I don't know of any government actively seeking the truth on the origins.
It's astounding to me. You would think that is the most important component of the pandemic to understand, in order to prevent this from happening again.
Yeah, it's not exclusive to the US. Some part of it must surely be an uncertainty, and a fear, of what precisely an investigation would uncover, and who would be implicated.
Another problem, is that most of the answers are probably locked up and inaccessible in Wuhan, but still you'd expect investigators to be raiding the labs of important western virologists and interviewing them. In a way, the Wuhan angle makes that even more important.
Yes... I quite agree we should have done nothing at all: this was just another flu-type virus, quite boring really, whatever the origins, we simply decided to make a mountain of mostly imaginary mass graves out of this epidemiological molehill. The rest is history.
Terrific write-up and summarization. I've read several of Ridley's books, so yours is great effort to get this out to a wider audience--and your analysis and critique is top notch! Best...
For me the lab leak theory of wild-type covid is accepted on the "balance of probabilities" standard of evidence. We do not have, however, strong enough evidence to convict, on the basis of "beyond reasonable doubt".
If it was a lab leak, then of a virus collected from the wild, and possibly subjected to humanization, forced evolution to be more infective to humans, as part of a dumb research program. This does not need to be dark forces with military funding doing secret experiments in hollowed-out Ukrainian volcanoes, you can do this crap as a postdoc, or even lower down the academic foodchain, and it costs next to nothing. Wuhan would be the obvious source, even if they discovered it many months after the fact (likely) and by that time there were political machinations deciding what best to do with this. Perhaps the Wuhan wet market was the best cover-up they could come up with at the time, even though with it all around the world by then, not "discovering" it in Wuhan at all might have been a better option.
I know, from the day job, that Wuhan hospitals were in full-on panic mode months before the official declaration, and were _documenting_ their refusal to see trial patients by October 2019 because of the pandemic.
Far more intriguing to me is the possibility, to likelihood, that Omicron was engineered. A genetic throwback with almost all nonysnonymous mutations. And likely also a "leak", in the accidental, rather than deliberate sense. Microbe labs have slapdash safety procedures, checkbox "there is a shower in the corner of every room" stuff, and the scientists get very blase and arrogant about it, as only academics can. I know, I've been one (not deadly virus research but similar setups).
I agree that Omicron looks like a lab virus, and that that is extremely intriguing. Doubly so, because unlike SARS-2 itself, it's hard to find any related published scientific literature, which in my view suggests a military or intelligence project of some sort.
Beyond a thread on twitter pointing out the wildly implausible mutation ratio, there is an absolutely stunning radio silence on this. But 100,000 or more knowledgeable people have looked at the sequence, and decided to keep their traps shut. They are not co-conspirators, they just have nowhere to turn, or know better to keep quiet.
No, because you would have to know how infective it was (efficacy) and how many people it didn't kill (safety).
This kiboshes both the "weapon" theory as well as the "omicron vaccine" theory. Even taking for granted it was developed by a Dr (Sh)Evil in a hollowed-out volcano, you would need a very large number of test subjects (prisoners) to work out the lethality of it. Granted, China is the only place that could do that kind of thing undetected, but it is still extremely unlikely, because it just kills so few people. To be sure omicron was one or two Fergusons* below its predecessors would have taken a number of prisoners, er, volunteer test subjects, so high that I am not sure even China could do it undetected.
My best guess is WT covid was a wild bat strain passaged lots through human cells, that escaped by accident, and China thought the best (and weaponized beyond their wildest dreams) cover story was to "discover" it where it originated, perhaps as much as a year after it escaped, and omicron a literal postgraduate research project that also escaped. Unfortunately, neither of these can be known with sufficient confidence to entirely dismiss other plausible hypotheses.
*: The new SI unit for "out by an order of magnitude".
I think there might be a case for Omicron as some kind of badly attenuated vaccine, or the precursor to such a thing, developed perhaps to eliminate animal reservoirs which got away somewhere in the earlier developmental stages.
my ideas haven’t changed since i wrote this piece, i’m also not aware of very much new evidence either. but i’ll cast around and see if the matter is worth reconsideration.
Cool, I liked that article, just thinking along the same lines, i.e. is there any worthwhile news on the matter since December? If not, also good to know.
Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is not the only book from a major trade publisher to consider the problem of virus origins in an objective light. My "Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics"--I am both a China expert and hold an advanced degree in biology--concludes that it was clearly a bioweapon in development. I will be glad to send you a copy, Eugyppius.
I expected this review months ago, and here I am on vacation with my copy of Viral littered with hundreds of sticky notes all the back at home... oh well.
Have to go from memory some of the talking points I had in mind:
1) First off, anyone who wants the TL;DR, I think Matt Ridley's interview with Michael Shermer months back gives a good overview on the book (and closes with Matt giving his best "steel-manning" of both sides, which Eugyppius noted was strange in chapters 12/13) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8LXhhnwuPo
2) I started flagging each instance in the book Daszak was caught in a lie and it got comical eventually how lazy he got at even trying to lie. Kept picturing Mr Burns having the nuclear inspectors shows up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdthUGWFMtM Seriously, anyone doing a first time read, try to keep up with the number of blatant lies he tells... 50? 100?
