mostly finish off the old, the sick, and the infirm.
I assumed the insurance companies were behind it somehow, or at least involved, as a way to save money. The last year of life is pretty expensive for them.
Still not sure I’m wrong.
If that first paragraph was read on just about any approved-narrative-media roundtable discussion the professional journalist host would be chanting “That’s not true” by the mid-point. Accountability for the Left is rare with an ignorant and/or willfully compliant media blockade like this.
In a way it seems that the plandemic that helped to push Trump out of office was also helpful in getting him back in. I think it will be a while before most conservatives will ever trust the government and other institutions to the degree that we once did. I wish I could say that we never will, but memories are short and other generations will have to learn the lessons all over again.
What’s crazy is that it’s all been well documented and IIRC Fauci has incrementally admitted to all of it.
I posted in late March 0f 2020 to document the level of skepticism that – while clearly not fully defined at the time – was dancing around in my head about the path this outbreak was pushing us down. In that I said nothing about the origin theories of the virus. Someday I will need to go through all posts and comments from that era to find when I first stated “in public” my confidence in the lab leak origin and total rejection of the silly proposed alternative. (From memory, I am sure I was saying it to the captive audience here at the house by May of that year.)
The real answer to your questions is a version of this one. The established large pipelines of cash for so many in DC political circles must be maintained at all costs to keep that drug coming. “Bought & paid for” is more of a continuous buying/control process for addicts. (The first impeachment was a reflexive reaction to Trump sniffing around that other pipeline. But don’t get me started on that…)
Here is, and was, my argument since the beginning.
We were told it originated in the Wuhan wet market. This is in the same square mile as the virology institute. I have no proof of it’s origin but I do have statistical probability. There are 3,700,000 square miles of land in China. The odds of the official story being accurate are 1:3,700,000.
I agree. I don’t really see how anyone can argue this point.
This is an interesting question. China got rid of a hostile power (Donald Trump) and replaced him with their representative (Joe Biden). Since it worked out so well for the Chinese, one might presume they did it intentionally.
But I’m skeptical, for two reasons. First of all, there are LOTS of variables here, and the outcome would have been difficult to predict. I don’t think anyone is that smart.
Second, let’s suppose the Chinese developed a bioweapon and killed millions of people around the world with it. That’s an act of war. Against every country in the world. And really, I don’t think it matters if they released it intentionally. There is only one reason to develop bioweapons – to kill everybody except for your own people, who you would vaccinate first. These are not precision weapons. They kill everybody. That’s all they’re good for.
This is the part I really don’t understand. Why hasn’t ANYBODY attacked China yet? If they developed a bioweapon that killed millions of people, surely SOMEBODY would be a bit miffed. Maybe not Joe Biden, obviously. But SOMEBODY. Right?
Because of this, I really don’t think I understand what happened. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
The quote in your link about how the lab theory is racist was a part of it. I would need to look carefully at the timing of how it all unfolded, but a lot of it may be just the old us v. them dynamic: The know nothing maga types think it’s a lab leak, therefore we must oppose that like Pavlov’s dogs. And call it racist. (Even though it was always the wet market theory that lent itself to a racist narrative a thousand times more easily than the lab leak theory.)
Although ultimately I think there was more to the cover up than this, like Fauci’s involvement with the Chinese research.
Remember how Nancy Pelosi immediately came out swinging when Trump wanted to restrict China travel early on? It’s like they were all on the CCP payroll. Consider how much higher education depends on Chinese students paying full freight tuition and it’s like every legacy institution is under Chicom control.
Boy, Apple text correction sure doesn’t like “Chicom”.
I believe that is the odds for it happening at that location if it were actually to happened…is there not also a component associated with the probability of the “wet market” mechanism actually happening? I posit that the overall odds are orders of magnitude worse than your estimate. But this little thought exercise is already more science than Fauci has actually seen in his entire career.
I’m a conservative kinda guy. I suppose I should have said, “The odds of the official story possibly being accurate are 1:3,700,000″. That increases that 3.7M quite a bit.
