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I don’t know whether SARS-CoV-2 is a natural spillover virus or a synthesised chimera, but it is certainly unhelpful when people try to obfuscate the issue. The review of Breathless – David Quammen’s book on the outbreak – demonstrates just how some writers attempt to re-write history, but for what reason?
Friends in Viral Places, by Nicholas Wade (City Journal, 21 Oct 2022)
The review of David Quammen’s Breathless is by science writer Nicolas Wade, whose story has remained consistent since published in May 2021 by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021
How COVID-19’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West By Nicholas Wade | Aug 17, 2021
Oh. Shibboleth a sock?
I found the review; it’s in City Journal.org, October 21, 2022.
Hi Clark
Shibboleth’s comment was suspended for investigation a few minutes after it appeared, because it was posted via an anonymous VPN which has been used to evade moderation in the past.
After the lengthy unattributed quotation was identified, those 1,400 words were removed from Shibboleth’s post and replaced with a link – unsurprisingly to the same source and author you identified in the meantime.
— Update: Shibboleth is not under suspicion of sockpuppetry, having used that name with a genuine email address some years ago.
Thank you for providing the links to Nick Wade’s earlier papers on the origins. What is startling is that there is no criminal investigation into the activities of Daszak, Andersen or any of the co-signatories of the Lancet letter, who attempted to deflect proper enquiry at the start of the outbreak. Almost seven million people have died from Covid so far, yet these individuals are still at liberty and undertaking/funding GoF research.
Appreciate the complexity and sensitivity, given the role of NIH, NIAD and WIV and the various jurisdictions – but don’t the UN or WHO have authority to launch a global investigation, or is there a degree of complicity there too?
We are only three years into this pandemic and given the viral evolution and antigenic nature, we may never see an end to recurring infections. Nick is correct – the outcry from the public would be so severe that gene editing and virology would be consigned as a criminal enterprise.
– “What is startling is that there is no criminal investigation into the activities of Daszak, Andersen or any of the co-signatories of the Lancet letter…”
Since when has pollution from outsourcing resulted in criminal investigations?
Since when has pollution from outsourcing resulted in criminal investigations?
A bit too cryptic and cynical for me but I take your point. Good discussion on the main blog though.
Sorry. I get terse sometimes, apparently watching the end of the world from within.
Covid looks to be by far the most highly leveraged pollution disaster of all human history, but something like it was bound to happen eventually because it’s the direction industrialisation is heading in. Covid is just the most technologically advanced edge of a vast wedge of less potent but proportionally more abundant pollutants. Until we change course or industrialisation collapses it’s bound to be exceeded, by a similar factor, as we continue attempting to march up the ever steepening curve of economic growth.
Hello Clark
Have you read any of the papers by Karl and Dan Sirotkin? They published an early paper claiming SARS-CoV-2 was a live attenuated vaccine (LAV) that escaped from the lab in Wuhan. Dan’s substack is an interesting read – his articles on covid origins particularly. If his assertion that the virus is undergoing deattenuation to its original state is correct – like the polio OPV, then we are in for a difficult time in the next few years.
The microbiologist JC on a bike, covered Dan’s papers recently on his YouTube vlog. Worth a watch.
Shibboleth, thanks. I hadn’t encountered that Sirotkin paper. I’d followed a link to one article at harvard2thebighouse, and I think I had a bit of a browse there, but that was months ago. I had elsewhere heard mention of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 might have some sort of evolutionary ‘destination’ but I hadn’t followed it up. It might be a while before I have enough time to concentrate upon reading that paper but I’ll take a look at the YouTube link now.
Shibboleth, many thanks for the link to JC’s vid; he’s certainly been doing his homework, and this could well explain why China is still following a zero covid policy.
You’re welcome.
For me, what is most disturbing, is the conspiracy between the principal authorities in compiling the Lancet letter in early 2020 that denounces the possibility of a lab leak from an engineered chimeric virus. It’s taken two and a half years to uncover the paper trail of emails between Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Patrick Vallance, Jeremy Ferrari, Kristain Andersen et al., that clearly show a concerted effort into framing a ‘natural origin’ narrative for the virus.
Clearly this was meant to influence the public and media into dismissing the ‘conspiracy theorists’ at a stage – in late January 2020 – when it was impossible to determine accurately where the virus originated, unless these individuals had prior knowledge. So much for keeping an open mind.
Obviously there is a great deal at stake. If it were established that the pandemic was a result of scientific experimentation and gain of function research, the backlash would be substantial. Aside from reputational damage, the industry itself would be financially devastated. What is equally concerning is the emergence of various patents for vaccine technologies by some of the major companies, like Moderna, which target this particular virus but predate the emergence by many months. Was it just luck?
