Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals that all but one scientist who wrote a letter in The Lancet medical journal dismissing even the slightest possibility COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, have ties to Chinese researchers. This stunning revelation suggests that 26 of the 27 scientists listed in the letter might of had a conflict of interest.
Peter Daszak fist-bumps fellow Covid-19 origins investigator in Wuhan, China
The letter, published in March of last year, sought to quash any debate among the scientific community or the media over the origins of the virus - until international intelligence findings in 2021 brought the matter back to the spotlight.
The man who orchestrated the article is Dr. Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit which was armed with millions in NIH funding to work with Wuhan scientists to experiment with coronaviruses and 'gain of function' research. Last week, a FOIA email release by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.
Peter Daszak (left), Anthony Fauci
Daszak - a noted friend and colleague of Fauci - was also tapped to head up The Lancet’s UN backed commission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, according to Summit News.
The British scientist was picked despite the fact that he was intimately associated with the Wuhan lab, had repeatedly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis a ‘dangerous conspiracy theory’, and created a pressure campaign via a letter published by The Lancet to force the scientific community into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak.
Daszak was also the lead investigator for the World Health Organisation investigation that determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was no leak purely based on the word of researchers there.
Daszak was later employed as an ‘expert fact checker’ by Facebook when it was monitoring and removing ‘misinformation’ about the origins of COVID on its platform, much of which was credible scientific research. Facebook has since reversed the policy of banning any posts containing information suggesting COVID-19 was “man-made”.
Besides Daszak, 25 other scientists listed in the letter have connections with either the lab or Chinese researchers. Below, the Daily Mail takes The Telegraph's investigation and dives deeper into those who wrote the letter. A few examples (truncated, emphasis ours):
Dr Jeremy Farrar
Tropical medicine expert and SAGE adviser & The Wellcome Trust, London
The newspaper also found that three of the signatories were from Britain's Wellcome Trust, which has also previously funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Signatory Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the UK's Sage and the director of the Trust, has in the past published work with George Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, whom he has described as 'an old friend'.
Dr Gao, who studied at Oxford University, is a former research assistant at the Wellcome Trust. Mr Daszak has claimed Dr Gao supported his nomination to the National Academy of Sciences, according to The Telegraph.
The Chinese scientist also has connections to Shi Zhengli, the scientist who has become known as 'batwoman' on account of her research into bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. Her team discovered a virus in 2013 which is the closest ever previously found to Sars-Cov-2 - the virus that causes Covid-19.
Two other signatories - Dr Josie Golding and Professor Mike Turner - are known to have current or past connections with the Wellcome Trust.
Professor Linda SaifMicrobiology expert, The Ohio State University
Microbiology expert Professor Linda Saif, another signatory, spoke at a workshop in Wuhan in May 2017 along with Dr Shi and Dr Gao. The workshop was partly organised by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The level of security in Chinese labs was among the topics discussed at the workshop, while Professor Saif's talk covered animal coronaviruses.
The Global Virome Project
Two more signatories on The Lancet letter are in the leadership team of the Global Virome Project - an organisations whose goal is to detect and identify 99 percent or more of potential zoonotic viral threats.
Mr Daszak is the treasurer of the Global Virome Project, while Dr Gao helped launch it, with EcoHealth Alliance as one of its partners.
The Global Virome Project took over from the Predict project, which discovered more than 1,000 unique viruses in animals and humans.
But according to The Telegraph, the Predict project was also found to have part-funded contentious work by Wuhan researchers on bat coronaviruses, which were altered to see if they could infect humans.
The funds for the research were provided by the EcoHealth Alliance.
Professor John Mackenzie
Tropical infectious diseases expert, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Tropical infectious disease expert Professor John Mackenzie who works out of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, was another of the signatories.
The investigation has found that he did not disclose that he was still listed as a committee member of the the Scientific Advisory Committee of Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan institute.
Professor Kanta Subbarao
Virology expert, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Professor Kanta Subbarao, another signatory from the University of Melbourne, spoke at a conference on emerging diseases in Wuhan in 2016 which was part-organised by the the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Prof. Subbarao was still chief of the US-based National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section.
Five more of the letter's signatories have all been found by the investigation to have published articles with Professor Ralph Baric.