3) I agree it felt like Alina and Matt were pandering to the possibility it wasn't a lab leak. I suspect partly because when they started writing they may have honestly not expected the evidence to be so damning, partly to appease publishers, and partly because sometimes you have pretend to see the other side (like when Jehovah's witnesses come to my door, occasionally I will be kind any act like I am carefully considering their bullshit). But yes, it reminded me of mid 90's when coverage of the OJ Simpson case tried to pretend there was any other possibility besides The Juice murdering Nicole and Ronald Goldman.
4) Eugyppius: "The irony is that the regime narrative is caught between a rock and a hard place here. To make the strongest case for natural origins outside Wuhan requires acknowledging widespread early infection and admitting that lockdowns were worthless. Alternatively, the more the press and the Corona astrologers cleave to the orthodox mythology that Corona did not take off in the West until February 2020, the more they seal the case for a WIV laboratory release."
Sorry about egregious delays, this review has been the most cursed of the series I planned. Every time I sat down to write some other temporary subject preempted, or I had to travel someplace, or (most recently) I got mysteriously ill. The next few reviews will now follow in rather quicker succession, as I am going on leave to write them, and the series must be over before the virus season begins again in the Fall.
The problem is, I'm not totally sure. The finale will be Kennedy/The Real Anthony Fauci. I'd also like to review Schwab/The Great Reset. Then with luck I'll have space for one more, but here I'm torn among a few different possibilities: Dodsworth/State of Fear maybe, or Gloger and Mascolo/Ausbruch (by normie journalists on the early days of the Merkel regime response, but full of interesting information).
Adding, also competing for the third slot is Ron Unz's collected articles promoting the theory that it's a US bioweapon against China. Thought maybe that would be fun, but perhaps less informative.
I don't know how I stumbled on some people on twitter at the beginning of DRASTIC, but somehow I did. It was a thrilling ride- all the pieces added up and they even managed to get film footage of the inside of the Lab before most of it got scrubbed (totally scary stuff with poorly sealed freezers jammed full of presumably dangerous stuff). There is some great footage out there of Dascak putting his foot in mouth several times- this whole US group was very very keen on gain of function and they were clearly not going to take no for an answer. It's infuriating to think that US taxpayer money actually funded this virus that ended up paralyzing the world and millions of people (never mind the deaths and critically ill people who were dreadfully treated in the hospitals). It should be so simple to see who in Congress gave permission to the NIH funding and heads should roll. But nothing happens, because they all cover for each other. Gain of function is a form of bio-weapon. It should not be studied by narcissistic morons like Fauci who couldn't even handle the HIV outbreak. These stupid people are dangerous. And the stupidity continues with no one lining up those with accountability and making them suffer some meaningful consequences.
Just because we couldn't have known (or didn't know), doesn't mean nobody could have known. The primary political result in the US was destruction of the president and installation of a monolithic socialist cabal. The timing of the release indicates someone knew, or calculated, the release at that time would shift American politics. I'm confident on the available evidence that it was on purpose and was driven by a multitude of corrupt parties that incited panic in the US which spread globally.
So it is well known to most people that it was released from a lab. Doesn't matter, except as evidence to identify and punish perpetrators. We're not there yet.
Two things we need to figure out:
One is finding out who did it and making sure they can't do it again. If no one is punished, they will continue. Biological pathogens are just a new tool for terrorism and oppression.
The other is making sure everyone understands that some people were significantly sickened by sars2, while most weren't. We need to help everyone understand how to maintain their immune health, and withhold sympathy for those who choose not to. Obesity and metabolic defects that are common to the worst outcomes are all caused by hedonistic lifestyles, and are easily prevented or corrected. The failures of medical integrity -- both in treatment and prevention -- got us into this mess. We should expect better of our doctors.
I just don't think American politics were the target here. I think, instead, that the American political opposition acted opportunistically and used the virus against Trump. But, that was only possible because a lot of other things had already happened: the Wuhan lockdown, the Italian lockdown (not about Trump at all), followed by the caving of UK and the rest of Europe, all for reasons that don't have much to do with US.
The one political conspiracy theory worth contemplating, I think, is the suppression of the Hong Kong protest movement. This owed a lot to early-stage virus hysteria in China, and might even explain initial willingness of Chinese authorities to publicise the infections. Or you could take this even further ...
The Hong Kong protests were squished by the National Security Law. I was there in Nov 2019 (used to spend several weeks every year in HK - that was my most recent visit for obvious reasons). It remains the only time I have ever smelt tear gas, been inconvenienced by makeshift roadblocks, have a police officer wave a firearm at me, or been in a crowd (at a stadium) that turned its back on the national anthem. Though I suspect some of that is coming to Europe, certainly Germany, later this year (and it might not be a bad thing...).
Somehow the city was quieted from petrol bombs and tear gas, and closing everything at 8pm (Hong Kongers rise late and go to bed late), and mass "religious walks" (because the police could not ban religious gatherings), the largest involving almost a quarter of the territory's population, to nothing, by the stroke of a pen. And the thought, one more big two-million person gathering _after_ the law, could have changed a lot. We really are cowards.
In hindsight, it feels like the moment I stepped into the wrong parallel universe, and I have been living in a downbeat and surreal Murakami novel since.
We've had countless pathogens worse than this one, none evoked this level of panic. The world overreacted because US medical authorities overreacted, international medical authorities were subverted by US and China authorities and the rest of the world followed them over the cliff. The very fact no one is doing competent investigations is evidence this is a scam. The most money and power at stake is American. That's where you'll find the original sin.
Weren't fauchi and gates major funders of Wuhan? If you know of more likely suspects? We'll find out soon, thanks to fine reporting like yours.
