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Dr. Robert Redfield testified before Congress Wednesday, noting three suspicious events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that strengthened his long-held conviction that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab — a belief, he says, that got him boxed out of transformative conversations.
Whereas there is now growing recognition that COVID-19 “most likely” originated in the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were routinely performed on coronaviruses, saying so in recent years prompted derision and censorship.
Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly received death threats from his fellow scientists for noting that human error and meddling may have resulted in the spread of a virus that claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” he told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
When addressing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on March 8, he did not hold back.
Redfield noted there were three things in particular that took place early in the pandemic that bolstered his suspicion that COVID-19 came from a lab.
First, “they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular. Researchers don’t like to do that.”
The New York Times reported that early in the pandemic, over 200 data entries from the genetic sequencing of early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan were erased from an online scientific database. The early suspicion was that these sequences were deleted because they revealed that the virus that ravaged the world may have predated the alleged outbreak at the wet marked in December 2019.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was able to track down 13 of the sequences online and determined that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”
Chinese researchers had requested that the National Institutes of Health delete the sequences, and the NIH complied, reported the Washington Examiner.
Redfield appeared to suggest that the deletion of sequences took place as early as September 2019.
Second, Redfield said, “they changed the command and control at the lab from civilian control to military control. Highly unusual.”
In 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted during a meeting of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019. … The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?”
The State Department noted in early 2021 that “the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biowarfare expert, formally took over the BSL-4 lab from a local communist party committee president on Jan. 31, 2020, sparking concerns that the virus not only originated in the lab but was linked to a biowarfare program.
Third, “which is very telling, they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. So I think, clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event that happened in that laboratory in September.”
Redfield ruffled feathers in March 2021 when he went on CNN and said, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped. … Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
Fauci’s skew
Redfield told the subcommittee that retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins both sought to push a “single narrative” about the virus’ origins.
Redfield noted that he “made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this and I let them know, as a virologist, that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS because they never learned how to transmit human to human.”
“I felt that this virus was too infectious for humans,” said Redfield. “There was a lot of evidence that lab actually published in 2014 that they put the ACE2 receptor into humanized mice so it could infect human tissue. I think, you know, we had to really seriously go after the fact it came from the lab and they knew that that was how I was thinking, although I thought we had to go after both hypotheses.”
Even though Redfield helmed the CDC at the time, Redfield intimated that Fauci elected not to involve him in the controversial Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with top virologists on account of his insistence on a possible lab origin.
TheBlaze previously reported that Fauci appeared keen to push the zoonotic origins theory, both on the conference call and in the correspondence that followed.
According to congressional investigators, just days after the call, Fauci commissioned an influential 2020 study suggesting COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese lab leak. The former NIAID director also reportedly edited and provided final approval for the document, which he later cited on the national stage without noting his involvement.
Redfield revealed he was not made aware of his exclusion from the conference call or the call itself until the correspondences was released following a FOIA request.
When asked why Fauci and others excluded him, Redfield answered, “Because I had a different point of view and I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative, which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield told Congress. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
Former CDC Director: Coming Up With a Single Narrative Is Antithetical to Science
Dr. Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, was excluded from a February 2020 call with doctors Fauci, Collins, and others discussing the origins of COVID.
Imagine not only having injected 5.5 billion people with multiple doses of the failed COVID shots, but destroying lives and denying humane treatment on account of them. Now imagine knowing everything we know about the efficacy and safety of these novel therapies and still forging ahead with more doses and now RSV and flu shots built upon the same platform. Bad enough, right? Well, it gets even worse. Fauci now concedes that all respiratory viral vaccines are garbage, including those for flu, coronavirus, and RSV. Yet the policies never match the new admissions, as they race to accelerate the new flu and RSV shots within months.
In probably the most impactful story ignored by the media in recent weeks, Fauci co-authored an academic paper in Cell last month, along with the senior scientific adviser of NIAID, absolutely dumping on not just coronavirus vaccines, but all respiratory vaccines. It was a paper that could have been written by censored doctors like Ryan Cole, Peter McCullough, and Pierre Kory, and it reveals that Fauci indeed had a deep knowledge all along of the shortcomings of suboptimal antibody responses generated by this genre of vaccine.
First, the authors concede that flu vaccines are often only 14% effective and have never improved over the years. “After more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted.”
Then they go on to admit that the vaunted COVID shots are in the same boat. “Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent. The vaccines for these two very different viruses have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.”
Remember, to this very day, we still have children being kicked out of day-cares, people being denied organ transplants, and hospital workers losing their jobs on account of a premise that Fauci quite blatantly admits was false all along.
Fauci and company demonstrate the common thread between the failures of coronavirus, flu, and RSV vaccines in that respiratory viruses do not lend themselves to a blood-based antibody response, as so many of the doctors on my podcast have been saying for two years.
In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. … As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2, tend to repeatedly re-infect people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable protection.
Fauci et al. ask the question: “If natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”
Say what?!!! This got me banned from Twitter for six months! Fauci is acknowledging that this genre of vaccine – before we even explore the dangers with spike protein, mRNA, and lipid nano particles – simply does not target the virus in the respiratory tract and in fact never achieves immunity! You can keep getting the virus again and again, as we now see. But nothing that he is positing is new. This is not some new revelation. From reading the piece, it’s clear Fauci understood this principle of immunology all along. Yet to this day, there are still COVID shot (and even flu shot) mandates looming over the military, medical settings, schools, and other important places.
It’s not just a lack of efficacy on transmission. As we’ve been warning for two years based on doctors who got this right from day one, whenever you have a leaky, waning vaccine built upon suboptimal antibodies with a rapidly mutating virus, it creates immune tolerance and imprinting so that the misfiring of the immune response actually generates negative efficacy. While this paper does not officially acknowledge negative efficacy, it does acknowledge the concern of “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which stem from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”
Given that we now see endless negative efficacy associated with the COVID shots and numerous studies showing a misfiring of antibody classes, why is there no concern that this shot and other respiratory viral shots are causing immune tolerance leading to negative efficacy? Numerous flu shot studies warn about the shots tamping down T cell responses and making people more vulnerable to infection. Moderna’s clinical trial of COVID shots for babies seemed to be associated with a dramatic increase in RSV cases, which seemed to play out globally during the off-season surge of RSV in the summer of 2021 and the early fall of 2022.
So this is not just about failure to stop transmission, but also about clinical outcomes as well as negative efficacy. A Canadian study of vaccine efficacy during the 2018-2019 flu season found negative efficacy for some age groups because “vaccine mismatch [a form of original antigenic sin] may have negatively interacted with imprinted immunity.”
Despite all the fanfare around the flu shot, a 2005 study published in JAMA soberingly found that there was no correlation between “increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.” The only mortality decline researchers discovered was against H3N2 in those born before the 1968 pandemic because of natural immunity, not the vaccines.
Despite everything we now know (and people like Fauci clearly knew for years), you can’t go into a pharmacy for half the year without being harassed to get a flu shot, and many schools and places of work strongly encourage if not mandate it. But do any of these fake medical practitioners even understand the issues with suboptimal antibodies, negative efficacy of the flu shots, and immune suppression of T cells?
Fauci and company conclude the paper with a shocking concession about these long-standing respiratory vaccines and the ones currently being studied, including RSV vaccines:
Challenges to developing next-generation respiratory vaccines are many and complex (Table 2). We must better understand why multiple sequential mucosal infections with the same circulating respiratory viruses, spread out over decades of life, fail to elicit natural protective immunity, especially with viruses that lack significant antigenic drift (e.g., RSV and parainfluenzaviruses), if we are to rationally develop vaccines that prevent them. We must think outside the box to make next-generation vaccines that elicit immune protection against viruses that survive in human populations because of their ability to remain significantly outside of the full protective reach of human innate and adaptive immunity.
Any sane person reading these statements does not get the impression that Fauci believes we are just weeks away from cracking the code on RSV shots. He believes the challenges are “many and complex,” are prone to mutation with “antigenic drift,” and require “outside the box” thinking to “make next-generation vaccines.”
With remarks like this from the undisputed champion of the vaccine movement, how are we to accept an RSV and flu shot – not just on the traditional platform but on the dangerous mRNA platform – being forced upon us within months through expedited review? How do we not have legal safeguards in place to subject Moderna, essentially created and funded originally by DARPA, to liability and to prevent all mandates, coercion, and pressure to take it? How do we not have a better pharmacovigilance system in place? How do we not fix what went wrong with the trials for COVID? Then again, the FDA plans to keep producing and administering the same COVID shots that are for variants that don’t exist, which Fauci acknowledges in this piece is a function of the problematic antigenic drift.
Do facts no longer matter? Do human lives no longer matter? And for what? For the flu and RSV that we’ve lived with for decades?
Despite everything we are seeing about respiratory viral vaccines failing and mRNA not staying in the shoulder muscle, the FDA has granted Moderna “breakthrough therapy” designation for its RSV mRNA shot. This is a status usually granted for targeted treatment for deadly ailments that allows the FDA to speed up approval process, yet it is now being used for a virus that’s been around for decades and with a biological platform that everyone agrees has just failed. Pfizer and GSK also have RSV shots in the pipeline, and both Moderna and Pfizer have mRNA flu shots likely to be released later this year.It’s quite evident at this point that all of the safety nets protecting the public from Joseph Mengele-like experimentation have been breached. Our will to fight back is all we have left.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is seeking to represent the state of Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate, is challenging Dr. Anthony Fauci to a debate and has called Fauci a “petty tyrant” and “the J. Edgar Hoover of public health.”
