Critiquing Nature and the Lancet over their disinformation, but making huge material omissions while doing so. Who is Ian Birrell?
By Meryl Nass, M.D. | June 8, 2021
Below are excerpts from a very interesting Unherd article by Ian Birrell, who previously wrote about the lab leak hypothesis when it was very difficult to get anything published on it. Birrell’s reportage is good, as far as it goes. But he lets Fauci, Farra and Collins off the hook. He ponders whether Chinese money influenced the “debt-ridden” Nature publishing company. It surely could have.
But one should also be asking, why is the (formerly?) world’s top science magazine, Nature, the most important journal in the world in which to publish science, debt-ridden in the first place?
And Birrell deftly avoided the more obvious conclusion that if Farrar, Fauci and Collins initiated the Nature Medicine paper to produce faulty scientific arguments against a lab leak, wouldn’t they have been the ones to place it in Nature Medicine, not China?
Birrell did something else strange. He notes that Farrar directed him to the Nature Medicine paper as the scientific basis for the natural origin claim. But he fails to mention that the Fauci emails now show that Farrar was involved in crafting that paper, and involved his employee Josie Golding, who also signed the Daszac-written March 7 Lancet Correspondence, in its crafting. Though not a coauthor, she was quoted in the press release the Scripps Institute issued about the paper. From the Fauci emails, we now know that Kristian Andersen, the first author, emailed Fauci, Farrar and Collins to thank them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Thus this otherwise interesting article is a limited hangout. While criticizing Nature Medicine and the Lancet, and attempting to grab the high road, Ian Birrell reveals himself to be a purveyor of slanted news.
There are two other interesting things about Ian Birrell. He produced one of the earliest mainstrem articles on the lab hypothesis with Alina Chan, back in February. In hindsight, were they being set up then as trusted sources if the lab hypothesis gained prominence?
But who is Ian Birrell? His earlier claim to fame was as a speechwriter for David Cameron. Everyone knows what that means. He was a professional crafter of lying narratives. This Unherd article is designed to blame China and misdirect away from the role of the US and UK’s top science funders: Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins.
https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/
Nature Medicine, its sister publication, was also home for the second key commentary that set the tone in the scientific community after Daszak’s outing in The Lancet. “The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2″ bluntly concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Critics pointed out it was questionable to claim there was any “evidence” proving that Sars-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus. Others noted that the statement mentions the mysterious furin cleavage site — which Nikolai Petrovksy drew attention to as allowing the spike protein to bind effectively to cells in human tissues yet which is not found in the most closely-related coronaviruses — but downplays its potential significance. The statement suggests “it is likely that Sars-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species”. This has not happened so far.
This document — whose five signatories include one expert who was handed China’s top award for foreign scientists after nearly 20 years work there, and another who is a “guest professor” for the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention — has been accessed 5.4 million times and cited almost 1,500 times in other papers. It is so influential that when I emailed Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and one of The Lancet signatories, to see if his stance remained the same, he pointed me to this paper that he called “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus”.
The lead author was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research Institute in California who has been a very active voice on social media condemning the lab leak theory and confronting its proponents. Yet the recent release of emails to Anthony Fauci exposed that Andersen had previously admitted to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director that the virus had unusual features that “(potentially) look engineered” and which are “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. He claimed last week the discussion was “clear example of the scientific process” but as another top scientist said to me: “What a smoking gun!”. Now Anderson’s twitter account has suddenly disappeared…
[According to Rutgers professor Richard Ebright,] “Nature and The Lancet played important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative that science evidence indicates Sars-CoV-2 had a natural-spillover origin points and the false narrative that this was the scientific consensus”.
Or as another well-placed observer put it: “The game seems to be for Nature and The Lancet to rush non-peer revised correspondences to set the tone and then delay critical papers and responses.”
But why would they do this? This is where things become even murkier. Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial reasons…
We Should Welcome the Lab Leak Theory, Argues Biologist
By Noah Carl • Lockdown Sceptics • June 8, 2021
At the start of the pandemic, many of us were puzzled as to why the lab leak hypothesis was considered “racist” but the wet market hypothesis was not. Both theories said the pandemic began in China, and both implied that some Chinese people had acted carelessly. (In reality, of course, neither theory is “racist”.)