US medical authorities were some of the last to overreact. The activist response began with a few people in the WHO, and then with public health authorities in Italy. Even the Silicon Valley pro-lockdown push doesn't begin until after Neil Ferguson in the UK releases his dumb modelling study on 16 March. All of this is far upstream of the American reaction.
IF the UK had insisted on a Sweden-style approach and ignored the Ferguson panic crowd; if Italy had never locked down, empowering activists like Ferguson in the first place; if the WHO had remained agnostic about the Hubei suppression measures – then Corona would've never become a political issue in the US at all. American politics are just downstream of too many contingencies, and what actually happened accords with a longstanding pattern in American politics, whereby left-liberals adopt Euro arguments and policies as their own to wield against their opponents on the right.
In the early stages of the pandemic, through the mid-March 2020, when all the crucial decisions are happening, American influence is nowhere to be found. China is the big player then. US policy first played a global role with the development and approval of the vaccines in late 2020.
I appreciate your giving America a pass, however undeserved. We have greater reach, and greater influence, than many people realize. Someday we'll get a comprehensive analysis of what happened, when, and by whom. For now it's forbidden, and the instigators seem to be in control. But history is always revealed, eventually. Until then, every analysis should be viewed with suspicion. I'm hopeful the new US congress will begin to crack the conspiracies that are protecting the evidence. Next year will be exciting.
'I just don't think American politics were the target here. I think, instead, that the American political opposition acted opportunistically and used the virus against Trump.'
I hope you're both right. The mounting evidence seems to indicate you're not. We can be pretty sure we haven't learned all the facts yet. But the hysteria has been too well organized to write off as innocent incompetence or serendipity.
I would not write off intentional release so quickly. First off, if one were to intentionally release a virus for a specific purpose it would be prudent to have multiple layers of deniability. Natural occurrence would be the first line of defense. If that became untenable, an accidental leak would be the next line of defense. This would certainly be plausible in such a "face conscious" society as China. Being seen as having blundered is never preferable.
Second, if one does accidentally release a virus, is it customary to ship your citizens around the globe, as the Chinese Communist Party did?
Third, if one were to intentionally release a virus for a specific purpose, it would have to be designed to fit that purpose. If one wanted to cause a pandemic the virus could not be that virulent, or else the spread would peter out too quickly. It would however have to be deadly enough to cause the right level of panic. Or at least be capable of being spun into a sufficient level of panic. COVID-19 seems tailor made for this purpose.
What specific purpose could one have in mind to release such a virus. Well, it is not coincidental in my mind that the declaration of a pandemic occurred in March of 2020. It is also not coincidental that there was at the same time a campaign of lawfare going on in several critical swing States to make changes to voting laws that seemed purpose made for taking advantage of restrictions put in place in response to a pandemic.
It is also no secret that the American government is deeply penetrated by the Chinese Communist Party. Both the Chinese Communist Party and the Permanent American Deep State viewed Trump and his acolytes as an existential threat. It was also clear from at least late 2018 that the Democrat party had nothing to run against Trump.
Is it really that big a leap into conspiracy theory to posit that the American Deep State colluded with the Chinese Communist Party to create the conditions for widespread unregulated mail-in voting, which everyone agrees supplied Biden with his winning margin in every crucial swing State? I do not think it is. How this played out is simply too cute by half to be anything other than intentional and executed for the purpose of affecting the 2020 Presidential election. For instance, note that the "vaccines" showed up just in time, after the election, to turn off the pandemic just as Biden would be taking office. The fact that they failed to do so is beside the point, they were intended to.
This simply played out too perfectly for Xi Jinping, the American ruling class and the Globalist cabal for this to have been anything other than intentional.
I don‘t mean to rule out intentional release, but I think it‘s very unlikely such a release could have had grand political purposes extending all the way to American politics, for a simple reason: The developers of SARS-2 would’ve had no real way of knowing how the virus would behave at-large in the human population. It had never circulated widely in humans before.
Indeed, the probability was that the virus would infect a few people but ultimately go nowhere. This is the fate of the vast majority of new viruses introduced to humans from animal reservoirs. There are only a few big blockbuster viruses out there.
Can you really have any confidence, as a scientist, that your lab can produce a pathogen capable of achieving the success of bestsellers like RSV or rhinovirus? I don‘t think so. If there was an intentional release, the purpose would‘ve been either to cause a panic about a few SARS-related infections and/or to discredit the research programme or individual researchers at the WIV, by releasing a pathogen easily traced to their work.
I get that anti-Trump opposition in the US used the virus against opportunistically, but that came too late was dependent on too many prior contingencies, to be the purpose of Corona. It required the Italians to cave to WHO recommendations against their own planning, followed most of the rest of Europe. Without that, lockdowns would never have been a politically viable path in the United States and Trump‘s early statements that Corona was best ignored would‘ve been in line with the standard Western approach of minimal mitigation.
If Dr Evil, or rather, Dr Xivil could, and did, engineer a virus that was bad enough to attract attention but not bad enough to do any major damage, it would probably leak out before Xivil's planned release date anyway.
Even accepting the Dr Xivil hypothesis for the sake of argument, most of the political fallout was unforeseen and unplanned, and entirely unpredictable. Putting China in the firing line was a reckless thing to do, though exposing your own country to danger can also be used.
In the west we focus too much on Xivil's plans for global domination. They do exist, but first he has to dominate at home. If he released this virus, it was a longer-term ploy, to increase domestic control. And if it appeared out of nowhere because of a bowl of undercooked bat soup at a night market, it has also been used as a longer-term ploy, to increase domestic control.