Oz released a campaign video in which he challenges Fauci to a debate.
“You got COVID wrong,” Oz says in the video. “Let’s have a debate, doctor to doctor, and give the American people the truth about COVID-19. I’m game, anytime, anywhere. Dr. Fauci, are you in?”
It's past time Fauci faces the fact that he got COVID wrong. So, doctor to doctor – let's debate. This Doctor is in, are you? pic.twitter.com/KSPTsk1dS3
Fauci, who has been a prominent and controversial figure during the COVID-19 pandemic, has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for more than three decades and is also the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
“I think Dr. Fauci is basically the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He’s a petty tyrant. He got COVID wrong. He continues to get it wrong. I keep hearing from people inside the public health space, and outside, regular doctors like me, that he’s not managing this correctly,” Oz said during an interview on Newsmax.
Oz noted that he has been vaccinated but said, “If you’re older in America, you’re vulnerable, you should get vaccinated. But that’s my advice to you. Your local doctor should reinforce it. But it’s your choice, it’s your body.”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org
Wow, the opposition press isn’t what it used to be!
In a Sunday interview with “The Sexiest Man Alive,” Anthony Fauci, CNN’s Jake Tapper played a clip of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., criticizing Fauci for keeping the public in a state of raw panic over COVID.
Johnson: “Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it. He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population, when it couldn’t. And he’s doing — he’s using the exact same playbook for COVID.”
At that point, the anchor is supposed to say something like, “Dr. Fauci?” and let him respond. But CNN apparently thinks Fauci is too delicate a flower to answer an attack all by his lonesome.
So, before turning it over to the interviewee, Tapper blathered: “Obviously, that’s a bizarre and false assertion. President George W. Bush gave you the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of your leadership in the AIDS crisis. But I did want to give you an opportunity to respond.” (I guess this is how you apply for Chris Cuomo’s job at CNN.)
At that point, Fauci merely had to join Tapper in sneering at the senator: “Jake, how do you respond to something as preposterous as that?”
Thank you, Dr. Fauci for that penetrating response. Next up on CNN …
Actually, Fauci then went on to use the Hillary Benghazi defense: HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME WHEN PEOPLE DIED!!!
He said: “Overhyping AIDS? It’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million people worldwide. How do you overhype that? Overhyping COVID? It’s already killed 780,000 Americans and over 5 million people worldwide. So, I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about.”
That would have been a fantastic answer if Sen. Johnson had questioned whether anyone had ever died from AIDS or COVID. Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. Rather, he accused Fauci of overhyping the risk of COVID, terrifying everyone — as he did with AIDS — instead of concentrating protections on high-risk groups.
Overhyping car accidents? Cars have killed over 3.6 million Americans and multiple millions of people worldwide. How do you overhype that?
Yes, but you recommended that people drive blindfolded.
Long after it was clear that COVID was dangerous nearly exclusively for older people and the obese, Fauci lied, just as he once lied about AIDS being a risk for heterosexuals long after it became clear that it was almost entirely a problem for gay men and intravenous drug users.
Instead of devoting massive resources to shutting down bathhouses and shooting galleries to stop the spread of AIDS, and blanketing older Americans with protections in the case of COVID, Fauci repeatedly claimed that everyone was at risk.
This isn’t a matter of It’s a new virus! No one knew anything! I knew the high-risk groups back in March 2020. (bit.ly/3oBu8Et)
It seems that Fauci believes in “science” — except when he needs to terrify heterosexuals in the cause of destigmatizing gays, or frighten the entire population so as not to stigmatize the elderly and obese.
AIDS first appeared in 1981 in gay communities in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two years later, 72% of cases involved gay men, and 90% of the non-homosexual AIDS victims were intravenous drug users. Most of the rest were children born to AIDS-infected mothers or victims of AIDS-tainted blood transfusions.
This wasn’t a big secret. According to CDC, by June 1983, out of 1,552 AIDS victims, only 37 were not gay men, drug users, hemophiliacs or Haitians. Frontline doctors actually dealing with AIDS patients were assuring the public, “The average person has nothing to be concerned about,” as a New York cardiologist told The Associated Press. (Then, as now, you can trust your doctor; you can’t trust “public health authorities.”)
But Fauci was out there, alarming the entire population about the odds of contracting AIDS. In April 1983, he said: “As the months go by, we see more and more groups … AIDS is creeping out of well-defined epidemiological confines.”
A month later, he wrote: “The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS … has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome.” (This was based on a study of eight infants in Newark, New Jersey — who may or may not have had AIDS, in households with people who also may or may not have had AIDS. So it was a solid study.)
By 1985 — four years after AIDS first appeared — 73% of the cases were in gay men, 17% in intravenous drug users, 3% in Haitians, 2.2% in those who’d received blood, and 1% in sexual partners of AIDS patients. Less than 4% didn’t fit into one of these categories.
With zero cases of proven heterosexual transmission, in February 1985, Fauci said, “Am I worried about [heterosexual transmission]? Yes.”
By 1987, only 4% of AIDS cases could possibly be attributed to heterosexual contact — and half of those were in Africans and Haitians.
And yet, here was Fauci in March 1987, still babbling about the risk of AIDS to heterosexuals. Asked if AIDS could be transmitted to men by vaginal intercourse, he answered, “Absolutely.” He actually warned the public about French kissing: “[H]ealth officials have to presume that it is possible to transmit the virus by exchange of saliva in deep kissing.”
If some of these quotes sound familiar, I cited a few of them in that March 2020 column, at a time when “public health authorities,” cable news hosts and the president were demanding nationwide lockdowns.
Today, Fauci is doing the exact same thing with COVID, treating teenagers as if they face as much danger as people in their 70s, despite the latter having a 300 times greater chance of dying from COVID than those under 20. For young people who contract COVID, the chances of dying are less than the risk of dying from sunstroke over the course of their entire lives. Even for those in their 30s, the odds are about the same as their lifetime risk of dying by choking on food.
If he’s ever interviewed by a serious journalist, perhaps Fauci could explain why his idea of “science” is about avoiding stigmatizing certain groups, and not about saving lives.
Dr. Fauci on Sunday told CBS “Sunday Morning” senior contributor Ted Koppel that there’s a “misplaced perception” about people’s rights superseding “societal safety.”
“One of the things that to me was most difficult to accept is that we put together a good plan for how we were going to try and dampen down the spread of infection early on thinking that that was accepted by everybody,” Fauci said to Koppel. “And then, the next day you have the president [Trump] saying, ‘Free Michigan. Free Virginia.’ I didn’t quite understand what the purpose of that was, except to put this misplaced perception about people’s individual right to make a decision that supersedes the societal safety. That, to me, is one of the things that, I think, went awry in all of this.”
“Did you ever raise that with President Trump?” Koppel asked.
And this is precisely why Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat (and sociopath), should NEVER make decisions for the American people.
VIDEO:
Fauci: There is a "misplaced perception about people’s individual right to make a decision that supersedes the societal safety." pic.twitter.com/hBwObFKOI8
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
On “LevinTV” this week, BlazeTV host Mark Levin explained why he believes Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ responses to COVID-19 — whether prioritizing care for the elderly and nursing home facilities from the very beginning of the pandemic, refusing to issue mask and vaccine mandates, or fighting the federal government’s attempt to cap the distribution of antibody treatments to his state — have been way out in front of any other political leadership. Could this be a preview of the 2024 presidential election?
Levin pointed out that the Harvard-educated governor studies the most current COVID data on a daily basis and makes his decisions accordingly, as opposed to leaders who blindly follow the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci or comply with the political narrative of the day. As a result, Florida’s current (as of Monday, Oct 18, 2021) COVID death rate (per 100,000) is one of the lowest in the country.
Watch the video clip below to hear Mark Levin break it all down:
Disclaimer: The content of this clip does not provide medical advice. Please seek the advice of local health officials for any COVID-19 and/or COVID vaccine related questions & concerns.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A CNBC host confronted Dr. Anthony Fauci recently about the frequency of so-called “breakthrough” COVID-19 cases in people who are fully vaccinated. Public health officials have been touting the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines for nearly a year now — and for good reason. The vaccines are more effective than first believed, especially considering scientists developed the vaccine less than one year after sequencing COVID-19’s genetic code. The exact number of breakthrough cases, in fact, is not even known. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped tracking that data in May. The agency has continued, however, to track hospitalizations and deaths among the fully vaccinated crowd. As of Sept. 27, the CDC reported “22,115 patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infection who were hospitalized or died.”
During an interview on “Closing Bell” Friday, host Sara Eisen confronted Fauci about breakthrough cases, asking him if the government is being “too casual about the limitations of the vaccine.” Eisen was asking because she contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. She said the virus had recently spread through her “entire family.”
In response, Fauci cited data that say unvaccinated people still remain most vulnerable to hospitalization or death from COVID, and the vaccination protects most people from a severe outcome if they contract COVID-19. Fauci told Eisen she should not “confuse” the “overwhelming benefits of the protection of vaccines” with occurrences of breakthrough cases.
But Eisen pushed back. Noting the CDC no longer tracks breakthrough cases, Eisen asked Fauci directly: “How do we know that [breakthrough cases are] happening to a small proportion and how do we know that they are tending to be mild?”
So, in answer to your very appropriate question about if you get vaccinated and you get infected, is there less of a chance that you will be transmitting it to someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is vulnerable? The chances of doing that are diminished by being vaccinated and even further diminished, according to preliminary data we’ll wait to see the real fundamental core of the data, but it looks like that extra added of protection from a boost will be very valuable.
