BY TYLER DURDEN
THURSDAY, NOV 02, 2023 – 08:40 AM
In the tumultuous dawn of 2020, as the world grappled with a pandemic that would shape public health policy, censorship, and reveal America’s involvement in deadly pathogen research, a quieter narrative was unfolding behind closed doors. A story that would not only bring truth to the narrative behind the origins of COVID-19 but also shed light on the dark corners of scientific research and the lengths to which some institutions would go to protect their interests.
To that end, former US Senate investigator Paul Thacker has done yet another a deep dive, weaving together key breadcrumbs surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci, his circle of virologists, the NIH / NIAID’s coronavirus biodefense and research programs, and the subsequent censorship, coverup, and smearing of journalists in order to protect the narrative.
As Thacker writes;
So much has happened since December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of a new pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China. The director sent me 6 pages of questions that we went over during the interview, but since most of them concern the cover-up of a possible Wuhan lab accident, I decided to put that down into an article.
Much of what we learned about the Wuhan cover-up leaked out over time, because Anthony Fauci and others in the government have been hiding information from the public and virologists such as Scripps Research’s Kristian Andersen have been lying to a complicit media. We only learned last July, for example, that Andersen didn’t believe the conclusions from the “Proximal Origins” paper he published in Nature Medicine that denigrated the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident.
“Natural selection and accidental release are both plausible scenarios,” Andersen messaged several scientists, before then publishing the “Proximal Origins” paper that concluded a Wuhan lab accident was not plausible. Andersen then trumpeted that paper to reporters.
Instead of going over how this all unfolded over almost four years, I decided to lay out what happened, based on what we now know. It’s been a long, tough journey.
Early Days: Connecting the Dots
By the end of January 2020, just a month after the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, key figures in the scientific community were already exchanging covert communications. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH’s NIAID, received emails detailing the NIAID’s financial backing of some of the world’s foremost coronavirus experts, including Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina.
Fauci’s NIAID oversaw a large program on biodefense and research on coronaviruses—the type of virus causing the pandemic, and which scientists abbreviate as “CoV.” The press officer noted that Fauci’s NIAID funded many of the world’s coronavirus experts, including Peter Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and Ian Lipkin of Columbia University. –The Disinformation Chronicle
“EcoHealth group (Peter Daszak et al) has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others,” wrote an NIH officer to Fauci on January 27, noting further that Fauci had been funding Daszak’s research in China.
“NIAID has funded Peter’s group for coronavirus research in China for the past five years.”
This raised immediate eyebrows. Why? Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had been funded by Fauci’s NIAID for coronavirus research in China for the past five years.
Hushed Conversations and Burner Phones
The urgency of these behind-the-scenes communications was palpable. Jeremey Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s leading virology funders, felt the need to use a burner phone to discuss sensitive matters. This was not normal scientific collaboration. This was a covert operation in real-time.
“We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts,” Farrar later admitted.
The Suspicions Surface
Soon, cracks began to show. Dr. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, in an email to Fauci, pointed out that some features of the COVID virus “look engineered.” Andersen’s statement directly contradicted the prevailing narrative that the virus was a natural occurrence.
As Thacker writes:
Fauci had also begun a series of calls and emails with various virologists, including Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. Emailing Fauci, Andersen explained that he had analyzed the COVID virus genetic sequence and “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Andersen added that, while opinions could change, he and other virologists felt the virus was not natural or consistent with “expectations with evolutionary theory.”
Fauci thanked Andersen on February 1 and then joined a conference call later that day that Farrar organized with Eddie Holmes, Kristian Andersen and other virologists. “Obviously ask everyone to treat in total confidence,” Farrar emailed Fauci.
“The call with Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust) went very well,” Fauci would later tell several government scientists in an email – including his boss, Francis Collins.
“Francis Collins joined and there were several highly credible scientists (including and in addition to the two that I spoke with last night) on the call with expertise in evolutionary biology.”
The Synchronized Denial
But instead of addressing these concerns head-on, a well-coordinated attempt to control the narrative began. Multiple scientific papers, promoted by top virologists and government officials, were quickly published, all singing the same tune: the idea that COVID-19 emerged from a lab was nothing more than a baseless “conspiracy theory.”
These emails show that Fauci and many of the world’s top virologists knew by February 1, 2020, that Fauci was funding EcoHealth Alliance to do coronavirus research in China and that the COVID virus did not seem natural. Some virologists were even suspicious that a gene may have been inserted into the COVID virus—suspicions only heightened because Wuhan scientists were doing gain-of-function research to genetically modify bat coronaviruses. But instead of alerting the public, emails show that Fauci, Farrar, and multiple virologists began plotting to deny these same suspicions by orchestrating the publication of three scientific papers to label the possibility of a lab accident a “conspiracy theory.”
