Curiouser & Curiouser

Quiet observer of media bread and circuses.

[Curiouser & Curiouser @Silvertron66]

This is one of the most concise and thoughtful articles I have ever read regarding the debacle of the past three years. It’s a must read: How the “Unvaccinated” Got It Right https://t.co/gqVKXyWy6c via @brownstoneinst

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Back in the day, the KGB would send agents who used “critical theory” to split every society into victims and oppressors to deliberately stir class against class, race against race, and faith against faith until the fighting created enough chaos to blame the leader, tank his support, and slide their puppet into power while everyone was distracted.

The modern left has run that exact same playbook across America and the West, and they’ve done it from within, without spies or secret police.

They divided people by identity in universities and corporations, they inflamed grievances through media and institutions, and they branded anyone who pushed back as the real threat to democracy.

While the violence does look different now with riots, cancel culture, vandalism, lawfare, and assassinations instead of open street battles, the goal hasn’t changed.
And too many still won’t admit we’re giving up our freedom one manufactured division at a time.

And that’s simply because leftism is a violent cult that is incompatible with a free, just, safe, and civilized society.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

There is no other way to regard @Tim_Walz than irrefutably grotesque.
He’s a fan of people who sexually terrorize children. You just can’t get lower.

[The Independent with Scott Atlas @ScottAtlas_IT]

Atlas: "Fauci at one point said, ‘One of the problems is the public is not afraid enough.’ I was shocked... I said, ‘Can you repeat that?’ He said, ‘The people are not afraid enough, so they won't listen.’ ... I said, ‘It's unethical to use fear in an emergency to manipulate people.’"

[unseen1 @unseen1_unseen]

Pro tip: if you have 52 million people on welfare/government assistance you don't have a labor shortage.

[Brandon Gill @realBrandonGill]

People who traverse across several countries and show up to our southern border "looking for a better life" are not legitimate asylum seekers.

You don't have a right to claim asylum in America just by showing up to our border.

"Asylum" has a specific definition under our laws— limited specifically to people facing persecution by their home government.

The vast majority of people who claim asylum don’t qualify.

[Buck Sexton @BuckSexton]

People who dismiss the rise of open Communists within the Democrat party don't understand Bolshevik tactics or history

Of course, Democrats nationally will say the commies are few. Their whole game is pretending the vanguard is just a fringe.

But once in power, who calls the shots? What policies do we get?

They put the oldest, most boring white man in Democrat politics- Joe Biden- in office, with dementia, because they could pretend he was non-threatening politically and a "unifier"

What did the Biden White House do?

Intentionally, systematically throw open our border to 10+ million foreigners, an abject betrayal of this nation we may never recover from

Which is *exactly* what Chevalier of the 13th congressional district says she wants to do, again, and more

Wake up, everyone. Communism is here. It just hasn't won yet. And they plan to keep lying about it until it's too late.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/ejBWooREBX

[Margot Cleveland @ProfMJCleveland]

The year was 1992. The U.S., now world’s only superpower, had just defeated Soviet Union in Cold War without firing a shot. World had achieved state of peace & freedom beyond what it had ever known.
Then these jokers took over.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Today Obama praised people for attempting to stop ICE from doing its job.

When he was running for President in 2008 Obama slammed Bush for not doing more to stop illegal immigration.

The Divider In Chief is such a fraud.

[Robert W Malone, MD @RWMaloneMD]

Fauci funded the Wuhan research. Then he helped steer the intelligence that cleared it.
Gabbard's final act as DNI was to declassify the proof. And it confirms what a CIA whistleblower had already sworn to Congress weeks earlier.
What the documents actually show. 🧵

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

For @GeneticLiteracy project's information here is the evidence I presented in 2024 at a debate attended by @angie_rasmussen.

There are facts here in every paragraph that can be checked.

The silence of members of the scientific establishment about even the possibility of a laboratory leak in Wuhan is deafening. They refuse to debate it – quite literally. The World Health Organisation studiously avoids talking about it. I tried to get the Royal Society to organise a debate: it’s not a suitable topic for discussion, it replied. I tried the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow: too controversial, it said. A former president of the Royal Society told me he hopes we never find out what happened, lest it annoy the Chinese. Would he have said the same about Bhopal, I wondered, or a plane crash?