Professor Prof Ralph Baric
While Prof Baric was omitted from the list of signatories, he was collaborating with Shi Zhengli and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, researching genetically manipulated coronaviruses to see if they could be made to infect humans.
Earlier this year, Republicans in the US argued that the virus was possibly genetically modified, and cite an interview with Baric in which he said it was possible to engineer a virus, 'without leaving a trace.'
Baric was initially asked to add his name to the letter by Mr Daszak, with emails between the pair recently coming to light ahead of The Lancet letter's publication, showing that the pair decided to mask their association with the Wuhan institute to avoid looking 'self-serving'.
Mr Daszak told Prof Baric that he would publish the letter in such a way that it doesn't 'link it back to our collaboration so we maximise an independent voice'.
Professor Peter Palese
Microbiology expert, Icahn School of Medicine, New York
A number of those who signed the letter have since changed their stance with some calling for a full inquiry into the origins of Covid-19.
Speaking to the MailOnline in June, Professor Peter Palese - a microbiology expert from Icahn School of Medicine, New York, said: 'I believe a thorough investigation about the origin of the Covid-19 virus is needed.
'A lot of disturbing information has surfaced since the Lancet letter I signed, so I want to see answers covering all questions.'
Asked how he was originally approached to sign the letter and what new information had come to light specifically, Professor Palese declined to comment.
Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St Georges, University of London, and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen, who worked hard to publish work showing a strong link between the lab and virus outbreak, said this new revelation proves there was an "extreme cover-up."
Dalgleish and Sorensen said The Telegraph's investigation "is the first to show beyond reasonable doubt that our entire area of virus research has been contaminated politically. We bear the scars to show it."
Molecular biologist Prof Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University, another scientist who attempted to uncover the truth behind the origins of the pandemic, said:
"For the June addendum, the Lancet invited the 27 authors of the letter to re-evaluate their competing interests.
"Incredibly, only Daszak appears to have done so. Conflicts of interest were not reported for any of the other 26 signers of the letter – not even those with obviously material undisclosed conflicts such as EcoHealth employees and Predict contractors.
"The standard remedy for fraudulent statements in scientific publications is retraction. It is unclear why retraction was not pursued."
To sum up, the letter identified anyone as a 'conspiracy theorist' for even mentioning the possibility the virus originated from a lab that was penned by scientists who had some sort of conflict of interest with Chinese researchers and or the lab. Could this be evidence of an extensive cover-up by the scientific community of an accidental release of the virus from a lab?
Even America's top virologist, Anthony Fauci, has had to admit the virus might have come from a lab.
First, access to hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was restricted. The chloroquine drugs only work during active viral replication. While extremely safe at prescribed doses, and used daily for years by hundreds of thousands of patients with rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, overdose can be fatal.
Awareness of these facts led to the FDA restricting the use of hydroxy Clora Quinn to only hospitalized patients, in whom it would no longer be effective. 3 large multi Center, multi nation clinical trials were designed to give patients excessive amounts of hydroxychloroquine, leading to predictable increased arrhythmias and probably deaths. Most of the early and large clinical trials were flawed deliberately by either using the drug too late or using too much. That's how the initial literature supported avoiding hydroxychloroquine for Covid. Later studies that used appropriate doses and gave the drug to patients early during the first week of illness showed almost uniformly excellent results.
Congruent with controlling much of the research, FDA and about 30 states imposed other restrictions. Maine has one of the least severe restricts, but still not good enough. In my state I can prescribe HCQ for early treatment but not for prophylaxis, even though the prophylactic dose is only about 1/6 of the treatment dose for lupus, and therefore extremely safe.
Like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin is also a licensed drug in the United States which physicians can (supposedly) prescribe freely. Fortunately, unlike HCQ, it is not toxic when given much more frequently than is necessary for parasites--which often require only one dose. It has been used over 3 billion times since 1987, without a prescription, for parasitic diseases. It is derived from a streptomycetes soil bacterium. According to Wikipedia:
Streptomycetes... produce over two-thirds of the clinically useful antibiotics of natural origin, e.g., neomycin, cypemycin, grisemycin, bottromycins and chloramphenicol. The antibiotic streptomycin takes its name directly from Streptomyces.