"If you look at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90% of them are unvaccinated," says Dr. Fauci. "If you get vaccinated and get a break through infection, you are much less likely of having a severe outcome and much more likely you would be without symptoms." pic.twitter.com/gEFsIjTNWj
Contrary to what Fauci said, the CDC has not said the chances of people transmitting COVID-19 have “diminished” if you are fully vaccinated. In fact, the CDC says that fully vaccinated people can transmit the virus as readily as unvaccinated people. Current CDC information states that viral load of the Delta variant is similar for vaccinated people and unvaccinated people — meaning both are similarly contagious. The agency, however, says vaccinated people are contagious for less time than unvaccinated people.
“For people infected with the Delta variant, similar amounts of viral genetic material have been found among both unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people. However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people,” the CDC explains. “This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the ongoing federal response to COVID-19 on May 11, 2021, in Washington, D.C. | Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
Chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that it’s “too soon to tell” whether Americans should gather for Christmas this year, as he spoke about the coronavirus pandemic and what to expect in the coming months.
“It’s just too soon to tell. We have to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we’re going to do at a particular time,” Fauci said on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” after anchor Margaret Brennan asked if Americans will be able to gather for Christmas.
“Let’s focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down. And we can do it by people getting vaccinated. Also, in the situation where boosters are appropriate, to get people boosted, because we know they can help greatly in diminishing infection and diminishing advanced disease.”
Fauci received criticism on social media for his comments.
“It’s bad enough that Fauci says these ridiculous things, but it’s worse that journos keep framing questions to him as if he has any say over whether we get together for Christmas,” Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross wrote, according to Fox News.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that Americans avoid traveling for Christmas. “The best thing for Americans to do in the upcoming holiday season is to stay at home and not travel,” Henry Walke, CDC’s COVID-19 incident manager, said at the time, The Hill reported.
In the United States, there have been over 42.9 million reported COVID-19 cases thus far, with 688,099 deaths counted as being from COVID-19 as of Monday, according to WHO, which also says, as of last Thursday, a total of 398,284,216 vaccine doses had been administered.
An investigative report found that states are counting deaths by suicide, murder and auto accidents as deaths from COVID-19, inflating death totals.
Dr. Fauci told CBS that complacency needs to be avoided. “We need to continue to get those individuals, now 70 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated, vaccinated.”
Fauci supported President Biden’s vaccine mandate, which requires federal employees, contractors and private employers with 100 workers or more to mandate vaccinations or weekly testing for the novel coronavirus.
“I think what the president said about companies greater than 100 individuals is a good thing, and you’re seeing also local groups, universities and businesses are doing that, mandating vaccines in particular,” Fauci said.
However, in August, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about requiring members of Congress to be vaccinated, she responded, “We cannot require someone to be vaccinated. It’s just not what we can do,” Forbes noted.
The vaccination status of members of Congress, she added, “is a matter of privacy.”
Several governors and members of Congress denounced Biden’s plans.
“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp tweeted.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts also responded, saying: “This plan isn’t about public health — this is about government control and taking away personal liberties. Americans, not the federal government, are responsible for taking charge of their personal health.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci declared last week that people hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine should “give up” their individual freedoms “for the greater good of society.”
After delivering a lecture via livestream at McGill University, which is located in Montreal, Fauci fielded several questions. One question asked Fauci how to approach “the value of individual freedom within the context of this global pandemic.”
First, Fauci took the opportunity to bash Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets. Then, he bashed individual freedom, framing vaccination as one’s responsibility toward others.
“I think what people have to appreciate, that indeed you do have personal liberties for yourself and you should be in control of that,” Fauci began. “But you are a member of society, and as a member of society, reaping all of the benefits of being a member of society, you have a responsibility to society.”
“I think each of us, particularly in the context of a pandemic that’s killing millions of people, you have got to look at it and say, ‘There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society,'” he explained.
“There is no doubt that that’s the case,” Fauci added.
The importance of vaccination, Fauci later explained, is that unvaccinated people “inadvertently” and “innocently” transmit COVID-19 to people who are vulnerable to hospitalization or death. He compared living unvaccinated to a person recklessly driving 95 mph on a highway.
“If I get hurt, that’s my problem. No! It’s somebody who you might kill’s problem, also,” Fauci said.
Earlier in the interview, Fauci said people opposed to the vaccine need to be convinced to get vaccinated by a “trusted messenger,” suggesting clergymen, family members, and sports figures.
During an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, Fauci said “it’s just too soon to tell” whether Americans should gather together for the Christmas holiday.
“We’ve just got to concentrating on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we’re going to do at a particular time,” Fauci said.
In that same interview, Fauci praised California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who last week announced all California students age 12 or older will be required to get vaccinated. Fauci implied every state should follow Newsom’s lead.
“People need to realize that having a vaccine requirement for schools is not a new, novel thing that is very peculiar or specific to COVID-19. We’ve been doing this for decades,” Fauci said. “My own children could not have gone to school if they had not gotten vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella. So when we see pushback on that, it’s as if this never happened before. It’s actually ongoing with other vaccines. So, let’s do it with a virus that’s very, very serious.”
The U.S. agency led by White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci funded research experiments to infect humanized mice with novel coronaviruses at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, newly released documents reveal.
Over 900 pages of documents were obtained by The Intercept as part of a Freedom of Information Act request against the National Institutes of Health. The documents detail how EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that supports field research on coronaviruses around the world, awarded federal funding to study bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
From The Intercept:
One of the grants, titled ” Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
The bat coronavirus grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, reviewed the documents and determined that the research described fits the definition of gain-of-function experiments.
“The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright told The Intercept. He indicated that the documents show the Chinese researchers were able to infect humanized mice with two different types of novel coronaviruses.
In a Twitter thread, Ebright elaborated that the materials “show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present.”
He also said the documents confirm that one of the experiments produced several ” laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses,” and that one of these engineered viruses “was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed.”
“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” Ebright said.
Fauci, the director of NIAID, has repeatedly denied that his agency or any part of the National Institutes of Health provided federal funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In July, Fauci accused Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) of lying after Paul pressed him on NIAID’s funding for coronavirus research in Wuhan.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology lab has been the focus of efforts to discover the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many scientists maintain that the most likely origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is natural spillover — a bat coronavirus, for example, making the evolutionary leap to infect humans — others have raised questions about the possible role the Wuhan lab played in the virus’ origins, given its proximity to the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan and the research that was conducted there.
The most relevant question is whether Chinese scientists in Wuhan performed gain-of-function experiments to engineer coronaviruses, and whether its possible one of those viruses escaped and caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scientists have so far been unable to conclusively prove that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin, which has led many in the scientific community to call for intense scrutiny of the Wuhan lab as part of any investigation of the origins of the pandemic. President Joe Biden in May ordered the intelligence community to investigate the matter, and the classified August 27 report he received was inconclusive.
But the new documents obtained by The Intercept support accusations that scientists in Wuhan, at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment if not the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were performing the kinds of dangerous experiments that many had previously warned could cause a pandemic under unsafe conditions.
And according to Sen. Paul, the documents show that “Fauci lied.”
Less than two years ago, an outbreak of a new, flu-like virus that would eventually be known as COVID-19 began in Wuhan, China. Today, almost 5 million people globally have died from this pandemic, and we are no closer to understanding how it began.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We are closer, but only by virtue of being allowed to ask in public a rather inconvenient question: Was a foreign lab that received U.S. taxpayer funding for years responsible for the start of the spread of this pandemic?
For months, this question was considered publicly taboo, prohibited from discussion (except as a topic of derision as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory) by a group of scientists who were, incredibly, some of the same people who should have been under the most intense scrutiny. The bizarre tableau would not have played out in any other walk of life. If ExxonMobil had conducted drilling operations that resulted in a massive oil leak, the media would not have refused to investigate the cause of the leak because respected scientists who happened to be employed by ExxonMobil insisted that it was not ExxonMobil’s fault.
And yet, incredibly, that appears to be exactly what happened to the most significant question that has faced our generation. The very people who stood to lose the most were allowed to hastily exonerate themselves, and for months — when important information should have been uncovered — social media companies and the media actually covered for them and are still covering for them today.
The decision to rule this topic out of bounds was made in late January 2020, just a few days after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Washington state. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has perhaps done more to shape coronavirus response policy than any other person in America, was a central figure in those discussions.
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It is difficult, after all that has happened over the last two years, to remember a time when Dr. Fauci was not famous, but it is important to remember that when the discussions that would shape the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic began, the men and women who conferred with him were not conferring with the celebrity who would soon come to dominate American media coverage. They were, rather, conferring with a bureaucrat — one whom a vast, overwhelming majority of Americans could not have picked out of a lineup when he was announced as a member of then-Vice President Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force on Jan. 29, 2020.
But just because he wasn’t famous doesn’t mean he wasn’t powerful. Not only is he literally the highest-paid employee of the entire federal government, but Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) provides billions of dollars for research projects in the United States and around the world. NIAID was responsible for doling out nearly $3 billion annually in federal taxpayer dollars to research scientists between fiscal years 2017 and 2019. In FY 2021, NIAID received an annual budget of $6,067,071,000. The agency plans to fund another $3.8 billion in research grants this year, 62% of its budget.