The most likely reason why the lab leak theory came to be seen as “racist” is that this was convenient for several key organisations, who wanted to avoid any suggestion that they might have helped to cause the pandemic. These organisations include the Chinese Communist Party, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the National Institutes of Health, and EcoHealth Alliance.
The fact that President Trump endorsed the lab leak theory also played a role, of course. Left-wing media outlets in the US have a habit of assuming that, if Trump says something, then it must – almost by definition – be racist.
In a recent article for UnHerd, the biologist Bret Weinstein argues that we should actually welcome the lab leak theory. This is because, if it turns out to be true, we know how to prevent future pandemics of this kind. Simple: ban the research until we can figure out how to do it safely. (Or at the very least: ramp up lab security.)
However, if the zoonotic spillover theory is correct, then “it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again. And again. And again.” As Weinstein notes, “The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab.”
He goes on to argue that, if the virus did escape from a lab, then one of the pandemic’s ultimate causes is the distorted incentives that led scientists to undertake such dangerous research in the first place. According to Weinstein:
… the scientific method has been hijacked by a competition over who can tell the most beguiling stories. Scientists have become salesmen, pitching serious problems that they and their research just so happen to be perfectly positioned to solve. The fittest in this game are not the most accurate, but the most stirring. And what could be more stirring than a story in which bat caves are ticking pandemic time-bombs from which only the boldest and brightest gene experts can save us?
Weinstein’s article contains a lot of interesting details, and is worth reading in full.
Why I spoke out against lockdowns
Martin Kulldorff on the necessity of challenging the Covid consensus
Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
By Martin Kulldorff | spiked | June 4, 2021
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.
Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.
In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.
With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.
Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.
In September, I met Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an organisation I had never heard of before the pandemic. To help the media gain a better understanding of the pandemic, we decided to invite journalists to meet with infectious-disease epidemiologists in Great Barrington, New England, to conduct more in-depth interviews. I invited two scientists to join me, Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford, one of the world’s pre-eminent infectious-disease epidemiologists, and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, an expert on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. To the surprise of AIER, the three of us also decided to write a declaration arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. We called it the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
Opposition to lockdowns had been deemed unscientific. When scientists spoke out against lockdowns, they were ignored, considered a fringe voice, or accused of not having proper credentials. We thought it would be hard to ignore something authored by three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from what were three respectable universities. We were right. All hell broke loose. That was good.
Some colleagues threw epithets at us like ‘crazy’, ‘exorcist’, ‘mass murderer’ or ‘Trumpian’. Some accused us of taking a stand for money, though nobody paid us a penny. Why such a vicious response? The declaration was in line with the many pandemic preparedness plans produced years earlier, but that was the crux. With no good public-health arguments against focused protection, they had to resort to mischaracterisation and slander, or else admit they had made a terrible, deadly mistake in their support of lockdowns.
Some lockdown proponents accused us of raising a strawman, as lockdowns had worked and were no longer needed. Just a few weeks later, the same critics lauded the reimposition of lockdowns during the very predictable second wave. We were told that we had not specified how to protect the old, even though we had described ideas in detail on our website and in op-eds. We were accused of advocating a ‘let it rip’ strategy, even though focused protection is its very opposite. Ironically, lockdowns are a dragged-out form of a let-it-rip strategy, in which each age group is infected in the same proportion as a let-it-rip strategy.
When writing the declaration, we knew we were exposing ourselves to attacks. That can be scary, but as Rosa Parks said: ‘I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.’ Also, I did not take the journalistic and academic attacks personally, however vile – and most came from people I had never even heard of before. The attacks were not primarily addressed at us anyhow. We had already spoken out and would continue to do so. Their main purpose was to discourage other scientists from speaking out.