It's worth observing that it has turned the smartphone into the literal "mark of the beast". I see no way back from that.
agreed, which is why I think the most likely intentional-release scenario is sabotage by a disgruntled researcher, undertaken to do reputational damage to his colleagues or superiors.
Couple of days ago A Midwestern Doctor posted "Where did COVID-19 Come From and What Can be Done to End this Pandemic?". Not a review of the book, but a discussion about the origin subject. For those who might want to read more. https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/where-did-covid-19-come-from-and
^This would be my answer. above all there are many useful references, and some of the broader historical discussion (on, say, research into furin cleavage sites) provide useful persepctive.
It is great that you are thinking about this. There are several "angles" to the story:
- Circumstantial evidence of China virology research (which is what you highlighted in an amazing and very accessible way)
- Genetic evidence of intentional design of Sars-Cov-2, such as the FCS (that you also mentioned), but also HIV gp120 inserts, which are critical to the pathology of SC2, reinfections, vaccine failure etc
- Evidence of preparations leading up to the pandemic, such as Event 201, parallel work on vaccines for "novel coronavirus" in July 2019 (I wrote about it, among others, highlighting what was in the NIH fridge on the B-roll promotional video)
I think HIV gp120 is clearly a non-story, an illusion arising mostly from sampling bias and other things. (HIV accounts for a huge proportion of the virus sequences known to man, and any analogues you search for will get a lot of HIV sequence hits regardless.) Even if the HIV origins of the insert were secure, you can't immediately make conclusions about the functions of what the insert codes for, as many do.
Yes, RaTG13 sequence was published after the pandemic started, but just can't be a false sequence. First of all, scientists don't know enough to invent plausible whole-virus genomes like that; second of all, it's vindicated by BANAL-52 and a few other closely related viruses. This is a real sarbecovirus variety current, probably, in horseshoes bats. What would be easy to fake, in some of these cases, is the origins of the sample.
Has anyone actually tested samples from 2018/early 2019 for covid in the proposed regions, I was a bit surprised that the Italy scientists actually did that, the mainstream undoubtedly does not want such a question being asked let alone answered
I mean, the PCR tests are everywhere by now, and all you need to do is find the virus in an old sample and you have an important article. We know people are doing these tests and looking, because there was that whole series of articles in late 2020/2021 reporting the results of this stuff. That paper testing Barcelona wastewater as far back as March 2019 (very likely much earlier). Then it petered out, as people found everything there was to find.
Was there any wastewater/patient sample testing done in a country like Mongolia or Cambodia or New Guinea though? You would need to see (lack of/) results in the region hypothesized to be affected.
East Asia/Oceania countries (besides Australia/NZ at least) probably don't have the same degree or quality infrastructure etc. (especially safeguards to prevent contamination) that would be helpful to conduct such testing.
doesn’t the theory substantial a large number of infections in china as early as 2018? there’s a huge amount of travel between there and the west, we should find evidence of the virus in west before fall 2019.
There could he other factors that favored a precursor strain in Asia but not in the West.
EG maybe the West had higher susceptibility to routine respiratory infections giving them an advantage in boxing out early precursor Covid as opposed to Wuhan CoV had evolved (or progressed or was juiced up) to be able to outcompete competition in rematch or maybe climate outside of East Asia was less favorable to precursor Covid
Firstly, it seems that all roads point to Wuhan for Sars -2 origin? And it was most likely a lab leak? Probably unintentional?
It seems the virus itself has a simple story to tell, but the humans surrounding this virus makes everything obscure and confusing. Perhaps due to all the ass covering, it will be difficult to get to the "bottom" of it, lol!
Anyways, mystery illnesses always do fade with some hearty rest, so please don't overtax yourself, E. Feel better soon!
apologies for typos and other infelicities - still cleaning them up, but wanted to finally get this out.
Wow! Such a great post for a guy suffering a stomach virus.
Why do you think the Biden administration is trying so hard through the US Intelligence Agencies to try to memory hole how the virus originated?
Interested in your thoughts.
I don't know of any government actively seeking the truth on the origins.
It's astounding to me. You would think that is the most important component of the pandemic to understand, in order to prevent this from happening again.
Maybe they don't want to find out?
Yeah, it's not exclusive to the US. Some part of it must surely be an uncertainty, and a fear, of what precisely an investigation would uncover, and who would be implicated.
Another problem, is that most of the answers are probably locked up and inaccessible in Wuhan, but still you'd expect investigators to be raiding the labs of important western virologists and interviewing them. In a way, the Wuhan angle makes that even more important.
Not a good look, at all.
It'll all be for nothing and we'll have learned nothing.
When we should've done NOTHING.
The irony.
Yes... I quite agree we should have done nothing at all: this was just another flu-type virus, quite boring really, whatever the origins, we simply decided to make a mountain of mostly imaginary mass graves out of this epidemiological molehill. The rest is history.
that is exactly why I started believing the conspiracy. Why wouldn't they want to know?
Politics and having to admit they were wrong?
that is asking too much right LOL
They do not. Baric is important to DoD and he is clearly being protected. Whatever else might he and his world's best lab team be working on?
Yeah right?! Probably not teddy bears
Excellent work. Thank you!!!!
Terrific write-up and summarization. I've read several of Ridley's books, so yours is great effort to get this out to a wider audience--and your analysis and critique is top notch! Best...
