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BuckyB93
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#621

I wouldn't label the folks that bought into the chaos as liars. They were lied to and carried the torch. I still think they are smart folks but for some reason they didn't toss out the penalty flag or challenge the mainstream mentality. Maybe they were sucked into the BS that we were being fed from the media and the corrupt government. Maybe their livelihood was at stake to take the bait {shrug}.

There was plenty of signs and fact that the COVID "facts" were actually a lie that was fertilized by the media, the government, big pharmacy, and so on. Lots of coverup that has been swept under the carpet. Folks would claim that Fauci was a great Dr but in reality, hes a politician - fact not opinion.

Vaccines have been redefined as a result of this stupid $hit - fact, not opinion. The COVID SHOT is not a vaccine. It is a research drug that doesn't work - fact, not opinion.
The death toll is truly not as large as they said - fact not opinion.

Where are all those death beds, ships, frozen trailer trucks and stuff that were claimed to be needed to keep humans alive and to deal with the dead? Total scam.

Sadly none of the folks that pushed the COVID vaccine will be held accountable.

On another note: If the COVID shot was so successful (cough) and was and so great (double cough), we are now in 2024... why don't we have any other approved mRNA drugs? Surely the pharmacies must have made some ground in the past 5 yrs or so

:-k

Edited by user 2 years ago | Reason: Not specified

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

2 years ago

#622

BuckyB93 wrote:

When does critical thinking kick in and when do you realize the "emperor" wears no clothes? I guess...some will be forever told what to believe.

That's lying in my book Bucky. Even after facing contradictory evidence they STILL clung to the Fauci bull****. There's STILL people wearing masks walking around because of what they did. Are they all here? No! The ones that were...most of them skeedaddled like the feather plucked chickens they are. See ya, would NEVER wanna be ya...Lights are still on!

That's the only point of your post I disagreed with. They knew they were wrong. Couldn't admit it. Even if they kept up the charade, it was proven in front of their faces. I suppose they were just too high strung and I'm afraid the strain was more than they could bear. What with all the "Follow the Science" and "LOL" posts...they could still be chasing them. Farewell, sayonara suckers.

Edited by user 2 years ago | Reason: Not specified

JGKAMIN
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#623

The death toll is truly not as large as they said - fact not opinion.
:-k

BuckyB93 wrote:

Odd, we used to have the death ticker running on every channel, then all of a sudden it stopped being broadcast to us right after the last election. 🤦

MACS
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#624

Wow...

Dexamethasone, eh?

BuckyB93
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#625

I remember reading somewhere that if there was a currently accepted and approved treatment/drug that is effective then the fast tracking and allowing emergency use for a newly concocted treatment/drug would be revoked. In other words the FDA can't authorize shortcuts to get it new treatment released if there is already something out there that is safe and effective.

You think the pharma groups, the FDA, the CDC and so on wanted that to happen? Nope. Too much money on the line. Too much ego on the line. Too much politics on the line. Let's push this experimental drug through and do everything we can to scare everyone to take it. If we can't scare them then let's do everything we can to force everyone to take it using OSHA as our vehicle of control - they almost achieved that but the Supreme Court stopped that bull$hit.

Then we can raise our hand in victory, pat ourselves on the back, and fill up the money vaults. Pssst... by the way, we can and have pushed though legislation that says we cannot be held liable if there are any negative effects so we can write our own check and won't be punished if any consequences pop up.

Edited by user 2 years ago | Reason: Not specified

MACS
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#626

And folks wonder why I do not trust the government AT ALL for any bit of information... and trust the media even less.

MACS
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#627

Another Doctor's opinion...

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

2 years ago

#628

Remember when the so called "experts" talked over and down to anyone and everyone with their patented bulletproof line "Follow The Science"? Like they were to be trusted because they "were in charge"...yeah, about that...

Scientists Backtrack, Admit Proposed Virus Experiments Could Have Been Done In China

Scientists with close ties to China and the U.S. government is now saying that risky experiments he proposed—which some experts believe could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2—may have been done, deviating from earlier statements.

Another scientist involved in the proposal also says he doesn’t know if the work was done.

“To the very best of my knowledge ... the work hasn’t been done,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told a congressional panel this week.

