Succinct case for lab leak origin
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CIA tried to pay off analysts to bury findings that COVID lab leak was likely
The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges.
A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” the House panel chairmen wrote.
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G George K referenced this topic on
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Even the article says, "Long Read." So, not a "succinct case."
So I didn't.
Just putting it out there.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/20/the-shameless-cover-up-of-the-lab-leak-theory/
An excerpt:
Pandemics are not acts of God. Somebody somewhere did something that caused the virus to enter the human species. The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough. That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence. That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock. That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, August 2020.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, August 2020.
The coincidences of time and place are truly spectacular. The leading laboratory for bat sarbecoviruses in the world is not in Baltimore, Birmingham or Bombay. It is in Wuhan. When foot and mouth disease broke out near Pirbright in the UK in 2007, where the world’s leading reference laboratory for the foot-and-mouth virus is situated, it wasn’t a coincidence. When anthrax broke out downwind of a Soviet bioweapons factory in Sverdlovsk in 1979, it wasn’t a coincidence. When brucellosis broke out in Lanzhou in 2019, right by a brucellosis vaccine factory, it wasn’t a coincidence. And when smallpox infected a medical photographer at a smallpox lab in Birmingham in 1978, it wasn’t a coincidence. Lab leaks happen all the time. SARS itself leaked from labs after the end of the SARS epidemic of 2003 at least six times – once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times in Beijing.Yet the vested interests in ignoring and dismissing the possibility of a Covid lab leak are legion. They include the Chinese authorities, the World Health Organisation (which obsequiously does President Xi Jinping’s bidding these days), and the American scientific establishment – especially Dr Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases who funded some of the work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They also include EcoHealth Alliance, a New York non-profit headed up by Peter Daszak. EcoHealth Alliance has trousered millions of US taxpayer dollars since the SARS outbreak of 2003 for collecting viruses all over south-east Asia and sending them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all the while boasting of WIV’s gain-of-function experiments, which increase the infectivity of viruses.
And there are many others also invested in denying or dismissing the idea of a lab leak. There are some virologists who don’t want a light shone on their risky gain-of-function gravy train. And there is the academic world in general, which is terrified of doing anything to slow the flow of funds from China.
Indeed, we now know that the head of Harvard Medical School, George Daley, called Dr Fauci on 2 February 2020 to ask him to intervene to reassure a Chinese company, Evergrande, which was offering Harvard a donation of $115million. What could this Chinese property firm possibly need to hear from America’s top pandemic scientist? As investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg reports, Daley wrote to Fauci saying: ‘I met yesterday with a team led by Jack Xia, CEO of China’s Evergrande company, and Dr Jack Liu, Evergrande’s chief health officer.’ They wanted ‘whatever information you are willing to share on your current efforts to coordinate a response [to Covid]’.
Evergrande went bust this year before delivering the cash, but the incentive it was offering to shut up about the possibility of a lab leak was probably obvious to all. And sure enough, two days after the call with Evergrande, Dr Fauci and his colleagues started shutting down speculation about a lab leak, even though they had open-mindedly discussed the possibility over the preceding weekend, with some scientists deeming it ‘friggin’ likely’. (Harvard Medical School declined to reply to Rindsberg’s requests for a comment.)
By contrast, there is almost nobody who has a vested interest in the origin of Covid being a lab leak. Even the media, which ought to see this as the story of the century, have mostly steered clear of it. That’s because unlike every other kind of journalist, science and health journalists for some reason generally see it as their duty to fawn over and echo but never challenge the establishment view. Where political, business, even arts reporters challenge and critique their subjects, science reporters almost never do. I should know: I used to be one and when I occasionally did question the establishment view, I was treated like a pariah.
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Even the article says, "Long Read." So, not a "succinct case."
So I didn't.
Just putting it out there.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/20/the-shameless-cover-up-of-the-lab-leak-theory/
An excerpt:
Pandemics are not acts of God. Somebody somewhere did something that caused the virus to enter the human species. The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough. That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence. That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock. That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, August 2020.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, August 2020.