Earlier this year, I was approached by Open to Debate, an online debating forum, to propose the motion that Covid probably began with a lab accident. I quickly agreed. The organiser then asked more than 30 scientists, journalists and politicians to oppose me, including some who have vocally argued that it cannot possibly have come from a lab. They all said no, sometimes with a barrage of insults about me. Finally, a Nobel-prize winning immunologist in Australia agreed. But two weeks later, he pulled out.

Around the same time I was approached by the Soho Forum, a live debating forum in New York run by economist Gene Epstein. Again, would I take the lab-leak side of the debate if he could find a worthy opponent? Yes. He offered a fee of $10,000 to a series of scientists and journalists to take me on; they all said no. He upped the fee (and downed mine, which I am giving away anyway), and eventually one said yes: Stephen Goldstein, a virologist from the University of Utah.

The debate went ahead in July. This was, as far as I know, the first formal, live debate anywhere on the planet to address the origin of the worst pandemic in a century. At the start, we took a vote, both of those in the theatre and those watching online, and repeated it at the end. Before the debate, 51 per cent agreed with me that the pandemic probably began with a lab accident and 15 per cent agreed with Stephen that it probably did not. At the end, 65 per cent agreed with me and 12 per cent agreed with him, so my arguments must have been persuasive.

Opinion polls show a similar result – two-thirds of Americans believe the virus originated in a lab in China – yet most senior scientists seem to be sublimely unbothered by the fact that the public holds this view. They show little or no interest in getting out there and persuading people to change their minds. Instead, they just hope the whole topic fades into history. That reluctance even to try persuading the public betrays either a marked lack of confidence in their own case or a guilty conscience.

I was recently invited by one of the editors of a prestigious scientific journal to write a scholarly paper setting out the case that it was a lab leak. I agreed. With Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, I detailed how it is no coincidence that this virus turned up in exactly the right city at exactly the right time as they were planning exactly the right experiments that would put exactly the right insertion into exactly the right place in exactly the right gene of exactly the right kind of virus. And to do so at exactly the wrong biosafety level.

Our paper had hundreds of references to back up our claim, yet the editors of the journal rejected it out of hand, claiming – entirely wrongly – that ‘there is no evidence of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’ (WIV). In fact, that institute has published papers since 2017 detailing their gain-of-function experiments on SARS-like viruses. Were the editors of the journal unaware of this?

Why is this topic taboo? Scientists in the West have become addicted to collaboration with China. They get students and money from China. Ten British universities rely on Chinese students for more than a quarter of their income. Scientific journals get rich on Chinese publication fees. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: ‘I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.’

Occasionally, Westerners fret about the prevalence of scientific fraud, scientific espionage and low safety standards in China, but the money is too good. Yet it always comes with strings attached. As Ian Williams details in his new book, Vampire State, Western academia has been in the habit of ‘stifling debate and parroting Communist Party propaganda in order to ingratiate itself with Chinese partners and sponsors’. Right at the start of the pandemic, to take one example, Evergrande, a now bankrupt Chinese property firm, dangled a promise of $115million to Harvard Medical School, but only if Anthony Fauci – who has nothing to do with Harvard – spoke to its senior executives about US policy on Covid. Was the origin of the pandemic raised? Fauci has not said.

I did not start out thinking Covid came from a lab. For the first few months of 2020, I went around telling colleagues in the UK parliament we could rule that out (I retired from the House of Lords in 2021). Why? Mainly because I read the paper in March 2020 called ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ in the journal, Nature Medicine, which dismissed a lab leak. And I assumed that its authors knew what they were talking about.

Only later did I discover that I had been deceived: not only did their arguments fall apart on closer inspection but also they did not believe them themselves. We now know from congressional inquiries what the five virologists who authored the ‘proximal origin’ paper were saying to each other in private, while they drafted a paper that ruled out a lab leak. All five thought a lab leak was possible if not likely. One called it ‘friggin’ likely’, another ‘not crackpot’ and a third said ‘I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural’.

They went on saying things like this even after the paper was published – so it’s not that they changed their minds in the light of new evidence (as they have since claimed). A whole month after publication, lead author Kristian Andersen wrote in a private message that, ‘I’m still not fully convinced that no cell culture was involved’ and ‘we also can’t fully rule out engineering’. Writing a scientific paper that says the opposite of what you think is the truth is scientific misconduct at the very least. The paper should be retracted.

Why did they do this? They made that clear too: it was political. Co-author Andrew Rambaut wrote privately: ‘Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release’, they dare not do so. Andersen agreed, saying it was impossible not to ‘inject’ politics into science.