Mr. Daszak, however, admitted that he doesn’t know whether scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China have done the proposed experiments.

“Do you know if the WIV started this work?” he was asked during a U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in Washington.

“No,” Mr. Daszak replied.

“Then you can’t say that the work was not done,” Mitch Benzine, the staff director for the panel, said.

“There is no evidence of the work being done. There is no evidence that WIV started it,” Mr. Daszak said.

Has he ever asked Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at the WIV, whether she carried out the proposal?

“No,” Mr. Daszak acknowledged.

The proposal in question, dubbed Project DEFUSE, was submitted in 2018 to the U.S. government as EcoHealth and its partners, including WIV, sought to take viruses from bats, reverse engineer them, and add features. Some outside scientists say the proposed work could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) declined to fund the proposal, expressing concerns that adding features to coronaviruses could create a dangerous virus.

After the proposal was leaked to the public in 2021, Mr. Daszak and EcoHealth have said definitively that the proposed experiments never took place.

“The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple,” Mr. Daszak told The Intercept in 2022.

“The proposed research was never done,” EcoHealth added in a recent statement.

Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina virologist who was also listed in the DEFUSE proposal, also said in newly disclosed testimony that he did not know whether the proposed experiments were conducted.

“Certainly not by my group,” Mr. Baric told the subcommittee. “I don’t know what China did.”

Mr. Baric and Ms. Shi have created chimeras, or combination viruses, among other work together.

“There was no evidence that they were doing this kind of work,” Mr. Baric said. “Well, there was evidence that they were building chimeras using WIV1 as a backbone, so they were doing some discovery work about the functions of spike genes of zoonotic strains that they discovered later on, but I don’t know if they did any of the engineering or anything.”

WIV1 is a bat coronavirus that was found in China.

Mr. Baric also claimed he had forgotten about DEFUSE so he didn’t discuss it while meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. government official, on Feb. 12, 2020.

Mr. Daszak said Wednesday that DARPA later returned to EcoHealth “to try and fund portions” of DEFUSE, but no lawmakers pressed him on that disclosure.

‘They’ve Always Been Truthful’

EcoHealth separately for years funneled grant money from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Wuhan researchers, including money that funded experiments that increased the virulence of a bat coronavirus.

Asked how his group verified information about those experiments, Mr. Daszak acknowledged it relied on statements from the WIV. “I have no other way to verify,” he said.

The scientists in Wuhan “have always been honest with us,” he added later. “They’ve always been truthful. There’s never any untoward, underhand things going on. I have no reason to think that they were under pressure to lie. There’s no indication of that.”

After the pandemic started, WIV researchers refused to hand over laboratory notebooks and other files to EcoHealth after the U.S. government asked for the records, resulting in the government debarring WIV from receiving U.S. grant money.

“Nearly two years have passed since the NIH first requested that WIV provide the requested information and materials, and yet WIV has still failed to do so,” a debarment official wrote to Ms. Shi.

In comments on a draft of the DEFUSE proposal, Mr. Daszak said that some of the work would be done at the Wuhan lab.

“If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Mr. Daszak wrote in one comment. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well.”

Mr. Daszak told Mr. Baric in a May 27, 2021, email released by the subcommittee that Ms. Zhengli said culturing of animal viruses was being done under biosafety level two conditions, or one level below that applied in many other countries.

“We checked with Zhengli, who let us know that she used ‘BSL-2 with negative pressure and appropriate PPE.’ I also know that they are stricter now on SADS-CoV... ever since you showed it was able to infect human airway epithelial cells,” he wrote.

Mr. Baric responded by saying Mr. Daszak was “being told a bunch of [expletive].”

“BSL-2 w[ith] negative pressure, give me a break,” he wrote, adding later, “You believe this was appropriate containment, if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of [expletive].”

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/scientists-backtrack-admit-proposed-virus-experiments-could-have-been-done-china

I just want to know when someone is going to swing by their neck for committing Crimes Against Humanity because so far, they're all getting away with this crime.

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

2 years ago

#629

Follow the Science all the way to the gallows!!!

EcoHealth Alliance Grants Suspended and Formal Debarment Procedures Begun

Many years too late, but better late than never.

