wuhan bio- lab BS
belaTED placeholder6 25 ADD UKRAINE
legit sources looked at accidental leak?
see sino-phobia anti-commie
1 24 GENERIC FOR ALL HUMAN MADE CONSPIRACY BS
see bio- chemical weapons
SEE CREECH ON UKRAINE GRU DISINFO TUCKER RT
see fauci target
see conspiracy
aha: we/ rt hates mistrusts gubmint weapons labs, the chinese, and the WHO/UN globalist commies
plus invisible thing that kills --> fear/paranoia/ denial, hunt for scapegoat
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gmail 7 26 zeteo pt 2
Leading virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen dives into what the evidence actually shows about the origins of the Covid pandemic. Spoiler alert: It's not what Trump, RFK Jr. and Gabbard are telling you
...as Tulsi Gabbard departed her role as the director of national intelligence, she released what she characterized as a bombshell reveal that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about masterminding virology research that created SARS-CoV-2, which leaked from a lab and caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), has done the same, releasing a trove of similarly uninformative documents this week, which mostly show some of my co-authors joking around, discussing politics, and changing their minds when faced with evidence (full disclosure: they mention me in the context of complimenting my Twitter game). Paul claims this is evidence that they conspired with Fauci to help him cover up the truth about the lab leak by writing a paper for a scientific journal.
These documents are not proof of anything besides showing that, yet again, efforts across multiple intelligence agencies and the Senate HSGAC failed to uncover any hard evidence that a “lab leak” occurred. That’s because the sole piece of evidence supporting that version of events is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies coronaviruses. There was also a market, where live animals were sold.
This is the second part of a two-part series. In Part 1, I examined how disinformation about the “lab leak” is being weaponized to attack science and persecute scientists, including Fauci, furthering the advancement of authoritarianism and erosion of democracy in America. Part 2 discusses what the evidence actually shows about the origin of the pandemic – and none of it indicates that it started in a lab.
What Evidence?...
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AN 4 26
DOJ indictments are converging with MAGA media narratives
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 04/30/26
Recent Justice Department indictments whose validity have been questioned by legal experts demonstrate an increasing alignment of the Trump DOJ’s activities with the narratives of the MAGA media echo chamber.
President Donald Trump has long sought to use federal law enforcement to punish his enemies, and under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ and FBI launched scattershot and apparently pretextual probes targeting figures like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff over behavior unrelated to the president’s gripes.
But since Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche became acting attorney general last month, the president’s federal retaliation machine has seemed to sync up more closely with long-running talking points of his propaganda arm rather than simply focusing on the same targets.
Federal charges were filed or unsealed in recent days against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group; former National Institutes of Health official Dr. David Morens; and former FBI Director James Comey. Legal experts have said that each of these cases are either weak or concern behavior common among Trump administration officials.
Each set of charges, however, has buttressed MAGA arguments, and provided their proponents with fresh opportunities to leverage them for content. And they foreshadow the potential fruits of DOJ’s ongoing “Grand Conspiracy” investigation, which unifies a string of conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity under the auspices of Joe diGenova, a Republican lawyer and longtime fixture in right-wing media.
James Comey
Citation
Fox News
The target. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 until May 2017, when Trump fired him over his handling of the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which the president describes as a “hoax”; he subsequently became a key figure in the right’s “deep state” conspiracy theories. The DOJ indicted Comey last year over congressional testimony he gave in 2020, but a judge dismissed the case, ruling that the appointment of the prosecutor who filed the indictment (and replaced a U.S. attorney who had questioned the case) had been unconstitutional.
The charges. Federal prosecutors on April 28 charged Comey with one count of “Threatening the President” and one count of “Transmitting a Threat in Interstate Commerce” related to a now-deleted May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey posted a photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “86 47” and commented, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” In the press release announcing the charges, Blanche said, “The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable,” while FBI Director Kash Patel added, “James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. MAGA pundits have argued that recent examples of political violence targeting the right are the result of overheated commentary from Democrats and the media, often erasing incidents of right-wing political violence and ignoring violent rhetoric from the likes of Trump in the process. Numerous Fox News personalities suggested last May that Comey face an investigation or charges over his post, with Jesse Watters calling for it as “retribution.” And the indictment came days after a gunman allegedly targeting the president was stopped trying to breach the perimeter at the April 25 White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner, which Trump, the White House, and media allies subsequently blamed on criticism from Democrats and journalists. VID]
The response from legal experts.“Supreme Court precedent has placed a high bar for convictions in threat cases like these, and former prosecutors and First Amendment scholars alike were highly skeptical the new prosecution would be successful,” CNN reported. Even some lawyers who are Fox News contributors aren’t buying DOJ’s argument — George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox that Comey’s Instagram post would “very likely be viewed as protected speech if it was the basis of a criminal indictment” and “have a hard-time standing up in court,” while Andrew McCarthy wrote at National Review that the “bogus” indictment is a “farce,” called Comey’s conviction “inconceivable,” and added: “Of course, when the Justice Department abuses power this way, as it has repeatedly, it shreds its credibility with the courts and undermines the integrity of all its work.”
The response from the MAGA right. While the indictment drew skepticism on Fox’s daytime coverage, the network’s evening programs championed it on Tuesday night. MAGA lawyer Mike Davis said on The Ingraham Angle that the charges were “a long time coming,” offered “cheers” to Blanche and Patel, called Comey’s post “a clear threat,” and claimed, “There have been people who have gone to prison for a lot less than this.” Hannity, meanwhile, mocked the idea that “86 47” could mean anything but “get rid of Trump,” and hosted Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett to claim that Comey “surely knew what the phrase meant” and that “if he tries to claim free speech as a defense, that's not going to work.”
Dr. David Morens
Citation
Fox News
The target. Morens is an expert in public health and infectious diseases who served from 2006 to 2022 as senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The charges. The Justice Department announced on April 28 that Morens had been charged with “conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” specifically by using his personal Gmail account to conduct what prosecutors allege was government business in order to avoid public disclosure. Blanche alleged in the press release that Morens “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” while Patel claimed that “circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. The right-wing media echo chamber responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in part by turning Fauci into a hate object. Its participants also claimed that the coronavirus originated through a lab leak from a Chinese virology facility and its development may even have been funded by American tax dollars, rather than the prevailing view that the virus initially spread among wild animals before jumping to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. Morens and his email practices came under scrutiny from congressional Republicans and right-wing media in 2023 and 2024. While the Justice Department suggests Morens was acting to suppress the lab leak theory, The New York Times reports that the DOJ’s investigation “has so far yielded no evidence that scientists or health officials were involved in research that started or spread the coronavirus outbreak” and his emails in the indictment “do not show him trying to conceal evidence of a lab leak.”
The response from legal experts.Scott Amey, general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told The New York Times that “the allegations are quite concerning,” but also “noted that senior members of the Trump administration have themselves been accused of trying to evade federal record-keeping laws.” Indeed, The Washington Post reported last year that top Trump administration national security officials were communicating over their private Gmail accounts, and in March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared operational details of an impending U.S. military strike over an unsecured Signal chat with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other Trump administration officials, and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been accidentally added to the chain.
The response from the MAGA right. The New York Post reported on — and effectively generated — “pressure on DOJ to prosecute Anthony Fauci” in light of Morens’ indictment. Its Thursday article claimed that “critics say Fauci … bears the most responsibility and that he should be hauled into court,” citing the head of a right-wing think tank, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and a former DOJ official who is now national political reporter at the right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice.
The Southern Poverty Law Center
Citation
Fox News
The target.The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights organization best known for its monitoring, researching, and reporting on white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and others it describes as “hate and antigovernment extremist groups” that “make up some of the most extreme elements of the hard right.”
The charges. The Justice Department revealed April 21 that a grand jury had returned an indictment charging the SPLC with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” DOJ alleges that by using paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups” from 2014 to 2023, including to one individual who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.” Blanche claimed in a press release that SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” while Patel alleged the group “engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors.”
The underlying right-wing media narrative. As the American right adopted positions previously espoused only by explicit white supremacists, the SPLC drew its ire by expanding its monitoring to include “extreme” right-wing elements that were nonetheless accepted within its mainstream, like Turning Point USA. Right-wing media figures denounced SPLC’s characterizations of TPUSA after the assassination of its founder, MAGA operative Charlie Kirk, in September 2025, and the following month, Patel said the FBI was cutting ties with the group, which he described as a “partisan smear machine.” Right-wing media figures have also pushed back hard against links between Trump and the deadly Charlottesville event, and described white supremacy itself as a “hoax.”
The response from legal experts.The SPLC indictment “may contain serious legal defects that could lead to a full or partial dismissal because it struggles to articulate the elements of the alleged crimes,” CBS News reported after consulting former federal prosecutors. “Legal experts say it is not clear exactly how the SPLC's statements to donors represent material falsehoods or omissions, or why its past use of paid informants would run counter to its mission of dismantling white supremacist groups, a tactic that federal and local law enforcement also utilize to infiltrate and break up criminal organizations,” the report added. Andrew Weissmann, who led the DOJ Fraud Section from 2015 to 2019, likewise wrote in a piece for Just Security that DOJ’s claims “may sound superficially plausible in a press release against an organization dissimilar to the SPLC, but nothing in the speaking indictment against the Center appears to meet the legal standard required” for the charges.
The response from the MAGA right.Right-wing pundits have gleefully parroted the DOJ allegations, using them both to the SPLC and to suggest that the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally had been a false-flag hoax instigated by the left as a way to sabotage Trump. Fox personalities alone have mentioned the SPLC nearly 400 times since the indictment’s release, according to a Media Matters review. (The indictment was “huge breaking news,” as Hannity put it before hosting Patel to accuse the SPLC of the “ultimate definition of hypocrisy.”) Trump himself has picked up the story, rambling about how “Southern Law” is a “total scam” in an interview with CBS over the weekend. The president said in part:
I see these No Kings which are funded just like the Southern Law was funded. You all that Southern Laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your 60 Minutes episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on Southern Law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.
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REF 3
Scientist searching for a coronavirus cure exposes right-wing “disinformation campaign” that led to Trump cutting his funding
60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley: “There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab”
Written by Eric Kleefeld
:{Published 05/11/20
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox-Trump feedback loop has been a dangerous factor undermining the United States’ response to the crisis. Now, as CBS News’ *60 Minutes* documented on Sunday night, right-wing media misinformation about the coronavirus’s origins — the idea that it originated in an infectious disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China — has even resulted in the Trump administration shutting down funding for actual pandemic research.
CBS anchor Scott Pelley spotlighted infectious disease researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the New York-based nonprofit medical organization EcoHealth Alliance, which just recently lost a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As CBS noted, Daszak's “work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure.”
The broadcast traced the chain of events back to when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said during an April 14 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight: “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”
:{Video
Citation
From the April 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson then asked President Donald Trump about the supposed grant during a White House briefing on April 17 — attributing this grant to actions by the Obama administration — to which Trump said he would end it “very quickly.”
But these allegations were untrue.
“There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab,” Pelley explained. The grant was actually to EcoHealth, of which about $100,000 per year went toward working with the Wuhan facility — and even that could only take place after careful review by the NIH.
:{Video
Citation
From the May 10, 2020, edition of CBS News’ 60 Minutes
PELLEY: His funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China's Wuhan Institute.
...
PELLEY: On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China's Wuhan Institute had, quote, "birthed a monster." Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He's been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony.
...
PELLEY: There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room.
The specific claim that $3.7 million was sent to the Wuhan lab has been spread by a variety of sources, such as when the U.K.-based Daily Mail on April 11 mentioned “documents” it obtained that it said showed scientists in Wuhan had “experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health”; the article featured comments from Gaetz regarding the Wuhan Institute.
And on April 26, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted:
PolitiFact rated the claim as “False,” noting, “The grant was made in 2014, and the amount that went to the lab was a bit under $600,000. The grant restriction did not apply to identifying naturally occurring viruses.”
In an interview on a New York talk radio show on April 26, Giuliani opened a new rhetorical front to pin the blame on another target: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a target of right-wing ire since the crisis began. Outlets such as The Washington Times, RedState, and Gateway Pundit all picked up on Giuliani’s false allegations attempting to tie Fauci to this supposed large grant of money to the lab.
Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the right-wing media’s conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, and in an article published last week in National Geographic, he reaffirmed not only that the virus was not manipulated artificially in a lab, but also dismissed the secondary conspiracy theory that it could have been discovered occurring naturally but then leaked from the facility in the course of other research work:
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory‐that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
Fox News has played a key role in spreading these right-wing media conspiracy theories and other coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.
Earlier in the crisis, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) actively pushed the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was released from the Wuhan research facility. They and other voices on Fox News repeatedly cited a study from the respected medical journal The Lancet to allege that the virus did not come from the city’s wet market — and therefore it must have come from a laboratory — even as The Lancet itself has disavowed the very notion that right-wing media are trying to spin.
More recently, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said, “I personally believe it's entirely possible that they engineered the Wuhan virus.” And just last week, Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that a multinational intelligence dossier “confirms much of what we've suspected” about the virus coming from the Wuhan facility. Intelligence professionals have refuted the fringe theory and the claim that the dossier even supported the idea amid this latest push from Fox and other Murdoch media outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia.
Other right-wing media voices from outside Fox News have also pushed this theory:
- The Washington Times ran an article in late January, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.” That article now contains a disclaimer at the top: *“Editor’s note (March 25, 2020): Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”
- Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief White House Strategist, has spread the idea and given interviews to one of his financial benefactors, Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui. At one point, however, Bannon interviewed an actual virologist who told him that idea was “a load of crap.”
- Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who Trump recently awarded the Medal of Freedom, declared in February: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them.”
- Sebastian Gorka, far-right political commentator and former deputy assistant to Trump, agreed on the April 27 edition of his radio show that “one of the most likely scenarios” is that China deliberately released the virus to the rest of the world in order to take down other countries’ economies.
- Sinclair Broadcasting host Eric Bolling, who was in regular communications with the White House about the pandemic back in March, has repeatedly asked about this theory in interviews with White House officials and members of Congress. In one example, he told the U.S. assistant secretary for health: “This virus feels to me that it was more engineered than simply someone eating a bat in China in a wet market and it jumping from animal to human.”
- One America News Network, a far-wing outlet repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, has been tying in the idea about the Wuhan lab together with other conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, the “deep state,” and population control.
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February 4, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Frank, you called this defund the police 2.0. What do you mean by that?
FRANK GAFFNEY (GUEST): Well, as you said earlier, Steve, in 2020 the pretext of the Floyd death was used to mount violent attacks on not just government property and private property but law enforcement personnel. And the result of all of that was this huge effort to blame the police for the problem and say they needed to be defunded.
Well, if that doesn't sound like déjà vu all over again at the moment, I don't know what this is. The law enforcement personnel who are doing their assigned missions as well as they can under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to say nothing of life threatening circumstances in some cases, are now being told we need to defund them effectively. I mean, whether it's disarming them or simply dismantling any protection that they have from being doxxed and thereby having not only their own lives put at risk but their families.
I mean, the question has to be asked, Steve. Not only is this, you know, defund the police 2.0, who are we thinking are gonna do these jobs under these circumstances? It is just as was the first go round. Predictably the case that you will see people bailing out of ICE, people refusing to work under these job conditions, people making the eminently sensible decision that if they — we don't have their back, they're out of there. And then where are we?
And I just have to say, Steve, I did a commentary this morning, I think you're referring to it, about this being a moment when actually we need ICE more than ever. And it's not just because of the, the so-called worst of the worst, the gang bangers and the drug cartels and this, I'm worried sick about what we are told is multiple divisions worth of Chinese soldiers who were brought in across Joe Biden's open borders.
And what Sam Faddis has just written up at AND magazine, one of his stupendous pieces informed by his own experience in his last duty station at the Central Intelligence Agency where he was responsible for countering weapons of mass destruction terrorism. And he's warning about the second biowarfare laboratory by the same guy who had the first one and possibly they think there may be 20 more of these things.
You put those Chinese soldiers in positions to use bioweapons that, according to Sam, maybe have a mortality rate of 60 to 90%. You're talking about mass destruction of the United States, the population, and that's what the blood of — will be on the hands of these Democrats and some Republicans who are trying to get rid of ICE. We need them more than ever now.
BANNON: They don't care, they'd rather keep the 20 million, that's how they keep power.
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an 4 25
Doctors, policy analysts and members of the media reacted badly to President Donald Trump's administration replacing the pivotal Covid.gov government website with what critics described as an ill-conceived movie poster.
“The United States has, it seems, lost the plot,” wrote Loughborough University professor Duncan Robertson.
University of Washington biology professor Carl T. Bergstrom posted, “One person's ‘in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions’ is another person's attempt to deal with a president who suggests treating COVID by injected bleach or sticking a UV light up someone's a--."
READ MORE:Defense Secretary mistakenly shares screenshot of article contradicting his self-praise
Christina Pagel, a professor at University College London’s Clinical Operational Research Unit, lamented: “US govt are disinfo kings. Covid.gov website a week ago was pretty normal info about staying up to date with covid vaccines and now [it’s] some bizarre amalgam of Trump and lab leak theories.”
At the height of the Covid pandemic, Covid.gov provided U.S. residents means to access life-saving information about vaccines and treatment options. It also educated visitors on how to recognize the damaging, sometimes fatal, secondary illnesses and infections that COVID can herald, and it offered a resource for receiving free virus tests.