So why have I gradually come to the same conclusion that all of them did in private that the pandemic may have begun in a lab? The outbreak began not just in one of the very few cities doing research on this kind of virus, but also in the city with the biggest SARS-like virus research programme on the planet.

These kinds of viruses are found a thousand miles away from Wuhan. That’s the distance of London to Rome. We know of only one animal species that regularly travelled that route, carrying lots of viruses. That animal was the scientists themselves. In the 15 years before the pandemic, they collected over 16,000 bat viruses from all over southern China and south-east Asia and brought them a long way north to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak were in the freezer of the WIV.

Coincidences do happen, but when foot and mouth broke out in the UK in 2007, just down the road from the world’s reference lab for foot-and-mouth virus, people did not think it was just a coincidence. They investigated and sure enough it was a lab leak.

The experiments they did in Wuhan were crazily risky. They took the spike genes of SARS-like viruses they found in bats and inserted them into other virus backbones to make chimeras (viruses that contain genetic material from two or more sources), then infected human cells and humanised mice. In one case, the chimera virus proved to be 10,000 times more infectious in terms of viral load in the mice and significantly more lethal. That’s a gain-of-function experiment of concern.

Why were they even doing this? Ostensibly to predict which virus would cause the next pandemic. That went well, didn’t it? As Rambaut put it privately: ‘Perhaps they had planned a press conference predicting which virus would cause the next pandemic but then it escaped from the lab early.’

What is more, the work in Wuhan was being done in unsafe conditions: at biosafety level two (BSL-2), most of the time. Don’t take my word for it. The head of the lab, Shi Zhengli, said so explicitly. Her collaborator, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, boasted about BSL-2 being ‘highly cost effective’. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina called the WIV’s work ‘irresponsible’. Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin called it ‘unacceptable’. Kristian Andersen called it ‘completely nuts’. Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, could not believe it. Jeremy Farrar, formerly of the Wellcome Trust, called it the ‘wild west’.

When biosafety was discussed at a meeting in London of the US National Academies and the UK’s Royal Society in 2015, the WIV was singled out as the riskiest lab on the planet. When US diplomats toured the place in 2017, they expressed extreme alarm about the biosafety training.

But it’s a coincidence of time as well as place. We now know – as we did not in 2020 – from two EcoHealth Alliance documents that the experiments the Wuhan lab planned to do starting in 2019 were practically a blueprint for making SARS-CoV-2. WIV said it was switching its focus from SARS-1, the virus behind the SARS epidemic in East Asia between 2002 and 2004, to viruses from southern China that are 10 to 25 per cent different from SARS-1, ie like SARS-CoV-2.

It planned to introduce things called ‘furin cleavage sites’, potentially optimised for humans, into the spike genes of SARS-like viruses for the first time, at the so-called S1/S2 junction in the gene. All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that SARS-CoV-2 is the first and only SARS-like virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene. Sure enough, it’s an insertion, not a mutation, and it’s at the S1/S2 junction.

In any case, lab leaks happen all the time. There have been lab accidents that caused outbreaks of influenza, anthrax and many other pathogens. In 1977, there was a global influenza pandemic caused by the trial of an experimental vaccine that had been inadequately attenuated.

In 2003-4, SARS-1 leaked from a lab at least four times, once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and at least twice in Beijing, and killed the mother of a researcher. In three of those cases, we still don’t know how the accident happened.

Besides, there is way more virology going on now than 20 years ago. So arguing that previous pandemics began naturally, and therefore you should give natural theories the benefit of the doubt, is like saying no soldiers were killed by gunpowder in the Roman Empire, so we should assume people are being killed by swords and spears in Ukraine.

The scientists in Wuhan have behaved very suspiciously. They refuse to this day to share the database they had accumulated with 22,000 virus samples in it, even though it would exonerate them in a flash if it does not contain a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They also changed the name of the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 that was in their freezer, but did not admit to doing so, causing months of confusion. They implied they had not worked on it until 2020, then had to admit they had done so in 2018, the year before the pandemic started. They failed to tell the world that they had eight other similar viruses.

When Shi Zhengli of the WIV published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 for the first time in 2020, in two separate papers, she completely ignored the furin cleavage site. Those words don’t appear. One of the diagrams is truncated just before the site would appear. As Alina Chan – with whom I co-authored a book on the lab leak, Viral – put it, that’s like ‘describing a unicorn in detail and not mentioning the horn’. By contrast, Western scientists – like the five authors of ‘proximal origin’ – were immediately alarmed by the furin cleavage site because they worried that it was a sign the virus might be man-made.

