Curiouser and Curiouser

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The western world's one-size-fits-all response to the Covid - lockdowns, mandates, silencing of dissenting voices, assault on core liberties such as freedom of movement and freedom of worship - remains their template for the years ahead, as manifested in impending restraints such as "Net Zero", "fifteen-minute cities" and the World Health Organisation treaty.

And, if you're minded to talk about any of that, the most effective assault has been on freedom of speech, where in the interests of "preventing misinformation" governments around the west are taking Covidstan's crushing of dissent to the next level. If you look at what happened to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the plan next time - in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, France - is to pre-silence them, so you'll never hear about it.

Against all this we have the very very very modified limited hangout by government and media with regard to, say, modest concessions about the lasting emotional, physical and developmental damage to a generation of children - accompanied by the accountability dinner-theatre farce of Baroness Hallett's UK "public inquiry", which is designed to protect officialdom at all costs, so that they will be free to do it to us all over again.

And, as I always say, half your neighbours - whether in Europe, North America, Australia - will be happy to swallow all the totalitarian bollocks all over again: lock me down once, shame on you; lock me down twice, shame on me.

Nevertheless, basic questions remain unanswered. It is now coming up on three years since I wrote:

Nineteen months in, my main interest remains the origins of the WuFlu.

At the same time, one notices the almost total lack of interest in its origins from virtually anyone who matters, starting at the very highest levels of government. As Rumsfeld used to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Somewhat analogously, overwhelming lack of interest in evidence is paradoxically evidence of interest. The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its 'public health' bureaucracies, and for the broader 'science' community and its peer-reviewed journals and grant-application processes. Furthermore, the public deference to political leaders who claim to be 'following the science' - already fraying badly in France and Australia - would take a huge hit once it became clear that the killer virus is itself the creation of 'science' and of a Washington public-health bureaucracy that followed it all the way to an insecure lab in Wuhan.

I was just riffing on probabilities at that time - as one still can, just about, on a personal website. But you couldn't say such things on Twitter or Facebook without getting your account shut down. Even at that point - "nineteen months in" - the length of time without any verifiable account for the origin of the virus was unprecedented in the modern era. For another year, the theory that the pandemic was not a natural evolution from bats or pangolins (remember them?) but the result of a lab leak remained Number One on the Wikipedia entry for Covid conspiracy theories. It's still there, but somewhat more muted and moved down-page. Maintaining the poor old pangolin as designated fall-guy was extremely important to Fauci in Washington, Professor Pantsdown in London, "Doctor" Tedros in Geneva, and all the other players. And the most impeccably respectable "peer-reviewed" journals were happy to go along with it. Me, again from that 2021 column:

The Lancet was for two centuries one of the most respected medical journals on the planet. Then it became corrupted and worthless. A year and a half ago, it allowed itself to be used to discredit the lab-leak thesis by publishing a round-robin of respected scientists rustled up by Peter Daszak. Daszak had an obvious interest in quashing any 'conspiracy theory' that the WuFlu escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology because he was the lead western 'scientist' doing the gain-of-function mambo with Batgirl, while assuring us (until DRASTIC's photographic evidence proved otherwise) that there weren't even any bats in the Wuhan lab.

Instead of being furious at being used by Daszak, Richard Horton and his colleagues doubled down. Only now, getting on for two years into this thing, has The Lancet finally permitted a dissenting view to be published in its pages. As the authors write of the original Daszak letter:

'The statement has imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.'

Of course. That was the point. The 'natural origin' theory was critical not only to protecting China but to legitimizing the whole shelter-in-place a-tsnunami-that-lasts-a-lifetime approach of 'public health'. In response to 'the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation', the authors note primly:

'We do not think that scientists should promote "unity".'

No. But totalitarian governments promote 'unity', and scientists in their service are happy to go along.

The above-referenced Peter Daszak is a British subject who heads up an American company called EcoHealth Alliance. We've talked about them on The Mark Steyn Show with Matt Ridley. Daszak and EHA are very well-connected. Or they were - until yesterday. Our friend Natalie Winters, whose nineteen-year-old self did the job that The Lancet failed to do, treats herself to a well-deserved gloat:

Today I got a scalp I've waited years for. This was my first series of investigative reports ever (at nineteen)!@PeterDaszak, no more taxpayer funds for you.