Today, however, anybody clicking “Covid.gov” will be redirected to a website with the U.S. president front and center on the landing page with the text: "LAB LEAK."
The site includes intense criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, who helmed the nation’s Covid response policy under not only Joe Biden, but also Donald Trump in his first term. Many Trump voters and MAGA devotees, however, resented Fauci’s recommendations to wear masks in public and his advocacy for the evolving line of vaccines developed to combat the ever-evolving virus that killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
READ MORE:'Rapid erosion': Trump's FEMA cuts put hurricane-prone states in a 'really bad situation'
The site also pushes the hotly contested “Wuhan virus” theory describing the virus as created in a Chinese lab, over the more widely accepted theory (and more common occurrence) of the virus emerging from species crossover exposure.
“The White House has turned covid.gov into a conspiracy theory page,” wrote Gizmodo tech reporter Matt Novak.
Washington Post* White House reporter Dan Diamond pointed out the website’s claim is disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies, and “appears to rest entirely on a House GOP report that no Democrats signed.”
Read the Guardian article here.
READ MORE:(Opinion) Trump has finally met his match as he fights 3 unwinnable wars
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https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/dan-ball-leads-oans-unhinged-coverage-russian-invasion-ukraine}:
no lnx many vids
Dan Ball leads OAN’s unhinged coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
The OAN host pushes a Russian government conspiracy theory about “biolabs” and believes that Hunter Biden has something to do with the invasion
WRITTEN BY BOBBY LEWIS
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BEATRICE MOUNT & EMMA MAE WEBER
PUBLISHED03/31/22
One America News Network’s Dan Ball is covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a scattershot of conspiracy theories, both dredging up old claims and repeating new ones from the Russian government.
In early February, Ball told OAN viewers that President Joe Biden might encourage the crisis in Ukraine to benefit himself. Once Russia invaded, Ball began claiming that Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company Burisma may have something to do with the war, that the Russian military is targeting U.S.-European Union bioweapons plants in Ukraine, and even that theRussian attack on Mariupol hospital may have been a false flag by Ukraine.
There is no evidence that any of this is true, but Ball stands behind the absurd propaganda on his show, assuring his viewers on March 9: “What we are reporting is correct. This was not a conspiracy theory. We are not pro-Russia, so don’t go there.”
This commentary is a sad reflection of Ball and OAN’s obsession with what the host regularly calls the “Biden crime family.” The false allegations against Hunter Biden date back years and were the inspiration for former President Donald Trump’s extortion scheme against Ukraine, resulting in his first impeachment. Ball is undeterred by these basic facts, however, and now going to any length to falsely implicate Biden -- and by extension, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- in provoking the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s war.
Ball says that “something does not pass the smell test” in the official story of Russia’s invasion
Five days into the Russian invasion, Ball told his audience, “We really need to ask ourselves, are we getting the whole story,” because several heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance had turned out to be false. Asserting that “the Biden regime” wanted to “wag the dog,”Ball suggested “positive war propaganda” was being used to divert American attention from “the invasion on our southern border” and “the COVID scam,” telling his audience it could even have something to do with “the whole Hunter and Joe Biden connection with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and of course the Russia collusion hoax.”
Video From the February 28, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
Days later, Ball insisted on March 3 that “something does not pass the smell test” because Biden “immediately” paused new oil and gas leases in the U.S. as the Russian invasion began. In reality, the timing is coincidence; as CNBC reports, “the Biden administration is delaying decisions on new oil and gas leases and permits after a Louisiana federal judge blocked officials from using higher cost estimates of climate change.”
“Something stinks here,” Ball asserted, because “this can’t just be Putin and Russia going, ‘I want a land grab,’” since “we know Ukraine’s been corrupt for a long time,” and pointed again to “the Hunter Biden connection with Burisma.”
Weeks into the war, Ball continued to suspect that something was amiss about the official story, questioning if President Biden is “the one actually calling the shots” and “how much of this is acting” from Zelensky, a former actor whom Ball said was “install[ed]” by the U.S., “trying to push us to get us into this war.” “Obviously, Biden is compromised. We’re in the middle of a war that we might get into with our troops, and so shouldn’t all Americans be concerned that the guy making and calling the shots is compromised?”
Eventually, with America “on the brink of getting involved in a war with Russia,” Ball warned that Biden is too mentally unreliable and called on Democrats and Republicans to use the 25th Amendment to “remove [Biden], remove Harris, remove the entire administration before it’s too late.”
Ball suggests Hunter Biden and American bioweapons have something to do with the invasion
By February 28, Ball became focused on the idea that because “we know there’s so much involvement [in Ukraine] with this president, his son, Burisma, this oil and gas in Ukraine, plus Russia, the pipeline,” and “billions if not trillions of dollars involved,” that it all must have something to do with the war.
The Biden family was “in bed with Ukraine” and “now we have a war right in front of us,” Ball told a concurring guest, retired Army officer Darin Gaub, who called Ukraine “the bank” of the Clinton Foundation and other Democrats during his March 3 show.
Ball eventually began asking members of Congress what President Biden’s son has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a March 2 interview with Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), Ball said that “the Hunter laptop” and “the tie to Burisma” suggested that “there’s more to play than just the gas and oil here. I want to know what the hell is really going on.”
“I mean, all the connections that came out tying the Biden family to Ukraine before he took office, now all of a sudden Russia attacks Ukraine, even though they didn’t while Trump was in office,” Ball said. “What’s at play here? It’s deeper – There’s deeper state stuff here, Debbie, don’t you think?”
Video From the March 2, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
After Lesko mostly evaded Ball’s question to instead complain about the Trump impeachments, Ball mentioned “rumors that America’s had biolaboratories set up in Ukraine since ‘14, when we installed the last clown in there,” a topic which became a focal point for Ball’s conspiracy theorizing.
That same day, Ball claimed that in addition to “Hunter’s laptop tying Mr. Biden to Burisma,” there are “questions about Zelensky’s leadership and how he came to power,” as well as “questions about biolabs being set up in that country by America and other corporation, we’re talking biotech-type weaponry.”
Days later, on March 7, Ball asked Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) about “three or four possible biochemical weapons plants” in Ukraine built by the U.S. and EU.Ball told Biggs, who also evaded the question, that “Putin would have an actual gripe” to justify targeting these weapons.
Ball even took an unearned victory lap on March 9, claiming his biolabs conspiracy theory had been “proven correct” by a “smoking gun” from the Russian foreign affairs ministry, which claimed to have found U.S. “biological weapons plants” in Ukraine. Not only that, Ball preened, but “a Biden regime minion” -- Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland -- had openly discussed the labs in the Senate during a recent hearing. RUBIO QUESTIONED
“The headline once again proves that things that we report here on OAN and on this program, Real America, are not conspiracy theories like the left claims,” Ball complained. He later added, “What we are reporting is correct. This was not a conspiracy theory. We are not pro-Russia, so don’t go there.”
Video From the March 9, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
NBC News would later report that these “biolabs” claims are essentially Russian government propaganda filtered through American right-wing media outlets like OAN. The only American-supported “biolabs” in Ukraine, including the ones Nuland discussed before the Senate, are research facilities -- that do not produce weapons -- which are part of a public 2005 deal between the two countries.
Nonetheless, Ball has concluded that “obviously, Biden is compromised” by his son, and Ball continued to tout “biolabs” as a potential cause for Russia’s invasion.
Ball suggests that horrific Russian attacks on Mariupol may have been false flags
Part of Ball’s narrative of the Russian war is that the Ukrainian government led by President Zelensky is deeply corrupt. And when the Russian military bombed a maternity hospital during its siege of Mariupol, Ball professed that he’s “not saying somebody staged this to make things look worse,” but he also implied that “special operatives” and “undercover forces” who “do Zelensky’s bidding” may have been involved in the bombing, saying that Russia’s denials were credible since “they haven’t denied … hitting other stuff,” which is not true.
Video From the March 9, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
A week later, Ukrainian officials reported that a Russian airstrike destroyed a theater in Mariupol, with hundreds of civilians hiding inside and the word “children” written on the ground outside. On his March 17 show, Ball delivered a winding rant against the American, Ukrainian, and Russian governments, as well as the media trying to “push us into this war and accuse networks like OAN of pushing pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda.” Ball then briefly reported on the theater airstrike, and stressed that the story is just “what we’re told.Not saying it’s not true. Just asking the question.”
Ball discovers some consequences of Ukraine conspiracy theories
Despite calling the pre-invasion warnings “a pageant,” suggesting the Mariupol hospital attack was a false flag, and sharing Russian “biolabs” propaganda, Ball has grown tired of conspiracy theories that call the entire war fake.
Above a chyron that questioned whether we are “getting the entire story about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ball again stressed “the Biden crime family and its connections to Ukraine and Russia” -- but told viewers, with a hint of frustration, that the war is “undeniable … and I say this because I see so many online stories of people saying this is all false, it’s all made up.”
“Make no mistake: There is a war going on, folks, and innocent civilians are being harmed and killed,” the OAN host said. “That is a fact, and that’s a tragedy. But while all that is going on,what else is going on? Not just with this conflict, but what aren’t we paying attention to globally – and more importantly, here at home. That’s what we as patriots need to stay focused on.”
Video From the March 15, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
Even while denouncing actual lies about the Russian invasion, Ball could not resist the urge to indulge in deranged falsehoods.
“Most times, there’s nothing as such called a conspiracy theory,” Ball said. “They’re just coverups waiting for the truth to come out.” But the conspiracy theories he presents to OAN viewers are just as false as the conspiracy theories he denies.
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UKRAINE GUK
How ‘Ukrainian bioweapons labs’ myth went from QAnon fringe to Fox News
A feedback loop involving Russia and Tucker Carlson is promoting claims of US funding for biological weapons in Ukraine
Fri 18 Mar 2022 GUK
The American rightwing media’s trumpeting of a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian biological facilities that masked a clandestine bioweapons programme has now rocketed from a fringe QAnon channel directly to Fox News and Donald Trump Jr.
The Russian propaganda machine is so engaged in sowing disinformation about their invasion of Ukraine that they are even ordering Russian TV to broadcast one of the bioweapon theory’s largest boosters: Tucker Carlson.
[
‘Game of Whac-a-Mole’: why Russian disinformation is still running amok on social media
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/15/russia-disinformation-social-media-ukraine)
The conspiracy theory began in seeming obscurity. In the hours after Russia launched its aerial bombardment of Ukraine, the Twitter account of a longtime follower of the QAnon conspiracy movement remarked that approximately 30 biolabs were dotted across Ukraine.
“China and Russia indirectly (and correctly) blamed the US for the [Covid-19] outbreak,” the user, who goes by the username @WarClandestine, tweeted. “And are fearful that the US/allies have more viruses (bioweapons) to let out.” The invasion, he posited, was truly about destroying those facilities and the viruses they contained.
In effect, this theory was just a remix of an allegation that Moscow has made for years: accusing the United States of running a secret bioweapons program, often in eastern Europe. A close adviser to President Vladimir Putin alleged last year that Washington “deliberately caused” the coronavirus pandemic and pointed his finger at US-funded laboratories near Russian and Chinese borders.
In January, the Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva wrote a sensationalist piece accusing the US of conducting biological experiments on Ukrainian and Georgian soldiers. Gaytandzhieva has previously published overt Russian disinformation, and her reporting was picked up by pro-Russian channels. Gaytandzhieva was even awarded a journalism prize last month by a pro-Russian Latvian politician to “encourage her for new research”, according to a press release.
Around the same time, John Mark Dougan – an American in Moscow, on the lam from wiretapping and extortion charges in Florida – began posting a similar theory, citing a Ukrainian whistleblower. “Washington and its funded laboratories are playing a very dangerous game with these viruses,” he warned in a December 2021 video.
This disinformation laid the groundwork for the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory about Ukrainian biolabs in late February. In less than 24 hours, the far-right US conspiracy site Infowars, which played a particularly acute role in promoting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, ran a story based on the allegation. The headline read: Russian Strikes Targeting US-Run Bio-Labs in Ukraine?
From there, the theory percolated through an array of QAnon and conspiracy theory websites, podcasts and video channels.
The very core of the story is true: the Department of Defense funds biological research and laboratories in Ukraine, and elsewhere in Europe and the Caucasus, in order to surveil emerging infectious diseases and to keep secure facilities that housed a Soviet bioweapons program. But Washington insists that it does not fund biological weapons research anywhere, much less in Ukraine – a claim backed up by a bevy of international organisations and non-proliferation advocates.
Despite that, the claim made its way to Tucker Carlson Tonight, which boasts more than 3 million viewers a night on Fox News. On his show, Carlson insisted that the United States was “funding the creation of deadly pathogens” and played clips of spokespeople for the Russian and Chinese regimes, accusing Washington of operating a bioweapons programme in Europe.
Carlson pursued the story on three different episodes of his show over the past week. On 10 March he brought on writer Glenn Greenwald. “When the government comes out and emphatically denies that they have biological weapons,” Greenwald said. “We know they’re not telling the truth.”
These claims have led to an active feedback loop with Russian state propaganda.
Tass, the Russian news agency seen as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, has recently accused “Ukrainian radicals” of planning to use “toxic chemicals” against Russian forces or even Ukrainian civilians. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said publicly that these labs are “deadly threats” to the Russian state. These claims have been promoted widely by an array of Russian social media channels, television stations and commentators.
The interplay between American reporting on these biolabs and the Russian response is no accident.
Mother Jones obtained a missive from the department of information and telecommunications support, instructing Russian media to, per a translation, “use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson”.
[
What are Russia’s biological weapons claims and what’s actually happening?
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/russia-biological-weapon-claim-us-un-ukraine-bio-labs-explainer)
Specifically, the department called on its mouthpieces in Russian media to highlight that “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe”.
All told, the propaganda effort might be an effort to cover up something much more sinister in its own back yard. In a 2021 report, the US state department took the extraordinary step of accusing Moscow of continuing its Soviet-era bioweapons programme.
While Russia submits annual reports to the United Nations stating it has no active bioweapons programme, Washington believes that “the Russian Federation has revised plans and funding to its national chemical and biological facilities.”
But the effort continues, even when contradictory.
On Thursday, state propaganda outlet Sputnik published new documents which, they claim, show “components of biological weapons were being created in Ukraine with direct US involvement and financing”. The US documents themselves, however, clearly contradict that. The Pentagon’s funding will “help to detect, prevent, and predict disease emergence in the region”, reads a 2019 request for funding, reportedly released from the Russian defense ministry.
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an 11 24
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) predicted that former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) would prosecute vaccine-related "crimes against humanity" if he becomes President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general.
During a House Oversight Committee hearing on pandemic preparedness on Thursday, Greene accused the federal government of using "the American people's hard-earned tax dollars to create viruses that can be unleashed on the world like COVID-19 was."
"Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people," she said. "He lied, and many, many people died."
"Now vaccines have been mandated on the population in order to work, go to school, and live as functioning citizens in the United States," she continued. "I can tell you when you talk about vaccine hesitancy, as one sitting before you that never took the COVID vaccine, nor will I take it, thank God. I'm so glad I didn't take it."
Greene falsely suggested other vaccines were linked to "the rise of autism, learning disabilities, neurological problems, and so much more that children are suffering from today."
ALSO READ:The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy
"Preparing for the next pandemic is actually recognizing that the last pandemic resulted in crimes against humanity," the lawmaker opined.
"People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I'm pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen," she added.
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06/05/24
fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy falsely claims there were Chinese bioweapons labs found in California
In reality, as The Associated Press reported at the time, “The charges deal with federal health regulations, nothing related to online conspiracy theories about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America”
WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF
:{:{PUBLISHED 06/05/24}:
During a June 5 diatribe about the dangers of Chinese influence within our hemisphere, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy wrongly asserted that “bioweapons labs [were] found in California.” The host was seemingly referring to debunked conspiracy theories that had circulated the previous fall.
In 2023, an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration found an unauthorized lab in Fresno, California, which was owned by Jia Bei Zhu. Zhu was arrested on “charges of not obtaining the proper permits to manufacture tests for COVID-19, pregnancy and HIV.”
Discovery of the lab had fueled conspiracy theories about bioweapons, but as The Associated Press reported at the time, “The charges deal with federal health regulations, nothing related to online conspiracy theories about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America.” Additionally, according to the article, “The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no sign that the lab was illegally in possession of the materials or had select agents or toxins that could be used as bioweapons.”
Yet during a morning rant about the supposed dangers permeating American borders, Campos-Duffy seemingly referred to the lab while fearmongering about “the Chinese exerting influence all over our hemisphere.” She went on to allege that “some people [are] saying the election in Mexico, the Chinese were very much involved in that election.”
Video
CitationFrom the June 5, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (CO-HOST): What's happening in our own hemisphere, you have Mexico turning into a narco-state but, more importantly, you have the Chinese exerting influence all over our hemisphere: flying, you know, spy balloons over our country, buying up farmland, setting up secret police, bioweapons labs found in California, and then buying up all kinds of, you know, mines and infrastructure and ports all over Latin America. This is unheard of in our own backyard. This is a massive problem. Many people are saying it's actually the biggest problem. And some people saying the election in Mexico, the Chinese were very much involved in that election. And we had 34 candidates who were killed in this campaign season in Mexico. Mexico is a very hot spot right now.
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6 24 fauci testimony //
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russia disinfo said AIDS was US bio-weapon;
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covid-19-was-deployed-as-a-weapon-in-globalist-scheme-to-dethrone-trump-says-kari-lake
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ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan has revealed what he calls "smoking gun" evidence that the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has gathered against Joe Biden, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
The congressman and other Republican filed a legal briefing in an ongoing case, the State of Missouri v. Biden, which accuses the president's administration of government overreach by attempting to suppress information online.