There’s a whole bunch of suspicious events that happened in the autumn of 2019 and the early months of 2020. The WIV patented a device for dealing with animal bites. It ordered new ventilation equipment for the lab. It held a pep talk about lab safety. There was a coronavirus drill at the Wuhan airport. Three key lab workers fell ill with a Covid-like respiratory disease in late 2019. Chinese government officials patented a vaccine really early (February 2020) and the leader of the vaccine project died by falling off the roof of a building. They sent in the military to take over running the lab. Somebody quietly deleted a bunch of crucial genomic data from an international database. They banned the sale of ex-laboratory animals in markets.

Now, these may not mean anything. They may be coincidences. Some of these claims we cannot even confirm. But we know – for sure – that China offered an astonishing lack of transparency and cooperation with investigations into the virus’s origins – of a kind that the world would not have tolerated from any other country.

Against this deluge of evidence for a lab leak, what could the proponents of natural origin suggest? My opponent in the New York debate was reduced to arguing that the outbreak might have begun in a seafood market when an unidentified raccoon dog that had somehow been infected by an unidentified bat from a thousand miles away somehow infected an unidentified person who then passed it on to ordinary people, all while leaving no trace.

There was indeed a surge of cases in and around such a market in Wuhan in December 2019. But even Ralph Baric, the world’s leading coronavirologist, dismisses this argument: ‘People who say that those were the first cases, no chance.’ The family trees of the virus’s variants make clear that the first infection almost certainly happened much earlier, some time between July and November 2019.

Even the Chinese authorities, who blamed the market at first, have given up on that theory. They searched the market and found no infected animals, no antibodies in animals or people, no infected animal vendors, no infected handlers of wildlife food, no chain of upstream infection in suppliers, no other markets affected. Most of these things turned up very quickly for SARS, MERS, Nipah and other natural outbreaks. For none of them to turn up at all – at a time when the technology for detecting such things is far more sophisticated – is bizarre.

Despite a lot of talk about raccoon dogs and pangolins, it is a fact that no animal with this virus, or a closely related virus that might have evolved into it, has ever been found from before the beginning of the human outbreak. Yet vague speculation about something in the market is all the natural-origin theorists have left. So there they must stand.

There were traces of the human version of the virus in the market. But they were found only in and on inanimate objects and (with the doubtful exception of one possibly contaminated glove) they were all of one later human strain of the virus, which is most definitely not the ancestor. The earliest strains of the virus were not represented in the market.

The positive samples in the market cluster in one corner where there were stalls selling wildlife. Well of course they do because the authorities focussed their testing on the stalls selling wildlife: ‘Shops selling wildlife as well as shops linked to early cases were prioritised for sampling’, as one paper put it. There were traces of the virus in twice as many stalls that sold vegetables as sold wildlife.

They also argue that the early human cases cluster around the market. Well of course they do. The inclusion-exclusion criteria for deciding if you had Covid in the early days were that you had to have a connection to the market or to have been treated at a hospital near the market. It’s a circular argument.

In short, those of us who argue that the pandemic began with a laboratory accident have comprehensively won the debate. I do have some sympathy with the virologists who have waged a four-year battle to suppress, censor and delete all discussion of a laboratory leak. If my livelihood depended on this kind of research, I too would probably find it hard to accept that a lab leak had happened. Scientists, politicians, businesspeople and even journalists have a vested interest in hoping the subject just fades from memory.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

The revelations six years later are pouring out so quickly that it is impossible to keep up much less mentally process all this:

* The Director of National Intelligence has documented 120 US-funded/owned biolabs in 30 countries many of which are manufacturing and manipulating infectious diseases.

* Senator Rand Paul's committee has released the receipts concerning US funding/backing of the manufactured SARS-CoV-2 virus/vaccine as part of this program.

* Senator Johnson has produced definitive evidence that US public health agencies knew of the grave dangers of the shot to everyone but said nothing.

* Many officials are privately admitting/proving that the whole point of lockdowns was to preserve population immunity for the shot and block other avenues toward wellness.

* Hardly any of this makes the national news and one wonders if the public mind has any awareness at all.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

🧵 THREAD: You've heard the phrase "OUR DEMOCRACY" a million times. But what exactly is "OUR DEMOCRACY"? 🤔

When they say "democracy," they don't mean a republic. They don't mean consent of the governed. They don't mean your right to choose your own leaders.