The director of NIAID wields enormous power and influence over which research projects receive that funding, which scientists will be paid to continue their work, and which therapies, vaccines, diagnostic tests, and other technologies get developed in the competitive field of infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases. And Fauci is the longest-serving head of NIAID, having been appointed director in 1984 and supervising research both within and without the agency from that position for nearly four decades since.
So, while the average American might never have heard of Dr. Anthony Fauci prior to sometime in February or March 2020, the people who study viruses for a living certainly had. Not only had they heard of him, but they were also acutely aware that he was in charge of the funding upon which a significant portion of their livelihood depends. Risking the disfavor of Fauci was not a move many in the field of infectious disease research would make.
Another important individual in that field was Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the megacharity known as the Wellcome Trust. With an annual total disbursement budget of over $11 billion — a significant portion of which is spent on infectious disease research — Farrar also represented an enormously important gatekeeper of medical research funding. The Wellcome Trust had a financial endowment of £29.1 billion, or just over $40 billion, in 2020, making it the fourth wealthiest charitable foundation in the world.
Both Fauci and Farrar would play key roles in shaping the public response to questions about the origins of COVID-19. And they would serve — whether willfully or not — to stamp out questions that would have tended to implicate recipients of their funding largesse — and thus ultimately themselves. Somehow, very few people in the media found this worthy of curiosity, much less rigorous investigation.
Although the particulars of the lab-leak theory, as it would come to be called, would not be fleshed out for several months after the pandemic began, when COVID-19 introduced itself to the world in late 2019, it did not take long for a couple of salient facts to begin circulating on the internet. The first was that Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID outbreak, was home to a virology lab that had been the subject of a scathing State Department report that blasted the lab for inadequate security procedures, saying the Wuhan Institute “has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The second was that one of the lab’s top scientists, Shi Zhengli, had for years led a team of researchers into the field to collect dozens of coronavirus samples in the wild. Her virus-hunting expeditions took her deep into bat caves, earning her the nickname “bat woman,” a fact that was of particular interest in early 2020 because Chinese scientists had published a paper showing the SARS-CoV-2 virus was 96% identical to a previously discovered bat coronavirus.
A video released by Chinese state media just weeks before the first official reports of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan also gained attention. The video showed Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention staff (not to be confused with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a separate lab) collecting virus samples from horseshoe and pipistrelle bats in caves found in China’s Hubei province. The video demonstrated that Chinese scientists had been handling bats and collecting virus samples similar to SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 pandemic was linked to Wuhan, and right there next to the city were a laboratory and a health institute that studied coronaviruses.
Given that the early scientific evidence strongly pointed to bats as the original host animal of what would become COVID-19, this led many to naturally wonder, “Could this lab have been the source of the pandemic?”
Topping it all off, the lab in question, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was funded by taxpayer dollars that were funneled to it via the nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, whose president, Peter Daszak, is one of the leading scientific voices discrediting the possibility that the virus came from the lab. Daszak’s nonprofit received at least $15.2 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health since 2005, according to the NIH’s RePORTER website. Between 2014 and 2019, EcoHealth Alliance directed at least $600,000 in NIH sub-grants from Fauci’s NIAID to study bat coronaviruses in collaboration with the Wuhan lab, a fact confirmed by Fauci himself in testimony given to Congress.
In June, Daszak recused himself from a U.N.-partnered commission investigating the origins of COVID-19 because of his apparent conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Fauci served as a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force all through 2020, is now the top White House adviser on the coronavirus response, and continues to be sought after by the media as an expert authority on all things related to a pandemic that possibly has origins tied to research his agency funded.
It is almost unimaginable that the above series of facts alone did not lead to months of endless public interrogation of Fauci. Every media organization and governmental watchdog in the country should have immediately been calling for nonstop investigations — especially given the eagerness of the press to tar anyone connected with the Trump administration. The national media spent endless hours speculating, without any factual basis, about the contacts with Russia of every obscure member of Trump’s team. Surely they would have interest in whether the man who was fast becoming the face of the Trump response to coronavirus was complicit, even indirectly, with the release of the virus into the world?
It turned out they would not. Somewhere along the line, Fauci became synonymous with “science” for many liberals and other opponents of President Trump. Perhaps nothing shielded Fauci from criticism or even investigation more effectively than the fact that, while he was nominally a member of the Trump administration, he was erected in the minds of liberals as the COVID foil to Trump.
Fauci himself encouraged this deification, telling MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, “So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science. And anybody that looks at what is going on clearly sees that, you have to be asleep not to see that.” Fauci became the scaffolding upon which the entire edifice of COVID-fighting measures favored by Democrats was built, and to attack him was seen as an indication that you probably sided with the “anti-science” crazies who think the virus is fake.
And the story of how this prevented the press from questioning Fauci or anyone else associated with him about how this pandemic began is one of the most regrettable failures of investigative journalism in all of history. But even more bizarre, as evidence has begun to mount that the very people who set forth to immediately stamp out all discussion of the lab-leak theory were a) the very people who would be implicated if the lab-leak theory proved true and b) were beholden to Fauci, the press seems curiously uninterested.
Only recently have cracks begun to appear in the façade, such as last week’s surprising Washington Post article that finally began asking government officials in various health agencies some difficult questions about exactly what level of oversight was exercised over the increasingly risky research being funded by taxpayer dollars. A shocking number of government officials absolutely stonewalled even the Post’s inquiries.
This series is not intended to prove that the lab-leak theory is true. That can probably never be known with any certainty at this point, thanks largely to the intentional destruction of evidence by the Chinese government. But it is intended to ask questions that every person in the entire world should be interested in — and it seeks to encourage the public and the politicians who are theoretically accountable to them to demand answers that should have been demanded long ago.
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Over the next days and weeks, this series will investigate what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may never know about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part 2 will examine the “gain of function” controversy and what we know about the research that was done on coronaviruses by Shi Zhengli, Ralph Baric, and others and the evidence regarding the structure of the virus that has led many to wonder if COVID-19 was, in fact, engineered in some way.
Part 3 will examine the early response to the pandemic by the group of scientists who would be responsible for shutting down any discussion of the lab-leak theory and the decision to control the message.
Part 4 will examine the scientific arguments put forth by opponents of the theory and the issues they have either glossed over or failed to examine.
Part 5 will track the effort that was made by social media companies to silence any questions about the theory as conspiracy theories.
Finally, part 6 will discuss the current state of knowledge and suggest a path forward for the debate.
The trail of suffering left across the globe by the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant measures that have been undertaken to attempt to slow its spread are almost incalculable. Millions have died, millions more have suffered severe diseases, and almost everyone has been severely economically and emotionally impacted. Perhaps most devastatingly, so many of those who died during the pandemic had to die alone, isolated from friends and loved ones by fear of the contagion. The full downstream effects of this catastrophe cannot even be guessed at, and the possibility remains that the mutations of the virus may make it virtually undefeatable by vaccines in the long term.
In the face of all this human suffering, humanity deserves answers. We must do everything in our power to determine why this happened, so that we can do everything in our power to prevent it from happening again. The search for answers must be inexhaustible, and any person who might possibly be involved in any way should be an appropriate subject of aggressive investigation. After all that COVID-19 has done, humanity deserves no less. And it certainly deserves more than legacy media and social media companies have given it thus far. We will attempt to find those answers.
It’s the 800-poundgorilla in the pandemic. The debate over forced vaccination with an ever-waning vaccine is cresting right around the time when the debate should be moot for a lot of people. Among the most fraudulent messages of the CDC’s campaign of deceit is to force the vaccine on those with prior infection, who have a greater degree of protection against all versions of the virus than those with any of the vaccines. It’s time to set the record straight once and for all that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broader, more durable, and longer-lasting than any of the shots on the market today. Our policies must reflect that reality.
It should be noted that this exercise is not even necessary now that our own government concedes that immunity from the vaccines, particularly the Pfizer shot, wanes each month. With the Mayo Clinic researchers suggesting, based on old data that likely got even worse since, that Pfizer’s efficacy against infection is only 42%, there is no reason to even attempt to compare this degree of immunity to the near-perfect immunity of prior infection, even against Delta. It should be obvious to any intellectually honest person that an unvaccinated individual with prior infection is exponentially safer to be around than someone who had the vaccines but not prior infection.
Remember, a significant portion of the population already got infected, and when the latest Delta wave is over in the South, the region will likely reach clear supermajorities of the population with immunity, as was found in India following the circulation of this very contagious strain of the virus.
Now consider the fact that studies have shown those with prior infection are associated with 4.4x increased odds of clinically significant side effects following mRNA vaccination. Thus, it is as scandalous as it is unnecessary to vaccinate those with prior infection, even if one supports vaccination for those without prior immunity. But as you can imagine, that would take a massive share of the market off the table from the greedy hands of Big Pharma.
To that end, it’s important to clarify once and for all, based on the current academic literature, that yes, people with prior infection are indeed immune, more so than those with vaccines. Here is just a small list of some of the more recent studies, which demonstrate the effectiveness of natural immunity — even from mild infection — much later into the pandemic than the study window of the vaccines:
The authors studied the contrast between vaccine immunity and immunity from prior infection as it relates to stimulating the innate T-cell immunity, which is more durable than adaptive immunity through antibodies alone. They concluded, “In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the observed dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate-like lymphocytes in patients but not in immunized subjects.”
The study further notes: “Analysis of B and T cell receptor repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal B and T cells in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients clonally expanded cells were primarily circulating memory cells.” What this means in plain English is that effector cells trigger an innate response that is quicker and more durable, whereas memory response requires an adaptive mode that is slower to respond. Natural immunity conveys much more innate immunity, while the vaccine mainly stimulates adaptive immunity.