For me the lab leak theory of wild-type covid is accepted on the "balance of probabilities" standard of evidence. We do not have, however, strong enough evidence to convict, on the basis of "beyond reasonable doubt".
If it was a lab leak, then of a virus collected from the wild, and possibly subjected to humanization, forced evolution to be more infective to humans, as part of a dumb research program. This does not need to be dark forces with military funding doing secret experiments in hollowed-out Ukrainian volcanoes, you can do this crap as a postdoc, or even lower down the academic foodchain, and it costs next to nothing. Wuhan would be the obvious source, even if they discovered it many months after the fact (likely) and by that time there were political machinations deciding what best to do with this. Perhaps the Wuhan wet market was the best cover-up they could come up with at the time, even though with it all around the world by then, not "discovering" it in Wuhan at all might have been a better option.
I know, from the day job, that Wuhan hospitals were in full-on panic mode months before the official declaration, and were _documenting_ their refusal to see trial patients by October 2019 because of the pandemic.
Far more intriguing to me is the possibility, to likelihood, that Omicron was engineered. A genetic throwback with almost all nonysnonymous mutations. And likely also a "leak", in the accidental, rather than deliberate sense. Microbe labs have slapdash safety procedures, checkbox "there is a shower in the corner of every room" stuff, and the scientists get very blase and arrogant about it, as only academics can. I know, I've been one (not deadly virus research but similar setups).
I agree that Omicron looks like a lab virus, and that that is extremely intriguing. Doubly so, because unlike SARS-2 itself, it's hard to find any related published scientific literature, which in my view suggests a military or intelligence project of some sort.
Beyond a thread on twitter pointing out the wildly implausible mutation ratio, there is an absolutely stunning radio silence on this. But 100,000 or more knowledgeable people have looked at the sequence, and decided to keep their traps shut. They are not co-conspirators, they just have nowhere to turn, or know better to keep quiet.
Do you think Omicron was "engineered" to be a "vaccine"?
No, because you would have to know how infective it was (efficacy) and how many people it didn't kill (safety).
This kiboshes both the "weapon" theory as well as the "omicron vaccine" theory. Even taking for granted it was developed by a Dr (Sh)Evil in a hollowed-out volcano, you would need a very large number of test subjects (prisoners) to work out the lethality of it. Granted, China is the only place that could do that kind of thing undetected, but it is still extremely unlikely, because it just kills so few people. To be sure omicron was one or two Fergusons* below its predecessors would have taken a number of prisoners, er, volunteer test subjects, so high that I am not sure even China could do it undetected.
My best guess is WT covid was a wild bat strain passaged lots through human cells, that escaped by accident, and China thought the best (and weaponized beyond their wildest dreams) cover story was to "discover" it where it originated, perhaps as much as a year after it escaped, and omicron a literal postgraduate research project that also escaped. Unfortunately, neither of these can be known with sufficient confidence to entirely dismiss other plausible hypotheses.
*: The new SI unit for "out by an order of magnitude".
I think there might be a case for Omicron as some kind of badly attenuated vaccine, or the precursor to such a thing, developed perhaps to eliminate animal reservoirs which got away somewhere in the earlier developmental stages.
There has been a lot of chatter recently about the self replicating vaccines. Maybe omicron was a poorly designed attempt that got away?
Would it be possible to do a summary article on the case for Omicron being a lab leak?
my ideas haven’t changed since i wrote this piece, i’m also not aware of very much new evidence either. but i’ll cast around and see if the matter is worth reconsideration.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/omicron-is-not-normal
Cool, I liked that article, just thinking along the same lines, i.e. is there any worthwhile news on the matter since December? If not, also good to know.
Did we find out where the 4 diplomats who traveled to Botswana came from? Can't someone bribe someone there to get the info:)
Thanks for the lovely new SI unit "Ferguson". Will use that.
Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is not the only book from a major trade publisher to consider the problem of virus origins in an objective light. My "Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics"--I am both a China expert and hold an advanced degree in biology--concludes that it was clearly a bioweapon in development. I will be glad to send you a copy, Eugyppius.
ha! i stand corrected, and i will add update. of course i will buy a copy.
I need to read your newest book. I'll add that your book "Bully of Asia" is the best, most informative and interesting book on China I've read.
I expected this review months ago, and here I am on vacation with my copy of Viral littered with hundreds of sticky notes all the back at home... oh well.
Have to go from memory some of the talking points I had in mind:
1) First off, anyone who wants the TL;DR, I think Matt Ridley's interview with Michael Shermer months back gives a good overview on the book (and closes with Matt giving his best "steel-manning" of both sides, which Eugyppius noted was strange in chapters 12/13) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8LXhhnwuPo
2) I started flagging each instance in the book Daszak was caught in a lie and it got comical eventually how lazy he got at even trying to lie. Kept picturing Mr Burns having the nuclear inspectors shows up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdthUGWFMtM Seriously, anyone doing a first time read, try to keep up with the number of blatant lies he tells... 50? 100?
3) I agree it felt like Alina and Matt were pandering to the possibility it wasn't a lab leak. I suspect partly because when they started writing they may have honestly not expected the evidence to be so damning, partly to appease publishers, and partly because sometimes you have pretend to see the other side (like when Jehovah's witnesses come to my door, occasionally I will be kind any act like I am carefully considering their bullshit). But yes, it reminded me of mid 90's when coverage of the OJ Simpson case tried to pretend there was any other possibility besides The Juice murdering Nicole and Ronald Goldman.
