Wuhan

Cockburn absorbed a lengthy segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight along with his nightcap last night, that reported on an undercover Project Veritas video purporting to show a Pfizer executive admitting to all kinds of alarming practices. Namely that the company is considering carrying out the same type of experiments that caused the Covid pandemic. The video shows Pfizer director of research and development, Jordon Trishton Walker, who evidently thought he was on a date with the Veritas reporter, talking freely about Pfizer’s operations. Walker explains, amid giggles, how the company is “exploring” mutating Covid variants themselves “so we could create — preemptively build new vaccines, right?

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition last week as part of a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The suit claims that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor information surrounding the origins and circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as information that went against CDC guidelines and mandates around vaccines and efficacy masks. Fauci, the NIAID and chief medical advisor to President Biden (and others), didn’t say much. In fact he used the term “I cannot recall,” or some variation, over 190 times.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the Covid pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if “wet” wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit. Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. “Nature is sending us a message.

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”  That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics.

The biggest shock amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been the discovery that the virus may have been released during an illegal collaboration on so-called 'gain-of-function' research between the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Recently revealed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents show that American taxpayers directly subsidized this joint effort, despite a federal government ban on any experiment that might give pathogens the ability to leap species. Even worse was that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak tried to shut down any debate on whether the coronavirus had been leaked from a lab by getting 27 prominent scientists to endorse a March 2020 letter to the medical journal the Lancet.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate. Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let's examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today. ‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].' The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

The theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory has completed its year-long trudge — from fringe nutjob idea to mainstream and expert-approved opinion. Leading scientists and epidemiologists such as none other than Dr Anthony Fauci were so quick to dismiss the ‘lab talk’. It was first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media. Now it is seen as not only an acceptable theory worth more study, but one that has broken through into the mainstream. This has happened in a matter of days. Where does Sen. Tom Cotton go for his apology?