The media scared people last year into thinking that if antibody levels wane, it means their immunity is weakening, as we are indeed seeing with the vaccines today. But as Nature wrote, “People who recover [even] from mild COVID-19 have bone-marrow cells that can churn out antibodies for decades.” Thus, aside from the robust T-cell memory that is likely lacking from most or all vaccinated individuals, prior infection creates memory B cells that “patrol the blood for reinfection, while bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) hide away in bones, trickling out antibodies for decades” as needed.
It’s therefore not surprising that early on in the pandemic, an in-vitro study in Singapore found the immunity against SARS-CoV-2 to last even 17 years later from SARS-1-infected patients who never even had COVID-19.
In a study of 1,359 previously infected health care workers in the Cleveland Clinic system, not a single one of them was reinfected 10 months into the pandemic, despite some of these individuals being around COVID-positive patients more than the regular population.
The study found that most recovered patients produced durable antibodies, memory B cells, and durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells, which target multiple parts of the virus. “Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients,” concluded the authors. In other words, unlike with the vaccines, no boosters are required to assist natural immunity.
The authors conclude: “Natural infection induced expansion of larger CD8 T cell clones occupied distinct clusters, likely due to the recognition of a broader set of viral epitopes presented by the virus not seen in the mRNA vaccine” (emphasis added).
Conclusion: “In infection-naïve individuals, the second dose boosted the quantity but not quality of the T cell response, while in convalescents the second dose helped neither. Spike-specific T cells from convalescent vaccinees differed strikingly from those of infection-naïve vaccinees, with phenotypic features suggesting superior long-term persistence and ability to home to the respiratory tract including the nasopharynx.”
Given that we know the virus spreads through the nasopharynx, the fact that natural infection conveys much stronger mucosal immunity makes it clear that the previously infected are much safer to be around than infection-naive people with the vaccine. The fact that this study artfully couched the choices between vaccinated naive people and vaccinated recovered rather than just plain recovered doesn’t change the fact that it’s the prior infection, not the vaccine, conveying mucosal immunity. In fact, studies now show that infected vaccinated people contain just as much viral load in their nasopharynx as those unvaccinated, a clearly unmistakable conclusion from the virus spreading wildly in many areas with nearly every adult vaccinated.
Aside from more robust T cell and memory B cell immunity, which is more important than antibody levels, Israeli researchers found that antibodies wane slower among those with prior infection. “In vaccinated subjects, antibody titers decreased by up to 40% each subsequent month while in convalescents they decreased by less than 5% per month.”
Researchers conducted a review of 11 cohort studies with over 600,000 total recovered COVID patients who were followed up with over 10 months. The key finding? Unlike the vaccine, after about four to six months, they found “no study reporting an increase in the risk of reinfection over time.”
This is one of the only studies that analyzed the population‐level risk of reinfection based on whole genome sequencing in a subset of patients with supporting evidence of reinfection. Researchers estimate the risk at 0.66 per 10,000 person-weeks. Most importantly, the study found no evidence of waning of immunity for over seven months of the follow-up period. The few reinfections that did occur “were less severe than primary infections,” and “only one reinfection was severe, two were moderate, and none were critical or fatal.” Also, unlike many vaccinated breakthrough infections in recent weeks that have been very symptomatic, “most reinfections were diagnosed incidentally through random or routine testing, or through contact tracing.”
Several months ago, Israeli researchers studied 6.3 million Israelis and their COVID status and were able to confirm only one death in the entire country of someone who supposedly already had the virus, and he was over 80 years old. Contrast that to the torrent of hospitalizations and deaths we are seeing in those vaccinated more than five months ago in Israel.
Researchers tested blood samples from health care workers who never had the virus but got both Pfizer shots against blood samples from those health care workers who had a previous mild infection and a third group of patients who had a serious case of COVID. They found, “No neutralization escape could be feared concerning the two variants of concern [Alpha and Beta] in both populations” of those previously infected.
Many people are wondering: If they got only an asymptomatic infection, are they less protected against future infection than those who suffered infection with more evident symptoms? These researchers believe the opposite is true. “Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–infected individuals are not characterized by weak antiviral immunity; on the contrary, they mount a highly functional virus-specific cellular immune response,” wrote the authors after studying T cell responses from both symptomatic and asymptomatic convalescent patients. If anything, they found that those with asymptomatic infection only had signs of non-inflammatory cytokines, which means that the body is primed to deal with the virus without producing that dangerous inflammatory response that is killing so many hospitalized with the virus.
The authors found that the T cells created from convalescent patients had “stem-cell like” qualities. After studying SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells in recovered patients who had the virus in varying degrees of severity, the authors concluded that long-term “SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell memory is successfully maintained regardless of the severity of COVID-19.”
The researchers note that far from suffering waning immunity, memory B cells in those with prior infection “express increasingly broad and potent antibodies that are resistant to mutations found in variants of concern.” They conclude that “memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination.” And again, this is even before getting into the innate cellular immunity which is exponentially greater in those with natural immunity.
Until now, we have established that natural immunity provides better adaptive B cell and innate T cell responses that last longer and work for the variants as compared to the vaccines. Moreover, those with prior infection are at greater risk for bad side effects from the vaccines, rendering the campaign to vaccinate the previously infected both unnecessary and dangerous. But the final question is: Do the vaccines possibly harm the superior T cell immunity built up from prior infection?
Immunologists from Mount Sinai in New York and Hospital La Paz in Madrid have raised serious concerns. In a shocking discovery after monitoring a group of vaccinated people both with and without prior infection, they found “in individuals with a pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV-2, the second vaccine dose not only fail to boost humoral immunity but determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response.” They also note that other research has shown “the second vaccination dose appears to exert a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals.
As early as March 27, among the many accurate statements Dr. Fauci made before he became a political animal, he declared he was “really confident” in the immunity conferred by prior infection. That was long before 17 months of data and dozens of studies confirmed that. Yet, today, there are thousands of doctors and nurses with infinitely better immunity than what the vaccines can confer who are losing their jobs during a staffing crisis for not getting the shots. Just know that the big lie about natural immunity is perhaps the most verifiable lie, but it is likely not the only lie with devastating consequences we are being told about the virus, the vaccines, and alternative treatment options.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that truth goes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Guess what’s next for us?
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who watches the watchers?
Six months ago, I began my first article on scientific censorship during COVID-19 by introducing Dr. Anthony Fauci as a surprise character who had emerged unexpectedly while I dug through what were then 83,000 FOIA emails, published by US Right-to-Know over the course of the last year: see files related to Ralph Baric, Linda Saif, Rita Colwell, Colorado State/Rocky Mountain National Laboratory and the NCBI; other FOIA releases from Judicial Watch, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post include NIH funding of the WIV and Dr. Fauci’s emails.
I’ve been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci “situation,” but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash or collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow. It’s time Americans were told the truth: that the grant money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is merely a footnote in this narrative. After all, Dr. Fauci controls nearly $4 billion of annual grant funding for the NIAID, the institute within the NIH he has directed since 1984. Over 37 years, more than 50,000 research projects have been supported with more than $50 billion (conservatively) of taxpayer funds that have been doled out to them.
“$4 billion of annual grant funding “
Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
It’s reasonable to hold him accountable for the results of his organization’s efforts, but the direct funding received by the WIV for gain-of-function (GOF) research represents only a tiny fraction of Fauci’s involvement in enabling risky research. The 2017 repeal of the GOF ban was decided without the consultation of the Trump administration, even though news coverage during the pandemic blamed him for the decision. Neither Fauci nor his boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, bothered to clarify the record, which looks especially disgusting in the wake of persistent rejections of Sen. Rand Paul’s assertions (with accompanying evidence) that the NIH financially supported such research.
First, do no harm … to Fauci’s legacy
It’s important to plainly state that I’m aware of the intense politicization of virtually every aspect of the pandemic and the pandemic response. Since many readers may not be aware, I’ll point out that my specific motivation for building a COVID-19 website (later moved here to Substack) and speaking to a broader audience about the various facets of the pandemic was to offer unfiltered information to counter the disgusting polarization I observed:
I have chosen to offer this website as a forum for information about the current COVID-19 pandemic, in an effort to provide meaningful, factual and useful content during what will continue to be a destabilizing time. There is no indication that our media will soon get better at filling the knowledge void they’ve created; as a result, confidence in those who deliver our news has hit rock bottom at the exact moment in recent history when we need responsible media the most.
My past experience and current observations lead me to believe that the big picture of the pandemic is poorly understood, and there has been so much conflicting information floating around that it has been very difficult to see what awaits us beyond the immediate horizon. My goal is simply to provide resources so that each of us can approach the coming months with intention – as perspective widens, willpower to overcome circumstance increases. The opposite is also true, in that fear increases when awareness decreases, and in the aftermath of societal upheaval a vacuum appears that will be filled, by one voice or another.
Just as the Native American parable states, courage and fear are interrelated; now is the time to feed courage and starve fear.
My goal is to learn and prepare, because those who expect “normal” to return are going to be disappointed. The odds of future waves of infection are high, and a lot of changes will have to be made in order to keep the engine running once flu season arrives in the fall. The statistics paint a clear picture, in that the near-simultaneous global response saved millions of lives; it’s also clear that applying the same medicine several times will negate the economic prosperity that fuels innovation in medical technology. Being able to see a storm coming is meaningless if all you can do is watch and wait, and America’s economy has been even more critical during the last decade of malaise in a majority of the developed world. In particular, the last few years of higher growth gave a bigger cushion to land on, but after witnessing unemployment go from historically low to historically high in six weeks it would be foolish to expect us to fully recover before the re-emergence of a global peak in cases.