4) Eugyppius: "The irony is that the regime narrative is caught between a rock and a hard place here. To make the strongest case for natural origins outside Wuhan requires acknowledging widespread early infection and admitting that lockdowns were worthless. Alternatively, the more the press and the Corona astrologers cleave to the orthodox mythology that Corona did not take off in the West until February 2020, the more they seal the case for a WIV laboratory release."
Precisely.
Sorry about egregious delays, this review has been the most cursed of the series I planned. Every time I sat down to write some other temporary subject preempted, or I had to travel someplace, or (most recently) I got mysteriously ill. The next few reviews will now follow in rather quicker succession, as I am going on leave to write them, and the series must be over before the virus season begins again in the Fall.
Thanks for the reminder to fill out my bracket for virus season.
Maybe a quick open thread list of upcoming reviews?
The problem is, I'm not totally sure. The finale will be Kennedy/The Real Anthony Fauci. I'd also like to review Schwab/The Great Reset. Then with luck I'll have space for one more, but here I'm torn among a few different possibilities: Dodsworth/State of Fear maybe, or Gloger and Mascolo/Ausbruch (by normie journalists on the early days of the Merkel regime response, but full of interesting information).
Adding, also competing for the third slot is Ron Unz's collected articles promoting the theory that it's a US bioweapon against China. Thought maybe that would be fun, but perhaps less informative.
imo The Real AF should be required reading
with bookends of Unreported Truths Booklets(Pts1-4)/Pandemia and A Plague Upon Our House
'or (most recently) I got mysteriously ill'
Uh-oh, conspiracy theory fodder ;)
Thx for this post; it answers the question I posed to E.
And answers many other questions I had.
Thanks!
I don't know how I stumbled on some people on twitter at the beginning of DRASTIC, but somehow I did. It was a thrilling ride- all the pieces added up and they even managed to get film footage of the inside of the Lab before most of it got scrubbed (totally scary stuff with poorly sealed freezers jammed full of presumably dangerous stuff). There is some great footage out there of Dascak putting his foot in mouth several times- this whole US group was very very keen on gain of function and they were clearly not going to take no for an answer. It's infuriating to think that US taxpayer money actually funded this virus that ended up paralyzing the world and millions of people (never mind the deaths and critically ill people who were dreadfully treated in the hospitals). It should be so simple to see who in Congress gave permission to the NIH funding and heads should roll. But nothing happens, because they all cover for each other. Gain of function is a form of bio-weapon. It should not be studied by narcissistic morons like Fauci who couldn't even handle the HIV outbreak. These stupid people are dangerous. And the stupidity continues with no one lining up those with accountability and making them suffer some meaningful consequences.
Just because we couldn't have known (or didn't know), doesn't mean nobody could have known. The primary political result in the US was destruction of the president and installation of a monolithic socialist cabal. The timing of the release indicates someone knew, or calculated, the release at that time would shift American politics. I'm confident on the available evidence that it was on purpose and was driven by a multitude of corrupt parties that incited panic in the US which spread globally.
So it is well known to most people that it was released from a lab. Doesn't matter, except as evidence to identify and punish perpetrators. We're not there yet.
Two things we need to figure out:
One is finding out who did it and making sure they can't do it again. If no one is punished, they will continue. Biological pathogens are just a new tool for terrorism and oppression.
The other is making sure everyone understands that some people were significantly sickened by sars2, while most weren't. We need to help everyone understand how to maintain their immune health, and withhold sympathy for those who choose not to. Obesity and metabolic defects that are common to the worst outcomes are all caused by hedonistic lifestyles, and are easily prevented or corrected. The failures of medical integrity -- both in treatment and prevention -- got us into this mess. We should expect better of our doctors.
I just don't think American politics were the target here. I think, instead, that the American political opposition acted opportunistically and used the virus against Trump. But, that was only possible because a lot of other things had already happened: the Wuhan lockdown, the Italian lockdown (not about Trump at all), followed by the caving of UK and the rest of Europe, all for reasons that don't have much to do with US.
The one political conspiracy theory worth contemplating, I think, is the suppression of the Hong Kong protest movement. This owed a lot to early-stage virus hysteria in China, and might even explain initial willingness of Chinese authorities to publicise the infections. Or you could take this even further ...
The Hong Kong protests were squished by the National Security Law. I was there in Nov 2019 (used to spend several weeks every year in HK - that was my most recent visit for obvious reasons). It remains the only time I have ever smelt tear gas, been inconvenienced by makeshift roadblocks, have a police officer wave a firearm at me, or been in a crowd (at a stadium) that turned its back on the national anthem. Though I suspect some of that is coming to Europe, certainly Germany, later this year (and it might not be a bad thing...).
Somehow the city was quieted from petrol bombs and tear gas, and closing everything at 8pm (Hong Kongers rise late and go to bed late), and mass "religious walks" (because the police could not ban religious gatherings), the largest involving almost a quarter of the territory's population, to nothing, by the stroke of a pen. And the thought, one more big two-million person gathering _after_ the law, could have changed a lot. We really are cowards.
In hindsight, it feels like the moment I stepped into the wrong parallel universe, and I have been living in a downbeat and surreal Murakami novel since.
We've had countless pathogens worse than this one, none evoked this level of panic. The world overreacted because US medical authorities overreacted, international medical authorities were subverted by US and China authorities and the rest of the world followed them over the cliff. The very fact no one is doing competent investigations is evidence this is a scam. The most money and power at stake is American. That's where you'll find the original sin.