When I think back to all those Covid advisories with Chris Whitty, Boris Johnson and Patrick Vallance, it makes for uncomfortable reflection to think the Chief Scientific Officer might have been personally involved in manipulating public opinion into believing something he couldn’t possibly know, but at the same time as having undisclosed financial interests in the vaccine technology. If nothing else, it just erodes public trust at a time when we really need some honest voices.
No doubt the truth will out eventually, but almost 7 million have died so far and we’re a long way from the finishing line.
– “What is equally concerning is the emergence of various patents for vaccine technologies by some of the major companies, like Moderna, which target this particular virus but predate the emergence by many months.”
I am unlikely to get time to follow up the papers cited by J.C. in the video linked earlier to see just how specific these patents were to SARS-CoV-2 (sorry, there is also the climate and ecological crisis to be addressed), but the ones I have looked at were certainly relevant, though not specific.
There is a video (hopefully still on YouTube) of an interview of the above-mentioned Peter Daszak – who coordinated the “conspiracy theory” letter to the Lancet while falsely claiming to have no conflict of interest – describing his EcoHealth Alliance project to develop a vaccine against the original SARS.
It seems to me that the US and Chinese governments are the biggest and most powerful economic entities that have ever existed, and both have extremely powerful motives to cover up a lab leak, as do many very senior scientists in virology and closely related fields.
Some may argue that SARS-CoV-2 was developed and released deliberately to create a market for vaccines, but I find this unlikely. The vaccine development projects were not secret, and the publication of the aforementioned video and papers would make no sense in that context. And who would deliberately release such a thing into their own environment? It is not credible that some more effective vaccine was developed secretly prior to release; upon what human population could such a vaccine (and therefore, necessarily, the virus) have been tested?
Something which puzzles me is that in various videos leaked from China in the early days of the pandemic, we occasionally see people lying apparently dead in the streets, suggesting very sudden death as people went about their business. This is very different from the deaths we have seen everywhere else since then; covid kills by gradual debilitation over the course of a week or more.
[ Mod: Relocated from the thread ‘Covid-19 in 2022‘. ]
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I just wish our politicians had taken it more seriously in early 2020 and we had followed a zero-covid policy with enhanced mitigations across the entire planet. Some hope, huh? The problem is that the leading actors had a good idea what we were facing at the outset. From Jeremy Farrar’s book, he describes the circumstances in January and February 2020”After the genetic sequence of the virus was published, people began noticing something peculiar about its molecular structure. In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release.
…This was a brand-new virus that seemingly sprang from nowhere. Except that this pathogen had surface in Wuhan, a city with a BSL-4 virology lab which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses.
..It seemed a huge coincidence for a coronavirus to crop up in Wuhan, a city with a superlab. Could the novel coronavirus be anything to do with ‘gain of function’ (GOF) studies?
Jeremy then goes on to describe what GOF is and how it works before discussing the pros and cons, concluding that “GOF research can furnish scientific findings that are ultimately useful [and] bans are often unworkable in practice.”
He then questions whether it was even novel at all. “It might have been engineered years ago, put in a freezer, and then taken out more recently by someone who decided to work on it again. And then, maybe, there was…an accident?
It sounded crazy but once you get into a mindset it becomes easy to connect things that are unrelated. You begin to see a pattern that is only there because of your own starting bias. And my starting bias was that it was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly – in a city with a biolab. One standout molecular feature of the virus was a region in the genome sequence called a furin cleavage site, which enhances infectivity. This novel virus, spreading like wildfire, seemed almost designed to infect human cells.
Due to his concerns over a lab leak, he told his colleague at Wellcome, Eliza Manningham-Buller. Eliza was the former director general of the UK intelligence agency MI5. She advised that everyone raise their guard, security wise. “We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts”.
This begs the questions, when we read released emails between Farrar and Fauci, are these the only emails? What emails was he sending on his new email address?
The burner phone, mentioned above, started to be used. He rang his brother who “could hear the fear in my voice”.
Towards the end of January 2020, Jeremy reports on a call between Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute in California and Eddie Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney.
During the call, Kristian confessed to Eddie that three things bothered him about the new virus. The first was the receptor binding domain, the bit of the spike protein in the virus that attaches to the host cell to infect it, looked too good to be true – like a perfect ‘key’ for entering human cells.
The second klaxon was that this ‘key’ was accompanied by a short genome sequence known as a furin cleavage site, seen in highly contagious flu viruses….we had never seen it before in these coronaviruses. If someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific bit of genetic material from somewhere else and inserting it, this was what it might end up looking like.
And then Kristian delivered his denouement: he’d found a scientific paper where exactly this technique had been used to modify the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-1 virus….At first glace, the paper Kristian had unearthed looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory. The pair knew of a laboratory where researchers had been experimenting on coronaviruses for years: the Wuhan Institute of Virology. ‘Fuck, this is bad’ was Eddie’s first reaction.