According to Jordan and other committee members, the Biden administration called on Facebook to take down posts that suggest the COVID-19 pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a theory that has gained traction in recent months, buoyed by Biden's own Department of Energy concluding in February that the virus likely originated from a lab leak.
"This pressure was direct and coercive. For example, the Administration tried to suppress discussion of COVID's origins: when a Facebook executive asked in July 2021 why the company censored the COVID lab leak theory, an executive in charge of content policy development said, '[b]ecause we were under pressure from the [A]dministration' to do so. The same Facebook executive confessed that the company 'shouldn't have done it,'" the briefing reads.
In another email, a Facebook employee allegedly told CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg that the company was "facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content."
As Newsweek points out, the Biden administration has previously defended its coordination with social media platforms to take down or throttle content it defined as misinformation as the pandemic unfolded.
"We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the surgeon general's office," then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a press conference in July of 2021. "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts who are popular with our audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content – so we are helping get trusted content out there."
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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/gop-scientific-method-evidence-conspiracy/
an 7 23 no lnx
Home | For the GOP, the scientific method is evidence of conspiracy
Lindsay Beyerstein July 19, 2023
A scientific paper now ranks with the grassy knoll in the minds of conspiracy theorists. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (2020) has become an object of obsession complete with its own rich folklore. Last week, House Republicans devoted a three-hour hearing to haranguing the scientists who wrote it.
Two of the paper’s authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert F. Garry, were hauled before the committee to answer for their defiance from GOP orthodoxy.
The GOP party line is that Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow forced a group of university professors to publish a peer-reviewed paper arguing that Covid-19 wasn’t a bioweapon or a laboratory construct. Fauci supposedly wanted to discredit the lab leak because he helped the Wuhan Institute of Virology create the virus. No, really. They get indignant when you call it a conspiracy theory, but that’s the B-movie plot they’re pushing.
READ MORE: Did Trump let Americans die purely for political purposes?
The proximal origin of Proximal Origin was not Fauci’s NIAID lair, but a teleconference organized by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, then the head of a UK research charity. Farrar set the agenda, invited the guests, and even provided tech support. The witnesses testified that Fauci hopped on the call but said little of substance.
Andersen also testified that, far from pressuring him to debunk the lab leak, Fauci had encouraged him to publish any evidence that he might find of a leak and offered to help him share any such evidence with the proper authorities. These are not the actions of someone orchestrating a massive coverup.
In lab leak lore, the researchers’ open-mindedness is evidence of coercion. The subpoenaed emails show that, far from being reflexive leak deniers, the authors of this paper thought they saw features that couldn’t have evolved naturally. If they couldn’t explain how the virus might have arisen in nature, that raised red flags that it might have been engineered. But once they delved into the quirks of SCV2 and explored the weird and wonderful features of wild coronaviruses, their doubts were allayed.
If Fauci was orchestrating a coverup, why would he pick scientists who said they took the lab leak seriously?
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report
Another plank in the GOP conspiracy theory is that Fauci bribed Andersento argue against the lab leak with a federal research grant.In fact, that grant was awarded before the pandemic started. As is standard for such grants, the award was based on high scores by independent reviewers, not the whims of Tony Fauci.
The majority falsely claimed in its report that the authors sent the paper to Fauci for editing and approval before it was published. In fact, Fauci received a copy of the manuscript that had already been accepted by the journal and didn’t offer any comments.
Most disturbing of all, Republicans tried to spin the scientific method itself as evidence of a conspiracy. They seized on a snippet of an Andersen email stating that he and his colleagues were trying to disprove the lab leak theory. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s science. Experimenters start with a testable hypothesis like, “Sars-CoV-2 leaked from a lab” and then they do their best to knock it down. If they can’t defeat it, the hypothesis survives to be tested again another day. As Andersen explained, they couldn’t definitively disprove a lab leak, but the evidence convinced them it was unlikely.
“My early hypothesis was that of a ‘lab theory’ and when I stated that we were “trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” I was specifically referring to the concept of falsification,” Andersen said in his written remarks.
“This is a text-book example of the scientific method in use.”
READ MORE: 'Ignorance about the biological function': Virologist dispels testimony from GOP’s lab link 'expert'
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Column: House Republicans give a crash course in how to concoct a conspiracy theory about COVID’s origin
covid origins
Virologists Robert Garry, left, and Kristian Andersen listen patiently at a Congressional hearing Tuesday as a gang of politicians tell them their scientific method was flawed. (House Oversight Committee)
BY MICHAEL HILTZIK
BUSINESS COLUMNIST
JULY 11, 2023
Opening Tuesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the origin of the COVID virus, the panel’schairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), promised an impartial inquiry.
“This is not an attack on science,” he said. “And it’s not an attack on an individual.”
He and his GOP colleagues proceeded over nearly three hours to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — one of the most respected such scientists in the world — of having masterminded the creation of the virus, with the connivance of Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.
Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories...have resulted in significant harassment and threats....Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists.
— Virological expert Kristian G. Andersen
The Republicans’ main “evidence,” such as it is, involves a seminal paper in the scientific study of the virus.
Published as a letter in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, under the title “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper weighed the two major theories of COVID’s origin: that it reached the human population from infected wildlife (known as zoonosis) or that it leaked from a government lab in Wuhan, China, the teeming metropolis where the first COVID outbreak occurred in late 2019.
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The paper’s authors noted that all the features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, are observable in nature, coinciding with the zoonosis hypothesis. They added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
For years, Republicans have asserted without a scintilla of evidence that Fauci and Collins manipulated the scientific consensus away from the lab-leak hypothesis.
Why have they seized on this theory? Its provenance may offer a clue: It flowered during the Trump administration among political appointees in the State Department, who saw it as a cudgel with which to beat the Chinese government, which they viewed as an economic threat to the U.S. It was also useful to undermine the authority of Fauci, whose skepticism about Trump’s COVID policies was manifest.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via
Column: U.S. government debunks COVID lab-leak conspiracy theory, enraging conspiracy theorists
June 26, 2023
Soon enough, it became Republican orthodoxy.
Lab leak proponents in government and Congress have smeared and vilified Fauci and Collins, among other scientists, in the service of purely partisan claims, ignoring the utter absence of any scientific evidence for a lab leak and the mounting evidence that it first reached humans through interactions with susceptible animals being sold illegally at a wildlife market in Wuhan.
The foils for this phase of the GOP effort to construct an evidence-free narrative of COVID’s origin were two of the five authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, Robert F. Garry of Tulane and Kristian G. Andersen of Scripps Research in La Jolla.
Garry and Andersen sat patiently at the witness table in the committee room as the Republican members used cherry-picked quotes from their emails, misrepresented their research findings and ignored their painstaking explanations of how science is done in the real world. They listened stoically to committee members — some of whom have medical degrees but none any evident expertise in scientific research — harangue them about supposed flaws in their scientific methods.
“We do know something for certain,” Westrup said: “that the drafting, coordination and publication of ‘Proximal Origin’ and downplaying the lab leak was antithetical to science.”
One low note among many others during the hearing came fromRep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who charged that “Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they had been implicated in the creation of production or the creation of this virus and they were doing everything they could including both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles to undermine that theory.”
Truth to tell, however, the committee majority’s purpose was no secret from the start. The hearing was titled, after all, “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up.”
It may be useful to examine the path the subcommittee’s GOP majority traveled to come to its assertions that the Proximal Origin paper was a sham.
[Dr. Scott Atlas speaks as President Donald Trump looks on
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Column: These ‘experts’ sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price
May 23, 2023]
As laid out in written testimony submitted to the subcommittee by Garry and Andersen, it started in January 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus and not much about its genomic family.
The first examinations of its structure revealed several features unfamiliar to virologists. At first glance, they looked like nothing occurring in nature. Many thought this pointed to some sort of laboratory engineering.
When Andersen brought this concern to Fauci during a call on Jan. 31, Fauci urged him to write a scientific paper about the issue, and suggested that if confirmed, the matter should be referred to the FBI and the British intelligence service MI5.
Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert who is currently the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, convened a conference call on Feb. 1 among nine scientists, including Andersen and Garry. Fauci and Collins joined the call, but by all accounts merely listened in without contributing any opinions.
New data came to the scientific community in a torrent over the next few days and weeks. The unfamiliar features turned out to be more common in nature than many virologists had known, and the process by which they might become incorporated in SARS-CoV-2 progressively better understood.
By the end of February, when the authors of the Proximal Origin paper submitted an initial draft to Nature Medicine, they still did not have enough data to rule out either major theory but had become more certain that a laboratory role was plausible.
The subcommittee Republicans profess to be thunderstruck that a theory about COVID’s origin could be posed and discarded in the space of a few days, but Andersen and Garry tried to explain that they’re wrong.
The scientists started with no data, and incorporated new information into their viewpoints as it arrived. In any event, Andersen testified, the period between the conference and the publication of the paper wasn’t three days, as the Republicans kept insisting, but 45 days. Neither Fauci nor Collins played any role in guiding the authors’ conclusions, the witnesses said.
The published paper, moreover, made clear that the state of SARS-CoV-2 research was in its infancy. “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another,” the authors wrote.
[Column: How Trump’s anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research
May 12, 2023]
But its general conclusion that a lab leak is implausible and the virus probably emerged by natural spillover from animals “has only been further supported by additional evidence and studies,” Andersen told the subcommittee. He and Garry said that if evidence emerged supporting a lab leak, they would examine it objectively and be guided by their findings. As of this moment, there is none.
Under prompting by subcommittee Democrats, the witnesses pointed to the long-term consequences of the Republican efforts to foment mistrust of science by mainstreaming conspiracies.
“Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats,” Andersen said. “Including everything from typical targets on social media to emails, to telephone calls to my office ... to death threats.... Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists together with my co-authors.”
The thrust of the subcommittee’s claims, he said, “is that the virus was created and that American scientists played a role in that and have been covering that up.... All of which, as the record clearly shows, is false.... The focus has been that there’s a need to blame someone.”
What has been going on here has been nothing less than a partisan witch hunt. Westrup made clear that the Republican narrative was predetermined: “We’re examining any conflicts of interest, biases or suppression of scientific discourse regarding the origins of COVID-19,” he said. The record shows, however, that what occurred was the scientific method in action.
If the subcommittee members are truly devoted to protect Americans from a future pandemic, they couldn’t find a worse way to reach that goal. “If I was a future scientist, looking at the attacks directed at us, for example, maybe I wouldn’t go into infectious disease research.... It’s incredibly damaging,” Anderson said.
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am 7 23 vid
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) warned Republicans that former President Donald Trump's culpability for Covid-19 deaths "would only deepen" if their theory about a lab leak in China was true.
Raskin made the remarks during a Tuesday House Oversight hearing into the origins of Covid-19.
"We are all interested in finding out the origins of the Covid-19 epidemic to make sure that such a nightmare never happens again to us," Raskin began. "Some people think that the finding that it all started with a lab leak would somehow absolve Donald Trump of his lethally reckless response to the pandemic. Of course, his response was dangerously dysfunctional regardless of how it got started."
The Maryland Democrat pointed out that Trump's former adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, "said that we lost hundreds of thousands of American lives because of the flaws in the response."
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump has set up an 'embarrassing' trap for his own lawyers: national security attorney
"But even if the virus came from a lab, as indeed it could have, we don't know that yet, that would only deepen Donald Trump's culpability because he was the one who repeatedly and enthusiastically praised China's early handling of the pandemic and assured us that he was working closely with President Xi on the response to it," Raskin added. "So let's just get the facts straight and leave all the political myth-making aside."
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staff oppos res?
an 4 23
Dr. Mark Lowenthal accused Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of misleading the public about the origins of Covid-19.
During a House hearing on Covid-19 Tuesday, Greene complained that the government could track down alleged military leaker Jack Teixeira but couldn't determine the origins of the virus.
"So, the intelligence community is able to figure out immediately who was leaking classified information in a Discord chat, but yet still doesn't want to say whether it came from the lab or didn't come from the lab," Greene said. "The intelligence communities seem to release or not release information based on how the information will affect the government that it seems to protect."
Lowenthal, a former intelligence agent, responded to Greene.
"May I respond to something else that you said in your comments, Ms. Greene?" he began. "There is a vast, vast difference between tracking a leak on a social media site and determining the origins of this disease. And to compare the two is entirely fallacious, ma'am."
"Dr. Lowenthal, you've said that you keep your intelligence claims and information nonpartisan," Greene shot back. "In 2018, Mr. Lowenthal, you were quoted in the New York Times saying that President Trump is the best president that Russia ever had. That sounds pretty political to me."
"I was no longer an intelligence officer at the time, ma'am," Lowenthal replied. "I'm a private citizen."
"Well, I think you have a difficult time keeping your political opinions out of your political [analysis]," Greene quipped.[vid]
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an 3 23
'Ignorance about the biological function': Virologist dispels testimony from GOP’s lab link 'expert'
Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined by President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, along with members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, addresses his remarks at a coronavirus update briefing Wednesday, April 8, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
Lindsay BeyersteinandThe Editorial BoardMarch 10, 2023
Proponents of a lab origin for SARS-Cov-2 are trying to make it seem as if new evidence for their conjecture is rapidly accumulating.
But Wednesday’s House Oversight hearing on the origins of the coronavirus seemed as if wiped from a bat’s butt. It was the same old players ruminating over the same stale conspiracy theories.
You wouldn’t know it from the hearing, but a lot has been done in the last three years to ferret out the origins of SARS-Cov-2.
After an all-out sprint called by President Biden to uncover the origins of the virus, the consensus of the US intelligence community remains that SARS-Cov-2 probably spilled over from wild animals, and that it’s neither genetically engineered nor a bioweapon.
Three years on, there’s still no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (or any other lab) had SARS-Cov-2 or any plausible progenitor virus before the outbreak. Most importantly, research has shown that the earliest cases of covid were tightly linked to one of the few markets in Wuhan that sold trafficked wildlife.
The GOP’s star witness was Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control under Donald Trump.
The Republicans on the committee staked a lot on his credibility because, unlike their other witnesses (a science writer, and a self-described technology futurist), Redfield’s a virologist.
But Redfield botched basic facts in his testimony. And these weren’t trivial misstatements. He put false claims forward as his main reasons for thinking that SARS-Cov-2 was genetically engineered.
Redfield’s critics had plenty of time to roast him on Twitter because the GOP majority didn’t see fit to call any real virus experts to testify.
“Just looked in on the COVID origins to hear Redfield talking complete and utter gibberish,” tweeted Dr. Paul Bieniasz, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Rockefeller University.
Redfield falsely asserted that the SARS1 and MERS coronaviruses cannot spread person-to-person. He said, as a scientist, that he realized immediately that the Covid-19 virus was genetically engineered because it seemed designed to spread person-to-person, unlike SARS1 and MERS, which don’t spread that way.
Actually, the SARS1 and MERS coronaviruses do spread between people. SARS1 was so good at spreading person-to-person that it went to Canada all the way from China to kill hundreds.
So much for that argument.
Redfield insinuated that Chinese researchers must have taken a harmless bat virus and inserted into it a special sequence to make it infectious to people. In saying so, he grossly misstated the function of a viral feature known as the furin cleavage site (FCS). He said he suspected covid was genetically engineered because the virus’s furin cleavage site “totally changes the orientation of the binding domain of Covid [...] so it has high affinity for human [ACE2] receptors.”
None of this is true.
“The furin site is not involved in spike binding to the ACE2 receptor, and insertion of the furin site does not reorient the receptor binding domain to allow recognition of human ACE2,” Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah, explained to me.
“It's a stunning revelation about Redfield's ignorance about the biological function of the FCS as well as even a basic understanding of the Spike-ACE2 binding and viral entry,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, and a co-author of one of the most influential papers arguing for a natural origin.
Redfield also spent time whining about how Anthony Fauci excluded him from a working group investigating the origins of SARS-Cov-2.
“It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view,” Redfield claimed.
He offered no evidence to support his claim that he’d been excluded because of his opinion that the virus was genetically engineered. However, Redfield’s claim is unlikely true because scientists who were initially sympathetic to a lab origin were invited to participate.
Maybe they thought Redfield was busy running the CDC during a global pandemic.
Or maybe Redfield was left out because he doesn’t know a furin cleavage site from a fusilli.
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Hearing Wrap Up: Suppression of the Lab Leak Hypothesis ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › Press Releases
Jul 12, 2023 — WASHINGTON — The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing titled “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up” to ...
Garry Testimony
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › uploads › 2023/07
Jul 11, 2023 — United States House of Representatives. Oversight and Accountability Committee. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Wenstrup to Hold Hearing with “Proximal Origins” Authors
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › Press Releases
Jun 27, 2023 — WASHINGTON — Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) will hold a hearing titled “Investigating the ...
Comer & Jordan Demand Docs & Testimony on COVID ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › Press Releases
Dec 14, 2022 — and House Committee on the Judiciary Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are pressing senior Biden Administration officials, the president of ...
February 3, 2022 Dr. Robert Garry Professor, School of ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › Letter-to-Dr-Garry
Feb 3, 2022 — Documents in the custody of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reveal how a group of scientists—including you—initially believed COVID-19.
COVID Origins - United States House Committee on ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › landing › covid-origins
Mounting evidence points to the virus originating from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. National Institutes of Health ...