Weren't fauchi and gates major funders of Wuhan? If you know of more likely suspects? We'll find out soon, thanks to fine reporting like yours.
US medical authorities were some of the last to overreact. The activist response began with a few people in the WHO, and then with public health authorities in Italy. Even the Silicon Valley pro-lockdown push doesn't begin until after Neil Ferguson in the UK releases his dumb modelling study on 16 March. All of this is far upstream of the American reaction.
IF the UK had insisted on a Sweden-style approach and ignored the Ferguson panic crowd; if Italy had never locked down, empowering activists like Ferguson in the first place; if the WHO had remained agnostic about the Hubei suppression measures – then Corona would've never become a political issue in the US at all. American politics are just downstream of too many contingencies, and what actually happened accords with a longstanding pattern in American politics, whereby left-liberals adopt Euro arguments and policies as their own to wield against their opponents on the right.
In the early stages of the pandemic, through the mid-March 2020, when all the crucial decisions are happening, American influence is nowhere to be found. China is the big player then. US policy first played a global role with the development and approval of the vaccines in late 2020.
I appreciate your giving America a pass, however undeserved. We have greater reach, and greater influence, than many people realize. Someday we'll get a comprehensive analysis of what happened, when, and by whom. For now it's forbidden, and the instigators seem to be in control. But history is always revealed, eventually. Until then, every analysis should be viewed with suspicion. I'm hopeful the new US congress will begin to crack the conspiracies that are protecting the evidence. Next year will be exciting.
This makes a lot of sense if you separate American involvement in the creation of the virus, if any, from America's public health response.
My personal feeling is that for the latter, opportunism was rampant and a primary factor.
Speaking as a total nobody, of course :)
'I just don't think American politics were the target here. I think, instead, that the American political opposition acted opportunistically and used the virus against Trump.'
Thank you.
I hope you're both right. The mounting evidence seems to indicate you're not. We can be pretty sure we haven't learned all the facts yet. But the hysteria has been too well organized to write off as innocent incompetence or serendipity.
I would not write off intentional release so quickly. First off, if one were to intentionally release a virus for a specific purpose it would be prudent to have multiple layers of deniability. Natural occurrence would be the first line of defense. If that became untenable, an accidental leak would be the next line of defense. This would certainly be plausible in such a "face conscious" society as China. Being seen as having blundered is never preferable.
Second, if one does accidentally release a virus, is it customary to ship your citizens around the globe, as the Chinese Communist Party did?
Third, if one were to intentionally release a virus for a specific purpose, it would have to be designed to fit that purpose. If one wanted to cause a pandemic the virus could not be that virulent, or else the spread would peter out too quickly. It would however have to be deadly enough to cause the right level of panic. Or at least be capable of being spun into a sufficient level of panic. COVID-19 seems tailor made for this purpose.
What specific purpose could one have in mind to release such a virus. Well, it is not coincidental in my mind that the declaration of a pandemic occurred in March of 2020. It is also not coincidental that there was at the same time a campaign of lawfare going on in several critical swing States to make changes to voting laws that seemed purpose made for taking advantage of restrictions put in place in response to a pandemic.
It is also no secret that the American government is deeply penetrated by the Chinese Communist Party. Both the Chinese Communist Party and the Permanent American Deep State viewed Trump and his acolytes as an existential threat. It was also clear from at least late 2018 that the Democrat party had nothing to run against Trump.
Is it really that big a leap into conspiracy theory to posit that the American Deep State colluded with the Chinese Communist Party to create the conditions for widespread unregulated mail-in voting, which everyone agrees supplied Biden with his winning margin in every crucial swing State? I do not think it is. How this played out is simply too cute by half to be anything other than intentional and executed for the purpose of affecting the 2020 Presidential election. For instance, note that the "vaccines" showed up just in time, after the election, to turn off the pandemic just as Biden would be taking office. The fact that they failed to do so is beside the point, they were intended to.
This simply played out too perfectly for Xi Jinping, the American ruling class and the Globalist cabal for this to have been anything other than intentional.
I don‘t mean to rule out intentional release, but I think it‘s very unlikely such a release could have had grand political purposes extending all the way to American politics, for a simple reason: The developers of SARS-2 would’ve had no real way of knowing how the virus would behave at-large in the human population. It had never circulated widely in humans before.
Indeed, the probability was that the virus would infect a few people but ultimately go nowhere. This is the fate of the vast majority of new viruses introduced to humans from animal reservoirs. There are only a few big blockbuster viruses out there.
Can you really have any confidence, as a scientist, that your lab can produce a pathogen capable of achieving the success of bestsellers like RSV or rhinovirus? I don‘t think so. If there was an intentional release, the purpose would‘ve been either to cause a panic about a few SARS-related infections and/or to discredit the research programme or individual researchers at the WIV, by releasing a pathogen easily traced to their work.
I get that anti-Trump opposition in the US used the virus against opportunistically, but that came too late was dependent on too many prior contingencies, to be the purpose of Corona. It required the Italians to cave to WHO recommendations against their own planning, followed most of the rest of Europe. Without that, lockdowns would never have been a politically viable path in the United States and Trump‘s early statements that Corona was best ignored would‘ve been in line with the standard Western approach of minimal mitigation.
If Dr Evil, or rather, Dr Xivil could, and did, engineer a virus that was bad enough to attract attention but not bad enough to do any major damage, it would probably leak out before Xivil's planned release date anyway.