I feel obligated to reiterate my stance, because the nature and importance of the situation can’t be ignored any longer: Congress is now actively engaged in investigating the pandemic’s origins, and we must confront the truth if we are to gain meaningful insight that can help us prepare for future crises. There is no level of partisanship that justifies ignoring a tragedy of this magnitude.
‘Everything rises and falls on leadership’ — John Maxwell
It’s hard to place a dollar value on the impact of Fauci’s leadership decisions upon almost all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it’s not difficult to understand the willingness of some to avoid a legitimate inquiry into the issue altogether. After all, he sits at the nexus of:
A) The NIH’s role in supporting the research and development of mRNA technology and new antiviral drugs like remdesivir, and the resulting conflicts of interestthat the NIH continues to ignore.
B) His role in pushing those NIH-sponsored inventions; specifically, advocating for remdesivir on the basis of weak evidence while rejecting legitimate investigations into generic alternatives with no less statistical support, as well as …
C) … his role in obfuscating concerning data and censoring public debate over the risk/benefit evidence emerging about COVID-19 vaccines. Had Fauci been bluntly honest about the unknowns involving the new technology throughout the pandemic, Americans would still largely have assumed the risk — at least, assuming that antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) was not a likely outcome … oops.
D) His evolving stances on masking, lockdowns, school closures, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), largely the result of growing public awareness that those decisions have consistently been based upon reducing the accountability of cowardly officials, not the best interest of their constituents. (Note: This is a conclusion from my research focus last year, which I will return to once the origin issue allows me to do so.)
E) His refusal to address the blatant censorship of vaccine side-effect data — it takes a disturbing level of cynicism to witness the large-scale skepticism and uncertainty that has resulted from such censorship and then vilify those willing to speak up and blaming them for any future vaccine breakout, when one of the most likely causes would be ADE. ADE with SARS-CoV-2 would most likely result from the specific targeting of the mRNA vaccines, not vaccine hesitancy (in the absence of a simultaneous global administration of the shots, which was never feasible under the geopolitical and temporal constraints of the pandemic).
Each of those factors has contributed to the fading perception of Fauci as “America’s Doctor,” but each has also become a divisive litmus test for which the evidence for and against is hotly debated. My purpose here is not to offer judgment on those (self-evident) issues; rather, I want to highlight the fact that Dr. Fauci’s legacy includes elements far beyond the scope of my research — and the context of those debates is directly relevant for the proper framing of the failures illuminated here. The same hubris and gaslighting in defense of “Science” has plagued every facet of our government’s response to COVID-19.
My disgust doesn’t stem from casual reflection and an exaggeration of weak assertions to fan partisan flames. It stems from my analysis of 100,000 pages of FOIA documents, 1,000-plus research articles reviewed, and my own published analysis of the impact of Fauci’s censorship, which was the first of its kind.
My approach was external to science — from the perspective of a historian seeking to understand the “why” behind the further collapse of trust in our institutions during the pandemic. My conclusions were formed over six months of investigation and focused on the realization that one of the worst developments of the pandemic is the evaporation of public trust in scientists (see “Edifice Wrecks”). I’ve never sought to inflame conspiracy theories or ignore evidence in support of zoonosis, but I’ve personally entered into discussions with a half-dozen of the scientists highlighted below, and none of them ever addressed the emerging evidence that, under normal circumstances, would have been part of the open debate that Fauci pretends already took place.
Every additional moment spent in denial and suppression just adds fuel to the coming backlash, and thus far discussions have ignored what I believe is the largest and most consequential elephant in the room:
F) Fauci quietly but directly ensured that scientific censorship was implemented, in large measure to prevent public awareness of the extent of his role in GOF research and the controversies surrounding it. The evidence proves that, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci and many leading scientists moved to protect themselves — not us, who weren’t yet aware of the potential calamity at our doorstep. Fauci led the efforts to obstruct research into COVID’s origins, colluding with the president’s science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier and Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar, to proactively undermine consideration of the evidence that directly tied their global research initiatives to the lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, all of their efforts have been focused on preventing disclosure of embarrassing connections — not preventing another novel pathogen from sparking a global pandemic; to prevent future scrutiny, not future tragedy.
Scientists, if you’re struggling to understand the distinction between degrees of commitment to truth, I offer the example of Thích Quảng Đức, pictured here protesting the corrupt South Vietnam regime in a prologue to the Vietnam War:
Photo by Keystone/Getty Images
You see, the message for scientists who believe that a threat is existential is that words gain true meaning when they are supported by the actions and sacrifices of the speaker. What message are we supposed to derive from the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d recommend pausing for reflection — on the image above, specifically — because what the world is beginning to see is that the scientific establishment made a mockery of the trust it had been given. The world’s leading experts in virology and public health called attention to a threat by setting the world on fire, rather than themselves — and then blaming us for being too simple to believe their noble lie.
Priorities
The baseline assumption of the public at large has been that Dr. Fauci has earned the benefit of the doubt thanks to his five decades of public service and consistency in defending establishment science — the admiration of which has risen nearly to cult worship in recent decades. The cognitive dissonance between appearance and reality has created a situation where trust in “Science” has reached its sacred peak at the exact moment when such trust is least deserved.
At the center of this incestuous arrogance is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recipient of unquestioned adulation by those in the political sphere who have spent more than a century arguing that a Platonic “philosopher-king” ideal must be forced upon intellectually vacuous masses who, left to their own devices, would inevitably self-immolate.
Scientists reached new heights in the ivory tower when they warned us that man’s evil nature had left previous generations protected only by the horrific death equation of Mutually Assured Destruction.Setting aside the obvious complicity of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons, trusting science over many decades has simply led to a new formulation of that Faustian bargain — Mutually Assured Corruption.
A study in scarlet
Before heading down the long and winding road, it’s important to explain what zoonosis is and why Fauci’s denial of basic facts simply kicks the accountability can down the road. Should we really be surprised that Dr. Fauci is “confused” by the definition of “gain of function”? After all, not that long ago, he also ridiculed the idea that the virus could have come from a lab before finally admitting that it was a statistical possibility.
Zoonosis in the context of viral emergence doesn’t mean a virus originally sprang from nature — all viruses do. It means that the jump from animals to humans happened in the wild, as the result of a fortuitous combination of mutations that allow a virus to survive the switch. If human intervention artificially encouraged the process of adaptation by experimentation, or simply by virtue of bringing a virus to a lab and increasing the odds of such exposure, then the origin of a viral pandemic is a lab.
What’s sickening about his tortured twisting of language is that Fauci knows this better than almost anyone; thus his lies aren’t born of ignorance. What he’s done is use his scientific gravitas to pretend that observers’ understanding of literal definitions is flawed because we are too ignorant to appreciate the complexity of the issues. The truth, however, is that our generation’s most prominent infectious disease expert is gaslighting the citizens of the country he swore an oath to protect (one could also use the term epistemic injustice).
*****
We begin this story on Jan. 31, 2020, on the eve of a four-day stretch that seemingly made true believers out of serious skeptics:
The brief exchange above was a precursor to a conference call the next day, Feb. 1, 2020, organized by Jeremy Farrar and Dr. Fauci for the explicit purpose of addressing the swirling rumors that had emerged following the publication of an Indian pre-print that alleged the discovery of inserts identical to sequence segments within the HIV genome.
As far as sparking the intense reaction, the proof is in the pudding — between the various collections of FOIA emails, the Indian paper and Zero Hedge commentary are explicitly mentioned. The purpose of this meeting was to address several aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that pointed toward an artificial origin, by means of generating adaptive changes through passaging and/or direct manipulation of the genome. Immediately afterward, Baric’s 2015 paper was investigated and shared among Fauci, his assistant Hugh Auchincloss, and others.
There’s no reason to discuss the meeting’s purpose as a hypothetical — the Indian paper proposed a possible method of tweaking, and the Sirotkins’ paper and Adrian Bond’s arguments, as later magnified via Zero Hedge, discussed the general outline of how the WIV would have approached it, based on published experiments. The assembled experts on the conference call knew this, and they also knew — by Feb. 1, 2020 anyway — that Baric’s chimaera and the methods within that paper needed to be compared and considered to determine what to do next. I took it as quite likely that the reference to “backbone” directly stems from that paper.
In retrospect, it makes sense for there to be questions about the love child from that 2015 experiment, because the full sequence wasn’t added to the article’s supplementary files until May 22, 2020 — three months after that conference call. Given that the experiments immediately triggered renewed debate about gain-of-function research, less than a year after the GOF ban began, pretending that repeated corrections (in this case, relatively minor sequence segments) are acceptable for the world’s leading coronavirologist publishing a landmark paper in the world’s most prestigious journal is stupid.
Also completely obscured is the fact that at least one, and very likely all, of the people on the conference call were aware of the existence of the FCS (furin cleavage site), since Bill Gallaher had pointed it out on Jan. 29, 2020, and Robert Garry reiterated it (just a day before the conference call): see Analysis of Wuhan Coronavirus: Deja Vu – SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus / nCoV-2019 Evolutionary History – Virological. There is some confusion as to whether or not Garry actually made it onto the call, given a comment just prior, but further emails show that Garry’s input nonetheless was received by Feb. 2, 2020.