In my twenties, I risked my life in Guatemala working for a human-rights organisation called Peace Brigades International. We protected farmers, unionised workers, students, religious organisations, women’s groups and human-rights defenders who were threatened, murdered, and disappeared by military death squads. While the courageous Guatemalans I worked with faced much more danger, the death squads did once throw a hand grenade into our house. If I could do that work then, why should I not now take much smaller risks for people here at home? When I was falsely accused of being a Koch-funded right-winger, I just shrugged – typical behaviour by both establishment servants and armchair revolutionaries.
After the Great Barrington Declaration, there was no longer a lack of media attention on focused protection as an alternative to lockdowns. On the contrary, requests came from across the globe. I noticed an interesting contrast. In the US and UK, media outlets were either friendly with softball questions or hostile with trick questions and ad hominem attacks. Journalists in most other countries asked hard but relevant and fair questions, exploring and critically examining the Great Barrington Declaration. I think that is how journalism should be done.
While most governments continued with their failed lockdown policies, things have moved in the right direction. More and more schools have reopened, and Florida rejected lockdowns in favour of focused protection, partly based on our advice, without the negative consequences that the lockdowners predicted.
With the lockdown failures increasingly clear, attacks and censorship have increased rather than decreased: Google-owned YouTube censored a video from a roundtable with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where my colleagues and I stated that children do not need to wear masks; Facebook closed the GBD account when we posted a pro-vaccine message arguing that older people should be prioritised for vaccination; Twitter censored a post when I said that children and those already infected do not need to be vaccinated; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) removed me from a vaccine-safety working group when I argued that the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine should not be withheld from older Americans.
Twitter even locked my account for writing that:
‘Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid because of it. Tragic. Public-health officials/scientists must always be honest with the public.’
This increased pressure may seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Had we been wrong, our scientific colleagues might have taken pity on us and the media would have gone back to ignoring us. Being correct means that we embarrassed some immensely powerful people in politics, journalism, big tech and science. They are never going to forgive us.
That is not what matters, though. The pandemic has been a great tragedy. A 79-year-old friend of mine died from Covid, and a few months later his wife died from cancer that was not detected in time to initiate treatment. While deaths are inevitable during a pandemic, the naive but mistaken belief that lockdowns would protect the old meant that governments did not implement many standard focused-protection measures. The dragged-out pandemic made it harder for older people to protect themselves. With a focused-protection strategy, my friend and his wife might be alive today, together with countless other people around the world.
Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor. In the US, lockdowns are the biggest assault on workers since segregation and the Vietnam War. Except for war, there are few government actions during my life that have imposed more suffering and injustice on such a large scale.
As an infectious-disease epidemiologist, I had no choice. I had to speak up. If not, why be a scientist? Many others who bravely spoke could comfortably have stayed silent. If they had, more schools would still be closed, and the collateral public-health damage would have been greater. I am aware of many fantastic people fighting against these ineffective and damaging lockdowns, writing articles, posting on social media, making videos, talking to friends, speaking up at school board meetings, and protesting in the streets. If you are one of them, it has truly been an honour to work with you on this effort together. I hope that we will one day meet in person and then, let’s dance together. Danser encore!
The Global Race Towards Full Vaccination
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 1, 2021
Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of a population would have to acquire resistance to Covid-19 in order for herd immunity to take effect, a threshold that has been revised upwards since the start of the year with 80 to 85 percent quoted in some cases.
Despite the ever-higher immunity threshold discussed by scientists, Israel’s Covid-19 case count started to tumble when 40 percent of its population received at least one jab and now 59.3 percent of its inhabitants are fully vaccinated. The country’s reproduction rate has been around 0.5 in recent weeks and it appears to be on track to emerge from the pandemic, suggesting that initial herd immunity estimates carried some accuracy.
With 45.4 percent of its inhabitants fully vaccinated, Bahrain comes second on the list.
In the United States, 40.2 percent of people have been fully vaccinated (though do not forget that almost half of unvaccinated Americans have natural immunity from prior infection).
In this case, full vaccination refers to all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol with data only available for countries reporting the breakdown of their doses.
