It was five years ago this month that Covid-19 began its worldwide spread. Back in December 2019, 34-year-old Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, and a few other Chinese medical practitioners, began putting out the word to the world that a novel coronavirus had been discovered and was spreading. His warning was suppressed by government authorities and he was arrested for spreading "rumors." A couple of weeks later, he died of exposure to the virus and panic ensued, with thousands of Chinese netizens expressing their outrage and grief online at social media sites.
When word of the pandemic broke, the US population was deeply caught up in the first Trump impeachment hearings, and its bread and circus, and smoke and mirrors, and clown show atmospherics held the American populace in its throes of political absurdity. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed what she knew was an unwinnable quest to impeach Donald Trump (Republicans held sway in the Senate, so no conviction was possible) and the MSM, which hated Trump, went along with the Bakhtinian carnival in its overbearing coverage.
America was exhausted from the MSM's ubiquitous Trump coverage by February 3, 2020, and just wanted to watch the Super Bowl on TV -- and, of course, the ads. (Some folks were still buzzing from the 2019 ad with Jeff Bridges switching to Stella Artois to the tune of Dylan's "The Man in Me.") By then, the pandemic had already reached the USA. In fact, the first confirmed case relating to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was announced by the state of Washington on January 21, 2020. A smart precaution would have seen the Super Bowl cancelled. But talk online and on the air was mostly the annual debate on whether Monday should be declared a national holiday, as so many workers call in sick anyway the day after the game, the argument went. Instead, the super-spreader event went ahead, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis even admitting afterward that the virus was probably spread at the Super Bowl, and so, further distributed afterward when the crowd dispersed nationally on planes going in every direction. On Tuesday February 5, the Senate, still recovering from hangovers, acquitted Trump; the impeachment ended with a whimper and a gavel bang.
If it had all ended there, reason and rationality might have rescued the nation. But it didn't end there, and the jugglers and the clowns took over. Trump pooh-poohed masks. Trump doubted the need for self-quarantines after exposure. Trump talked 'herd immunity'. He pushed the use of hydroxychloroquine, ignoring the advice of US infectious disease chief Dr Anthony Fauci, who the MSM fawned over. Trump's shortcomings were glaring. In The Monster Enters,Mike Davis wrote:
Trump's craven abdications, tantrums, lies, and sundry high crimes and misdemeanors during this crisis. For now, it is possible to summarize the major factors responsible for the catastrophic meltdown of the federal response in the first three months of the pandemic.
Fauci, the highest paid public servant ($400,000) smiled blithely for a while, and then the tide changed when it was learned he may have okayed funding for an offshore re-start of gain-of-function research of viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This struck some as the lies of conspiracy theorists and was pooh-poohed by the MSM, for the most part, although Newsweek ran an April 2020 telling piece titled "The Controversial Experiments and Wuhan Lab Suspected of Starting the Coronavirus Pandemic." But, on the other hand, in late December 2017,the NIH announced that it was "lifting a funding pause dating back to October 2014 on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses."
Further, evidence of WIV's involvement in risky research came from the English version of the WIV site itself, where the Director's Message discussed the success WIV had seen in its research with bats and coronaviruses. The Message included: "SARS etiology origin: The live SARS-like coronavirus SL-CoV-WIV1 has been isolated for the first time from the bat droppings; and such virus has been confirmed to invade the host cells through the ACE2 of human beings, civets and Rhinolophus sinicus. The research result has so far provided the most convincing evidence to the view that Rhinolophus sinicus is the natural host of SARS-CoV (Nature, 2013)." In addition, in a brief flurry of nervousness WaPo ran a piece, " State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses" that suggested that the kind of trouble that could lead to a lab leak was brewing two years before the outbreak. The MSM has yet to fully explore the details of the US-China arrangement on such research.