They mean a system where "institutions" - NGOs, multilaterals, the permanent bureaucracy - advance a set of values they consider settled: equality, social justice, cosmopolitanism, global governance. These values aren't proposals to be voted on. They're treated as moral prerequisites that must be true *before* your vote counts.

Despite what they say, they aren't for checks and balances. Checks and balances limit what government can do to you. This limits what you can do to *them*. The brakes are on accountability, not power. The institutions that set the boundaries of acceptable policy have put themselves beyond the reach of the electorate, and they call that arrangement "democracy."

Trump has been an existential threat to this system since the moment he said "drain the swamp" ... because the swamp IS the system. When he threatened those institutions, he didn't threaten the republic. He threatened their immunity from it.

And they said so. On camera. At their own events. In their own words.

As always, patience as I pull together the thread.👇

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@SecScottBessent: "A nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength and sovereignty to others. That is a dangerous dependency for any country; it is an unacceptable one for the United States of America."

[Miranda Devine @mirandadevine]

Sorry but this is such BS. If she genuinely was "frightened" that he was having a stroke then any rational wife would have insisted he go straight to the hospital. Instead she dragged him off to a Waffle House and patronized him on stage like a baby: “Joe – you did such a great job.” We saw his incapacity for years. Don't try to rewrite history.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Get the vaccine so you don't transmit the virus to other people.

A year later...

We had no clue if the vaccine stopped transmission. We never even tested for that.

Science. 👌😜

[Rosie Memos @almostjingo]

@MayorFrey You didn’t even post about the men and women who gave their lives for this Country. The only reason you have the freedom of speech to spew this bullshit on a sacred day is because they fought for it. Have some respect, goblin.

[The Seeker @TheSeeker268]

The last few days have been somewhat remarkable in terms of accountability on COVID origins, the cover up, and the broader issue of dangerous pathogen research.

- David Morens was indicted for concealing key documents and conspiring with EHA.
- Ralph Baric was served a Notice of Suspension and Proposed Debarment.
- Tulsi Gabbard is investigating US-funded biolabs in more than 30 countries.
- A CIA whistleblower now says Fauci influenced the Agency’s assessment, despite most CIA scientists concluding the virus came from a lab.

These are the absolute low-hanging fruits.

What the public actually needs is the underlying studies, analyses, and intelligence that drove IC's lab origin assessment. If the whistleblower is right, some of that material may already be sitting on Gabbard’s desk awaiting release, and hopefully, it sees daylight soon.

But Morens could not have run a multi-year scheme to dodge FOIA and transparency laws on his own, without it being known at least at some higher level. And there is already evidence that Fauci organised the "Proximal Origin" paper outside official channels, communicated through a private Gmail account, and worked to shield Daszak and EHA - all points raised in Morens’ own emails. Why is he still untouched?

Then there’s Francis Collins, the man who directed the gain-of-function research policies, relaxed it's scope, and is on record discussing ways to "put down" what he called a "very destructive conspiracy," and hoping that Proximal Origin paper would settle it. Why is Collins rarely mentioned when accountability is discussed?

Daszak was debarred from federal funding, but that’s about it. Much of his EHA team, along with partners at USAID and elsewhere haven't even been scrutinized more closely. Same goes for the Proximal Origin authors and other conflicted scientists and officials. Somehow they still get to keep their jobs.

If this were some routine police investigation, the evidence already in public view would be enough to serve court warrants, and justify a far more aggressive inquiry. Instead, years later, groups like @USRightToKnow are still fighting in courts, lawsuits after lawsuits, for scraps of information.

Yes, we are far from where things stood a few years ago. But it's wild that while the Trump admin has publicly embraced lab origin yet simultaneously treats it like a minor inconvenience, throwing up just a flashy website and some headlines instead of delivering any real accountability and reform.

No serious guardrails or regulations have been put in place to stop this from happening again. No meaningful transparency reforms. No robust oversight framework for high-risk pathogen research. And, almost no one of real significance has been held meaningfully accountable.

Time matters here.

Documents go missing. Custody changes hands. Memories fade and the context erodes with time.

And the clock is ticking.

[el gato malo @boriquagato]

important hantavirus health advice.

[Matt Orfalea @0rf]

FAUCI: "We know exactly what we should be doing"