Excerpt from "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says," a 2.26 N.Y. Times story by Julien E. Barnes, based on a 2.26 Wall Street Journal story by Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel:
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It pains me to consider the possibility, much less admit, that the sociopathic Mussolini and would-be Democracy destroyer Donald Trump might have been correct last year when he theorized that Covid-19 originated with a lab leak.
Rightwing nutters are theorizing that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease guy who curtly dismissed the lab leak theory but has more recently come around, may be half-complicit in the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab-leak error (if it indeed happened). Also that he had “potentially conflicting ties to China’s top scientists and the very lab under suspicion.”
From “Former MI6 chief says any Wuhan lab leak evidence has likely been destroyed,” posted in The Independent on Thursday, 6.3:
“Any evidence of a lab leak that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic would likely have been destroyed by Chinese officials by now, a former MI6 chief has claimed.
The former intelligence chief, head of the UK’s spy agency between 1999 and 2004, has previously said the novel coronavirus is “far more likely” to have come from a lab than an animal.
“Covid-infected bats in a Wuhan wet market”? Not any longer.
Scott Gottlieb is an American physician and investor who served as the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2017 until April 2019.
“These kinds of lab leaks happen all the time,” @ScottGottliebMD says of COVID-19 lab-leak theory. “Even here in the United States, we’ve had mishaps. In China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs.” pic.twitter.com/NX2iWBIdBx
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 30, 2021

Dr. Anthony Fauci has done a sudden about–face in terms of his once-dismissive opinion about COVID-19 having possibly originated as an accidental Wuhan “lab leak”. He’s admitted that he’s now less than convinced that the virus began as a natural (if catastrophic) biological occurrence. This breaks the dam. Lab leakers now have the upper hand.

Jordan Ruimy: “Josh Rogin was on Joe Rogan today. The entire episode was about the lab leak. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. The most thoughtful and concise conversation about the lab leak theory thus far. Your mind will be blown numerous times. Rogin is a Trump hater but he can absolutely separate politics from the lab leak theory and recognize that we have a major problem here.”

Same subject, Bret Weinstein, recorded on 4.19.21:

Every semi-intelligent person out there believes that the origin of COVID-19, which exploded stateside in March 2020 and wasn’t fully put to bed until early ’22, came from a Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak.
Persuasive, reasonable-sounding reporting about a suspected Wuhan lab leak began to emerge from reputable websites and print publications (including The Wall Street Journal) in May 2021. (Here are links to several HE copy-and-paste stories about same.)
So it’s not exactly a big deal that the CIA, citing a just-released analysis, is now saying it too believes in lab leak theology.
N.Y. Times reporting by Julian Barnes: “The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
“But the agency [has] issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
“The analysis…is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.”
If NPR’s Terry Gross is nominally on-board with the Wuhan lab-leak theory, you know that other cautious liberal types are giving it serious consideration.
Gross has interviewed Katherine Eban, author of a 6.3.21 Vanity Fair piece titled “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.”
Yesterday Joe Rogan discussed a related issue. The episode is titled “Fauci, Gain-of-Function Research, and Wuhan Lab Funding.”
I hate linking to anything that gives the loathsome Mike Pompeo a sheen of even-handed credibility, and don’t even mention the psychotic Devin Nunes.
But Bari Weiss’s 5.18 Substack piece about the suspected Wuhan lab leak is worth pondering, especially since she’s up-to-date with other high-profile lab leak discussers like Donald McNeil, Jr.
“Did the Covid-19 virus come from a lab in Wuhan, China?
“To ask that question in public was, until recently, to out yourself as a person wearing a tinfoil hat. It was nothing more than a far-right crackpot conspiracy theory, ‘disinformation’ that could get you banned from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook all at once, the kind of thing you only dared discuss in private.
“Yesterday I asked that question of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. His answer: Yes. He told me he’s believed that it’s come from a lab for ‘some time’ and lays out the evidence. (Evidence, he says, that has troubling implications for Dr. Fauci.)
“Why does this matter? Because we want to prevent it from happening again.
“Virology labs are typically highly regulated and monitored with specific precautions for certain work. If a virus that’s claimed 3.4 million lives escaped from the Wuhan lab — one that former New York Times correspondent Donald McNeil points out was “highly prone to porous leaks” — we should know what went exactly wrong.
“Another reason this matters is because it could reveal important things about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, which disappeared and jailed journalists who dared to report on the virus, silenced heroic whistleblowers, and used the World Health Organization to broadcast its propaganda.
“So why is this theory only now being discussed? Well, at The New York Times, as Donald McNeil points out in a post just published on Medium, staff was hamstrung. Sources in the Trump administration posited the lab leak theory, so it must be untrue, thought reporters and editors. Epidemiologists cast doubt on it, so it couldn’t be true.