On February 19, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and Wellcome Trust’s Farrar published a statement in The Lancet that claimed a possible Wuhan lab accident was a “conspiracy theory.” The statement did not disclose that Daszak was funding research led by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A week later, on February 26, virologists working behind the scenes with Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli published a commentary in Emerging Microbes & Infections that claimed it was a conspiracy theory to speculate that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab. Three weeks after that, on March 17, Kristian Andersen, Ian Lipkin, and Eddie Holmes published a paper titled “Proximal Origins” in Nature Medicine that concluded a lab accident was not “plausible.” -Disinformation Chronicle
The Media’s Role (rest of report via The Disinformation Chronicle):
After silencing the science community and the media, these same virologists then began campaigning inside the intelligence community to shut down any inquiry into a possible Chinese lab accident, later admitting they had briefed officials from the State Department, FBI and the CIA. Fauci and allied virologists continue to cover-up their role in denying the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident causing the pandemic.
“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci told NBC as his role in orchestrating a Wuhan cover-up first started becoming public. “Because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science.”
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Conspiring to label critics “conspiracy theorists”
Days after Jeremy Farrar organized the February 1 call with Fauci and other virologists, he sent Fauci and Collins the draft summary of a paper he received from virologist Eddie Holmes that would later become the “Proximal Origins” paper. “Please treat in confidence—a very rough first draft from Eddie and team—they will send on the edited, cleaner version later,” Farrar emailed Fauci and Collins, on February 4. The following day, Farrar emailed Fauci and Collins, “Tony and Francis, The revised draft from Eddie, copied here.”
Two days later on February 6, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak began organizing researchers to sign a statement in The Lancet to call any discussion of a possible Wuhan lab accident a “conspiracy theory.” In a February 6 email, Daszak explained that some of his fellow virologists should not sign The Lancet statement “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.”
“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Daszak emailed Ralph Baric.
Three days later, Fauci dismissed the possibility of a lab accident as a “conspiracy theory” on a February 9 podcast with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich:
“There’s a sort of urban legend,” Mr. Gingrich prodded Dr. Fauci, “that there’s a biological warfare center in Wuhan and that the coronavirus escaped from that.”
“I’ve heard these conspiracy theories,” Dr. Fauci replied. “And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.” Fauci added that while he could not say that scenario was impossible “the things you’re hearing are still in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.”
Three days after that, on February 12, a group of virologists in America, including Linda Saif at Ohio University, began preparing an essay for the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections. One of the author’s forwarded an email from Ralph Baric that included his comments and changes to the essay’s text, although Baric wrote that he wanted to hide his involvement.
“Don’t want to be cited in as having commented before submission,” Baric wrote.
That same day, Kristian Andersen emailed an editor at Nature Magazine to see if she was interested in the “Proximal Origins” paper—prompted by Farrar, Fauci, and Collins—that discussed the origin of the COVID virus.
Four days later, on February 16, the authors of the Emerging Microbes & Infections paper emailed each other private concerns that some samples of viruses from Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan Institute of Virology “may not have been handled properly and leaked out of the lab…But just a possibility.”
Some hours later, the same authors discussed comments that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli had sent them on their paper—the same researcher that many suspect may have caused the lab accident.
The following day, on February 17, Farrar sent an email to virologists asking them to make some last-minute changes to their “Proximal Origins” paper. “Sorry to micro-manage/microedit!” Farrar wrote. “But would you be willing to change one sentence?”
“Thanks for shepherding this paper,” Lipkin wrote back to Farrar.
“I will push Nature,” Farrar responded, meaning push Nature to accept the paper.
Kristian Andersen and his co-authors then published a draft of the “Proximal Origins” paper on a preprint server that same day. One scientists later admitted that Farrar should have been listed as an author.
Two days after, on February 19, The Lancet published Daszak’s statement that said, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” Several of the 27 scientists who signed the statement omitted reporting their ties to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Signatories included Jeremy Farrar, who was working behind the scenes with Kristian Andersen to publish the “Proximal Origins” paper, and Linda Saif, who was working to publish the essay in Emerging Microbes & Infections.
Read the rest, including…
- Making intelligence dumb
- The complicit media
- Censoring critics, hiding public documents
- And the continued conspiracy
… at The Disinformation Chronicle (well worth the subscription if you haven’t done so already).