As Scott Morefield wrote recently, Blue-state lockdown-lovers drunk on their own power like Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who insist on a 70 percent vaccination rate in order to ease up on mandates and restrictions are ignoring the science completely in order to hold their people hostage to an unobtainable, unnecessary goal.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital debunked the desire among some health officials, sometimes referred to as “zero COVID,” that COVID-19 can be eradicated completely.
Well, unfortunately, we have this perception now that’s being created by some public health leaders that we need to reach total eradication. We’re not gonna get to total absolute risk elimination. That is a false goal and quite honestly it’s being used now to manipulate the public. We heard today again from our public health leaders that if we get to 70% vaccination, then we can start seeing restrictions removed. That’s dishonest. Most of the country is at herd immunity.
Other parts will get there later this month. San Francisco had 12 cases yesterday, most asymptomatic. What do you call that? I call that herd immunity. And I think what’s happening is our public health leaders are dismissing natural immunity from prior infection, which changes the path to get to more population immunity. It invokes mandates, it means kids may have to get it and it demonizes those that are hesitant rather than respecting their decision.
Indeed, you don’t have to have a medical degree to know that the formula for herd immunity has always been vaccinated plus natural immunity.
Meryl Nass on anti-vaccine petition to FDA
Listen HERE
Kevin Barrett | May 31, 2021
Meryl Nass, MD discusses her and RFK Jr.’s new Children’s Health Defense petition to the FDA to withdraw COVID vaccines from the market. CHD reports:
“On May 16, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Meryl Nass, MD, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), took a landmark step in the COVID crisis that has irrevocably changed billions of lives around the globe by filing a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw COVID-19 vaccines from the market…
“Specifically, the petition calls upon the FDA to:
- Revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines
- Refrain from licensing COVID vaccines
- Disallow the participation of minors in COVID vaccine trials
- Immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of minors
- Revoke its tacit approval of pregnant women receiving COVID vaccines
- Immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of chloroquine drugs, ivermectin, and any other safe and effective drugs against COVID.”
Evidence for the effectiveness of COVID-19 treatments can be found at c19study.com .
At the end of the show, Meryl Nass expresses her concern that the suppression of COVID treatments, in conjunction with the mass vaccination program and draconian censorship, raises a disturbing question: Is there some ulterior and perhaps sinister motive driving this seemingly irrational policy?
Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar and his co-conspirators Peter Horby and Rick Bright
With a Vietnam connection
By Meryl Nass, MD | June 6, 2021
Before Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar got the plum job of CEO of the wealthiest foundation in the UK and one of the wealthiest in the world, he did research for Oxford University in Vietnam for 18 years. It seems curious how one job led to the other. Will (like Las Vegas) what happened in Vietnam stay in Vietnam? Or will internet sleuths tell us how Farrar was groomed for his current role?
Vietnam is a country where two other co-conspirators on the hydroxychloroquine suppression worked, too. All 3 had something to do with vaccine trials there. Hmmm.
When Dr. Martin Landray approached Jeremy Farrar about starting a large multicenter clinical trial in the UK, Farrar told him to talk to Horby. He did, and Horby and Landray became the Principal Investigators for the trial. Landray was not in on the scheme to overdose patients with hydroxychloroquine. Because when he was interviewed by France Soir, an online newspaper, he made several mistakes discussing the dose of hydroxychloroquine used. He simply had no idea about the overdoses. (France Soir knew.) Landray had been too busy to look up the dose, apparently, that he was responsible for giving to 1600 human guinea pigs.
Dr. Horby then attempted to give Landray cover in some tweets I read last May or June. I think Horby knew what was going on. Horby claimed France Soir did not transcribe what Landray said accurately. But France Soir had the recording, so that excuse didn’t fly. I blogged about this at the time.
Neither Landray nor Horby has so much as apologized for using borderline fatal doses in their subjects. Were the subjects’ families ever told? Probably not.