Missing: garry | Show results with: garry
Wenstrup: Knowing the Origin of COVID-19 is Fundamental ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › Press Releases
Mar 8, 2023 — WASHINGTON—Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) opened today's hearing on “Investigating the ...
Interview of: Robert F. Garry
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › uploads › 2023/07
Jul 11, 2023 — COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY,. SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC,. U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,. WASHINGTON, D.C..
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic ...
House.gov
https://oversight.house.gov › uploads › 2023/03
Mar 5, 2023 — Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan,. China and, further, may have been intentionally ...
Scientists at House hearing refute claims they were bribed ...
CNN.com
https://www.cnn.com › 2023/07/11 › health › covid-orig...
Jul 11, 2023 — Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said they aimed to use a hearing Tuesday to set the record straight ...
Hearing on the Origins of COVID-19
C-SPAN
https://www.c-span.org › video › hearing-origins-covid-19
Jul 12, 2023 — Scientists Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry testified on the origins of COVID-19 before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the ...
House Hearing on the Origins of COVID-19 | March 8, 2023
C-SPAN
https://www.c-span.org › video › house-hearing-origins-...
Mar 13, 2023 — Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield joined public health and science professionals and advocates to testify on the origins of COVID-19 ...
GOP probes covid origin paper as authors protest 'absurd' ...
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › health › 2023/07/11
Jul 11, 2023 — The House panel investigating the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic heard testimony Tuesday from influential virologists who ...
Now in charge, House Republicans launch flurry of ...
Science
https://www.science.org › content › article › now-charge...
Jan 13, 2023 — The new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is preparing to shine a bright light on science—and scientists.
Republicans Release Text of Redacted Fauci Emails on ...
The Intercept
https://theintercept.com › 2022/01/12 › covid-origins-...
Jan 12, 2022 — A scientist told The Intercept he was advised not to “mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists” after a call ...
Congress takes up COVID origins: A primer on the debate ...
The Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com › USA › Politics › Congress-...
Jan 31, 2023 — Republicans say they're trying to get answers on how the pandemic started, but others worry a partisan probe will muddy the waters.
COVID-19 ORIGIN ACT OF 2023; Congressional Record ...
Congress.gov
https://www.congress.gov › house-section › article
Mar 10, 2023 — For complete and accurate display of this text, see the PDF. [Pages H1255-H1260] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government ...
Hiltzik: The COVID lab leak conspiracy game
Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com › business › story › column-ho...
Jul 11, 2023 — House Republicans used an oversight hearing to accuse former NIH officials Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of complicity in the COVID ...
Revisiting Gain of Function Research: What the Pandemic ...
Senate.gov
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov › etso › hearings › revisi...
Revisiting Gain of Function Research: What the Pandemic Taught Us and Where Do We Go From Here. Date: August 3, 2022. Time: 2:30pm.
House Oversight holds hearing on origins of COVID-19
PBS
https://www.pbs.org › newshour › politics › watch-liv...
Mar 8, 2023 — The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on Wednesday on the origins of COVID-19 following a new report from the Energy Department that ...
Missing: garry | Show results with: garry
Uncovering COVID-19's Origin Just One of Many Pandemic ...
The Heritage Foundation
https://www.heritage.org › public-health › commentary
Nov 9, 2022 — The origin of COVID-19—whether natural or the product of a lab—is a crucial yet unresolved issue. Minority staff of a key Senate committee, ...
Lab-Leak Theory Resurfaces as House Republicans ...
WTTW
https://news.wttw.com › 2023/03/09 › lab-leak-theory...
Mar 9, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI both assess that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Yet the Energy Department ...
Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
U.S. Right to Know
https://usrtk.org › covid-19-origins › timeline-the-pro...
Apr 11, 2023 — NIAID had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology — a fact Fauci had been alerted to by late January. Minutes after being alerted by one of the ...
Amid Partisan Politicking, Revelations on a Covid Origins ...
The Nation
https://www.thenation.com › Article
Jul 12, 2023 — On Tuesday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held an oversight hearing on “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a ...
A Covid Origin Conspiracy?
City Journal
https://www.city-journal.org › article › a-covid-origin-...
Jan 23, 2022 — From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London ...
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
https://twitter.com › covidselect
Fauci was aware of risky gain-of-function research occurring in Wuhan, China prior to the emergence of COVID-19. Why didn't he tell the American people? @ ...
Top oversight Republicans call on 7 scientists to testify ...
Fox News
https://www.foxnews.com › politics › top-oversight-re...
Feb 3, 2022 — EXCLUSIVE: Three senior House Republicans investigating the origins of the coronavirus called on seven scientists to provide voluntary ...
Rand Paul and the GOP effort to blame Fauci for the ...
National Institutes of Health (.gov)
https://www.nih.gov › foia › simonson-56433
May 7, 2021 — It has been known for a long time that. U.S. health agencies funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it's valid to ask whether that funding.
House Republicans Launch Subcommittee to Investigate ...
National Review
https://www.nationalreview.com › news › house-repub...
Jan 10, 2023 — House Republicans passed a rules package that included the formation of a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to investigate the ...
Republicans revive discredited Wuhan Lab Leak theory ...
World Socialist Web Site
https://www.wsws.org › articles › 2023/02/17 › sjcr-f17
Feb 16, 2023 — Republicans have demanded Former Biden chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci testify on the Wuhan lab leak theory.
U.S. Government Pulls Funding For Research Project On ...
NPR
https://www.npr.org › goatsandsoda › 2020/04/29 › why...
Apr 29, 2020 — The project, run by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, aimed to identify places to monitor, come up with strategies to prevent spillover of ...
EcoHealth Alliance Statement Correcting Inaccuracies in ...
EcoHealth Alliance
https://www.ecohealthalliance.org › 2023 › March
Mar 13, 2023 — March 13 2023 – Professor Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) submitted written testimony to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus ...
A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of ...
PNAS
https://www.pnas.org › doi › pnas.2202769119
by NL Harrison · 2022 · Cited by 27 — Since the identification of theSARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, in January 2020 (1), the origin of the virus has been a topic of intense scientific debate and ...
NIH acknowledges US funded gain-of-function at Wuhan ...
WVLT
https://www.wvlt.tv › 2021/10/21 › nih-acknowledges-us...
Oct 21, 2021 — Rand Paul. The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated ...
House panel investigating COVID-19's origins holds first ...
Gem 104
https://www.gem104.com › 2023/03/08 › house-panel...
Mar 8, 2023 — Tetra Images - Henryk Sadura/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- On the heels of a federal agency's new assessment that COVID-19 "mostly likely" ...
A Critical Analysis of the Evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 Origin ...
American Society for Microbiology
https://journals.asm.org › mBio › Vol. 14, No. 2
Mar 28, 2023 — When humans experience a new, devastating viral infection such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), ...
COVID-19 lab leak theory
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › COVID-19_lab_leak...
The COVID-19 lab leak theory, or lab leak hypothesis, is the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, is the result of a ...
Fauci shut down lab leak theory despite scientists lending it ...
Denver Gazette
https://denvergazette.com › news › fauci-shut-down-lab-l...
Jan 11, 2022 — Scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan, China, was possible ...
How Top Experts Misled World On Covid-origin, Why Are ...
Outlook India
https://www.outlookindia.com › International
Apr 4, 2023 — The experts included the then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr Anthony Fauci, Holmes, Wellcome Trust ...
Republicans Push COVID Lab-Leak Theory, Imply Cover ...
Medpage Today
https://www.medpagetoday.com › ... › COVID-19
Mar 9, 2023 — While there is "no smoking gun" to prove a laboratory leak hypothesis, "the growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a gun that is at ...
TWiV 774: Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and the ...
MicrobeTV
https://www.microbe.tv › twiv › twiv-774
Jul 1, 2021 — Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry join TWiV to discuss recovery of deleted deep sequencing data from early in the Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic ...
Lab Leak
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
https://radioopensource.org › lab-leak
May 27, 2021 — There's a swerve in the road, signs that say “Sharp Curves Ahead,” in the origin story of the COVID pandemic. Where did that virus come from?
House panel investigating COVID-19's origins holds first hearing
go.com
https://abcnews.go.com › Politics › story
Mar 8, 2023 — The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, met to tackle a question that's plagued ...
Missing: garry | Show results with: garry
Rep. Jim Jordan, Sen. Roger Marshall expose Fauci's web ...
Minot Daily News
https://www.minotdailynews.com › opinion › 2022/02
Feb 10, 2022 — More than two years into the pandemic, it's becoming increasingly clear that Americans don't trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House ...
Key questions for new House subcommittee on ...
South Gibson Star-Times
https://www.sgstartimes.com › articles › opinion › key...
Mar 14, 2023 — It's no longer a “conspiracy theory.” There's growing evidence that COVID-19 probably originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, and not from a ...
Congress launches probe into Covid-19 origins
Homeland Preparedness News
https://homelandprepnews.com › featured › 71249-co...
A congressional panel began the formal process of investigating the origins of Covid-19 Wednesday amid recriminations over allegations of researchers being ...
Uncovering COVID-19's Origin Just One of Many Pandemic ...
The Daily Signal
https://www.dailysignal.com › 2022/11/08
Nov 8, 2022 — The Senate report details the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a center of China's intense, bat-based coronavirus research, the ...
CD258: Gain of Function Research
Congressional Dish |
https://congressionaldish.com › cd258-gain-of-functio...
Sep 18, 2022 — On August 3rd, Senate Republicans held a hearing examining gain of function research: its possible role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic; ...
Top virologists who changed tune on COVID-19 lab leak ...
Washington Examiner
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com › healthcare › c...
Mar 2, 2023 — Leading virologists who initially raised concerns about the possibility of COVID-19 leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, before later ...
Email Shows Fauci Privately Acknowledged Gain-Of- ...
The Daily Caller
https://dailycaller.com › fauci-gain-of-function-wuhan
Jul 14, 2023 — A new document released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus reveals that Anthony Fauci knew that gain-of-function research ...
Ask PolitiFact: What's going on with EcoHealth Alliance, the ...
PolitiFact
https://www.politifact.com › article › oct › ask-politifa...
Oct 28, 2021 — Lawrence Tabak has been cited as proof that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” research in Wuhan, China, despite ...
Is Biden silencing the world's premier spy agency over ...
93.3 KWTO
https://933kwto.com › is-biden-silencing-the-worlds-p...
Mar 9, 2023 — This week, the House Oversight Committee hosted a hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, with multiple expert witnesses pointing ...
Scientist who denounced Covid lab leak theory said ...
Daily Mail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk › health › article-12289007
Jul 13, 2023 — Dr Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist, co-authored a now-notorious research paper published on March 17, 2020, ...
ProPublica Takes Another Look at Wuhan
Substack
https://fallows.substack.com › propublica-takes-another-l...
Jul 12, 2023 — It was from the Republican staff of the House Foreign Affairs committee and it argued that Covid had begun with a “lab leak” in China.
Cruz: If IRS whistleblowers are telling the truth, AG Garland ...
Santa Barbara News-Press
https://newspress.com › Local
Jul 15, 2023 — “[Attorney General] Merrick Garland may have lied under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obstructed justice in the Hunter Biden ...
House Oversight subcommittee to investigate COVID-19 ...
USA Today
https://www.usatoday.com › politics › 2023/02/13 › h...
Feb 13, 2023 — A House Oversight select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic is launching its investigation into COVID-19 origins and funds sent to a ...
Missing: garry | Show results with: garry
No Evidence Scientists Received Grant for Changing ...
FactCheck.org
https://www.factcheck.org › 2023/03 › scicheck-no-ev...
Claim: Dr. Anthony Fauci pressured virologists to change their minds on the origin of COVID-19 in exchange for a $9 million grant.
Claimed by: Rep. Jim Jordan
Fact check by FactCheck.org: No Evidence
Feedback
Suppression of COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis Was Unscientific
thepulse.one
https://www.thepulse.one › suppression-of-covid-lab-lea...
7 days ago — Was it politics or science that covered-up and censored the discussion of COVID lab origins? A new hearing sheds light.
A Crypto Bill is Possible, Says Key Republican After Ripple ...
BNN Bloomberg
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca › a-crypto-bill-is-possib...
6 days ago — A federal judge ruled last week that sales of Ripple Labs Inc.'s XRP token were securities — and under the SEC's remit — when made directly to ...
N.I.H. Leader Rebuts Covid Lab Leak Theory at House ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics
Feb 8, 2023 — Now in the majority, House Republicans are eager to scrutinize the Biden administration's Covid policies and the origins of the virus, ...
Missing: garry | Show results with: garry
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an 2 23
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is pushing baseless conspiracy theories about the Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon floating over the United States – currently, over Montana – that the Pentagon is tracking, and he’s being widely mocked for his unfounded fear-mongering.
Fox News host Harris Faulkner set the stage perfectly for the far-right Republican from Kentucky, declaring the balloon is “the size of three buses” and that “China says was taken by wind – wind that we can’t substantiate.”
The Kentucky congressman who has falsely described President Biden as “compromised,” and stated he is going to target and investigate him, told Faulkner, “I have concern this is going to be another example of the Biden administration’s weakness on the national scale.”
Comer, 50, a former agriculture commissioner, lamented about Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, claiming it hurt the reputation of America’s military and Commander in Chief.
The balloon, he said, should “never have been allowed” to cross over into the United States.
“My concern is that the federal government doesn’t know what’s in that balloon.Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?” he asked, pushing unfounded theories while echoing the far-right’s false claims the COVID-19 virus was developed as a bioweapon and escaped the lab in Wuhan, China.
After suggesting it might have bioweapons, he then said it was “very concerning” the balloon was not shot down before reaching the U.S. – which could have spread the alleged bioweapon.
Faulkner, seen by some as a propagandist, then jumped in to exhibit her surprise that “people on Capitol Hill were not briefed” about the balloon.
READ MORE: Trump Spent 2020 Attacking Ballot Drop Boxes – but Now He’s Demanding They Be Deployed in Churches
“Calling for the president to ‘shoot down’ the craft,” The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona adds, “some in the GOP called the president ‘Beijing Biden’ while claiming this is further proof that ‘Communist China’ doesn’t ‘fear or respect’ Biden.” [ASK PUTIN, MIL --> PI]
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mma `1 23
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Their complete meltdown over all these investigations. I think the a — you've got Oversight, you have Judiciary, you got House Intel, we're now going to have a special committee on the COVID virus and particularly Wuhan lab, MTG is on that. But, the jewel of the crown, I think, at least right now, has got to be Weaponization of Government. This is going to a classic like Church, maybe even harder-hitting.
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8 22 update BTW in last month 2 sci artls prove that it was wet mkt?
a case study in RW bad faith? jrnl fail
aha hmmn 8 22 connect to target fauci // bogeyman conspir req single cause/bad guy a la soros
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-turned-dr-fauci
matt g
no lnx many vid]
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official and a public health adviser to seven presidents, announced on Monday that he plans to retire in December after more than 50 years of public service. President Joe Biden toasted Fauci as “a steady hand with wisdom and insight honed over decades” and praised his “unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity,” while top scientists touted his record of “sav[ing] countless lives.”
While Fauci once earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President George W. Bush, his impending retirement was not greeted with plaudits from the right. On Fox News that night, Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue described him as “a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” The New York Post headlined its editorial the next day “Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci,” while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board concluded that “his legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.”
Fauci, like everyone else involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans, does not have a perfect record. But he spent his career trying to remain impartial, avoid partisanship, and offer the best advice he could, and for decades, he was respected on both sides of the political aisle. That reputation ultimately could not survive the relentless propaganda of the right-wing press, which needed a coronavirus scapegoat and found one in the octogenarian scientist.
Right-wing propagandists began turning Fauci into their latest hate object in March 2020. At the time, states had imposed stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures that were recommended by the Trump administration to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. Fox and other pro-Trump outlets consistently downplayed the threat posed by the virus and promoted a minimalistic response that dismissed such efforts in favor of snake oil miracle cures.
Trump’s media supporters could not or would not try to directly challenge the president, and settled instead on targeting Fauci, who was a face of the administration’s response. He initially drew their ire as a critic of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, the malaria drugs that Fox hosts and then the president had recommended as a coronavirus treatment (numerous studies have found the drugs ineffective) and as part of the supposed “ruling class” that could weather a long-term economic shutdown.
At the time, even right-wing pugilists like Fox’s Tucker Carlson were still pulling their punches. “Imagine another year of this,” he said on his April 3, 2020, show. “That would be national suicide, and yet, that is what Anthony Fauci is suggesting, at least.” But Carlson went on to acknowledge that Fauci wasn’t trying to “hurt America,” saying that he “seems like a very decent man” who was simply misguided.
That gentility would not last. The pro-Trump media — and Carlson in particular — became increasingly unhinged and vituperative toward Fauci as the pandemic wore on. Ultimately, the right-wing attacks on Fauci had dramatic impacts for the country.
By mid-May of 2020, Fox’s prime-time stars had decided that the crisis was over. When Fauci said in congressional testimony that it was not, and that the virus was likely to recur in the fall and winter, they began pushing for Trump to fire him. On programs that the Fox-obsessed president watched religiously, they portrayed Fauci as power-mad and using his influence to “favor what the Democrats want.” Those attacks continued over the following weeks and months.
In July, Trump began publicly echoing the right-wing media’s concerns about Fauci. The following month, the president appointed Scott Atlas, a radiologist and right-wing think tanker who caught his attention through frequent Fox appearances, to the White House coronavirus task force.