The way the entire pandemic was handled was inexplicable for the most part if we were assuming either competence or good intentions or both. I am assuming the minions of those in power with a shred of decency thought that lying on many aspects of the pandemic was in our best interests because they have such a low opinion of the American people. But I don’t believe that argument for those at the top of the food chain. While CYA does likely play some role, I don’t think it is the only motivator.
We knew very quickly that NIH had indirectly funded the Wuhan Institute via EcoHealth. We have the emails from Peter Daszek from EcoHealth trying to keep his name off of the letter to Lancet in March 2020 that he wrote and circulated for signatures condemning the lab leak theory. He ultimately signed the letter but the signers declared:
“We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.” (emphasis mine)
He had a huge COI and no institutional COI board that I know would excuse what he did. I am told by my COI board every year that I must disclose my conflicts on every paper and presentation that I give. As everyone should. His colleagues knew he had a hugh COI and failed to correct the record. So this was a deliberate attempt to mislead by Lancet and all who signed. But all this came out pretty quickly too, as this piece from Feb 2021 shows. It wasn’t a secret that they were trying to keep.
The amount given to Wuhan wasn’t huge; the government spin machine could have downplayed it. They could have admitted doubt about the origins. But they didn’t. As always with the left, as we have now learned, they didn’t try to persuade that their side was correct through debate or discussion, they didn’t leave room for doubt. They declared the right answer and then ridiculed, dismissed and censored anyone who disagreed. A recent post attributed this strategy in the US to Obama (can’t find the link right now), but these are the tactics of totalitarian regimes. I cannot but conclude that the CCP was the driver of our American “elite”.
I wish there was someone in MAGAland–anyone–who was interested in making this behavior not only illegal but stoppable.
Are you trying to be a fiction writer like Clancy?
And it’s even crazier that nobody is interested in doing anything about it to keep it from happening again.
May they all receive their Just reward …
They were so desperate to remove President Trump from the Oval Office. There was nothing that they (democrat/Chicom alliance) would not do to achieve that outcome.
Flatten the curve ……………………
It was clearly of lab origin. We will never know the exact sequence of manufacture because all the antecedent viral cultures at Wuhan were destroyed along with all records of them. In compliance with the data sharing arrangement, NIH destroyed their copies of that material at the request of the Chinese. The top scientist involved at Wuhan fell/jumped/was pushed off the roof of the lab building and nobody else is gonna talk.
It was all too clumsy to have been leaked deliberately. They never would have released it in China, much less the same town as the lab that created it. The lab had substandard controls and blew off a number of reporting requirements.
The “proximal origin” paper was a crock but became the official government and MSM narrative. After being on a conference call with Fauci, Collins and the head of the UK Trust (who collectively controlled $70 billion in research funding) the authors knew they had to come up with the right answer and gave two reasons in the paper:
(a) Even though nobody found COVID-19 in any of the many critters tested at the wet market, some of those viruses had 96% similar DNA so there must have been a last-minute giant evolutionary leap from one of them (kinda like claiming it should not be surprising if a pair of chimps had a fully human baby). COVID-19 was never found in nature prior to the human outbreak. By 2021, fifty percent of North American white-tailed deer were estimated to be COVID seropositive so it was not as if the virus were not capable of spreading that way if it had a natural origin. It would have been everywhere.
(b) Golly, there was just no known method to make that whole sequence on the spike thing. Of course, Ecolab has asked for a DARPA grant in 2018 to do exactly that and one of the paper’s authors wrote in private correspondence that “a grad student could have done it.”
Everybody involved should be made to suffer. Those who restated this BS under oath should be J6’ed with long pre-trial confinement.
In other words, let’s not do anything about it.
It’s explicable if you understand that Fauci et al believed it would be more virulent and lethal than it actually was. The measures taken might make sense for a virus with a 40% mortality rather than a 1% mortality. The Draconian nature of the suggested response supports my bioweapon hypothesis.
The release into Wuhan was not deliberate but was a by product of seeding Wuhanese people bound for Italy with the virus. Remember, the first great outbreak of the disease outside of China was in Bergamo, Italy, where scores of Wuhanese people had come for training in the leather trade.