When the news about the Recovery trial’s fatal doses came out (I learned it from others on twitter) the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial stopped, and the principal investigators said the drug didn’t work. They acknowledged that there were about 10-20% more deaths in the hydroxychloroquine arm than in the placebo (“usual care,” a.k.a. no drug treatment arm) but have never acknowledged any mistakes or wrongdoing. Using the published Recovery trial statistics, there were about 60 excess deaths over placebo in the HCQ arm (of 400 total) that we can say were likely secondary to an HCQ overdose.
Peter Horby, also a physician and one of the two Principal Investigators of the Recovery Trial, in which 1600 subjects got poisonous doses of hydroxychloroquine and which Farrar supposedly helped found, worked in Vietnam and overlapped with Farrar. They had to have known the proper dose of antimalarial drugs, since they would have been treating malaria patients (Farrar was an infectious disease doctor), and it is likely they may have used the drugs for themselves. Or they may have used mefloquine, another antimalarial with anti-Covid effects, which was also being suppressed but got no press last year.
The third interesting Vietnam connection is Richard Bright, PhD, the head of BARDA who worked with FDA to use the Emergency Use Authorization for donated Covid drugs in the National Strategic Stockpile to interfere with doctors’ use of the chloroquine drugs for patients. He made the mistake of bragging about this after Trump fired him, pretending that he had saved the country from a dangerous drug that Trump had wanted used. Having worked in Vietnam, and probably therefore being very familar with antimalarials; overlapping his time in Vietnam with Horby and Farrar in our cast of characters; and had the job of doling out $1.5 billion per year as head of BARDA. I am convinced Bright is a co-conspirator to suppress the chloroquine drugs. It is of great interest that Collins, Fauci, Farrar and Bright were all given the responsiblity to dole out large pots of money to others. Rita Colwell, too, the former Director of the National Science Foundation who signed the Lancet letter, had had large amounts of money to distribute.
What is BARDA? It is a federal agency within DHHS:
“The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies such as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) accidents, incidents and attacks; pandemic influenza (PI), and emerging infectious diseases (EID).
Together with its industry partners, BARDA promotes the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st century health security threats.”
Here is what Sir Jeremy Farrar said about testing new drugs at the onset of the Covid pandemic.
“… Investing now, at scale, at risk and as a collective global effort is vital if we are to change the course of this epidemic. We welcome others to join us in this effort.” – Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome
And so the Covid Therapeutics Accelerator was begun, with core funding from:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationm (BMGF), Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard.
All 3 play important roles in the shaping of Covid. Mastercard used it to push for digital money, since handling money exposes you to the virus. BMGF and Wellcome used their research funding to suppress useful drugs and prolong the pandemic, while using the opportunity to test new drugs and new drug platforms, like mRNA.
The website is hosted by the BMGF. While this organization did fund some hydroxychloroquine trials, if memory serves, at least 2 were shut down before completion, including one at the University of Washington, which is practically a subsidiary of the BMGF. The Henry Ford hospital trial, which showed great benefit from hydroxychloroquine, never got any traction, though the doctors involved tried hard to be heard. The MORU COPCOV trial was held up by the UK authorities soon after it began, on the basis of the danger of hydroxychloroquine, even though only tiny prophylactic doses were being used. By then, apparently, the plan was to shut down the cheap old drugs. Or perhaps the trials were set up under Wellcome and BMGF’s initiative so their management and/or findings could be controlled.
Scientist at center of lab leak controversy to lead the Lancet’s task force to investigate virus origin
By Steve Watson | Summit News | June 4, 2021
Revered scientific journal The Lancet has created a ‘task force’ to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, yet it has decided to employ as its leader the very guy who funded the dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan lab and subsequently allegedly ‘bullied’ other scientists into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak.
In the wake of renewed scrutiny of the lab leak hypothesis, the Lancet’s task force will reportedly “focus on analyzing data on all of the theories put forward on the origins of COVID, on the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 was able to break out of Wuhan and spread globally, and on the most plausible strategies to prevent future pandemics.”
It also states that “The Task Force will review thoroughly and objectively all publicly available evidence, particularly the peer-reviewed literature, and conduct interviews with key leaders in science, medicine, policy and civil society.”