Atlas effectively displaced Fauci as Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, and used that position to promote a “herd immunity” strategy for coping with the virus. His actions ultimately helped bring about the very wave of hospitalizations and deaths Fauci had earned the opprobrium of the right for warning about months earlier.
But the right’s attacks on Fauci continued over the months and years to come.
Carlson was the scientist’s most implacable media foe. He described Fauci as an “elderly power-drunk epidemiologist”; “capricious and transparently political”; a “hypocritical buffoon”; an “oily politician on an ego trip”; and an “even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.” He denounced the scientist’s recommendations as “authoritarian,” falsely claimed that Fauci “helped to create” the coronavirus, and called for him to “never work in public policy again.”
Other right-wing pundits demonized Fauci as “one of the great criminals of our civilization” and a member of the “medical deep state” who was “on a jihad” against Trump and behaves “more like a monarch.” They called for an investigation into his purported crimes and fantasized about him being put in “leg irons” or even beheaded. They even accused him — falsely — of killing puppies, with one describing him as “the dog-murdering and orphan-killing doctor, Anthony Benito Fauci.”
Fox’s attacks on Fauci have become so habitual that they often seemed to serve as background noise on the right-wing channel. But at times, the network’s talking heads have issued comments so abhorrent that they trigger widespread public outrage and even a response from the network brass. Fox sidelined Lara Logan, a host on the network’s streaming service, after she compared Fauci to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele during a November 2021 appearance. The following month, the network publicly defended host Jesse Watters after he drew controversy for exhorting an audience of young right-wing activists to “ambush” Fauci with a rhetorical “deadly” “kill shot.”
Amid the flurry of often violent public criticism, Fauci divulged that he regularly received threats. Earlier this month, a man was sentenced to more than three years in prison for sending Fauci emails with comments like “You and your entire family will be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”
Fauci’s retirement announcement has opened a debate about who might succeed him. But senior members of the U.S. medical establishment are warning that the right’s attacks on Fauci may limit the pool of applicants willing to try to fill his shoes.
“What keeps the former surgeon general [Jerome Adams] up at night is his fear that talented candidates won’t want these jobs after what Fauci and other public health officials have faced over the last few years,” Politico reported on Monday. “Fauci has received death threats, and his daughters have been harassed — and Adams worries that this vitriol is a big part of why Fauci is stepping down.”
When the next pandemic hits, the U.S. response might thus be hobbled, thanks to the right-wing media’s impulse to destroy a vital public servant for political gain.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-promise-harass-anthony-fauci-retirement-if-republicans-win-back-control
no lnx vid
Right-wing media promise to harass Anthony Fauci in retirement if Republicans win back control of Congress
Fauci’s retirement announcement was met with a new flurry of vitriol from right-wing media
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD, BUSHRA SULTANA & SHELBY JAMERSON
PUBLISHED 08/24/22
When presidential medical adviser Anthony Fauci announced his plans to retire in December after five decades of public service, right-wing media personalities predictably attacked him, calling him a “sociopathic liar and political hack” who “needs to be held accountable for all of the lies and misdirections.”
On Monday, Fauci announced he intends to step down as President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser and as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In response, right-wing media mounted a public onslaught, claiming that Fauci is stepping down to avoid investigations if Republicans take control of Congress in November, directing the GOP to investigate Fauci if the party should take control, proclaiming Fauci should face criminal charges and be sent to prison, and generally attacking his character.
Even Fox anchor Neil Cavuto, who had previously served as a seeming voice of reason and who has previously interviewed Fauci at the network, pressed the retiring public servant about whether his retirement was really just “a way to avoid Republican investigators.”
Video
Citation From the August 23, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto
Right-wing media, especially Fox News, have been maligning Fauci since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted, then-President Donald Trump’s “media supporters could not or would not try to directly challenge the president,” whose administration’s response included recommendations of stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures, “and settled instead on targeting Fauci, who was a face of the administration’s response.” The smear campaign against Fauci didn’t stop;over a roughly 10-month period in 2021, Fox News personalities attacked him over 400 times.
Fauci may plan to retire at the end of the year, but the right-wing echo chamber is prepared to hound him for years to come if given the opportunity.
Claims that Fauci is stepping down to avoid oversight
Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlson speculated that Fauci may have resigned because he thinks the Republicans are going to take over Congress in the midterm elections and does not want to be investigated by them. “So it's possible that Tony Fauci might want to resign before he has to explain all of that to a new Congress,” Carlson said. “He might want to get out of town now and move to, say, Cambridge, find a safe place to hide before the reckoning. Just a thought. Because honestly, there's a lot to answer for.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/22/22]
Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham speculated that “Fauci thinks this retirement would save him from a congressional investigation or a subpoena.” She then interviewed Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who said congressional Republicans would want to investigate Fauci based on the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 virus was human-made. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/22/22]
Right-wing radio host Buck Sexton claimed, “Sociopathic liar and political hack Fauci is making a run for it before Republicans can take over the House.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch claimed Fauci “doesn't want that GOP-controlled House oversight.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Fox prime-time host Jesse Wattersclaimed that Fauci “seems to think stepping down before Republicans take the House will get him off scot-free.” Watters made this pronouncement just hours after Fauci appeared on Fox and told Neil Cavuto that he would not avoid appearing before Congress. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/23/22]
The National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam: “BREAKING: Fauci to step down right before Republicans are expected to take control of Congress and commence investigations into his funding of the Wuhan Lab and pandemic response.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Conservative pundit Mercedes Schlapp claimed “it's no coincidence” that Fauci announced he will step down in December, noting that it “is right after Republicans will take back the House and immediately plan oversight into our pandemic response and hisfunding of gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab.”[Twitter, 8/22/22]
Calls for congressional Republicans to investigate Fauci
Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity declared that “Fauci still needs to be held accountable for all of the lies and misdirections.” He then interviewedSen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who predicted that if there is a Republican-controlled Congress, it would subpoena Fauci to testify next year. [Fox News, Hannity, 8/22/22]
Fox’s “news side” presented a more respectable face for the right’s determination to investigate Fauci. Fox contributor Marc Thiessen discussed the need for an “after-action study” of the nation’s COVID-19 response, while blaming Fauci for various aspects of both the pandemic response and its economic consequences. Concluding the segment, co-anchor Bill Hemmer said that in “2023, I think we’ll see him again.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 8/23/22]
Fox anchor Sandra Smith asked Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS): “What do you want to see happen as far as holding Dr. Anthony Fauci accountable for his actions during this pandemic?” Marshall then repeatedly and falsely accused Fauci of covering up the supposed creation of COVID-19 in a lab, statements which Smith did not challenge. [Fox News, America Reports, 8/23/22; FactCheck.org, 5/19/22]
Former White House adviser Peter Navarro said on Newsmax that the government should to “take that SOB’s passport” so Fauci cannot flee a Republican-led congressional investigation.Navarro himself was recently indicted for a charge of contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. [Newsmax, Eric Bolling: The Balance, 8/22/22; NPR, 6/4/22]
Calls for Fauci’s to face criminal charges and/or prison
“Stop the Steal” organizer Alex Bruesewitz wrote that Fauci “should be investigated, and quite frankly arrested, for what he put our country through.” [Twitter, 8/22/22; Media Matters, 7/27/22]
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk declared that Fauci “belongs in prison.” He continued, “Seize the passports. Freeze his pension, distribute it to his victims. Lawyer up. Time to hold him accountable for the last 3 years.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Right-wing radio host Clay Travis wrote that Fauci “belongs in prison,” claiming he is the “most destructive bureaucrat in United States history.” Travis also said Fauci’s “‘leadership’ on covid will — in the decades ahead — come to be seen as one of the greatest and most destructive failures in our nation’s history.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Right-wing podcasters Diamond & Silk: “Fauci doesn't need to just step down, he should be arrested for Crimes Against Humanity!” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Attacks on Fauci’s character
In his opening monologue, Fox's Carlson said, “On some level, even Tony Fauci knows that Tony Fauci is in fact a dangerous fraud.” Carlson further elaborated that Fauci “has done things that in most countries at most times in history would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8/22/22]
Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy called Fauci an “authoritarian monster.” She claimed Fauci “led our country on aChinese-style approach instead of an American-style where we look at science.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/23/22]
Washington Examiner’s Haisten Willis described Fauci as someone some people “feel is … self-promoting, unaccountable, and even liable for helping start the pandemic.” [Washington Examiner, 8/22/22]
Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen: “Never has anybody been so wrong about so much for so long and been so lionized as Anthony Fauci.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 8/23/22]
Sean Duffy, Fox News contributor and former member of Congress, repeatedly accused Fauci of having “Chinese” principles instead of American ones in his supposed use of the power of government. [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 8/23/22]
Fox News’ Katie Pavlich said it is “sickening” the way Fauci supposedly let “power and fame” go to his head.Pavlich tweeted, “In March 2020 Fauci actually told the truth about who Wuhan coronavirus was deadly for, the elderly and those with comorbidities. He said it was ‘very clear.’ He also said drug store masks don’t work. Then, he got a taste of power and fame he just couldn’t let go. Sickening.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
New York Post columnist Karol Markowiczon Fauci: “His half-century of ‘public service’ was a disaster for us. His handling of covid should be studied in the future as a blueprint of what not to do.” [Twitter, 8/22/22]
Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro called Fauci “a true douchebag.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 08/23/22]
Right-wing media gadflyBenny Johnson called Fauci “the most evil and malevolent character in my lifetime.” [The Benny Show, via YouTube, 8/23/22]
IN THIS ARTICLE
Fox News
Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Covid-19 / Coronavirus
How the right turned on Dr. Fauci
08/23/22
Fox reacted to Dr. Fauci's COVID-19 infection with vaccine skepticism
06/17/22
Fox News is the Republican Party. Here are over 400 examples proving it.
05/16/22
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https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/dan-ball-leads-oans-unhinged-coverage-russian-invasion-ukraine
no lnx many vids
Dan Ball leads OAN’s unhinged coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
The OAN host pushes a Russian government conspiracy theory about “biolabs” and believes that Hunter Biden has something to do with the invasion
WRITTEN BY BOBBY LEWIS
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BEATRICE MOUNT & EMMA MAE WEBER
PUBLISHED03/31/22
One America News Network’s Dan Ball is covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a scattershot of conspiracy theories, both dredging up old claims and repeating new ones from the Russian government.
In early February, Ball told OAN viewers that President Joe Biden might encourage the crisis in Ukraine to benefit himself. Once Russia invaded, Ball began claiming that Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company Burisma may have something to do with the war, that the Russian military is targeting U.S.-European Union bioweapons plants in Ukraine, and even that theRussian attack on Mariupol hospital may have been a false flag by Ukraine.
There is no evidence that any of this is true, but Ball stands behind the absurd propaganda on his show, assuring his viewers on March 9: “What we are reporting is correct. This was not a conspiracy theory. We are not pro-Russia, so don’t go there.”
This commentary is a sad reflection of Ball and OAN’s obsession with what the host regularly calls the “Biden crime family.” The false allegations against Hunter Biden date back years and were the inspiration for former President Donald Trump’s extortion scheme against Ukraine, resulting in his first impeachment. Ball is undeterred by these basic facts, however, and now going to any length to falsely implicate Biden -- and by extension, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- in provoking the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s war.
Ball says that “something does not pass the smell test” in the official story of Russia’s invasion
Five days into the Russian invasion, Ball told his audience, “We really need to ask ourselves, are we getting the whole story,” because several heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance had turned out to be false. Asserting that “the Biden regime” wanted to “wag the dog,”Ball suggested “positive war propaganda” was being used to divert American attention from “the invasion on our southern border” and “the COVID scam,” telling his audience it could even have something to do with “the whole Hunter and Joe Biden connection with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and of course the Russia collusion hoax.”
Video From the February 28, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
Days later, Ball insisted on March 3 that “something does not pass the smell test” because Biden “immediately” paused new oil and gas leases in the U.S. as the Russian invasion began. In reality, the timing is coincidence; as CNBC reports, “the Biden administration is delaying decisions on new oil and gas leases and permits after a Louisiana federal judge blocked officials from using higher cost estimates of climate change.”
“Something stinks here,” Ball asserted, because “this can’t just be Putin and Russia going, ‘I want a land grab,’” since “we know Ukraine’s been corrupt for a long time,” and pointed again to “the Hunter Biden connection with Burisma.”
Weeks into the war, Ball continued to suspect that something was amiss about the official story, questioning if President Biden is “the one actually calling the shots” and “how much of this is acting” from Zelensky, a former actor whom Ball said was “install[ed]” by the U.S., “trying to push us to get us into this war.” “Obviously, Biden is compromised. We’re in the middle of a war that we might get into with our troops, and so shouldn’t all Americans be concerned that the guy making and calling the shots is compromised?”
Eventually, with America “on the brink of getting involved in a war with Russia,” Ball warned that Biden is too mentally unreliable and called on Democrats and Republicans to use the 25th Amendment to “remove [Biden], remove Harris, remove the entire administration before it’s too late.”
Ball suggests Hunter Biden and American bioweapons have something to do with the invasion
By February 28, Ball became focused on the idea that because “we know there’s so much involvement [in Ukraine] with this president, his son, Burisma, this oil and gas in Ukraine, plus Russia, the pipeline,” and “billions if not trillions of dollars involved,” that it all must have something to do with the war.
The Biden family was “in bed with Ukraine” and “now we have a war right in front of us,” Ball told a concurring guest, retired Army officer Darin Gaub, who called Ukraine “the bank” of the Clinton Foundation and other Democrats during his March 3 show.
Ball eventually began asking members of Congress what President Biden’s son has to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a March 2 interview with Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), Ball said that “the Hunter laptop” and “the tie to Burisma” suggested that “there’s more to play than just the gas and oil here. I want to know what the hell is really going on.”
“I mean, all the connections that came out tying the Biden family to Ukraine before he took office, now all of a sudden Russia attacks Ukraine, even though they didn’t while Trump was in office,” Ball said. “What’s at play here? It’s deeper – There’s deeper state stuff here, Debbie, don’t you think?”
Video From the March 2, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
After Lesko mostly evaded Ball’s question to instead complain about the Trump impeachments, Ball mentioned “rumors that America’s had biolaboratories set up in Ukraine since ‘14, when we installed the last clown in there,” a topic which became a focal point for Ball’s conspiracy theorizing.
That same day, Ball claimed that in addition to “Hunter’s laptop tying Mr. Biden to Burisma,” there are “questions about Zelensky’s leadership and how he came to power,” as well as “questions about biolabs being set up in that country by America and other corporation, we’re talking biotech-type weaponry.”
Days later, on March 7, Ball asked Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) about “three or four possible biochemical weapons plants” in Ukraine built by the U.S. and EU.Ball told Biggs, who also evaded the question, that “Putin would have an actual gripe” to justify targeting these weapons.
Ball even took an unearned victory lap on March 9, claiming his biolabs conspiracy theory had been “proven correct” by a “smoking gun” from the Russian foreign affairs ministry, which claimed to have found U.S. “biological weapons plants” in Ukraine. Not only that, Ball preened, but “a Biden regime minion” -- Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland -- had openly discussed the labs in the Senate during a recent hearing.
“The headline once again proves that things that we report here on OAN and on this program, Real America, are not conspiracy theories like the left claims,” Ball complained. He later added, “What we are reporting is correct. This was not a conspiracy theory. We are not pro-Russia, so don’t go there.”
Video From the March 9, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
NBC News would later report that these “biolabs” claims are essentially Russian government propaganda filtered through American right-wing media outlets like OAN. The only American-supported “biolabs” in Ukraine, including the ones Nuland discussed before the Senate, are research facilities -- that do not produce weapons -- which are part of a public 2005 deal between the two countries.
Nonetheless, Ball has concluded that “obviously, Biden is compromised” by his son, and Ball continued to tout “biolabs” as a potential cause for Russia’s invasion.
Ball suggests that horrific Russian attacks on Mariupol may have been false flags
Part of Ball’s narrative of the Russian war is that the Ukrainian government led by President Zelensky is deeply corrupt. And when the Russian military bombed a maternity hospital during its siege of Mariupol,Ball professed that he’s “not saying somebody staged this to make things look worse,” but he also implied that “special operatives” and “undercover forces” who “do Zelensky’s bidding” may have been involved in the bombing, saying that Russia’s denials were credible since “they haven’t denied … hitting other stuff,” which is not true.
Video From the March 9, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
A week later, Ukrainian officials reported that a Russian airstrike destroyed a theater in Mariupol, with hundreds of civilians hiding inside and the word “children” written on the ground outside. On his March 17 show, Ball delivered a winding rant against the American, Ukrainian, and Russian governments, as well as the media trying to “push us into this war and accuse networks like OAN of pushing pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda.” Ball then briefly reported on the theater airstrike, and stressed that the story is just “what we’re told.Not saying it’s not true. Just asking the question.”
Ball discovers some consequences of Ukraine conspiracy theories
Despite calling the pre-invasion warnings “a pageant,” suggesting the Mariupol hospital attack was a false flag, and sharing Russian “biolabs” propaganda, Ball has grown tired of conspiracy theories that call the entire war fake.
Above a chyron that questioned whether we are “getting the entire story about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ball again stressed “the Biden crime family and its connections to Ukraine and Russia” -- but told viewers, with a hint of frustration, that the war is “undeniable … and I say this because I see so many online stories of people saying this is all false, it’s all made up.”