But playing the Devil's Advocate for a moment, no sooner had Trump been inaugurated in January 2017, when the Deep State got busy. Cofer Black, who "conceived, planned, and led CIA's role in the war in Afghanistan" (OODA), joined the ex-president of Poland, Aleksander Kwa?niewski, and the embattled Hunter Biden. More importantly, perhaps, in 2018 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a book length framework document, titled Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology. In the framework scientists openly discuss the need for creating novel viruses and other synthetic structures to keep ahead of "our enemies," ostensibly China and Russia. And NASEM was aware of the potential virility of the Coronavirus in 2018. The text includes this tantalizing tidbit:
The bat virus, however, does not grow in cell culture. To help elucidate the steps that may have occurred to convert bat SARS-CoV into a virus infecting humans, Becker and colleagues (2008) substituted the human SARS coronavirus receptor binding domain for the equivalent domain in the bat SARS-CoV virus, making the bat SARS virus replication competent in cell culture and mice.
All of this is to say only that it is misinformative to aver that gain-of-function research was not under consideration or in play somewhere.
But another interesting development that came with the first Trump administration, in relation to Covid-19, is the wargame-like "simulation" of a massive outbreak that DARPA was coincidentally running in early 2020 with its partners (Vanderbilt U. and Abcellera) in the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3). another program which began after the Trump inauguration. Essentially, it was designed so that, according to DARPA, "to support military readiness and global stability through pursuit of novel methods to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases." Of the simulation, a DARPA rep told me in an email, "P3 convincingly demonstrated how to find and manufacture antibodies in less than 90 days (vs. years), using influenza, Zika, and MERS as test cases. As the COVID-19 outbreak began early in 2020, P3 research pivoted to address the novel coronavirus." The partnership came up with a non-vaccine monoclonal solution. The DARPA business model appeared to be a success. But the timing of the DARPA simulation, and the extraordinary technological feats leading to monoclonal and vaccine solutions have yet to be fully explored by the MSM.
The MSM -- CBS, ABC, Fox, NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, WSJ, et al -- have been somewhat less than adversarial to Power for quite some time. This was never more evident than in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the MSM largely focussed on Trump's often silly responses to the virus outbreak and how to deal with it. To spice things up, and keep Trump's administration seen as a fake administration, largely brought on by "the Russians" meddling in the election, the MSM, in 2020, began to hire top ex-spooks to worry for the nation. Hires included world class liars such as former CIA chief John Brennan (NBC), who lied about what happened in Abbottabad and had to walk it back; and, former NSA chief James Clapper (CNN), who lied before Congress when he was asked about warrantless NSA spying on American citizens and said No, it didn't happen "wittingly." (Of Clapper's testimony whistleblower Ed Snowden wrote in his quashed memoir, Permanent Record: "That was a witting, bald-faced lie, of course, not just to Congress but to the American people." Brennan and Clapper continued the implicit assault on Trump's legitimacy, raising questions about his response to the pandemic, while distracting from the machinations of the Deep State.
The biggest MSM flub in 2020, though, was the dereliction of duty to the public and the mission to keep the nation well-informed. As the presidential campaigning returned and Trump was up for re-election in the fall of 2020, the president began talking about an imminent October Surprise vaccine for Covid-19, called Operation Warp Speed. It has been described as a kind of Manhattan Project that brought together many and varied private and public investors and stakeholders to speed up development of vaccines. And it has never been fully fleshed out in the media. As late as May of 2020 the MSM were telling the public that Operation Warp Speed was dubious. The New York Times, for instance, in a March 2020 piece, chided Trump for his previously established skepticism about vaccines (autism) and a reversal when it came to Covid-19, for which he is "cheerleading" a very fast deployment of vaccines. The reporter quotes a very nervous Fauci, who tells a gathering of drug company executives:
"Would you -- would you make sure you get the President the information that a vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that's deployable. So he's asking the question, 'When is it going to be deployable?' And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go."
That meant, according to Fauci, the earliest a vaccine could be deployable would be between March and December 2021. In yet another Times piece, "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?" an interactive graph demonstrates what would have to be eliminated or short-cut in the vaccine development process to get a deployable vaccine. The piece is highly skeptical of Trump's timeline:
The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won't arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We've never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years -- more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.