Even accepting the Dr Xivil hypothesis for the sake of argument, most of the political fallout was unforeseen and unplanned, and entirely unpredictable. Putting China in the firing line was a reckless thing to do, though exposing your own country to danger can also be used.
In the west we focus too much on Xivil's plans for global domination. They do exist, but first he has to dominate at home. If he released this virus, it was a longer-term ploy, to increase domestic control. And if it appeared out of nowhere because of a bowl of undercooked bat soup at a night market, it has also been used as a longer-term ploy, to increase domestic control.
It's worth observing that it has turned the smartphone into the literal "mark of the beast". I see no way back from that.
agreed, which is why I think the most likely intentional-release scenario is sabotage by a disgruntled researcher, undertaken to do reputational damage to his colleagues or superiors.
Couple of days ago A Midwestern Doctor posted "Where did COVID-19 Come From and What Can be Done to End this Pandemic?". Not a review of the book, but a discussion about the origin subject. For those who might want to read more. https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/where-did-covid-19-come-from-and
Eugyppius, would your bottom-line recommendation be to buy this book, or not to buy it?
I recommend it, the citations alone are worth the price.
^This would be my answer. above all there are many useful references, and some of the broader historical discussion (on, say, research into furin cleavage sites) provide useful persepctive.
It is great that you are thinking about this. There are several "angles" to the story:
- Circumstantial evidence of China virology research (which is what you highlighted in an amazing and very accessible way)
- Genetic evidence of intentional design of Sars-Cov-2, such as the FCS (that you also mentioned), but also HIV gp120 inserts, which are critical to the pathology of SC2, reinfections, vaccine failure etc
- Evidence of preparations leading up to the pandemic, such as Event 201, parallel work on vaccines for "novel coronavirus" in July 2019 (I wrote about it, among others, highlighting what was in the NIH fridge on the B-roll promotional video)
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/2019-novel-coronavirus-vaccine-dated
The RatG13 virus was entered into databases AFTER release of SC2 and is widely considered to be a fake genome to distract our attention.
The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic is a fascinating story. If we do not understand what this virus IS, we will never come out of this sad situation.
Covid will get much, much worse, in my opinion. It is bad enough already.
I hope your stomach virus gets better, it might be covid, my covid (Nov 2020) started as a stomach flu. If you are dehydrated consider getting help!
I think HIV gp120 is clearly a non-story, an illusion arising mostly from sampling bias and other things. (HIV accounts for a huge proportion of the virus sequences known to man, and any analogues you search for will get a lot of HIV sequence hits regardless.) Even if the HIV origins of the insert were secure, you can't immediately make conclusions about the functions of what the insert codes for, as many do.
Yes, RaTG13 sequence was published after the pandemic started, but just can't be a false sequence. First of all, scientists don't know enough to invent plausible whole-virus genomes like that; second of all, it's vindicated by BANAL-52 and a few other closely related viruses. This is a real sarbecovirus variety current, probably, in horseshoes bats. What would be easy to fake, in some of these cases, is the origins of the sample.
The furin cleavage insert is the smoking gun for gain-of-function gene engineering.
have you read this ?
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/peter-daszak-well-yes-this-is-exactly?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F32715357-el-gato-malo&utm_medium=reader2
indeed i have
What do you think about Ethical Skeptic's hypothesis of covid in the human pop starting in 2018?
the problem is the lack of any evidence in terms of antigen tests or in preserved patient samples /archival wastewater from before fall 2019.
Has anyone actually tested samples from 2018/early 2019 for covid in the proposed regions, I was a bit surprised that the Italy scientists actually did that, the mainstream undoubtedly does not want such a question being asked let alone answered
I mean, the PCR tests are everywhere by now, and all you need to do is find the virus in an old sample and you have an important article. We know people are doing these tests and looking, because there was that whole series of articles in late 2020/2021 reporting the results of this stuff. That paper testing Barcelona wastewater as far back as March 2019 (very likely much earlier). Then it petered out, as people found everything there was to find.
Was there any wastewater/patient sample testing done in a country like Mongolia or Cambodia or New Guinea though? You would need to see (lack of/) results in the region hypothesized to be affected.
East Asia/Oceania countries (besides Australia/NZ at least) probably don't have the same degree or quality infrastructure etc. (especially safeguards to prevent contamination) that would be helpful to conduct such testing.
doesn’t the theory substantial a large number of infections in china as early as 2018? there’s a huge amount of travel between there and the west, we should find evidence of the virus in west before fall 2019.
There could he other factors that favored a precursor strain in Asia but not in the West.
EG maybe the West had higher susceptibility to routine respiratory infections giving them an advantage in boxing out early precursor Covid as opposed to Wuhan CoV had evolved (or progressed or was juiced up) to be able to outcompete competition in rematch or maybe climate outside of East Asia was less favorable to precursor Covid
And from left...left...left of field we find...
Based on the work/ideas ofFred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
Origin of new emergent Coronavirus and Candida fungal diseases—Terrestrial or cosmic?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7358766/
Lots of food for thought in this article!
Firstly, it seems that all roads point to Wuhan for Sars -2 origin? And it was most likely a lab leak? Probably unintentional?
It seems the virus itself has a simple story to tell, but the humans surrounding this virus makes everything obscure and confusing. Perhaps due to all the ass covering, it will be difficult to get to the "bottom" of it, lol!
Anyways, mystery illnesses always do fade with some hearty rest, so please don't overtax yourself, E. Feel better soon!
Lots of food for thought. Many thanks!