The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting off all funds and initiating procedures to ban the EcoHealth Alliance from getting federal money for at least three years. However, HHS may extend that period based on the seriousness of the violations.

The violations are very serious.

About damn time. Now, prosecute him. Toss him in jail and throw away the key. Tar and feather him. Put him in the stocks.

It is impossible to overstate how important this move is. It is a formal acknowledgment by The Department of Health and Human Services that the EcoHealth Alliance--which has been funding gain-of-function research that violates American law and almost certainly created the COVID-19 virus--is an outlaw entity with which the US government should have nothing to do.

Peter Daszak, its CEO, is one of Tony Fauci's best friends. He conspired to funnel money to Dazsek and has repeatedly lied about whether the organization engaged in prohibited activity. HHS has not directly implicated Fauci, but their conclusion that EcoHealth violated federal rules makes him a perjurer, having lied to Congress multiple times.

As if we didn't already know that.

The suspension and debarment stem from the investigation of the House's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The hearing with Daszak was fascinating because we witness a true sociopathic liar doing what he does best. A man who killed millions and can defend his record proudly is something you rarely see.
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I hope to never see it again.

"EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak should never again receive a single penny from the U.S. taxpayer. Only two weeks after the Select Subcommittee released an extensive report detailing EcoHealth's wrongdoing and recommending the formal debarment of EcoHealth and its president, HHS has begun efforts to cut off all U.S. funding to this corrupt organization. EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH. These actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action. EcoHealth's immediate funding suspension and future debarment is not only a victory for the U.S. taxpayer, but also for American

national security and the safety of citizens worldwide. "The Select Subcommittee's investigation into EcoHealth and the origins of COVID- 19 is far from over. Dr. Daszak and his team are still required to produce all outstanding documents and answer the Select Subcommittee's questions, specifically related to Dr. Daszak's potential dishonesty under oath. We will hold EcoHealth accountable for any waste, fraud, and abuse and are committed to uncovering any illegal activity, including lying to Congress, NIH, or the Inspector General," said Chairman Wenstrup.

All the worst actors during the pandemic have been defending Dazsak and the EcoHealth Alliance, including working behind the scenes to hide information from Congress and muddy the waters. Attacking Dazsak was equivalent to attacking Science™ itself.

These men too should be tarred and feathered.

Dazsak initiated the DEFUSE grant, which proposed creating a coronavirus that almost precisely matches the COVID-19 virus that caused the pandemic. Scientists involved in the proposal have testified that they don't even remember the project despite the virus erupting slightly more than a year after the proposal.

They are liars too.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was a prime recipient of EcoHealth Alliance funds. It is also the institution that Dazsak slated to create his frankenvirus.

As I have argued many times, the best and almost only thing Republicans in Congress can accomplish in this session is pushing forward the oversight investigations. Their slim majority makes passing legislation nearly impossible, but the subpoena power gives them enormous leverage to pry information out of reluctant agencies and organizations.
Advertisement

It's too early to know how far-reaching the results will be; stopping the flow of funds is a big step but only a first step in creating accountability.

A Republican president, House, and Senate will be necessary to press forward, and a Republican Attorney General can start putting the malefactors in jail for violating laws and committing perjury.

Let's get it done!

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/05/15/breaking-ecohealth-alliance-grants-suspended-and-formal-debarment-procedures-begun-n3788438

jeebling
Herf-A-Holic

2 years ago

#630

Lying under oath should be a punishable offense. They used to call it perjury. Now they call it Democrat protected testimony.

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

2 years ago

#631

Adviser to Fauci bragged about helping him evade FOIA, ‘he is too smart’ to get caught

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published evidence ahead of a hearing that explains the senior scientific adviser to then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci actually bragged about helping Fauci evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The adviser, David Morens, admitted in his own communications to intentionally evading FOIA by using a Fauci’s private Gmail address or just handing him documents in person, according to the newly disclosed emails.

The 35-page report on Morens includes previously unreleased emails including:

An April 21, 2021 email shows Morens contacted EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whom Morens has described as his “best friend” and a U.S. taxpayer conduit for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as Boston University and New England Biolabs researchers.