From “The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak: The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus,” by The Wall Street Journal‘s Steven Quay and Richard Muller:
“Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact — that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers — implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”
Consider a two-day-old 60 Minutes report, moderated by Lesley Stahl, about the origins of Covid-19 and the refusal of the World Health Organization to attempt a serious, real-deal investigation of what happened.
It focuses on a WHO excursion to Wuhan earlier this year. Technology futurist and geopolitics expert Jamie Metzl, who suspects that the coronvavirus may have came from a lab leak, is the good guy in the report. EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak is the bad guy.
60 Minutes transcript excerpt: “The question: how did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originate? Among the leading theories examined: was it accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan or did it come from infected animals in a wet market there?
“The WHO inquiry was far from comprehensive, because, as it has done since the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese government withheld information.
Jamie Metzl: “I wouldn’t really call what’s happened now an investigation. It’s essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour.”
Lesley Stahl: “Study tour!”
Metzl: “Study tour. Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.”
Metzl — former NSC official in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering — is one of more than two dozen experts, including virologists, who signed an open letter earlier this month calling for a new international inquiry with a return to China.
The letter says the WHO team did not have the independence or access “to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation” specifically into a possible accidental leak from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city where the first outbreak occurred.
Metzl: “We would have to ask the question, ‘Well, why in Wuhan?’ To quote Humphrey Bogart, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?’ What Wuhan does have is China’s level-four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses.
Stahl: “I had seen that the World Health Organization team only spent three hours at the lab.”
Metzl: ‘While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel.
That’s because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols.
On 11.3, ex-NY Times reporter Alex Berenson tweeted an aghast response to an 11.2 Times piece (written by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández) about WHO Covid responses. “[This article] about how China has blocked the search into the origins of #sarscov2 is bizarre,” Berenson wrote. “It explains how the PRC (People’s Republic of China) won’t allow a real investigation, but DOES NOT EVEN MENTION the possibility of the virus [having] escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
When Nicholson Baker‘s “The Lab Leak Hypothesis” was published on 1.4.21 in New York magazine, I was hesitant. I didn’t exactly wave it away, but I was reluctant to accept the lab-leak notion. I was still clinging to “dirty dead bats in the Wuhan wet market” theory.
“What happened was fairly simple,” Nicholson wrote. “It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.
“Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally or ‘zoonotically.’ They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.”
A little less than four weeks later, in the.1.29.21 edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, an assertion by biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein and his wife and colleague Heather Heying, co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century”, backed up Nicholson. It made me feel very uncomfortable. Mainly because agreeing or even allowing for this possibility meant giving credence to a suspicion that Donald Trump had voiced for some time, which is that the odds that Covid might have originated with an accident out of a Wuhan lab (specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology). The odds of that having happened, Weinstein saidm, were roughly 90%.
Maher to Weinstein and Heying: “We’ve heard a lot recently about the possibility that the coronavirus did start in a lab. Let’s talk about that. The fact that there is this lab…I think it’s the only one in the world quite like it, [and located] in Wuhan, where the whole thing started. It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn’t start in a lab.
“And that theory was demonized at first — ‘Oh, come on, that’s conspiracy thinking, that it started in the lab.’ But it’s certainly a 50-50…would you say that?”
Weinstein: “Oh, it’s far more likely than that. I think I said last June that the chances it came from a lab were about 90%. This was never a conspiracy theory. In fact that term was used to simply make it go away. It’s an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing, and we are only now, a year [into the pandemic], getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.”
This morning I watched a two-month-old “Joe Rogan Experience” with Berenson, and again I was thinking that it felt real. No proof and no smoking gun, but the fact that the mainstream liberal media won’t even touch this because they feel it would make them sound racist…I’m feeling more and more suspicious about this whole thing. It makes me sick to be anywhere close to the same side of this issue as Trump, but I can’t let my anti-Trump revulsion be the end-all and be-all.

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