Ivermectin not only works during viral replication, but also is effective later in the illness. This meant that the tricks that had been used to make hydroxychloroquine look bad would not be effective for ivermectin. Furthermore, there have been dozens of independent studies showing the drug's safety and effectiveness for Covid. The powers that be had not gotten into the game early to suppress it. Furthermore, there have been dozens of independent studies showing the drug's safety and effectiveness for Covid. The powers that be had not gotten into the game early with fake studies and fake publications. I have previously linked to a metanalysis by Bryant, Lawrie et al., and another by Pierre Kory et al.
I suspect the powers that be, like Fauci, were also somewhat gun-shy about trying their tricks to stop the public getting effective treatment for Covid again. Would they be outed by media this time around?
As more and more people began to obtain ivermectin, and thereby were able to discard their fear of Covid, also discarding any desire for vaccination, the bad guys apparently decided that despite the risk, they had to act.
This time a very concerted movement of FDA, CDC, Pharmacy chains, state medical boards, and drug wholesalers occurred together, beginning around August 25, 2021. I wrote about this earlier in a piece titled "The Mess Media." Let me lay out and expand on what happened.
At least 4 doctors in 3 states were suddenly publicly charged by their medical boards for prescribing ivermectin for Covid, and this made national news. Immediately thereafter the CDC sent out an Emergency memo titled Severe Reactions to Ivermectin. However the 4 papes said absolutely nothing about any adverse reactions to ivermectin prescribed by doctors. Instead, it was claimed that one internet purchaser and one consumer of veterinary ivermectin developed neurologic symptoms and were hospitalized.
FDA produced a famous tweet: "You are not a horse" about people taking veterinary ivermectin, and put up a warning on its website. FDA has yet to acknowledge reviewing the literature on ivermectin for the treatment of Covid.
Then lies about the huge number of calls to poison control centers were disseminated nationally. The Associated Press reported that 70% of calls to Mississippi's poison center were for ivermectin. Soon the AP corrected itself, when Mississippi's chief epidemiologist sait it was only "about 2%."
An actual Oklahoma doctor was interviewed by a TV station and claimed that there were so many ivermectin overdoses coming to ERs that people arriving with gunshot wounds were having to wait. This story made the international news, was covered by tweets from Rachel Maddow, and Rolling Stone did a story about it--using a photo of a long line of patients, allegedly waiting to be seen in an ER.
This story apparently had too many legs. One hospital where the doctor worked issued a statement that it had seen absolutely zero ivermectin overdoses, and there were no lines of patients waiting for care. The story was a complete fabrication, harking back to the Lancet paper on the dangers of the chloroquine drugs.
Within a few days, Walgreens' and CVS' corporate offices told their staff to stop filling ivermectin scripts. Cardinal Health, a distributor for many pharmacies, told those pharmacies (including my local Hannaford's) the drug was on backorder and Cardinal had no idea when it would be available. Cardinal formed a business relationship with CVS in 2014. I do not know if that is relevant or not.
Amerisource-Bergen and McKesson are the two other large drug wholesaler-distributors in the US. In 2018 they controlled 95% of the US market.
I just bit the bullet and drove around surveying local pharmacists. McKesson is not making ivermectin available to Osco or Walmart pharmacies. No one local seems to source ivermectin through Amerisource.
I do understand how multiple pharmacists expressed concerns about losing their license were they to fill the script. What a sad situation. The Big Lie wins, at least for now.
BYRON YORK: George W. Bush’s dreadful 9/11 speech.
Bush did not explicitly say so, but he appeared to be referencing Jan. 6. And he used the rhetorical trick of denying that there was “cultural overlap” between the 9/11 terrorists and the Jan. 6 rioters before outlining areas of such overlap. They were similar in their “disdain for pluralism,” Bush said, their “disregard for human life,” and their “determination to defile national symbols.” In these, Bush argued, not only was there cultural overlap between the two groups — they actually came from “the same foul spirit.”
With that, Bush joined a group of commentators, mostly but not entirely on the left, who maintain that 9/11 and 1/6 are similar. And they do so in the face of the obvious, enormous differences between the two. The Sept. 11 attacks killed roughly 3,000 people, brought down New York’s tallest skyscrapers, destroyed part of the Pentagon, crashed four passenger jetliners, resulted in two wars, and changed U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Jan. 6 riot led to the natural-causes death of one Capitol Police officer, the shooting death of one rioter at the hands of police, the “acute amphetamine intoxication” death of another rioter, and the natural-causes deaths of two more. Had the 9/11 attackers survived, they would have been charged with mass murder. Most of the Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with “Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.” Parts of the Capitol were ransacked, but not seriously enough that Congress could not meet and finish its election certification work on the night of the riot. The riot was appalling, and the participants deserve punishment, but it was simply nothing like Sept. 11. To visualize the difference, imagine that on the night of the 9/11 attacks, there was a convention that went on as scheduled at the World Trade Center.