The coincidences of time and place are truly spectacular. The leading laboratory for bat sarbecoviruses in the world is not in Baltimore, Birmingham or Bombay. It is in Wuhan. When foot and mouth disease broke out near Pirbright in the UK in 2007, where the world’s leading reference laboratory for the foot-and-mouth virus is situated, it wasn’t a coincidence. When anthrax broke out downwind of a Soviet bioweapons factory in Sverdlovsk in 1979, it wasn’t a coincidence. When brucellosis broke out in Lanzhou in 2019, right by a brucellosis vaccine factory, it wasn’t a coincidence. And when smallpox infected a medical photographer at a smallpox lab in Birmingham in 1978, it wasn’t a coincidence. Lab leaks happen all the time. SARS itself leaked from labs after the end of the SARS epidemic of 2003 at least six times – once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times in Beijing.Yet the vested interests in ignoring and dismissing the possibility of a Covid lab leak are legion. They include the Chinese authorities, the World Health Organisation (which obsequiously does President Xi Jinping’s bidding these days), and the American scientific establishment – especially Dr Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases who funded some of the work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They also include EcoHealth Alliance, a New York non-profit headed up by Peter Daszak. EcoHealth Alliance has trousered millions of US taxpayer dollars since the SARS outbreak of 2003 for collecting viruses all over south-east Asia and sending them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all the while boasting of WIV’s gain-of-function experiments, which increase the infectivity of viruses.
And there are many others also invested in denying or dismissing the idea of a lab leak. There are some virologists who don’t want a light shone on their risky gain-of-function gravy train. And there is the academic world in general, which is terrified of doing anything to slow the flow of funds from China.
Indeed, we now know that the head of Harvard Medical School, George Daley, called Dr Fauci on 2 February 2020 to ask him to intervene to reassure a Chinese company, Evergrande, which was offering Harvard a donation of $115million. What could this Chinese property firm possibly need to hear from America’s top pandemic scientist? As investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg reports, Daley wrote to Fauci saying: ‘I met yesterday with a team led by Jack Xia, CEO of China’s Evergrande company, and Dr Jack Liu, Evergrande’s chief health officer.’ They wanted ‘whatever information you are willing to share on your current efforts to coordinate a response [to Covid]’.
Evergrande went bust this year before delivering the cash, but the incentive it was offering to shut up about the possibility of a lab leak was probably obvious to all. And sure enough, two days after the call with Evergrande, Dr Fauci and his colleagues started shutting down speculation about a lab leak, even though they had open-mindedly discussed the possibility over the preceding weekend, with some scientists deeming it ‘friggin’ likely’. (Harvard Medical School declined to reply to Rindsberg’s requests for a comment.)
By contrast, there is almost nobody who has a vested interest in the origin of Covid being a lab leak. Even the media, which ought to see this as the story of the century, have mostly steered clear of it. That’s because unlike every other kind of journalist, science and health journalists for some reason generally see it as their duty to fawn over and echo but never challenge the establishment view. Where political, business, even arts reporters challenge and critique their subjects, science reporters almost never do. I should know: I used to be one and when I occasionally did question the establishment view, I was treated like a pariah.
@George-K said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
Pandemics are not acts of God. Somebody somewhere did something that caused the virus to enter the human species.
I'm not disagreeing that it came from the lab, however this statement is clearly not true. There were plenty of pandemics before we had all this technology.
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@jon-nyc said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
True usually the guilty agent is a point mutation that occurs during DNA replication.
God, IOW.
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Well often that’s not the novel thing. The novel thing is a mutation allows a virus that’s been around for years to jump the species barrier.
I guess one could interpret, for example, “farming chickens” as the thing someone did to get some avian flu.
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It was a poorly written first sentence, but it strains credulity to think the author is unaware that viruses occur naturally. I'm trying to imagine what he meant, and I imagine that he meant to include "someone doing something" that would still align with a natural origin theory.
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I don't think it was intentional.
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I dont think it was, and I also think that we will never know the true answer.
And I have asked this question before - if we knew way back at the beginning that it was a lab virus that escaped, would anything have been different in the way the virus went around the world and the response to it?
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I dont think it was, and I also think that we will never know the true answer.
And I have asked this question before - if we knew way back at the beginning that it was a lab virus that escaped, would anything have been different in the way the virus went around the world and the response to it?
@taiwan_girl said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
would anything have been different
We would have the identity of the person
Fauciresponsible for 7,010,681 deaths.And that person would pay for every one of them.
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@taiwan_girl said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
would anything have been different
We would have the identity of the person
Fauciresponsible for 7,010,681 deaths.And that person would pay for every one of them.
@Copper said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
@taiwan_girl said in Succinct case for lab leak origin:
would anything have been different
We would have the identity of the person
Fauciresponsible for 7,010,681 deaths.And that person would pay for every one of them.
You've certainly changed your tune. I seem to recall in 2020 it was just a bit of flu.
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@Copper beat me to it…
And yes, if it had come out in early 2020 that it was a lab leak and quite possibly the same virus that Fauci was funding, there likely would have been huge changes at the very top, and quite possibly, some of Fauci’s biggest critics would have stepped to the front. If Jay Bhattacharya and company had come to the front then, we likely would have had a different approach to schools and such by the fall of 2020.
We also wouldn’t have had 2 years of media and social media censoring any talk about lab leaks for 2 years…
