Oops!

Antecedents to the Great COVID Panic of 2020

I confess to having limited trust that any official review of the COVID pandemic will get to the bottom of what happened. With that in mind, I'd like to present my own best guesses as to how the events of 2020 unfolded as they did.

When I think about times in my own life when I have been panicked into a rash and foolish decision, a couple of antecedents were usually present.

The first was the sinking realization that I had screwed up in some way, that I was personally responsible for some very bad thing that had happened. That would goad me to look for any sort of Hail Mary pass, however unlikely or fanciful, that might relieve me of that terrible burden.

Dr. John Campbell yesterday produced a video reviewing emails released under a Freedom of Information request. These emails were between Anthony Fauci and various prestigious journal authors prior to the February 19th, 2020 release of a Lancet paper on The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2.

From those emails we know that the scientists who authored the above paper had the following concerns prior to the paper's release:

1) The labs at Wuhan had extremely lax bio-security protocols.

2) Procedures at the Wuhan labs were described as something out of the "Wild West."

3) Many people who lived near the Wuhan lab believed that COVID19 had escaped from that lab.

4) American NGO EcoHealth Alliance had submitted a funding proposal to insert a furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses, something that had hitherto not existed in any wild coronavirus. COVID19 is the only coronavirus in the world with a furin cleavage site, and it is that addition to the genome which makes COVID19 immensely more able to infect humans. That COVID19 should happen to develop this exact viral insertion by chance would be a one-in-a-million coincidence.

5) COVID19 was clearly optimized to infect humans extremely well. Normally, if a virus had achieved such an ability in the wild, there would have been various successive approximations of the virus present in the natural environment. The utter absence of any chain of viral precursors suggested that the virus had been optimized by passing it through a successive series of human cell hosts in a lab, where all the interim mutations would die out.

6) Prior to the release of the Lancet paper, some of the authors of the paper thought the balance of evidence suggested that COVID19 was the result of a lab leak, and not of natural origin.

Given the email concerns expressed in advance by the paper's authors, what do you suppose the final Lancet paper said? Well, the Lancet paper claimed that there was no doubt whatsoever that the COVID19 virus was of natural origin, and that any claim that it had originated in a lab was a "conspiracy theory."

At this point, you may be asking, how could this be?

The short answer is: Anthony Fauci. Fauci exercises immense control over the world's health research funding. Even eminent researchers are afraid to cross him because he has the power to instantly dry up the stream of research grants upon which medical researchers depend.

Clearly Fauci told these researchers what their paper's conclusions had to be if they were ever to see any future Government funding of any kind. (Dr. John Campbell was both shocked and appalled that such eminent researchers would fold under pressure, but can see no other explanation for what happened.)

Now we come to the most interesting question: Why did Fauci push for the Lancet paper to declare that COVID19 could not possibly have been created in a Chinese laboratory?

Consider all the other American news stories about China's handling of COVID. We were told about how apartment block doors were welded shut to prevent COVID-infected residents from leaving. We were told there were air quality alerts near every crematorium in Wuhan - supposedly evidence that the COVID death rate was much higher than China had admitted. Story after story drew a picture of an ugly, totalitarian regime. (This was only a temporary interruption in the daily bad-mouthing of China over the mistreatment of the Uighurs, pernicious social credit scores, Third World nations enslaved by Chinese debts, etc.)

The United States and American mainstream media have never ever missed a chance to paint China in the worst possible light. If certain facts needed to be twisted to make China look worse than it actually was, so be it.

Here we have a story that is an anti-China propagandist's wet dream: China foolishly creates a deadly new pathogen in the lab - and then negligently allows this deadly new disease to escape.

Does the United States exploit this made-in-heaven opportunity to make China look bad? No, the United States, for the first time in living memory, defends China and categorically states that COVID19 could not possibly have emerged from the Chinese labs at Wuhan.

This is so diametrically opposed to America's normal behavior towards China, I would argue that it is the single strongest piece of evidence that COVID19 was indeed created in a lab at Wuhan, and created with help and funding from the United States Government. I can see no other explanation why the US Government would behave in so utterly uncharacteristic a fashion.

So that's the first piece of the puzzle. By mid-February of 2020, Anthony Fauci has realized that COVID19 was created at the Wuhan labs with help and funding from the US Government.

Fauci had personally signed off on some of those grant applications. We have to expect that even a sociopath like Fauci would feel some sense of responsibility for having loosed COVID on the world.

Undoubtedly, Fauci was desperately hoping that COVID19 would prove to be mild and not terribly infectious. (As of the 15th of February, 2020, the United States had had only a dozen confirmed cases of COVID19, and no deaths at all.)

Unfortunately for Fauci, that would soon prove to be a false hope.