The subject line references “CoV research in China, GoF, etc.,” referring to EcoHealth-facilitated coronavirus research at WIV that could make a virus more transmissible or dangerous. The National Institutes of Health recently admitted it funded gain-of-function research under that definition but not a stricter regulatory definition.

“PS, i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs,” Morens wrote. “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

A May 13, 2021 email to the same recipients referred to “our ‘secret’ back channel” by which Morens connected Fauci to a journalist named “Arthur,” apparently to discuss the feds’ preferred narrative that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally rather than via lab leak. The email cited an article on the message board Virological.

Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at BU, emailed Daszak Oct. 25, 2021 to relay a phone conversation with “David,” who is “concerned about the privacy of text” and email sent and received on his “government phone” because they “could be FOIA’able.”

“Tony has told him not to be in touch with you and EHA for the time being,” Keusch wrote. Morens relayed that Daszak should get his story straight on EcoHealth’s claim that NIH locked it out of the system when it tried to file its year-five progress report that disclosed an arguable gain-of-function experiment.

Earlier in the day, Morens told Daszak “i will be meeting with Tony about this later on.” The subject line of the thread was “Draft response to Michael Lauer,” deputy director for extramural research at NIH.

Morens also told Daszak that Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins are “trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations,” apparently meaning against allegations that U.S. tax dollars passed through EcoHealth funded research that may have led to SARS-CoV-2’s emergence.

The subcommittee said it found emails that revealed “likely illegal” practices, including an April 2020 email in which Morens shared a “new NIAID implementation plan” with Daszak and an August 2020 email in which Daszak mentioned a “kick-back” to Morens after NIH awarded $7.5 million to EcoHealth.

https://saraacarter.com/adviser-to-fauci-bragged-about-helping-him-evade-foia-he-is-too-smart-to-get-caught/

More lies from The Science.

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

a year ago

#632

The Contrarians Were Right About Covid Hysteria

And the fearmongers did irreparable damage.

If you head over to “The Federalist” entry on Wikipedia, you will find, among other smears of our little operation, a “COVID-19 pandemic misinformation” section. It’s a sad reminder of how authoritarians misuse the idea of “misinformation” to quash debate and control the conversation.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic,” Wikipedia contends, “The Federalist published many pieces that contained false information, pseudoscience, and contradictions or misrepresentations of the recommendations of public health authorities.” According to Media Matters for America,” the entry goes on, “The Federalist published articles calling on the government to quickly end social distancing directions, and to open businesses again.”

To begin with, even if Federalist writers had turned out to be completely wrong about lockdowns and social distancing, calculating the tradeoffs of public policy and forming opinions that conflict with public-health officials isn’t any kind of “misinformation.” It’s the way we debate in an open society.

Public-health officials are preternaturally risk averse. They see the world through the prism of safety, often ignoring— among many other factors—personal freedoms, economic consequences, and social disruptions. Safetyism can lead to some of the worst infringements of individual rights. That is why we don’t live in a public-health dictatorship.

Or rather, why we didn’t until Covid.

The thing is, though, most of the time our writers weren’t wrong. It is now indisputable that shutdowns inflicted deep harm on children and destabilized the economy. It is also highly unlikely that, after it was clear Covid variants would continue to spread, keeping businesses closed for months saved lives.

And “social distancing” rules were definitely bunk. Fauci admitted as much in a January interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” he explained.

“It sort of just appeared” doesn’t sound like the vigorous inquiry we were promised by the self-ordained pontiff of “science.” Yet anyone who dared to tread within, say, five feet of another person was accused of being in a “death cult” and often censored on social media.

One of the problems was that Fauci could never admit to being unsure of anything. Remember when he told Americans, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” and then, months later, he wanted us wearing two of them at the same time. Yet governments almost always enacted his every suggestion.

Fauci also admitted to lying about the threshold for herd immunity because “polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine.” Worse, when three scientists — Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford — released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” questioning the efficacy of lockdowns and warning, among other things, about the damaging “physical and mental health impacts” of closing schools, Fauci colluded with others to suppress the document, plotting a “quick and devastating published takedown.”

Read the declaration. They were right. He was wrong.