The bottom line: There is simply no comparison in scale, act, motivation, or anything else between Sept. 11 and Jan. 6. And yet now, a former president suggests that those two enormously dissimilar events were actually similar, both coming from “the same foul spirit.”
Related: Stark Contrasts: RealClearInvestigations’ Jan. 6-BLM Side-by-Side Comparison.
More: From America’s Newspaper of Record: Guy Who Started Two Wars Calls For Civility.
If there ever was a time when you could see a trend solidly in motion, now is it.
That the Western, previously civilized world is in decline has been known to anyone with an ounce of curiosity and little analysis of data points.
Before Xi’s ascension to power one could have argued that this trend was worrying, but not terrifying.
What makes it terrifying is that Xi managed to abolish the two-term limit for his presidency with an overwhelming majority (2,959 to 2 and 3 abstaining votes — no prizes for guessing where those 5 guys are now). He then proceeded to have his name enshrined in the constitution. Seriously. You may recall Xi’s “anti-corruption” purge from a few years back. Well, this was Xi’s own internal secret police, designed to kill (literally) any opposition from within the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).
Today’s China, or should I say CCP, is not the same CCP of Deng Xiaoping. Today’s CCP is an ideological global weapon of control, and it is spreading like a cancer.
Which brings me to…
Sometimes knowing where not to be is just as important as knowing where to be since all investments are a matter of opportunity costs and probabilities.
The implosion of Chinese tech continues.
One can argue as to what the particular catalyst for this selloff was. Certainly, the CCP going after Didi (China’s clone of Uber) hasn’t helped things, though this is peculiar to me. Because, when Jack Ma fell afoul of the CCP and disappeared (still yet to be seen) with Ant financial now a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP, it was clear that Xi was implementing his three Cs: control, consolidate, continue.
It really is just nationalisation of resources with a carefully constructed veneer to pretend it really isn’t that at all. But that’s all it is — a veneer.
Truth is, much of the world works like this, including Putin’s Russia. China is moving towards controlling the key industry sectors (not that they didn’t have significant control before because they did) with less pretentiousness than before. Why?
The same reason they took Hong Kong. Because they could. And they could because the rest of the world is distracted, ironically by the Covid pantomime created by Fauci, Gates, Klaus, and their fellow technocrats.
All of this allows the CCP to do things they had not previously been able to do without repercussions, both politically and economically.
So now we have this gap between QQQ (US tech) and CQQQ (China tech), and the ratio between the two tech ETFs closed at another all-time low.
The Chinese tech regulatory issue has been going on for months, but the big question here is what is priced in.
What about the longer-term view? Is US tech any better?
US tech manipulates and owns the government whereas in China the government manipulates and owns China tech.
US investors have been buying up China tech as if it’s the same as US tech. Clearly it isn’t.
But the other question that is worth thinking about is what the US tech investors don’t know about the US tech? Do they still or should they still trust them to the extent that they do?
Well, you probably guessed my answer to that, but really what I think doesn’t matter because what the market thinks is what matters, at least for now.
Right now, the debate by the dolly birds on CNBC is around whether or not to buy these now cheaper Chinese tech stocks.
I would say a better question is if you can’t trust Chinese tech (and you clearly can’t), then pray tell, why would one trust US tech?
Do you chase US tech (like everybody else), puke Chinese tech (like everybody else), or start looking at the contrarian spread?
We are still a long way off buying China tech here as I don’t like putting out fires with my face… and that is what I think you’d be doing here. But buying US tech feels decidedly dicey as well.
So what do we do with all this?
We watch and see where these capital flows may go, and for now, we buy deep value.
Editor’s Note: The 2020s will likely to be an increasingly volatile decade. More governments are putting their money printing on overdrive. Negative interests are becoming the rule instead of the exception to it.
One thing is for sure, there will be a great deal of change taking place in the years ahead.
That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions.