“Make no mistake: There is a war going on, folks, and innocent civilians are being harmed and killed,” the OAN host said. “That is a fact, and that’s a tragedy. But while all that is going on,what else is going on? Not just with this conflict, but what aren’t we paying attention to globally – and more importantly, here at home. That’s what we as patriots need to stay focused on.”
Video From the March 15, 2022, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
Even while denouncing actual lies about the Russian invasion, Ball could not resist the urge to indulge in deranged falsehoods.
“Most times, there’s nothing as such called a conspiracy theory,” Ball said. “They’re just coverups waiting for the truth to come out.” But the conspiracy theories he presents to OAN viewers are just as false as the conspiracy theories he denies.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/conspiracy-theory-about-hunter-biden-and-ukrainian-biolabs-went-qanon
no lnx twt pix vid
a conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden and Ukrainian biolabs went from QAnon supporters and far-right message boards to the Kremlin and Tucker Carlson
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 03/28/22
A version of a false conspiracy theory about Ukrainian biolabs that holds that Hunter Biden is connected to those labs was spread by the Russian government, Chinese state media, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory and users on far-right message boards pushed the claim.
In late February, a false conspiracy theory spread online -- spurred on by a QAnon-supporting Twitter account known as “Clandestine” -- that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was targeting U.S.-linked labs working to create bioweapons. In reality, the labs are focused on detecting diseases, the U.S. program aims to prevent the development or spread of biological weapons, and the conspiracy theory has its roots in a longstanding Russian disinformation effort. The false claim has spread online among far-right figures and QAnon supporters, and the Russian government has invoked the conspiracy theory to justify the invasion following its spread in parts of the American right.
In the months before the invasion, a separate conspiracy theory circulated online suggesting that Biden was tied to labs involved in potentially nefarious activity around the world, including possibly causing the coronavirus pandemic.Although Ukraine was not the only focus of the conspiracy theory, it was mentioned as one of the countries supposedly involved in these efforts; this claim also followed previous allegations from right-wing media about wrongdoing by Biden in that country.
In particular, a thread from a QAnon-supporting Twitter account called “Blue Canaries” claimed in October that Biden was connected to an effort to manufacture “bio agents under diplomatic cover at ‘secret’ labs” and sell “pandemic insurance and trackers to help countries get ahead of what they are putting out.”
Blue Canaries Twitter
Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread quickly spread among some online conspiracy theorists, including on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board, the forum dedicated to “Q,” QAnon’s central figure. It was shared on-air by Infowars host Owen Shroyer, who hyped the thread as “unbelievable,” as well as by Jeffrey Pedersen, a QAnon influencer and show co-host known online as “intheMatrixxx,” who called it “a very interesting thread/dig.”
8kun Hunter biolabs1
CitationFrom 8kun's “/qresearch/” message board
Soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February, and as Clandestine’s biolabs conspiracy theory Twitter thread took off online, the Blue Canaries Twitter thread mentioning Biden was invoked again and began to spread among users on far-right message boards.
QAnon forum Hunter biolabs
It was also featured onPedersen’s MatrixxxGrooove Show(also known as MG Show) just one day after Russia’s invasion began. Pedersen -- who had by that point shared Clandestine’s claim about biolabs as a reason for the invasion -- extensively discussed Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread, linked it to Biden, and suggested “President [Vladimir] Putin and Russia have been worried about this.” Co-host Shannon Townsend added, “This looks like the biggest thing that they would be worried about considering what we’ve experienced in the world for the last two-plus years. Why would he not be afraid that this was going on? And what if we could prove that it was going on all over the country of Ukraine, right next door to him?”
Video CitationFrom the February 25, 2022, edition of the MatrixxxGrooove Show
Following that MatrixxxGrooove Show episode on February 25, both Blue Canaries’ Twitter thread and the claim that Biden was tied to Ukrainian biolabs continued to spread via some social media accounts and on far-right message board site 4chan. On February 28, RedPill78’s Zak Paine, a QAnon show host who participated in the Capitol insurrection, discussed Biden “in regards to those biolabs in the Ukraine” and the “ongoing conversation about biological weapons facilities in the country of Ukraine that were set up by the United States government.”
On March 8, Infowars published an article claiming Biden was “connected to US biolabs in Ukraine,” mentioning some of the same organizations cited by the Blue Canaries thread -- repeating claims that the outlet had pushed on-air months earlier. Two days later, far-right blog The Gateway Pundit came out with its own piece claiming Biden’s investment fund had “provided capital for the firms behind the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine,” citing Infowars’ “excellent article with connections between Hunter Biden” and the supposed biolabs. Pedersen shared both articles and wrote, “You heard it on the MG Show first,” adding that “we also beat infowars” on pushing the conspiracy theory.
Gateway Pundit Hunter biolabs
CitationFrom The Gateway Pundit
Following The Gateway Pundit’s article, the conspiracy theory gained more exposure on some mainstream social media platforms, getting thousands of total engagements on those platforms.
The Russian government invoked this particular version of the conspiracy theory on March 24, with the Ministry of Defense accusing Biden’s investment firm of having a “close connection” to military contractors responsible for “Pentagon biolaboratories around the world” -- similar to what Blue Canaries had suggested those months prior. Russia’s Defense Ministry also released a diagram of supposed connections between Biden, the Democratic Party, George Soros, various U.S. companies and federal agencies, and foreign governments as evidence for the conspiracy theory,and the claim was subsequently pushed by Russian state media. Chinese state media also pushed the claim, citing the Russian government.
Russian and Chinese state media Hunter biolabs
On the evening of March 24, Fox News host Tucker Carlson -- who had previously pushed the broader biolabs conspiracy theory to justify Russia’s invasion -- pointed to a National Pulse article from earlier that day to say that “a private equity firm run by Hunter Biden funded some of the research into pathogens in these biolabs.” The on-screen chyron said, “Report: Hunter Linked To Ukrainian Biolab.” (The MatrixxxGrooove Show’s Townsend had also shared the National Pulse article and claimed that his show found what the article claimed “over a month ago.”)
Video fileCitationFrom the March 24, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
For his part, Clandestine -- the QAnon supporter who caused the initial biolabs conspiracy theory to spread widely online following the invasion -- joined in hyping the Biden angle and cheered Carlson’s points, calling them “digestible doses for the normies” that are “culminating into a mass realization the likes of which the world has never seen.”
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IN THIS ARTICLE
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Tucker Carlson
QAnon Conspiracy Theory
Related
Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory
03/16/22 11:59 AM EDT
YouTube is making money off a false Ukraine-biolabs conspiracy theory that is tied to Russian disinformation and QAnon
03/08/22 3:27 PM EST
QAnon supporters and far-right figures hail Russian invasion of Ukraine as Putin taking down the “cabal”
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tulsi-gabbard/
Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University, featured Gabbard's tweets about Ukraine and "biolabs" as the latest Russia conspiracy theory propagated by right-wing media in the U.S.
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no lnx twt
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-and-instagram-have-allowed-and-profited-advertising-pushing-false-ukraine-us
Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 03/16/22
Meta has repeatedly allowed -- and profited from -- ads pushing a false conspiracy theory about biolabs in Ukraine which has been linked to both Russian propaganda and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The ads, which have run on Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, violate the platforms’ misinformation rules.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, a QAnon-supporting Twitter account helped spread a false conspiracy theory that the attack was undertaken to target U.S.-linked labs working to create bioweapons. In reality, the labs are focused on detecting diseases, and the conspiracy theory has its roots in a longstanding Russian disinformation effort. The false claims have spread online and among QAnon supporters, and the Russian government has invoked the conspiracy theory to defend the invasion.
A review by Media Matters found that since the invasion began, Meta has profited from the conspiracy theory by allowing at least nine ads to run on Facebook or Instagram pushing some form of the conspiracy theory, including an ad from Chinese state-controlled media. Meta’s rules explicitly prohibit ads that “include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers,” and at least one such fact-checker that Meta has partnered with, PolitiFact, has debunked the conspiracy theory. Although several ads were removed after Media Matters flagged them on Twitter, some are still running. Below is a rundown of all the ads we have found:
One ad on Facebook, from China’s official state press agency, features a video with a narrator saying, “With reports emerging about the U.S. running bioweapons lab in Ukraine, Syrian experts said the U.S. policy of setting up such labs in other countries poses risk to world security.”
Facebook biolabs ad Chinese state media
One Facebook ad, in French, featured a man pushing the claim and sharing a map of Ukrainian biolabs that apparently came from a QAnon-supporting Gab account.
Facebook biolabs ad1
Another Facebook ad featured a video of a woman at a prayer service saying, “As we wind up, I want us to pray for Ukraine. Really, I don’t know who is right or wrong. We may be saying, you know, I saw … something from another prayer group, but they were saying that there are U.S. biolabs in the Ukraine.”
Another ad, for Instagram, falsely claimed that “Russia found over 30 biological labs (with evidence of bioweapons) in Ukraine formed by the Pentagon in areas bordering Russia.”
Facebook biolabs ad2
An additional Instagram ad featured the (false) text “Pentagon Funded Bio-Weapons Labs in the Ukraine” and a video pushing the conspiracy theory, with a narrator saying, “For years now, Russia has made verifiable claims that the U.S. is running secret biological weapons labs around their borders.” The narrator also says that they are “reporting for Infowars,” a site whose content has been banned from Meta’s social media platforms.
Facebook biolabs ad3
Yet another ad, on Facebook, features a video of a woman saying about Ukraine, “There’s biolabs there, they’re talking about in the news today. The U.S. has them there. And so there are strategic reasons why Ukraine is important, which I understand, and I can understand why the civilians in Russia would understand where their leader’s coming from.”
One ad on Facebook features a video of a man saying, “They’re actually saying that the biolabs exist,” adding that he does “believe they do” exist. Another man agreed with him, saying, “I believe they do too. Because somebody is trying to get it out, and somebody is trying to bury it.”
Another ad, whose listing in the Facebook ad library specifies the range paid for it to run, ran for a day on Facebook and Instagram. The ad featured a video of a man saying there is “some evidence of U.S. involvement in the biolabs found there in Ukraine” and attacking PolitiFact for its debunk of the conspiracy theory, saying the outlet is a “propaganda arm of the progressive left.” This means Meta made money from an ad not only pushing the conspiracy theory but also explicitly attacking one of its third-party fact checkers. And the same account ran another ad on Facebook and Instagram (whose listing in the Facebook ad library also specifies the range paid for it to run) featuring a video with the same man saying the House of Representatives passed a bill that “includes an astonishing $15 billion to Ukraine, you know, so that we can protect our investment in Ukrainian biolabs.”
Facebook biolabs ad4
Meta is not the only company to have made money off of this Russian and QAnon-connected disinformation. YouTube has also monetized multiple videos pushing the same conspiracy theory.
THE LATEST
Facebook and Instagram have allowed and profited from advertising pushing the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory
03/16/22 11:59 AM EDT
Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor on “Stone Age” Indigenous people, South Asian immigrants, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and more
03/16/22 10:31 AM EDT
Candace Owens: “Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians”
03/16/22 10:12 AM EDT
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene returned to Alex Jones’ broadcast to deny calling for violence against trans people and double down on hateful rhetoric
03/16/22 9:24 AM EDT
Tucker Carlson says America could be hurting Ukrainians by providing weapons in their defense against Russia
03/15/22 8:45 PM EDT
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IN THIS ARTICLE
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Related
YouTube is making money off a false Ukraine-biolabs conspiracy theory that is tied to Russian disinformation and QAnon
03/08/22 3:27 PM EST
Right-wing personalities promote Kremlin conspiracy theory about biological research facilities in Ukraine
03/09/22 6:34 PM EST
QAnon supporters and far-right figures hail Russian invasion of Ukraine as Putin taking down the “cabal”
02/24/22 5:01 PM EST
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Far-right MAGA media is promoting a debunked Kremlin conspiracy theory
Alex Henderson March 16, 2022
More than 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine because of Russia’s invasion, which has caused thousands of deaths — and the worst may be yet to come. Regardless, some of President Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots in the United States have been apologists for the invasion, promoting a debunked Kremlin conspiracy theory which claims that bioweapons were being manufactured in Ukrainian laboratories. Putin, according to that conspiracy theory, was justified in invading Ukraine.
“Most of the conspiracy theories claim that the U.S. was developing and plotting to release a bioweapon or potentially another coronavirus from ‘biolabs’ throughout Ukraine and that Russia invaded to take over the labs,” journalists Ben Collins and Kevin Collier report in an article published by NBC News’ website on March 14. “Many of the theories implicate people who are often the targets of far-right conspiracy thinking — including Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden — as being behind creating the weaponized diseases in the biolabs. Disinformation experts said the biolabs theory echoes other Russian propaganda meant to justify its military efforts, which often makes allegations against other countries and populations that reflect similar attacks it plans to make.”
Collins and Collier note that “PolitiFact has debunked the theories, and no evidence of U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine has been put forward.”
“Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine,” Collins and Collier explain. “Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces andU.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. The theories, which have been boosted by Russian and Chinese officials, come as U.S. officials warn that Russia could be preparing a chemical or biological weapons attack of its own in Ukraine.”
Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, told NBC News, “The ‘biolabs’ are serving as a false justification for why Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s defensive. They create a situation where they go to a populist audience, push out talking points, get the audience primed and make it true later.”
Welton Chang, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Pyrra Technologies, told NBC News that everyone from QAnon to the far-right social media platform Gab has been pushing the Ukrainian biolabs conspiracy theory.
Chang explained, “These communities already know what the rhythm and cadence of COVID conspiracies should be like to get people to buy it,” Chang said. “They had a lot of practice with QAnon. The kinds of things that get people excited, like any time you say ‘secret biolab’ — it gets people’s emotions up.”
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How ‘Kremlin-friendly’ MAGA Republicans — and Tulsi Gabbard — became propaganda for Russia’s Ukraine invasion
Alex Henderson March 14, 2022
Some conservative Republicans have been unwavering in their disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. But in MAGA World, Putin has a long list of apologists — even as thousands of people die during Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. And Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, in an article published by The Bulwark on March 14, takes a look at some of the “Kremlin-friendly” talking points coming from America’s far right.
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“During the Cold War,” Carpenter explains, “the Soviet Union invested heavily in its global disinformation and propaganda efforts. And back in 2016, the Russians had to go to the trouble of creating a troll farm to push their divisive messages to the American audience. But today, they needn’t go to such lengths: Plenty of prominent right-wing media figures in the United States are pushing out Vladimir Putin’s propaganda for him.”
The media figures and politicians that Carpenter slams as “Kremlin-friendly” in her article include Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, former President Donald Trump, “War Room” host Steve Bannon and Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina. Carpenter notes that these are the sort of MAGA Republicans Cheney has dubbed “the Putin wing of the GOP.”
“It’s all the same people: fringe internet figures, Fox News hosts, Steve Bannon and his acolytes, Marjorie Tayor Greene caucus members, and the millions of people who love them,” Carpenter observes. “Most of these people claim to be free-thinking contrarians, but their accusations, questions, and conclusions about the United States, Russia and Ukraine always seem to go one way: The United States and Ukraine are somehow wrong, and the Russians have their reasons for waging war. If you don’t believe that, it’s only because all the Democrats are lying to you. Well, all the Democrats except for 2022 CPAC special guest Tulsi Gabbard, anyway.”
Carpenter notes that Carlson’s commentary on Fox News has been “so Kremlin-friendly” that according to a Kremlin memo obtained by Mother Jones, Kremlin officials have asked government-run media outlets to feature more clips of him.
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Mother Jones’ David Corn reported, “On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson.”
Carlson has promoted the conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government is manufacturing bioweapons in laboratories and that Putin is merely protecting Russia’s safety by invading Ukraine.
Carpenter comments, “One could have guessed that the same people who blamed Dr. Fauci for the coronavirus might try to find some other government bureaucrats to blame for Putin’s war. This time, according to Carlson, ‘Dangerous biological agents remain, thanks to the Biden Administration, unsecured in a chaotic war zone’…. This is the big story in their minds. Not the Russian invasion and the unfolding humanitarian disaster, but the Russian disinformation about bioweapons, which provides a cudgel for whacking the Biden Administration — no matter how bogus the claims.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/analysis-breaks-down-the-far-right-s-fascination-with-russian-disinformation/
As the Russian invasion continues in Ukraine, many far-right Republicans are still attempting to justify the actions of Russian President Vladamir Putin.
Even as conspiracy theory claims are debunked, far-right extremists are still embracing Russian disinformation and, to make matters worse, it appears to be circulating at an accelerated pace. Now, an analysis is breaking down the far-right's fascination with Russian disinformation. Pointing to two different headlines published on March 9, Glenn Kessler wapohighlighted the distinction between the two. “
"Bioweapon labs in Ukraine prove US criminal activity, diplomat says,” according to a headline for Tass News that highlighted a quote from Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
Later that evening, Fox News' Tucker Carlson fired back by putting his own spin on the claim.“Under oath in an open committee hearing, Toria Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe is, in fact, totally and completely true,” Carlson said.
Kessler explained how this type of bizarre phenomenon occurs. "Russian disinformation often begins with a speck of fact, which is then twisted into a full-blown conspiracy theory," he wrote. "The technique makes it easier to spread and take root among the country’s supporters. Note how quickly the party line uttered by the Russian Foreign Ministry was embraced by Carlson."
He added, "In this instance, Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up biowarfare labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.Then, brief remarks by Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state, were twisted to provide “confirmation” of the disinformation program."
Kessler went on to separate the actual facts from the ongoing conspiracy theories that seem to spiral out of control at every turn.