In any event, one of Wikipedia’s citations allegedly proving The Federalist spread social-distancing “misinformation” was written by an academic physician from an Ivy League institution who wrestled with ways to help flatten the curve. The piece is logical and cautious. It begins like so:

COVID-19 is severe. There is no doubt about that. We are now also learning that it is not a matter of if but when many of us will get coronavirus, whether we develop symptoms or not. Our only hope is to ‘flatten the curve,’ relieve stress on the medical system, and wait for a vaccine.

That sounds exactly like the framing of public-health officials before “flatten the curve” evolved into “shutter your business and shut up.”

Another Wikipedia footnote regarding “false information” leads to a completely factual opinion piece that points out that Zeke Emanuel, then named to Joe Biden’s Covid task force, had spent years arguing that people older than 75 were a suck on our resources and the elderly should be vaccinated last. Pointing out this person’s ugly positions was well within the norms of debate.

In another instance of alleged misinformation, a Federalist founder is accused of attacking the “prominent analysis from Imperial College London.” More like infamous analysis, as the model turned out to be a dubious guesstimation. Maybe it’s Wikipedia that needs a misinformation entry?

Now, I’m not contending everything The Federalist published about Covid turned out to be correct. But the alleged misinformation articles on the site are normal pieces of contrarianism. We need more of that, not less. Recall that Facebook, pressured by the government, banned any mention of the Chinese lab-leak theory, which is now widely believed to be true.

Sure, there are limits to skepticism. Reflexive disbelief of everything is no better than the opposite. It often manifests in conspiratorial thinking. But it is clear now that no one undermined trust in our public-health institutions like those who used rickety “science” to shut down businesses, churches, schools, and speech.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/12/the-contrarians-were-right-about-covid-hysteria/

I really hope the next time this hysteria gets all whipped up people remember how hard they were duped, punished, lied to and the freedoms tossed to the side so Power could be wielded over them and hammered into them.

They won't though. Some NEVER learn.

Edited by user a year ago | Reason: Not specified

JGKAMIN
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#633

“Herd immunity”, that’s all you heard about for awhile until the numbers approached those levels and then it went away never to be discussed again. Other things that went into obscurity, probably from January 20, 2021 on were the Covid death counts that scrolled every news channel with responsibility for them going on the guy with mean tweets.

MACS
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#634

Flu cases disappeared, too... lol. Some of us were paying attention. Others got fooled and would rather remain fooled than admit they fell for the bullsheit.

And someone left the boards and won't come back because they were vehement about how much they were right and we were wrong... and they don't want to face it. They didn't know sheit.

Edited by user a year ago | Reason: Not specified

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

a year ago

#635

Wearing masks, wearing 2 masks, standing 6 ft apart, only walking one way in grocery store aisles, getting vaccinated, getting boosted, getting boosted multiple times, staying home for 14 days to flatten the curve, preached down to by talking heads and numbskulls that we don't know all the data, following the science, Constitutional rights shredded in your face. There's STILL idiots walking around wearing masks!

The Fauci Conspiracy

We told you so. There’s probably a more polite way to say that, but who cares? We are long past the time for politeness regarding the derelictions of our leadership class when it came to Covid-19. The American public has every reason to be angry. And the small, maligned group of scientists, journalists, and political figures who challenged the wisdom of America’s designated Covid experts deserves an apology.

In the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, nobody knew much about this mysterious new disease. People were scared, and they were eager to follow the advice of the public health authorities. The experts, from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) chief Anthony Fauci to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and on down to local officials, all seemed confident they knew what they were doing. And they wasted no time telling us what to do.

We all had to stay six feet apart. Better yet, we should avoid leaving the house at all. Weddings, funerals, and religious services were cancelled. Businesses closed. Schoolchildren were consigned to remote “learning.” The media celebrated an unhinged Florida lawyer who roamed beaches dressed as the grim reaper, while authorities in San Clemente, California, filled a skateboard park with sand to protect local teenagers from the dangers of fresh air. Experts showed an eerie unanimity on the scientific mysteries surrounding Covid: Where did it come from? How did it spread? What treatments might be effective against it? The only acceptable answers to those questions were the ones passed down from the World Health Organization, America’s Centers for Disease Control, and similar authorities.