You and your organization @EcoHealthNYC are a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/PO4UYVuLZU

— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) May 16, 2024

After a disastrous appearance before Congress, Dr Daszak is being fitted for the traditional Foreigner-We-Can-Blame-It-All-On concrete overcoat (see also Ghislaine Maxwell). The United States Government has, effective Wednesday, suspended EcoHealth from participating in "federal procurement and nonprocurement programs", and has initiated "debarment" proceedings against Daszak and his company. Since the EHA exists only because it suckles on the federal teat, I would be very surprised if it were still around a year from now. (Needless to say, the disgraced Daszak is a pal of Michael E Mann.)

The original Covid "conspiracy theory" (as designated by Wikipedia, Facebook et al) now looks almost certainly true - that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Viscount Ridley writes:

The Chinese government and its scientists have yet to admit they caused the pandemic. But in exactly the right city, at exactly the right time, they were playing with exactly the right kind of genetic insertion into exactly the right part of exactly the right gene of exactly the right kind of virus, in exactly the right way. And they showed exactly the wrong kind of openness about it afterwards.

Correct. And yet, and yet ...while it may have wiggled loose in Wuhan, it is by no means certain it was created there.

The first assumption I made, when the Covid hit in early 2020, was that the Chinese were lying to us - because that's what they always do. However, it quickly became apparent "that, this time round, US public-health officials were also lying to the world about their 'gain-of-function' research off-shored to Wuhan."

Trump designated the WuFlu "the China virus"; Chairman Xi's spokesmen blamed it on the Yanks. So my second assumption, very early on, was that it was a Sino-American effort: gain-of-function is "the public health version of 'rendition' - something outsourced to the other side of the map where the rules don't apply."

Thinking on it a little further, however, the still unanswered question is whether it's a lot more American than it is Chinese - and whether on balance the Politburo may have the better side of the argument. Will Jones writes at The Daily Sceptic:

Perhaps the most compelling reason to suspect an American origin, though, is the telling fact that SARS-CoV-2 transmits efficiently in only five known mammals, and four of those five – American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink and Egyptian fruit bats – are commonly found in U.S. labs, including Anthony Fauci's high security Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. (The fifth animal, American white-tailed deer, is prevalent across the United States.) On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2 doesn't infect lab animals common in Chinese labs or present in the [Wuhan Institute of Virology], such as Chinese horseshoe bats.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories is one of the world's few Biosafety Level 4 labs, located in Hamilton, a Montana town of under 5,000 souls. It is owned and operated by the US Government - specifically, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose director for almost forty years until the end of 2022 was the sainted Fauci. And four of the five mammals that efficiently transmit Covid-19 are used for experiments at the Fauci redoubt ...but not in Chinese labs. Which might suggest the "China virus" is a lot more American than Chinese:

Given the history among some early case-patients of visiting the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, and its genetic close relatedness to SARSr-CoVs in bats and pangolins (2,4), SARS-CoV-2 was suspected to have emerged from wild animals, particularly bats, similar to SARS-CoV. SARS-CoV was a recombinant virus that originated from Chinese horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus sinicus) before it infected palm civets and then humans.

However:

The inability of SARS-CoV-2 to efficiently infect and replicate in R. sinicus cells may imply that R. sinicus bats were unlikely to be its proximal origin.

That paper, out of the Hong Kong University Faculty of Medicine at Queen Mary Hospital, was published in 2020. We have had four years of official lies from Fauci, Daszak, The Lancet and almost all other figures of authority. Nevertheless, if you buy the WHO numbers, as the public-health panjandrums still purport to, the death toll worldwide from Covid now stands at over seven million.

The same people who accept and promote those numbers are curiously uninterested in the question that logically follows:

Did a US government research project kill more people than the Holocaust?

If it was cooked up in an American lab, don't you think we should know about it? Before we move on to, oh, gain-of-function bird flu. Any media interest? Oh, look - a puff piece from public radio:

Rocky Mountain Labs Bring Cutting-Edge COVID Research To Montana

Maybe more "cutting-edge" than we'll ever know.

I doubt the full truth of any of this will be nailed down till after we're all dead. The difficulty in "following the science" is that Fauci and his friends keep putting so many obstacles in the way.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)