"The Russian claims about Ukrainian labs bear the earmarks of the Soviet Union’s long-running campaign of false allegations that the United States used biological weapons," Kessler wrote."The KGB, for instance, in the early 1980s spread false claims that a U.S.-funded research project in Pakistan was sending “killer mosquitoes” into Afghanistan, leading to local outrage that ended the program."
Kessler also noted that back in 2018, biological threat expert Filippa Lentzos also debunked these claims. In a letter addressing the spread of disinformation, he wrote, “The Russian charges that the Lugar Center and other biological labs in the Caucasus and Central Asia are making banned bioweapons are unfounded."
He added, "Last week a group of international experts, including this author, visited the Lugar Center by invitation of the Georgian government. We were given access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff, and concluded that the Center demonstrates significant transparency. Our group observed nothing out of the ordinary, or that we wouldn’t expect to see in a legitimate facility of this sort.”
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https://usrtk.org/tag/covid-19-origins/
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https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
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Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China?
Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at Scripps Research, in San Diego, began tracking the virus in January, 2020. He found the degree of contagion not just scary but unusual. Chinese scientists had already established that it belonged to a genus of coronaviruses commonly found in bats in southern China. It shared eighty per cent of its genome with the first sars, and was more distantly related to mers, another bat coronavirus. This new virus, however, was spreading far more quickly, reaching at least twenty-six countries by the end of the month. “It seemed to be locked and loaded for causing the pandemic,” Andersen told me. Most viruses circulating in the wild, though some can be deadly, are not very good at transmission. They are still animal viruses. “This, almost from Day One,” Andersen said, “appeared like a human virus.”
Andersen, who is originally from Denmark, is wiry and clean cut, with a cleft chin and clipped enunciation. He was working at the post office in Aarhus when he decided he might study molecular biology, and went on to become the first person in his family to attend university. His career took off with investigations into the emergence of West Nile virus, Ebola, and Zika. After the pandemic began, he was among the scientists whom Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, consulted regarding the origins of the virus. On January 31, 2020, according to an e-mail obtained by BuzzFeed News, Andersen wrote to Fauci and others that the sars-CoV-2 genome seemed “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic.]
Andersen noted that “a really small part” of sars-CoV-2’s genome had “unusual features.” Its spike—the crucial bit of surface protein that a coronavirus uses to invade a cell—appeared able to bind tightly to a human-cell receptor known as ace2. This, Andersen told me, “means that it’s more effective at infecting human cells.” The other significant trait, a rare insertion in the genome of twelve nucleotides, called a furin cleavage site, might also increase the virus’s transmissibility, and lower the species barrier, allowing the virus to jump more easily to humans. “One has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he wrote. There was much more data to analyze, he continued, “so those opinions could still change.”
A day later, Andersen joined a conference call with a group of prominent virologists and government officials, including Fauci and Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Andersen presented a summary of the notable features of the sars-CoV-2 genome, and asked the group, “Do we think this is unusual?” Fauci recalled that, among the participants, opinions were divided. “Knowledgeable people were saying, It does look like it could be something that might be engineered, because it’s not something you usually see,” he told me. “Then you have somebody else equally as knowledgeable say, Oh, nonsense, you can see that in other situations.”
Some comments about the meeting, e-mailed among the group after the call, were redacted. But three days later, on February 4th, Andersen’s perspective shifted. In an e-mail to a different group of scientists, which was recovered by U.S. Right to Know, an investigative group, Andersen wrote, “The main crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”
By March, Andersen and a few of his colleagues had finalized a letter, to be published by Nature Medicine, arguing that sars-CoV-2 had naturally spilled over from a bat, evolving into a pandemic virus either in an animal host or, unnoticed, in humans. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote. The paper was extremely influential. In the ensuing months, the scientific consensus, echoed by a number of mainstream media outlets, took the same view, that the virus most likely resulted from a natural zoonotic spillover.
On a recent Zoom call, Andersen sat at his desk, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He told me that his initial suspicions reflected the fact that he hadn’t known enough about coronaviruses. His use of the term “crackpot theories,” he said, was a reference, in part, to an article that was circulating at the time, which claimed that sars-CoV-2 was engineered with genetic inserts from H.I.V. He also had referred to himself as a crackpot in earlier discussions, he said, since his suspicions about viral engineering were not widely shared. “I think there were people that thought I was an idiot for even suggesting it came from a lab.”
As the pandemic progressed, not everyone was convinced by the natural-origin explanation. A zoonotic spillover would likely require an intermediate animal between bats and humans, but no such species has yet been identified. Initially, the Huanan market, in Wuhan, which sold fish, produce, and meat, seemed like the source of sars-CoV-2. Nearly a third of the hundred and seventy-four earliest known cases were linked to Huanan. And yet, patient zero likely was not. Chinese officials have said he was a middle-aged accountant, surnamed Chen, who developed symptoms on December 8th, and typically shopped at a supermarket across the river. In May of 2020, George Fu Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “At first, we assumed the seafood market might have the virus, but now the market is more like a victim. The novel coronavirus had existed long before.”
Among skeptics, many of them credentialled scientists, others amateur online sleuths—including some full-blown QAnon conspiracy theorists—another theory took shape. Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W.I.V.), which, since the first sars epidemic, has amassed one of the largest libraries of bat coronaviruses in the world; some nineteen thousand samples are stored in its labs. Its scientists have collaborated closely with international teams of virus hunters, published in leading academic journals, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants from the U.S. government. The W.I.V. also frequently partners with the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which, in the fall of 2019, moved its lab to a new location near the Huanan market.
Circumstantial evidence supporting a new narrative—that the pandemic might have started from a lab accident in Wuhan—began to accumulate in late 2020. Online data sets from the W.I.V. had disappeared, information on a previous outbreak had been elided, and W.I.V. researchers were conducting experiments with engineered viruses. Even Andersen acknowledged that the emergence of the virus in Wuhan is “a crazy coincidence.” In May, 2021, a group of prominent scientists published a letter in Science, calling for an origins investigation that took the lab-leak hypothesis seriously. Reports then emerged, from U.S. intelligence sources, that three W.I.V. researchers had fallen ill with covid-19-like symptoms, and sought hospital care, in November of 2019.
In response, President Biden called for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins. “I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion,” he said. The National Counterproliferation Center, whose mission is to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, was tapped to facilitate the effort. According to an unclassified summary of the investigation’s findings, released in August, the virus was not developed as a biological weapon, its sudden emergence caught Chinese officials off guard, and it infected humans no later than November, 2019, “with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China, in December.” Otherwise, all agencies agreed that two origin hypotheses remained “plausible”: a “natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”
In the spring of 2012, six men who worked clearing bat guano from an abandoned copper mine near the town of Tongguan, in Yunnan Province, fell ill with a severe respiratory disease. They were admitted to a university hospital in Kunming, which sent blood samples from four of the men to the lab of Shi Zhengli, the head of the W.I.V.’s Center for Emerging Infectious Disease. Shi is China’s most famous researcher of bat coronaviruses. Years earlier, she had joined the international team that discovered that horseshoe bats served as a reservoir for a large number of sars-related viruses. Her lab tested the workers’ serum for possible zoonotic pathogens that Shi and others had previously discovered. Everything came back negative. Three of the workers died.
Between 2012 and 2015, Shi and her team regularly travelled to the Tongguan mine, about a thousand miles from Wuhan. In the evenings, the researchers strung up a mist net at an entrance to the mineshaft, and waited for dusk, when the bats flew out to eat. Throat and fecal swabs were collected from six different species of horseshoe and vesper bats. Ultimately, Shi’s team brought back more than thirteen hundred samples to their lab.
In 2016, Shi and her colleagues published a paper from this work, finding that many of the bats were co-infected by two or more different coronaviruses at the same time. Because the bats live huddled in ever-shifting colonies, they circulate viruses endlessly, even across species, which allows different viruses to recombine, creating novel coronavirus strains: an evolutionary bacchanal. Eventually, Shi’s lab would sequence some portion of all nine sars-related coronaviruses that were found in samples taken from the Tongguan mine.
Three years later, in the final days of 2019, Shi received samples from seven patients sick with a novel virus that was quietly ravaging Wuhan. Once Shi sequenced the virus, sars-CoV-2, she scoured the W.I.V. databases for any evidence of a genetic match. The closest relative that she found, according to a paper that she and her colleagues published, in Nature, in February, 2020, was a bat coronavirus that was ninety-six-per-cent the same as sars-CoV-2. She called it RaTG13. “Ra” stood for the bat species, Rhinolophus affinis, or the intermediate horseshoe bat; “TG” stood for the place, Tongguan; and “13” was the year it was discovered, 2013.
Within a few months, a scientist couple in India, Monali Rahalkar and Rahul Bahulikar, discovered a surprising link—one that Shi had failed to note in her paper. In a preprint journal article posted online, they stated that, according to their genetic analysis, RaTG13 appeared “100% similar” to a novel sars-like coronavirus sample that Shi had described in her 2016 paper about the abandoned mineshaft, under a different name: RaBtCoV/4991. Oddly, neither of Shi’s papers mentioned the sick workers who had led the scientists to the abandoned mineshaft in the first place.
A Twitter user named @TheSeeker268 e-mailed Rahalkar and Bahulikar a link to a 2013 master’s thesis about the six workers’ illnesses. The author, a medical student at Kunming Medical University, wrote that the six patients were treated with antivirals, antibiotics, and antifungals—similar to treatments for covid-19. A prominent pulmonologist consulted with two of the patients remotely, and diagnosed them with pneumonia, primarily of viral origin, with a possible secondary fungal infection. The medical student concluded that the pneumonia cases were likely caused by sars-like coronaviruses that had spilled over from horseshoe bats in the mine. A subsequent chapter in a Ph.D. thesis from 2016 (also unearthed by @TheSeeker268) by a student who was supervised by Gao, China’s C.D.C. director, stated that blood samples from four of the patients, which were tested by the W.I.V., had antibodies to sars-related coronaviruses, suggesting a previous infection.
After these findings were released, Nature published an addendum to Shi’s RaTG13 paper that acknowledged the link to the mine. Shi clarified that her lab had fully sequenced RaTG13 in 2018, as the “technology and capability in our laboratory had improved.” She also provided details about the tests that her lab had conducted on the workers’ serum samples, and stated that the lab had recently retested the samples, this time for sars-CoV-2. They were negative. She also said that no antibodies to a sars-like coronavirus had been found.
The workers were not infected with sars-CoV-2, or we would have covid-12, not covid-19. But among some scientists, the lack of transparency raised questions. Labs like the W.I.V. are expected to warn the world about viruses that might constitute a threat. In Tongguan, there was a mini outbreak of a life-threatening illness, which looked like sars but wasn’t sars, in a mine thick with sars-like bat coronaviruses. The Wuhan Institute of Virology said nothing about the infected workers, even when their cases had direct relevance to the pandemic, until after independent researchers had established the link.
@TheSeeker268 is a member of drastic, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating covid-19, which formed on Twitter and has been among the most aggressive advocates of the lab-leak theory.(Rahalkar and Bahulikar are loosely connected with the group as well.) In a tweet about the W.I.V. researchers and the Tongguan mine, @TheSeeker268 wrote, “In a nutshell: They haven’t been forthcoming about their trips to the mine, the motive behind their trips, & all the CoVs they sampled.”
Shi has firmly denied that she tried to suppress anything about the Tongguan mine. “I’ve just downloaded the Kunming Hospital University student’s master’s thesis and read it,” Shi told the BBC. “The conclusion is neither based on evidence nor logic. But it’s used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me.” Instead, she said in an interview with Scientific American last year, a fungus was the pathogen that had sickened the miners. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave,” Shi said. Fungal infections are certainly a risk for spelunkers. But they are also a common secondary infection in pneumonia cases, as seen in some covid-19 patients.
Linfa Wang, the director of the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases, at Duke-N.U.S. Medical School, in Singapore, is one of the world’s leading bat-virus experts, and has frequently collaborated with Shi. He had helped analyze the samples that were collected from the workers in 2012, and dismissed accusations that Shi kept data secret. “We wanted to prove that a coronavirus caused the deaths,” Wang told Science. “If we proved that another sars-like virus was in humans in China that would have been scientifically brilliant.”
...drastic also exposed another mystery related to the W.I.V. In September, 2019, according to Web pages that drastic archived, a W.I.V. database that was once publicly available was made inaccessible. It contained records pertaining to roughly twenty-two thousand samples, including, presumably, the sequences from Tongguan. When asked about it by the BBC, Shi said that the W.I.V. had “nothing to hide,” and that its Web site and staff e-mail “had been attacked,” so the database “was taken offline for security reasons.” The data still has not been made available.
There are twelve hundred different mutations between the genomes of RaTG13 and sars-CoV-2—scattered variations that demonstrate the messiness of evolution. The number and distribution of these mutations are too large for RaTG13 to be the direct progenitor of sars-CoV-2; they split from a common ancestor at least twenty years ago. But its genetic proximity means “we should look for the ancestors of sars-CoV-2 in locations where relatives like RaTG13 are found,” Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me in September. “At this point, the closest relatives of sars-CoV-2 are known to have existed in two locations: bat caves in Yunnan, and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Geography aside, the nature of the experiments undertaken by the W.I.V. and its partners has raised concerns. In 2015, Shi was a co-author on a groundbreaking study, in Nature, with Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina. Through the use of pioneering genetic technology,Baric examined which viral structures could give a coronavirus the ability to infect humans. The work involved synthesizing what is known as a chimeric virus, named for the mythical beastwith its parts taken from various animals; in this case, a modified clone of sars was combined with a spike protein taken from one of the bat coronaviruses that Shi had discovered in Yunnan.
Their research took place during a fraught time for virologists. Four years earlier, a Dutch scientist named Ron Fouchier decided to see if he could make the lethal avian influenza virus, H5N1, more transmissible. After failing to genetically reëngineer the virus, Fouchier turned to a classic method: he passaged the virus through live ferrets repeatedly, forcing the virus to evolve in its new host. After ten rounds, the virus was airborne. He had created a pandemic-ready pathogen in his lab.
The experiment, which constituted a type of research known as “gain-of-function,” provoked alarm. There were high-level meetings, op-eds, and reports decrying such work as far riskier than it was valuable. In 2014, President Barack Obama mandated a pause on gain-of-function studies involving influenza, sars, and mers, until a new regulatory process could be created. Baric, however, was in the middle of his chimeric-virus experiment. He petitioned the N.I.H. biosecurity board, which granted him, and other researchers, an exemption from the pause.
When Baric tested the chimeric virus in a culture of human airway cells, its spike protein proved able to bind to the cell receptor ace2, suggesting that the virus was now poised to jump species. In live mice, it caused disease. Given this unexpected outcome, Baric concluded, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.”
That didn’t happen. Baric’s experiments, which the N.I.H. had determined were not gain-of-function, continued at the University of North Carolina. Shi’s lab developed its own platform for creating chimeric viruses. She crossed another bat coronavirus from Yunnan—named wiv1—with clones of different novel spike proteins, and tested the creation in humanized mice. The viruses quickly replicated. One made the mice emaciated, a sign of severe pathogenesis. What made this work especially risky was that wiv1 was already known to be potentially dangerous to humans. Baric himself had made this clear in a 2016 study titled “SARS-Like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence.”
Some of these experiments at the W.I.V. were funded by the U.S. government, according to Shi’s published papers, as well as N.I.H.-funded grant applications and progress reports obtained by the Intercept. In 2014, N.I.H. had awarded a New-York-based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance a five-year, $3.7-million grant, a portion of which—roughly six hundred thousand dollars—went to the W.I.V. Fauci and the N.I.H. have maintained that the W.I.V.’s work, like Baric’s, did not qualify as gain-of-function research, and so did not violate the Obama-era pause. (The Trump Administration lifted the pause in 2017,after three years of workshops and deliberations across multiple agencies resulted in a new regulatory process.) “Don’t mislead people by saying we haven’t taken this seriously for years,” Fauci told me, his voice rising. “According to our definition, it was not gain-of-function, period. If you don’t like the definition, let’s change the definition.”
In recent months, skeptics of natural origins have pointed to the fact that Shi was running her chimeric-virus experiments in a Biosafety Level 2 lab, which, compared with Biosafety Level 3, doesn’t require the same precautions, such as full P.P.E., medical surveillance for researchers, mandatory biosafety cabinets, controlled airflow, and two sets of self-closing, locking doors. (Shi did conduct live-animal experiments in a BSL-3 lab at a separate facility.) Because they were working with novel bat viruses rather than viruses known to infect humans directly, the low biosecurity setting was in accordance with Chinese laws. But Susan Weiss, a coronavirus expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, who co-authored a recent paper with Andersen and others that outlines the evidence for a natural origin, was surprised when I told her that they had been working in BSL-2. “That’s not a good idea,” she said.
Still, none of Shi’s documented work on chimeric viruses resulted in the creation of sars-CoV-2. (“If you’re trying to say that that particular experiment could have led to sars-CoV-2, that’s completely impossible,” Fauci said.) The chimeric viruses that the W.I.V. engineered are far from sars-CoV-2 on the coronavirus family tree. According to Shi, the W.I.V. has only isolated and grown in culture three novel coronaviruses out of their nineteen thousand samples. What this chapter of her work demonstrates, however, is a high tolerance for risk. “They were essentially playing Russian roulette with the virus that the world’s expert had labelled poised for human emergence,” David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford, said. “It’s the willingness to manipulate them without due concern.”