In the absence of hard data, a little overreach on the part of experts might have been forgivable, at least at first. As the pandemic ground on, however, scientists started learning more about the disease, including insights that could help slow transmission and that undermined the case for rigid lockdowns. But the Covid gatekeepers mostly ignored any data that challenged their initial recommendations. They never admitted a mistake and rarely changed course on policy. And when it came to the mystery of Covid’s origin, the scientific community instantly closed ranks. The idea that a bat-related coronavirus might have emerged from a Wuhan China lab devoted to studying bat-related coronaviruses was deemed a far-out right-wing fantasy.

In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.

But not everyone joined the lockstep march on Covid. Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, along with two other public health experts, issued the Great Barrington Declaration. It sensibly argued that the social costs of extended lockdowns far exceeded their mostly hypothetical benefits. The Great Barrington argument was derided in the press and secretly censored on social media at the behest of government officials.

Similarly, at a time when the CDC and WHO both asserted the disease was transmitted primarily through “close contact,” Virginia Tech’s Lynsey Marr and several other scientists found abundant evidence that Covid was, in fact, airborne. This meant the key to saving lives was improving indoor ventilation, not displays of hygiene theater. Both health organizations largely ignored the new findings for more than a year, instead sticking to the “six-feet-apart” mantra and other dubious protocols. The astonishingly early arrival of vaccines was one of the pandemic’s key medical breakthroughs. But, as University of California, San Francisco, oncologist and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad argued, health officials confused and angered the public by exaggerating the vaccine’s benefits, ignoring its small but real risks (for young men, the danger of myocarditis arguably outweighs the vaccine’s upsides), and insisting that everyone—even children or people who’d gained immunity from previous Covid infections—keep taking booster after booster. Fauci’s vaccine mandates were a massive overreach.

And then there was the lab leak. It takes a lot to shock me, but, after following the lab-leak debate for four years, I continue to be stunned by the duplicity of Anthony Fauci and other leading health officials on this issue. I’ve written column after column about how Fauci and his nominal boss, National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, joined several key virus researchers in scrambling to distract Congress, the press, and the public from questions about their long-standing links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed, long before most American conservatives had even heard the term “lab leak,” Fauci was denouncing the idea as a nutty conspiracy theory.

Today we know there was a conspiracy. But it had nothing to do with a few dissident scientists and journalists asking questions about the origin of the virus. The conspiracy was orchestrated by Fauci and his closest aides. Thanks to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other reporting, we can now see how Fauci strong-armed his fellow scientists to embrace a false consensus on the lab leak. (According to emails later released, even some of the scientists whom Fauci pushed to write the famous 2020 “Proximal Origin” article—which claimed to disprove the lab-leak hypothesis—had doubts about their own paper’s conclusions.) Fauci and his team went on to conceal public records, bamboozle reporters, mislead Congress, and lean on social-media outlets to suppress inconvenient stories—all to cover up their possible complicity in the creation of Covid.

If not for the researchers who searched for clues, the reporters who refused to bow to the conventional wisdom, and the politicians who demanded accountability from Fauci and other officials, the scandal of Covid’s origin might be mostly forgotten by now. Instead, today we know that SARS-CoV-2 almost certainly leaked from the Wuhan lab. Is the science definitive? No. And it might never be. But we do know the U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance used NIH funding to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Then, in 2018, EcoHealth proposed another GoF project that would modify bat coronaviruses in an even riskier way. The U.S. government declined to fund that research and an EcoHealth spokesperson says the group’s involvement with the project ceased at that point. But many experts believe that program, or a similar one, continued in Wuhan under other auspices. Because less than two years later, SARS-CoV-2—which featured the exact genetic modification the U.S. scientists had proposed—began spreading through Wuhan’s civilian population. Meanwhile, years of investigation have produced no clear evidence supporting the claim that Covid spontaneously jumped from some wild animal to humans—not in the Wuhan wet market or anywhere else.

In July 2021, when the debate over a possible lab leak was at its most intense, NIAID official Dr. David Morens—an adviser to Fauci for a quarter of a century—wrote a weirdly candid email to a Bloomberg reporter. Morens explained that “my boss tony” had authorized him to speak to reporters about the Covid-origin question, but that Fauci himself didn’t want to be quoted. “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” Morens wrote. We now can see that Tony had been good at keeping his fingerprints off awkward stories, at least for a while. It took years before the public learned about Fauci’s off-screen role in soliciting the misleading “Proximal Origin” paper in early 2020, in working to discredit the Great Barrington authors, and in lobbying U.S. intelligence agencies to downplay lab-leak evidence.