But then, a few weeks later, Jeremy Farrar was one of the signatories to the infamous Lancet letter that opined the “natural origins” and decried an engineered or lab leak as “conspiracy theory”. There’s nothing in his book that explains the volte face. Perhaps we can now guess why.
“Malone and McCullough, that you mention – they nust be highly credible scientists who publish papers for peer review…”
Not even doing the bare minimum of homework Glenn? Malone and McCullough have several thousand citations AND several hundred science papers between them while Yeadon has probably forgotten more about viruses than you ever knew.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LzqEaOkAAAAJ&hl=en
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Jf1bApYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
J, are there any peer-reviewed papers by those authors relevant to SARS-CoV-2 and/or COVID-19?
Yeaden in particular seems to have forgotten everything he once know about viruses. In fact, he seems to have gone completely batty – possibly as a result of catching a modified bat virus too many times.
J, this is an important point; scientists must present their ideas in the scientific literature of the relevant field, to subject them to the scrutiny of the appropriate scientific community. Science requires both adversarial and collaborative processes.
When scientists present their ideas directly to the public as the authors you name have done, and as Wakefield did regarding MMR vaccination, they’re bypassing scrutiny by the rest of their field, and that’s suspicious.
Character assassination is all you have left Clarke as the data leaves you far behind. You should openly join with all Craig’s enemies at this point, because you have so much in common with them.
Character assassination? It’s a scientist’s job to publish in the scientific literature! You yourself, J, just defended Malone and McCullough on the basis that they have published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Yeaden promoted his crazy assertion through James Delingpole’s blog. Delingpole is the resident global heating denier for the Telegraph, from which he’s gained a massive following; so much for “don’t trust the MSM”, eh? Yeaden predicted that there could not be a second wave of COVID – and was promptly proven wrong by the second wave.
Yeaden has since gone totally anti-vaxx, I believe; since when has Craig been anti-vaxx? I defend Craig by driving lethal bullshit off his blog; what are you up to, J?
– “…as the data leaves you far behind”
If you’ve got some data, link to it. Put up or shut up.
Shibboleth, I suspect that money is the reason for the cover-up.
Although Wuhan Institute of Virology has a BSL Level 4 lab, the highest Bio Security Level requiring full isolation suits, negative room pressure ventilation systems etc, much of the coronavirus work was being done at just BSL Level 2 – just mask up, wear gloves, and lock the door – so it’d be no surprise if a virus escaped. That’s outsourcing for you – done because it’s cheaper, because the regulations are more lax.
The US and China are the greatest economic and industrial powers in the world, but if either of them admitted liability the compensation would be astronomical, way beyond anything seen before – at least fifteen million people have been killed and who knows how many permanently injured, entire national economies have been closed under lockdowns, and that’s just in the first three years.
J, I’ve waited a while to give you the chance to respond and set matters straight, but you seem to have disengaged.
I find your accusation that I’m secretly an enemy of Craig’s most unpleasant. I think you should either withdraw it and apologise, or substantiate it ie. tell us who among Craig’s many enemies I “have so much in common with”, and what I have in common with them.
Or is character assassination all you have?
[ Mod: This reply was originally posted on the ‘Covid-19 in 2022’ thread at 3:15am on 25 Nov 2022. It was suspended moments later and reinstated here once the exchange about the lab leak hypothesis had been relocated to this thread. ]
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For starters, almost everything you have claimed from the beginning is completely wrong. Let’s begin here with DR John Campbell contradicting not only your views but highlighting the fundamental arrogance of attitudes uncannily resembling your own regarding lab origin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FckD6qL76uAJ will not be participating further in this discussion, as he was banned earlier this year for multiple infringements of blog etiquette, including sockpuppetry and defying moderation.
FYI, Dr Campbell’s presentation expounds an article in the Daily Telegraph: “UK experts helped shut down Covid lab leak theory – weeks after being told it might be true” (23 Nov 2022), by Sarah Knapton and Ashley Rindsberg – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/23/uk-experts-helped-shut-covid-lab-leak-theory-weeks-told-might/
*** MODS ***, thanks again. Sorry to add to your workload, but the third paragraph of Shibboleth’s November 23, 18:29 post, and my reply to J on November 26 at 01:38 should probably be moved to this thread as well.
Thanks also for the Telegraph link.
And regarding that Telegraph link, what I find most interesting is what it leaves out – no mention of the EcoHealth Alliance funding of the research, and no mention of its CEO Peter Daszak and his “conspiracy theory” letter to the Lancet; it’s all just “the top scientists don’t want to upset China”. I should think China is pretty damn upset anyway, US-funded research so dangerous that the US outsourced it, unleashing a pandemic right in the middle of one of their major industrial cities.