Feb. 2 was also the day that Marion Koopmans mentioned a “backbone” and an “insert.”
Thus, just like Zheng-Li Shi, the Proximals (the five editors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,”plus their running mates in the virological community) already knew about the existence of the FCS, certainly by the end of the conference call. If not, then they lied later about “nothing emerging to change their mind about the possibility of engineering.” Then, they said nothing for two weeks and let Etienne Decroly and Co. break the news. That’s pretty s**tty, since the first notions of asymptomatic spread were also arising, and the implications for many scientific disciplines, diplomatic interactions, and public health interventions are profound.
It’s even worse when you consider that 18 months later, they still can’t explain it — the Proximals refuse to respond to the fact that the FCS doesn’t exist within the sarbecovirus sub-genus that SARS-CoV-2 falls under. This is a problem, because members of the sub-genus are too distinct to recombine with the varieties of SARS-like viruses from other branches that do contain the FCS.
In sum, having gone through now 100,000 pages of FOIA emails and all 600-plus articles on my origin-only reference list, I’d be comfortable testifying that:
The Proximals were gathered by Farrar and Fauci explicitly to compare emerging arguments with what was known of Baric’s work, the spectrum of experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Whatever specifics they covered that were pulled from the Indian paper and Zero Hedge included elements from Baric’s experiments with SHC014.
They were nervous about the claims within the Indian paper (even if not tied to HIV per se), even though it had already been pulled — it struck a nerve.
They were concerned that unrestrained interest would lead back to them directly.
They were concerned about transgenic mice (header for one discussion), the ZH article, the Indian retraction, a backbone, an insert, Baric/Shi’s SHC014 love child, and preventing further inquiries into all of them.
They almost certainly also knew about the FCS on Feb. 2, 2020, but Garry might never have made it to the conference call, per the emails, so it’s possible that (if no one saw the Virological.com posting) this news had to wait until Feb. 3, 2020, when the Proximals were summoned again.
Based on continuing conversations, the decision to censor might not have been formally made until Feb. 3, 2020.
Public alarm? No, that’s not the emotion they’re afraid of.
Why? Because the part that everyone is mostly missing is the far more important aspect of the Baric emails — one that got lost amid their 83,000 pages. The big news last fall was that Peter Daszak, et al., conspired to shape the narrative. Three months later, I found and pointed out that the biggest nugget had been missed. Sadly, it mostly stayed that way even after the Fauci emails, despite my efforts.
The Proximals’ Feb. 4, 2020, collusion efforts were spawned by the Feb. 3 OSTP meeting, of which the stated purpose was to combat “misinformation.” There were obviously still concerns among the Feb. 4 crowd, but they intentionally suppressed them for the OSTP letter. This wasn’t their own secret plan — Kelvin Droegemeier, the recipient of said letter, was a speaker at the meeting on Feb. 3, so they weren’t obfuscating for him or Fauci or the NASEM presidents in whose name the letter was being written.
That was a quick turnaround — this letter was emailed the morning of Feb. 3, 2020, and the meeting it called for took place that afternoon:
Note: NIAID Director Dr. Fauci coordinated this meeting with Kelvin Droegemeier, the presidential science adviser, and included WMD/PPP expert Chris Hassell and the National Academies’ policy director, Alexander Pope.
The meeting’s purpose:
In response to a request from OSTP, the NASEM will examine information and identify data requirements that would help determine the origins of 2019-nCoV, specifically from an evolutionary/structural biology standpoint. NASEM will also consider whether this should include more temporally and geographically diverse clinical isolates, sequences, etc. Although a widely-disputed paper posted on a pre-print server last week has since been withdrawn, the response to that paper highlights the need to determine these information needs as quickly as possible. As part of a broader deliberative process, this review will help prepare for future events by establishing a process for quickly assembling subject matter experts for evaluation of other potentially threatening organisms.
The outcome: This group slapped the table on what the narrative was going to be — not what the science indicated. They hid their conflicts of interest from the NSTC and the president; most still continue to fight tooth and nail to suppress that information. This esteemed group of virologists expended more effort and publications in advancing their cover-up than leading the charge against the exploding pandemic, until at least the summer of 2020.
The 2/1 attendees included:
The world’s largest public (Fauci) and private (Farrar) grant money distributors, who organized the call; Farrar is also an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Seemingly no GOF opponents.
Nearly all of the major scientists with conflicts of interest related to the WIV who later published zoonosis materials.
Francis Ross but no other HHS, DHS, or other executive branch officials.
Ron Fouchier, famous for his Spanish Flu concoction.
The 2/3 meeting that decided to censor included:
The policy head of the NASEM academies that controlled fellowship conferral and published “Science.”
Heads of most of the most prestigious virology labs on the planet.
The president’s science adviser/OSTP head.
The HHS science adviser/PPP authority.
A mandate to control the narrative.
Therefore, the signal was sent to all scientists that pursuing the lab origins angle meant career death (no academy membership), no funding (via Fauci or Ross or Farrar), no publication in the big four journals during the historic pandemic (NEJM, Science, The Lancet, and Nature — by virtue of their publishing of the tone-setting pieces), no executive patronage for things like generic drugs, etc.
The disparity between peer-reviewed articles and everything else is stark:
If sorted chronologically, the impact from February to May 2020 is even clearer.
It’s disgusting, and the extension of that censorship to all Americans just ices the cake.
Edifice Wrecks
I’ve pondered the contents of the emails that were redacted before release, but I can’t imagine what could possibly be redacted that is worth protecting. The West didn’t make COVID-19, even if it taught the Chinese how to do major aspects of it. But, these people did decide to lie from the start, then continued to do so after it exploded from 40 deaths to 4 million. It means that they refuse to call a spade a spade even now, and the prospect of China getting off scot-free as a direct result is horrifying. The protection of Fauci is a midterm election decision only, and that means the goal is to drag this out until the electoral damage can be mitigated. Anything that clarifies this to the public negates being worthy of redaction.
The recent congressional appearances by Fauci, however, have shown that he is willing to drag this fight out forever in defense of his legacy, and many politicians are sympathetic to his plight. Thus, it’s clear that better questions are needed to build the proper level of awareness among the public to the full implications of Fauci’s concerted effort to prevent that same public discourse he claimed to support in 2012. Below are the questions I would lead with, were I appearing at his future hearings.
10 questions for Fauci
1) Where did the buck stop?In 2014, who served as the final approval authority for Baric’s pending research, which ultimately allowed it to be grandfathered under the impending GOF ban? Why did the experiment not get forwarded to Chris Hassell’s committee for review?
Why did no one notice that the experiment included the use of humanized mice to increase human pathogenicity, which David Relman had asked Ralph Baric about directly in November 2014, when Baric denied any current research interest in that area?
Coincidentally, it was also the research that Zheng-Li Shi was in North Carolina working with Baric on, then immediately returned to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and continued in 2016.
2) Holding Dr. Fauci to his word — In 2012, Dr. Fauci called for an open, public debate on the GOF issue, saying that scientists should justify their research to the broader public any time the risks of such research carried a non-negligible probability of an accident that could affect them. Why then, in 2017, did the NIH rescind the GOF pause — without first engaging the public or its constitutionally elected president/representatives?
3) Secrecy — What did Peter Daszak tell Erik Stemmy and Alan Embry “off the record” on Jan. 8, 2020? When did they pass on the contents of that discussion to Dr. Fauci?
4) Redactions — When did you first learn of the existence of the furin cleavage site within the genome of SARS-CoV-2? What were the insert and backbone referred to by Marion Koopmans? Was the insert the FCS? Why were emails with the topic heading “humanized mice” redacted?
Let me “recombine” these queries into a single thematic question: Why did the world’s leading virologists/microbiologists and top American/U.K. officials refrain from releasing their knowledge of the existence of the FCS when they first learned of it? The FCS is so good at increasing pathogenicity that it’s the specific insertion typically added by labs worldwide for such experiments. In fact, much has been made of the omission of that specific segment of the genome in the WIV’s landmark paper introducing the likely connection between SARS-CoV-2 and its purported predecessor RaTG13.
What possible justification could there have been to ignore the FCS, other than limit discussion during the early phase of their censorship? And what effect might that have had on our doctors’ ability to characterize the virus?
5) Silence — Why did Victor Dzau and the other two academy presidents of NASEM ultimately remove the forceful pro-zoonotic statements inserted by Daszak et al. from the final version of their public letter to the OSTP? What reservations justified that decision, and why did they not speak out when censorship prevented the doubts of others from being published?
6) Selective Inclusion — Why was Robert Kadlec, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, not included in any correspondence with Jeremy Farrar or your gathered audience of world-renowned virologists? His deputy is the chair of the PPP oversight panel and he is an expert on C-WMD and biological weapons. The existence of any doubt in the possibility of a zoonotic source (doubts which you harbored) should’ve made his inclusion mandatory.
Instead, you shaped the information provided to those outside the scientific community.
7) Why were you and Francis Collins the only U.S. officials involved in the Feb. 1, 2020, conference call?
8) Subversion — Did you, Collins, or Droegemeier alert Matt Pottinger, Robert Redfield, President Donald Trump, or any member of the National Security Council to the substance of the Feb. 1, 2020, conference call, or the decision-making over the next three days that led to an unannounced censorship of non-natural origin hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2? Why not?