‘Objectively’. Right.
Dr Peter Daszak, who is heading up this task force, is perhaps the least suitable scientist on the planet to objectively analyse the data, given his track record.
Daszak, as President of the EcoHealth Alliance, shovelled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab through the now infamous ‘gain of function’ research.
Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses. Here is a video of him talking in DECEMBER 2019 about how ‘good’ the viruses are for altering in a lab:
Daszak notes that “coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily… the spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab.”
No wonder then that Daszak as lead investigator for the WHO investigation determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was ‘nothing to see here’?
Recently released emails now document that Daszak thanked Dr Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory before any scientific research had been done on the possibility.
Daszak was later employed as an ‘expert fact checker’ by Facebook when it was monitoring and removing ‘misinformation’ about the origins of COVID on its platform, much of which was credible scientific research. Facebook has since reversed the policy of banning any posts containing information suggesting COVID-19 was “man-made”.
Daszak’s Twitter profile is basically one long ‘it came from bats not a lab’ thread, much to the annoyance of some other scientists:
Why does this guy keep getting put in charge of investigations, task forces and ‘fact checking’, when it’s abundantly clear that he has the biggest motive to dismiss the lab leak notion?
As microbiologist Professor Richard Ebright has noted, “Daszak was the contractor who funded the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that potentially was the source of the virus with subcontracts from $200million [£142million] from the US Department of State and $7million [£5million] from the US National Institutes of Health and he was a collaborator and co-author on research projects at the laboratory.”
Daszak has already lied about the type of research that was being conducted at the Wuhan lab, claiming, after the outbreak happened, that he didn’t know if it was gain of function or not. His own previous statements, and the Fauci emails prove he knew full well what was going on in the lab.
In addition, as reported by The Daily Mail and other outlets, Daszak “orchestrated a ‘bullying’ campaign and coerced top scientists into signing off on a letter to The Lancet aimed at removing blame for Covid-19 from the Wuhan lab he was funding with US money.”
Daszak used his influence to get the journal to publish the letter, which stated that to even suggest the lab leak theory had any credibility was equal to spreading “fear, rumours, and prejudice.”
It effetely shut down discussion among the scientific ‘consensus’ of the lab leak potential for a whole year until intelligence findings brought the matter back to the attention of the mainstream media.
WHO scientific advisor Jamie Metzl described Daszak’s letter as “scientific propaganda and a form of thuggery and intimidation.”
“By labelling anyone with different views a conspiracy theorist, the Lancet letter was the worst form of bullying in full contravention of the scientific method,” Metzl added.
The letter further stated that “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” and even had the audacity to state that “We declare no competing interests.”
Indeed, Daszak had made sure that the letter would be devoid of any link to EcoHealth, and even considered leaving his own name off it, emails released via the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
To make matters worse, the other members of The Lancet’s task force are practically all minions of Daszak, some of whom helped him draft the letter that unequivocally stated the lab leak theory was dangerous, and others who either worked with him on ‘fact checking’ for Facebook, or were cited as sources during that activity.
Taking all this into account, it is obvious what the outcome of The Lancet’s inquiry will be, and it should not and cannot be used as credible evidence against the lab leak theory.
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UAE tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization
The Cradle | October 31, 2026
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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- Congratulations climate skeptics — you are a ‘Hybrid weapon of war’ and a growing public health threat
- ‘The Arab Vote’: How Israeli Racism Has Ruined Their Elections
- Israel forces Palestinians in Gaza to choose between assassination alone or death with their families: Report
- US Approves Sale of 500 Patriot Missiles to Ukraine, Deliveries May Take Years
- German Imperialism: An Urgent Explainer
- Backed by AAP, West Virginia Proposal Would Allow Dental Hygienists to Give HPV Vaccine to 9-Year-Olds
- Poland Is the Symptom and Europe Is the Patient
- UAE security forces tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization: Report
- They Compared the Spice to the Drug. The Spice Won — Again. (Part 2)
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