Yesterday I stumbled upon this video by Potholer54:
Fact-checking Nicholas Wade’s claims about a ‘man-made’ virus: YouTube, 23 minutes.
Potholer54 is usually pretty good, but I think he got this one wrong and treats Wade’s article unfairy. Sure, the article in question is a bit polemical, but you can hardly expect otherwise in the atmosphere of the cover-up.
I hope this link works – a conversation with Kim Dotcom, Charles Rixey and Dr Andrew Huff yesterday – regarding the origin of SARS-Cov-2. Andrew Huff worked at Eco Health Alliance until the virus emerged and Kim Dotcom is a major supporter of Julian Assange. Well worth a listen, but it’s deeply concerning all the same.
Nope, sorry, Shibboleth. That link leads to an audio recording lasting 2 hours 35 mins, and the only control option available is Pause. I listened to the first few minutes, which basically consist of a seemingly interminable sound check without any meaningful content before the guest speakers arrive. Waste of time.
You haven’t given any indication of the content. What position do the speakers adopt? What evidence do they point to? What myths are they claiming to bust?
You’ve obviously listened to it, so it would be helpful if you could provide a summary for the rest of us (who don’t have as much time on our hands, or just maybe less patience). Otherwise, your interjection is only a deflection rather than a valid contribution to the debate.
You have to wind forward several minutes until the three guests arrive and listen from there. However, you may like to read Tom Czerniawski‘s release of documents at the link below which has just been published today. I have to take some time out to consider fully the implications of this release, but Tom uses the word genocide and I’m struggling to find another more suitable term. I appreciate not everyone has a working knowledge of genetic engineering and reverse transcription, but you should be able to follow the thread nonetheless. The implications are quite staggering and it’s probably – no definitely – the most frightening this I’ve ever read.
I’ve been living in a hostel for the past two months and I’m about to be released to go home next week. Two of the staff here lost family members this week – a boy of seven years from an epileptic type seizure and a girl of twenty-eight from a MI. Both were in good health with no prior medical conditions. I’m reading more and more similar cases worldwide in the past month. Sorry to spoil your weekend if you do read this, perhaps ignorance is bliss, so think carefully before you click on the link. If you can’t be bothered to read the scientific basis of what’s facing humanity, I’ll post a video released this week that gives a broader picture.
Tom Czerniawski @BlackTomThePyr8
10:07 PM · Nov 16, 2022We are all the targets of a global genocide.
It is being carried out with laboratory-originated strategic biological weapons of mass destruction.
Our own governments created these bio-weapons.
Then they told us to inject more bio-weapons, to be safe from their bio-weapons.The video mentioned in the previous post:
“The Big Reset movie: the uncensored documentary about the truth of the pandemic” – on Odysee (11 Sep 2022)
Ah, not sure what happened with the direct link, but you can find it on Jessica’s substack page here:
https://jessica5b3.substack.com/p/watch-this-movie-today-and-please
OK, I’m 13 minutes 15 seconds into the video linked from jessica5b3.substack.com/p/watch-this-movie-today-and-please: “The first and most important tool, are the PCR tests”.
Enough.
No, this is merely a conspiracy theory film. The PCR tests reliably predicted hospital admissions a week later, and the death rate a week after that. Something was causing those peaks in the deaths from all causes curves.
Like Dawg, I won’t be bothered to watch hours of inferred stuff. I’ll read summaries, critical thinking, and scientific papers, I’ll view statistical data etc.
Yes, some people are very rich, and some are very powerful, but they’re not superhuman. Yes, capitalism can now capitalise on any disaster. But I’m not watching very glossy, apparently very expensive films to freak myself out.
[ Mod: Caught in spam filter; released 5 Dec 2022 16:44 ]
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Yeah, I agree. I watched the whole 2 1/2 hours last night and gave up trying to make sense when nanotechnology, grapheme and PCBs were ‘discovered’ in the mRNA vaccines which turn people into cyborgs. Appreciate if the mods can delete the posts. The twitter thread from Tom C above is a different matter altogether.This is a YT video featuring Jordan Peterson interviewing Matt Ridley, a UK science writer, discussing the origins of SAR-CoV2. Annoyingly, there are many embedded ads in the video that are not YT ads but it’s quite an interesting discussion. There is nothing startlingly new, they discuss the usual things such as the furin cleavage sites, gain of function research, the emails from those scientists suspicious of a lab leak, Danzak etc etc There isn’t any sensationalism and Matt Ridley (now appointed to the house of Lords) is very measured in what he says. I didn’t really know much about MAtt Ridley before this but in this interview he comes across well in my view.
The conclusion is that we still don’t know for sure one way or the other but it ought to be fully investigated.
OK, I made the above post before I had finished watching it all. They kinda get off topic and a little philosophical from 1 Hr 20 on but they also get back on kinda.