9) Diverging Narratives — Jeremy Farrar’s experts decided on natural origins of COVID-19 on March 17, 2020? So, Fauci and the presidential science adviser lied to us and President Trump in the OSTP letter on Feb. 7, 2020? And in “Proximal,” on Feb. 16, 2020, written by your future dream team? What was the basis of the Feb. 4, 2020, decision to reject a lab-leak origin and produce “Proximal Origin” — if no additional evidence was added to the Feb. 16 version prior to its March 17, 2020, online appearance in Nature?
Both Fauci and Farrar explained the general makeup and purpose of a “group of experts”:
By this point on Feb. 13, 2020, 10 days had passed since the “Proximals” and Fauci had held a second conclave, this time with the OSTP director, that was followed directly by a flurry of peer-reviewed letter, articles, and “collaboration” (collusion) to smother the scientific community with pro-zoonotic propaganda.
10) Prove It — Which evidence, specifically, led to the Proximals’ reversal from Feb. 1, 2020, to Feb. 4, 2020? The arguments made in the following weeks were pathetically unsubstantiated. If stronger evidence exists, why wouldn’t it have been shown?
The answer, of course, is that the driving force behind the shift had nothing to do with the quality or quantity of the supporting evidence.
Paved by good intentions
The only proper action for Dr. Fauci to take at this point is to resign immediately and apologize for prioritizing the suppression of embarrassing and extensive conflicts of interest, double standards, and political decisions masked as sound policy. Ideally, such a statement would include a call for the retraction of “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” one of the most-read (and potentially most impactful) pieces of scientific propaganda published in at least a generation. Each of its five authors intentionally framed the COVID origin debate around “evidence” and “facts” that they couldn’t prove and a finality of their conclusions that the known facts couldn’t justify.
These actions are independent of the ultimate answer to the origin question, because the failures of leadership I’ve described are ethically and morally indefensible, regardless of China’s guilt or innocence in the sparking of the pandemic. Any remaining shreds of credibility left in the public’s perception of scientists must be salvaged by new leaders who are willing to do what needs to be done to clean the Augean Stables.
Sufficient evidence already exists for Congress to do the right thing moving forward. Given the enormity of the failures — and of the efforts to hide, censor, and destroy the credibility of anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, vaccines, masks, generic drugs, mRNA efficacy versus risks, and the curtailment of numerous constitutional/human rights in the last 18 months — it will take historic leadership to honestly converse with a righteously indignant citizenry (in the U.S. and everywhere else). We must accept that our current representatives have proven manifestly unqualified to assume such leadership — in the last six months, censorship has been expanding, not receding.
The COVID-19 pandemic has manifestly proven that there is no lie so “noble” that it overrides the rights and wisdom of a free and informed public. That doesn’t mean that the public will inherently do better.
It’s just acknowledging the inescapable conclusion — that we can’t possibly do worse.
*****
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article details current historical research into COVID-19’s origins as part of the D.R.A.S.T.I.C. team of scientists, journalists, and researchers.
All references for this and other articles are compiled under my research project The Arc of Inquiry Bends Towards Enlightenment. The files include my statistical analysis of the impact of censorship on the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
More than 100,000 pages of FOIA documents referred to here have been condensed into 173 pages of the most relevant selections in my appendix Prometheus Shrugged. It was here, last February, that the role of Dr. Fauci in ongoing academic censorship of COVID’s origin was first exposed. A chronological narrative of the events described throughout my research will included in a forthcoming volume of D.R.A.S.T.I.C.’s set of published collections of evidence.
Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 that they required hospitalization, according to a damning American intelligence report.
The intelligence, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, adds weight to the Wuhan lab leak theory, which suggests the COVID-19 pandemic originated inside China’s only Biosafety level-4 laboratory.
The intelligence is particularly significant because it suggests COVID-19 was spreading in China much earlier than China has admitted. China’s communist government traced patient-zero to a man who became sick on Dec. 8. But if researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized one month prior, the virus was likely spreading even earlier than previously believed.
One official familiar with the intelligence described it as “of exquisite quality.”
“The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” the official told the Journal.
Another official told the Journal that while the intelligence was potentially significant, it needed further corroboration to be definitive. The intelligence corroborates a fact sheet released by the State Department in the final days of the Trump administration, which cited classified intelligence and suggested COVID-19 may have escaped from the Wuhan lab via infected researchers. That report said, “U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and seasonal illnesses.”
China’s Foreign Ministry bucked the intelligence, and continued to suggest COVID-19 originated in the United States. “The U.S. continues to hype the lab leak theory,” the foreign ministry told the Journal. “Is it actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?” China’s communist government has infamously refused transparency with investigations surrounding the pandemic’s origins.
“The Wuhan Institute hasn’t shared raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive work with coronaviruses in bats, which many consider the most likely source of the virus,” the Journal noted.
China has pointed to wet markets in Wuhan as the source of the pandemic. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council reiterated concerns about the pandemic’s origins, but declined to comment further.
“We continue to have serious questions about the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, including its origins within the People’s Republic of China,” the spokeswoman said. “We’re not going to make pronouncements that prejudge an ongoing WHO study into the source of SARS-CoV-2. As a matter of policy we never comment on intelligence issues.”
The Wuhan lab leak theory has been widely denounced as a conspiracy theory despite a lack of evidence disproving the possibility. In fact, aside from equally plausible origination theories, only the World Health Organization has said it was “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 came from the laboratory. But their conclusion came after a rushed investigation in which access to critical data was tightly controlled by Chinese authorities.
Indeed, 18 high-profile scientists published a letter this month calling for more investigations into the lab leak theory, saying, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The group even responded to the WHO’s conclusion, which they rebuked because, as they explained, the WHO did not give the Wuhan lab leak theory “balanced consideration,” writing, “Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, also said this month that he is no longer convinced COVID-19 originated naturally.
President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Tuesday confirmed what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him two months ago about mask-wearing being unnecessary for Americans vaccinated against COVID-19.
Fauci appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new mask recommendations, reiterating that the CDC says it’s safe for vaccinated people to stop wearing face coverings. He explained that the science has “evolved” over the last few weeks to show that vaccinated people are protected from infection and that the risk of them spreading the virus to someone else is “extremely low, very very low.” When asked by host George Stephanopoulos how his personal mask-wearing habits have changed, Fauci responded that he feels more comfortable being seen in public indoors without a mask. Though he was vaccinated in December, Fauci said he had continued to wear a mask to avoid sending “mixed signals” to the American people by not wearing a mask.
“But being a fully vaccinated person the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low. And that’s the reason why in indoor settings now I feel comfortable about not wearing a mask because I’m fully vaccinated.”
Exactly two months ago, on March 18, Fauci told a different story to Sen. Paul during a hearing on the pandemic response. Paul had grilled Fauci on the absence of scientific evidence to suggest that vaccinated Americans needed to wear masks.
“You’re telling everybody to wear a mask whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine, what I’m saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity,” Paul said. “What studies do you have that people who have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?”
“If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?” he pressed.
At the time, Fauci told Paul “I totally disagree with you” and insisted that mask-wearing is not theater because of the risk that vaccines did not protect against COVID-19 variants. Now, Fauci admits that he continued to wear a mask indoors even though he was vaccinated and knew he didn’t need to because he didn’t want to send “mixed signals” to the American people, which appears to be the very definition of “theater.”
Sen. Paul has not yet commented publicly on Fauci’s remarks but he did share the following social media post from the Republican Party of Kentucky: “Two months TO THE DAY after Dr. @RandPaul said Dr. Fauci was performing ‘theater’ and wearing two masks ‘for show’ despite being vaccinated, Dr. Fauci finally admits it was, indeed, for show.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Elementary school children boarding school bus, Mount Shasta, California
Most US schools have been closed since March due to the Wuhan Coronavirus. Democrats want to keep the schools closed. They say its because of coronavirus. But it’s only because of politics.
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So far this year, via the CDC— since February, there have been 226 deaths of children and young adults under age 24 in the United States caused by coronavirus or possibly linked to coronavirus.
The last full flu season from 2018-2019, via the CDC, saw 477 deaths of children and young adults under age 17 in the United States from the seasonal flu.
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That means nearly twice as many children died from the seasonal flu last year as from the China Coronavirus this year.
The media won’t tell you this. The COVID-19 is LESS DANGEROUS to children than a typical influenza!
And after four months of the pandemic we now know that children are more likely to die from the flu than from the coronavirus!
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Andrew Bostom posted this on Twitter.
And yet CDC officials are still scaring Americans over the reopening of schools this fall!
We need better medical officials.
Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Dr. Silverman says 10% of the US population is already infected with the virus.
A second study by Fivetran estimates that from March 1 and April 4th 12 million Americans were infected with the coronavirus.
Andrew Bostom@andrewbostom
“Between Mar 1 & April 4, there were 311,000 confirmed cases of COVID19 in U.S. We est an additional 1.3 million COVID19 pts visited their docs during this time period but were not able to get tested, & additional 10.7 million people were infected” https://fivetran.com/blog/covid-19-count …
How many Americans have COVID-19?
Fivetran uses data and BigQuery ML to estimate hidden COVID-19 cases.
A third study finds that 25% of residents at homeless shelters tested positive for the virus. And 66% of those residents tested at San Francisco homeless facilities tested positive for the coronavirus!
If 33 million Americans are already infected with the coronavirus that means the US mortality rated (45,000/44,000,000) is 0.14%. This is the same number you would expect from a seasonal flu.
It makes no sense to destroy an entire economy based on these numbers. Fire Fauci.
Come again?
Back in 2017 at forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University Dr. Fauci made an interesting statement. Fauci told the audience the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
That was quite a prediction considering it was back in 2017!
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Family
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Military
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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