Fauci’s empire of misdirection eventually began to collapse from within. His longtime deputy Morens was a particularly weak link. This spring, the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has held hearings and released troves of incriminating documents. Some of the most damning revelations come from emails written by the hapless Dr. Morens. For years, Fauci and his NIAID team had been accustomed to operating with little public or government oversight. But then came Covid and with it nosy journalists filing FOIA requests right and left. Morens tried to shelter his boss, advising his contacts—via email!—how to avoid having their emails to Fauci and others swept up in document searches. According to him, NIAID has a FOIA expert who, instead of advising agency staffers how to follow the law, literally gave advice on evading FOIA requests.

“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in one ill-advised missive. One of the people on that email chain was EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak. Morens seems to have been particularly worried about protecting Daszak, a longtime friend, from damning disclosures. “Delete all of Peter’s emails and others relating to origin,” Morens advised another contact.

On the dubious assumption that those private emails would be immune to inquiries, Morens advised Daszak and others to contact him only via Gmail. But if that weren’t feasible, he added, “just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.” Other NIH staffers took to using clever misspellings—such as “Ec~Health”—apparently in hopes of evading FOIA keyword searches. (Both EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak himself have recently been debarred from receiving federal research funds.) In an article about the NIH’s attempted FOIA foiling, the New York Times blandly noted, “Experts on record retention policies said the comments were reflective of poor transparency practices.” Ya think?

In late May, Morens tried to explain himself before the House Subcommittee. In one of his many emails to Daszak, Morens had written that Fauci and Collins “are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations.” During his confused, evasive testimony, Morens did little to protect his bosses’ reputations. Or his own. (At one point, a sympathetic lawmaker advised the witness to simply stop talking and plead the Fifth.) AEI senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr., who attended the hearing, called it “possibly the worst performance by a witness that I’ve observed in the past 30 years.”

But the shambolic Morens appearance was just a warm-up for the big event: Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the subcommittee on June 3. The now-retired NIAID director had testified behind closed doors for two days in January. Now the subcommittee members would have the chance to grill him in an open session.

Fauci’s earlier testimony—which the subcommittee released in advance of his public appearance—offered numerous lines of inquiry. For example, in January, Fauci casually admitted he knew of no scientific basis for the CDC’s six-foot guideline, which his agency had endorsed. Had Fauci reviewed studies supporting mask requirements for school children? “You know, I might have,” he said in the earlier hearing, “but I don’t recall specifically that I did.” In truth, there is little scientific basis for either policy. And yet Fauci and his colleagues never wavered on rules that disrupted almost every aspect of public and economic life and damaged an entire cohort of children.

As is all too often the case, the hearing failed to generate the information it was convened to uncover. Republicans were uncoordinated in their questions, and rather than following sustained lines of inquiry, they tried to outdo each other in berating the witness. (Marjorie Taylor Greene held up a picture of dogs she claimed were killed in research “you signed off on!”) Meanwhile, Democrats on the panel seemed united in protecting Fauci from any criticism. “Thank you for your science,” said Jill Tokuda of Hawaii. Debbie Dingell of Michigan dismissed the Republican-led hearing as “a witch hunt.”

And then there was the biggest question: Did gain-of-function research in Wuhan lead to the global pandemic, and did U.S. agencies and scientists play any role in that research? A year or two ago, it seemed that the old “conspiracy-theory” jabs were fading, and that Democrats and Republicans were becoming more willing to address the question with open minds. But Democrats showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s deepest mystery—and the possible world-historical scandal at the bottom of it.

When Republicans pressed him on the Wuhan question, the former NIAID director tried to brazen them out. Asked by Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan whether he agreed “there was a push to downplay the lab-leak theory,” Fauci snapped, “None on my part.” Questioned about the “Proximal Origin” paper he had pressed scientists to write, he claimed the paper only rejected the notion that the virus was “engineered.” This is a lie. The paper flatly stated, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Pressed on evidence that his employees were illegally skirting recordkeeping rules, Fauci threw his longtime adviser Morens under the bus. He “may report to someone lower,” he sniffed.