The first vaccine arrived in December 2020, well before the fastest anticipation. That vaccine was Moderna's mRNA, an innovative biotechnological approach which was partially funded by DARPA. (But at least one knowledgeable medical scientist involved with Covid-19 and vaccines refuses to call mRNA a vaccine at all, but rather " a gene therapy," and falsely marketed: "Most people did not know that the mRNA jabs were not tested for vaccine effectiveness against transmission," writes Andrew G. Huff scientist and former vice president of EcoHealth, in his book The Truth About Wuhan.) A deluge of vaccines then hit the market well before the expected earliest possible deployment date -- with the potential lack of safety to the public of some or many of the new vaccines implied by their release under the Emergency Use Authorization, which limits liability; there is no meaningful redress if the vaccines fuck you up. It also raises the question that some vaccines may have been lab-ratted among Americans at large. The MSM largely reported Big Pharma indifference to safety as disinformation, even after the lessons drawn from oxycontin distribution and the lies told by the Sackler family about the drug's lethality.
Five years later, we, the public, do not have a definitive answer to the origin of Covid-19. We have a right to know, since it may very well be that Americans unwittingly paid to have the virus developed, when Fauci arranged for funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance. As it stands, we seem to be faced with the choice between an "escape from the lab" or a "spillover" event at a wet market down the road, which is to say a choice between what the Brits call a co*k-up and Nature coming home to roost co*k-a-doodle doo style. A third, more disturbing way, has been proposed by Andrew Huff in his book: There was a flub at the lab and to enhance deniability the virus was planted by unknown personnel at the wet market. But this seems to creep into conspiracy theory. Alas, it was once so reassuring, if ever so briefly, to believe the pangolin story that was first put out. But the main point here is that the origin remains a mystery, and choosing 'lab accident' or 'wet spillover' seems more a choice of politics than science.
However, we can be assured that the veracity and objectivity of science has taken a hit from the way the catastrophe was investigated. French virologist Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel prize in 2008 for his work on the HIV virus as cause of the AIDS epidemic, said in 2020 that the virus was "novel" and "man-made" that the vaccines were causing the variants in the virus. He was laughed at, and he quietly disappeared and then died. His views went viral among the anti-vaxxer lot.
The Montagnier de'dain was amusing, if you love the sound of the French language as I do, but the fall-out from the origins question got even more farcical. Trump's confidante, Rudy Giuliani, was caught in the last Sacha Baron Cohen film, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), seemingly making a pass in a hotel room at a teenaged "reporter" from Kazakhstan; that was sleaze laughed at. But what was often glossed over by the MSM reporting on the film was Giuliani's statement in the interview with the girl, during which he said that China intentionally made the virus and spread it around the world. Seemingly, nobody in the MSM batted an eyelash over this allegation, which if true would make China a world pariah. More Barnum and Bailey at work.
Is a Bird Flu Pandemic Next?
Given the way that the Covid-19 pandemic was handled it is fair to wonder how American might survive another virus outbreak with Trump in charge and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his health secretary. Over the last few months the MSM has been quietly reporting on outbreaks of bird flu in the midwest and California. While there is scant evidence, at the moment, of a development toward an epidemic, let alone a pandemic, it remains a frightening consideration to behold in the mind's eye. While Covid-19 was largely unpredicted, some scientists have posited that a H5N1 pandemic was overdue. At Vanderbilt University, Dr. Jim Crowe, who headed up the DARPA simulation for P3, recently told me by email that his team was currently working on a monoclonal solution for H5N1. "Both antibodies and vaccines are being developed for bird flu. They are complementary tools. But it's true there is a cognitive bias in which government and industry prioritize vaccines." A cognitive bias that ignores what DARPA told me by email a few years back: Monoclonal is a better mitigation.
In his last book before he died, The Monster Enters (Or Books, 2020), published just after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, author Mike Davis, long time gloom-and-doomer (not that there's anything wrong with that), quotes microbiologist Kennedy Shortridge: "Eight years of research on H5N1 had convinced him that this cunning little Darwinian demon was capable of ecocide -- the wiping out of entire species." Davis was convinced we had been lucky so far and that something like Covid-19 was an event from which humankind could learn to live better lives. As many have pointed out, in 2020, thanks largely to the quarantining, the climate catastrophe eased in such a way as to provide hope that a sustained effort could yet see humans overcome the seemingly imminent eschatological crisis ahead. But we went right back to our profligate polluting ways once we began taking vaccines.
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