Asked about NIAID’s well-documented funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, Fauci answered, “I would not characterize it as dangerous gain-of-function research.” Instead, he doubled down on his long-standing effort to narrow the definition of the term to the point of meaninglessness. Even EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak has referred to some of the experiments in question as “gain-of-function.” Watching this, U.S. Right to Know reporter Emily Kopp—who has done groundbreaking work on this issue—was stunned. “I can’t understand how this would not qualify as willful perjury,” she wrote on X.

Republicans shouldn’t let up on pushing for a reckoning. Keep those subpoenas coming. We may never know for certain that Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab, or whether U.S. scientists were—directly or indirectly—involved in its creation. But we do know that our country’s top public health officials lied to us about their history with the lab. And that they implemented draconian policies that devastated our economy and disadvantaged children, all based on little more than hunches.

The skeptics were right. The experts were wrong. And “Tony’s fingerprints” are all over the cover-up.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-meigs/fauci-covid-conspiracy/

RobertHively
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#636

Wife has some connections at the law school we attended back in Virginia.

A really good job is open at the school. She could get it.

She asked me what I truly thought of going back to Virginia.

I told her we gonna end up back in these mountains again, the very next time they bring back another fake pandemic.

This school will be like the last school, which will be like the school before that. They'll take that government handout and then administer the medical tyranny on behalf of the government.

Besides, I've achieved mountain man status, and I've earned it.. This place couldn't break me. I won. I'm not going back to society as it has nothing to offer me that I cant do for myself.

I hope that people won't fall for it again. But as they say, history repeats...

And when it repeats we'll be treated like scum for our beliefs and principles. Not worth the risk. We've sacrificed too much to build a life here that isn't tied to the whims of a bunch of psychopaths hundreds of miles away.

That's what I said in a nut shell.

I told her that if she wants to do it then just do what our favorite professor did, go alone, rent a chitty basement apartment, get that money while you can, come home on the weekends.

DrMaddVibe
Herf-A-Holic Topic Starter

a year ago

#637

RobertHively wrote:

I regard Virginia as the most beautiful state in the nation. Stunningly majestic. Has it all. Mountains, beaches...all 4 seasons.

Save the property. Sounds like you're happy there. Good luck with the new opportunity. Hopefully its on the west side of the state. Commonwealth...whatever.

frankj1
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#638

what a lovely conundrum, though, Robert.
Polar end choices, each utopian for different types of people.

Your big edge is having reached the goal line in each world so there are few variables that would be unforeseen. You guys chose to have no offspring to muddy the decision, and you are (sadly, I'd guess) willing to let her go, which takes more strength and perhaps love than I could imagine being able to muster up. Weekends would help for sure.

Change causes anxiety (I learned that in Social Work School!!!), but is not necessarily less anxiety provoking when the change is good, so you know how to go through the process. I have nothing but faith in you.

Also, been meaning to ask you for a follow up to part of a post you made a while ago about a United Nations presentation, or something like that.

RobertHively
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#639

DrMaddVibe wrote:

This is Virginia, the western 1/3. Lol

Seized by the Union and turned into a natural resource extraction economy by northern bidness interests.

Coal, gas and timber... Timber around here.

That and the terrain have made it a sparsely populated area of the country.

After going through the scamdemic I say the fewer people the better.

When the masks went on I watched peoples mask of sanity fall off.

RobertHively
Herf-A-Holic

a year ago

#640

frankj1 wrote:

It is nice to have options. Not sure if leaving here is a long term option though, "In these times".

She isn't going to leave her gardens and everything she worked so hard for up here. Plus we haven't lived there in 10 yrs...

"We need to get back there" has been a running joke with us for years. I like it there too, but now I don't think it's worth it.

Back during the "pandemic" people couldn't even work online in higher education without being vax'd. Why? That type of employee never sets foot on campus.

Plus I saw where a former director of the CDC (Redfield?) said there's going to be a new bird flu pandemic.

We'd probably end up back at Hivelyland anyway Lol

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