In January, the World Health Organization sent a team of international scientists to Wuhan to conduct the first phase of a search for sars-CoV-2’s origins. The group’s report, published in March, ranked a zoonotic spillover—from a bat, through an intermediate animal, to a human—as the most likely origin pathway.They ruled a lab incident as “extremely unlikely,” dedicating just three of more than a hundred pages in the primary report to the theory. As Andersen frequently says when surveying the evidence, “Anything is possible, but I’m interested in what’s plausible.”
First, a natural origin has historic precedence. sars spilled over from bats to civets at an urban market in November, 2002. mers, which emerged in Saudi Arabia, in 2012, went from bats to camels to people. The civet was identified as the most probable source of sars within four months of the outbreak; camels were identified within nine months of mers. And yet, sars-CoV-2’s intermediate animal—among the only things, at this point, that could definitively prove that it did not originate in the Wuhan labs—has not been found. Such a discovery is becoming less likely, too. As members of the W.H.O. mission wrote in an August letter to Nature, “The window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China.”
One member of the W.H.O. team was Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which is dedicated to mitigating the emergence of infectious diseases. Since the first sars outbreak, he has been one of the W.I.V.’s closest partners, facilitating the N.I.H. subcontracts and working extensively with Shi and her team in the field. He has unwaveringly vouched for Shi, and led the charge to call any suggestion of a lab accident a conspiracy theory. “The problem with this lab-release hypothesis,” he told me, “is that it depends on a critical thing: that the virus was in the lab before it got out. But I know that that virus was not in the lab.”
Daszak, a widely published disease ecologist, also knows that the diversity of viruses in nature is nearly limitless. Most recently, he and other EcoHealth scientists built a model analyzing how frequently coronaviruses might spill over from bats to people across southern China and southeast Asia. They overlaid the habitats of all twenty-three bat species known to harbor sars-related coronaviruses with maps of human populations. Based on bat-human contact and antibody data, they estimated that roughly four hundred thousand people could be infected with sars-related coronaviruses annually. “People are getting exposed to them every year,” Daszak told me. “They may not know it. They may even get sick and die.”
In other words, spillovers happen far more often than anyone realizes. People are exposed to bats when they shelter in caves, harvest bat guano—the world’s best fertilizer—and hunt, butcher, and eat bats, which is a well-documented practice in various pockets across the region. “These small villages are at the edge of disappearing forests,” Kendra Phelps, a bat biologist with the EcoHealth Alliance and a co-author on the recent study, told me. “Inside that forest is densely packed wildlife, which is super stressed by things like encroaching palm oil and rice monocultures.” Stressed animals (just like us) are more likely to get sick and shed virus.
Before the pandemic, President Xi Jinping promoted wildlife farms as a means of poverty alleviation, and the industry, which was largely unregulated, employed more than fourteen million people. “There’s this incredible network of people involved in farming and raising animals and trying out new ideas,” Daszak told me last year. “It’s entrepreneurial, it’s chaotic, it’s the sort of farms that are half falling apart, with mixed species in them.” The W.H.O. report stated that some wild-meat suppliers to Wuhan were located in south China, where horseshoe bats that host sars-like coronaviruses primarily reside. Perhaps that is where the virus crossed from bats to animals, and those sickened animals were brought to Wuhan, where they were sold in Huanan and the city’s three other known live-animal markets. “The big missed opportunity, clearly,” Andersen said, “was testing potential reservoirs—intermediate hosts at these markets, not just at Huanan market but across Wuhan, as well as the farther-flung farms where these animals came from, which, to my knowledge, was officially not done.”
The Chinese government shuttered and sanitized the Huanan market on January 1, 2020, essentially destroying a crime scene. China’s officials told W.H.O. investigators that no live mammals were sold there—a position they still maintain. But a virologist at Hubei University of Traditional Chinese Medicine had been, he wrote, “serendipitously” conducting monthly surveys to identify the source of a severe tick-borne disease. In June, he published a study containing documentary evidence that, in the two years prior to the emergence of sars-CoV-2, nearly fifty thousand live animals representing thirty-eight wild species—many of which are now known to be susceptible to sars-CoV-2—were sold and butchered in Wuhan markets, including Huanan.
In February, 2020, China banned the trade and consumption of live wild animals.Tens of thousands of farms were shut down throughout the country. A farmer in Yunnan said that the government had bought and killed his mischief of bamboo rats. Chinese officials have not shared the extent to which they tested the farm animals and workers before the mass slaughter. This makes “any evidence of early coronavirus spillover increasingly difficult to find,” the W.H.O. mission noted in its report. Chinese officials told the W.H.O. that their scientists did test more than eighty thousand livestock, poultry, and wild-animal samples, across thirty-one provinces, collected both before and after the outbreak, but found no evidence of sars-CoV-2.
The world’s most trafficked animal, the pangolin, was initially thought to be a likely contender in the intermediate-animal search, not because they were sold at Huanan market but because, in early 2020, tissue samples from a group of pangolins—confiscated from smugglers at China’s southern border—tested positive for a coronavirus. There are coronaviruses particular to all sorts of animals, but this one was weird. Part of its spike protein, the receptor binding domain, could bind more tightly to human ace2 than sars-CoV-2’s. Back in February, 2020, Andersen had been suspicious of sars-CoV-2’s ace2 binding strength. The pangolin-coronavirus discovery helped change his mind. If the pangolin had naturally evolved a coronavirus primed for binding to ace2, then sars-CoV-2 could have naturally evolved such a feature as well. (The rest of the pangolin coronavirus was too distinct from sars-CoV-2 to be its source.)
Since then, close relatives of sars-CoV-2 have been identified in China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan. But the most significant finding supporting a natural origin was announced in September. Scientists in Laos—just south of the border from Yunnan—found a horseshoe-bat coronavirus that is genetically closer to sars-CoV-2 than the virus from the Tongguan mine. It might have split from a common ancestor with sars-CoV-2 sometime in the last decade or so. Alarmingly, their spikes are identical and bind with equal efficiency to human ace2 receptors. The discovery “completely blows away many of the main lab-leak arguments about Yunnan being special,” Andersen said. “These types of viruses are much more widespread than we initially realized.”
Bloom questioned the significance of the discoveries in Laos. “I don’t think it really, again, tells us exactly how these viruses got to Wuhan,” he said. But China’s wildlife trade could have been both an incubator and a transit system for a virus like sars-CoV-2, which has proved not so necessarily adapted to humans but to mammals more generally. Coughing tigers tested positive for covid-19 at the Bronx Zoo, then eight congested gorillas at the San Diego Zoo. White-tailed deer have sars-CoV-2 antibodies. In the Netherlands, the virus devastated mink farms, infecting sixty-eight per cent of farm workers and hastening a permanent end to the country’s fur trade. China is the world’s largest fur producer. Could mink farms have been the problem? Raccoon dogs, another source of fur and exotic meat in China, are susceptible. “We’ve seen this virus jump into all kinds of animals with no adaptation, no evolution,” Andersen told me. “It’s a generalist. It had to be, otherwise it probably couldn’t cause a pandemic. It’s a unique beast.”
On September 21st, drastic published a startling new revelation. In 2018, Daszak, at EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with Shi, Baric, and Wang, had submitted a $14.2-million grant proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa). The proposal—which was obtained from an anonymous whistle-blower—detailed an ambitious plan to identify, model, and test the spillover risk of novel sars-related bat coronaviruses, then develop vaccines for the horseshoe bats themselves, to preëmpt viruses from jumping into other animals or people. What stood out was their plan to insert “human-specific” furin cleavage sites into sars-like bat coronaviruses.The furin cleavage site is the single most distinguishing feature of sars-CoV-2. It’s “the magic sauce of this virus,” Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said recently. “Whether it’s natural or genetically modified, this is why this virus is circulating in humans.”
Before sars-CoV-2 emerged, research suggested that a furin cleavage site broadens the range of host species that a virus can successfully infect, and increases its contagiousness (a hypothesis that the pandemic has confirmed). In order for a coronavirus to enter a cell, its spike must undergo a fragile metamorphosis, in which it is cut into two pieces. Only then can the virus fuse to the host cell’s membrane, and unload its genetic material, or RNA. A virus with a furin cleavage site can use a host’s furin—an enzyme that the human body readily produces—to quickly cut apart its spike. Worobey said that this “kind of puts the virus on a hair trigger so that once it binds to the cell, it can get in and be very effective.”
The darpa proposal stated that scientists would introduce furin cleavage sites into lab-created versions of sars-related coronaviruses, recovered from bats in Yunnan. They planned to fully sequence and generate clones of three to five novel bat viruses each year. Then they would test the altered viruses in human respiratory cells, and, potentially, in humanized mice. “This describes work that is, like, ‘Let’s go out and discover new viruses,’ ” Andersen said, “and do things like furin cleavage sites. So, yes, that’s why this is relevant to the wider conversation.”
sars-CoV-2 is the only virus known to possess a furin cleavage site in its section of the coronavirus family tree. “We now know that there are full-length bat CoVs similar to sars-CoV-2 that bind well to human ace2,” Bloom said, referring to the Laos viruses, “but only lack the furin cleavage site.” The W.I.V. was collecting many viruses each year. What if researchers had found one even more similar to sars-CoV-2, with the same binding affinity for human ace2, then swapped a furin cleavage site into a clone of that virus in the lab? Such work could have led directly to the creation of sars-CoV-2. “A novel furin cleavage site might have been the extra ingredient for a natural virus to spill over from animals to humans and cause a pandemic,” Alina Chan, a postdoc in molecular biology and gene therapy at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, tweeted recently. “It could also have been the extra ingredient for a lab virus to jump into a researcher and be carried out of the lab unnoticed.”
Chan is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of covid-19,” and has been, since the spring of 2020, one of the most tenacious researchers of a possible lab accident. “The question has to be asked,” she tweeted, “why people in the know didn’t think it was urgent & important, in Jan 2020, to let the world know there was research that could have plausibly led to the emergence of SARS2 in Wuhan.”
The proposal was rejected. A darpa project manager explained that its “key strengths are the experienced team and the selected coronavirus hotspot caves that show high prevalence for novel bat coronaviruses.” But, they wrote, the team “does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research.” That is, the group didn’t have a plan for the event that their experiments created a novel, pandemic-ready virus. Reviewers within darpa “were really shocked” by the “irresponsible” nature of the proposal, and its lack of consideration for the risks that gain-of-function research would entail, an official, who was not authorized to speak to reporters, told me.
In the spring of 2020, when President Donald Trump started promoting the lab-leak theory, hijacking it from any reasonable discussion, someone told him that EcoHealth’s N.I.H. grant funded the W.I.V. The N.I.H. abruptly cancelled the grant. I spoke to Daszak at that time about the politicization of science and how the decision would affect his organization’s ability to function. He said that it halted collaboration with the W.I.V. on important work that was directly related to developing drugs for covid-19, tracing the origin of the virus, and preventing the next pandemic. It also meant, he said, that EcoHealth scientists would no longer have access to the W.I.V.’s data. “It’s a very complex thing,” he said, describing EcoHealth’s work in China, “Chinese scientists will try and do my work, but it won’t be the same work, and it won’t be the work that we need to really understand the next one.”
Despite the fact that furin cleavage sites have been the subject of much debate for the past year and a half, Shi, Baric, and Wang never publicly mentioned that they had proposed these experiments. Daszak, despite being a member of the W.H.O. investigation, said nothing. (“All of that sort of furin-cleavage-site work was supposed to be done in North Carolina, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” an EcoHealth spokesman said.) Andersen emphasized that there is no evidence to suggest that any of the work described in the proposal was actually done. But he added, “I was quite appalled, actually, to see it released now. I think the U.S.-based researchers that were on this particular grant have done a huge disservice by not releasing this information earlier.” (The EcoHealth spokesman told me that “the darpa proposal was not funded” and that “the work described was not ever done.”)
Wang, at Duke-N.U.S. Medical School, was the first member of the darpa proposal to publicly discuss it. He recently joined Bloom, Worobey, and Chan for a debate hosted by Science and live-streamed online. Both Bloom and Chan asked why the proposal’s existence was not shared earlier. Wang, who was born and raised in China, holds Australian citizenship, and now lives in Singapore, said that he didn’t know “the proper procedure of releasing the information” from a failed darpa grant. When Jon Cohen, a writer for Science and the moderator of the debate, pressed him on transparency, Wang said the furin cleavage sites were not his part of the proposal. “From Day One, I said, to engineer a coronavirus in a lab, technically that is possible. But to engineer sars-CoV-2 from existing knowledge? That’s not possible.”
It used to strike me as strange that, with current technology, virologists couldn’t look at the sars-CoV-2 genome and determine whether it had been engineered. When I mentioned this to a French virologist who studies coronaviruses, he said, deadpan, “The secret is if you just look closely enough, you can see a tiny Wuhan Institute of Virology signature.” Proponents of a lab leak rest most of their arguments on the assumption that Chinese officials, the W.I.V., and Shi Zhengli are lying about the viruses they had, and the work they did, in a massive coverup. The natural-origin proponents assume that the W.I.V. has shared everything. “It’s not that the scientists would not have wanted to share,” Relman, who has refrained from taking a position on the question of sars-CoV-2’s origin, said. “It’s that they wouldn’t have been allowed.”
The stakes are high on all sides. From one perspective, proving the virus has a natural origin is even worse for China. If wildlife farms were responsible for the pandemic, that would implicate the policies of President Xi Jinping. If there was a lab leak, just one, or a few, scientists are culpable of an accident. Either way, it is likely that the Chinese government prefers a storm of swirling theories, within which they can continue to push their own: that U.S. soldiers brought the virus to Wuhan in October, 2019, during the World Military Games, or that the American government manufactured the virus in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Or they can blame imported frozen food. The conspiracy theories branch out from there, in their own kind of evolutionary tree.
Without greater transparency from China, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find the truth. Beijing “continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States,” the intelligence community states, in the declassified summary. “These actions reflect, in part, China’s government’s own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure.” President Biden, in a statement, said that the U.S. and its allies would continue to “press the P.R.C. to fully share information,” and to coöperate in the second phase of the W.H.O.’s investigation, both of which, so far, Beijing has refused to do.
For now, the battle between two theories rolls onward. As a friend said to me recently, “Why does it seem like we have to pick a side?” Both camps share a desire to understand the origins in order to prevent the emergence of the next pandemic. But, between them, there are some differences of emphasis.
The lab leakers tend to be more interested in biosecurity, transparency, and human hubris. They exhibit an admirable drive to follow the money, to upend centralized power, to overturn academic hierarchy, and to expose the injustices of oppressive governments. Some are China hawks. By and large, they have not done virus-hunting field or lab work.
On the natural-origin side, most people have done the kind of field and lab work that the W.I.V. pursued—and are regularly bowled over by nature’s endless diversity. They believe in scientific precedent, as opposed to uncertainties that have yet to be resolved. Many people in this camp have devoted their careers to conservation, biodiversity, and public health, and have been warning about a future pandemic for years. Spillovers most often happen because of land-use change, or human encroachment into previously wild places, which is happening on pretty much the entire planet, but particularly in areas that are developing rapidly, like south China and southeast Asia.
More than one virologist reminded me that nature is the best bioterrorist. It’s far more creative than humans are. With enough time, evolution is capable of anything we can imagine, and everything we can’t. “If you look at a platypus, you can very clearly realize that that’s not something somebody would have designed, right?” Andersen said. “Because it’s too absurd. It’s a bit of a disaster. But it works pretty well.” It occupies its own ecological niche. Some of the notable features of sars-CoV-2, Andersen said, make it “the platypus of coronaviruses.”
Still, humans have changed the equation. Calling viruses zoonotic obscures the role we play in their evolution, whether in the wilderness, a wet market, or a lab. What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything? Nature’s staggering diversity includes human nature. Somehow, sars-CoV-2 found its ecological niche in us.
More on the Coronavirus
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Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-pushing-debunked-claims-about-coronavirus-are-linked-his-billionaire
many lnx vids (see below)
Steve Bannon is pushing debunked claims about the coronavirus that are linked to his billionaire benefactor
WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ
PUBLISHED 02/06/20 11:04 AM EST
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has pushed a debunked theory about the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China on his daily radio broadcast War Room: Pandemic. The claim echoes fake news pushed by G News, a website that has reportedly paid him at least $1 million for consulting and offered him a position as senior editor.
War Room: Pandemic launched on January 25 as a spin-off to War Room: Impeachment, Bannon’s rapid response operation defending President Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial. Since the new show began, Bannon has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from a covert biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes a secure research facility where scientists study highly contagious and infectious diseases.
The unfounded narrative that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from the lab has been wholly rejected by experts, with The Washington Post labeling it a “fringe theory,” PolitiFact calling the claim made in the G News article “false,” and Foreign Policy describing it as “an outbreak of nonsense.” Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Post that “based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus.”
But evidence is no object when Bannon is on a mission to propagandize. On the podcast, Bannon has repeatedly cited stories by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times that suggest, based on speculations from a single source, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is researching biowarfare, and that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from there. Bannon kicked off the show’s inaugural episode by interviewing Gertz to promote his flimsy reporting.
BuzzFeed recently reported on Bannon's ties to G News, a digital media outlet launched by Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui that has also published two false stories about how the coronavirus was first introduced to residents of Wuhan. One G News story falsely alleged that the Chinese government would imminently confess that the virus was genetically engineered and leaked from a lab near the densely populated city. The other included a document purporting to validate a conspiracy theory that the Chinese military spread the disease on purpose.
Bannon’s contracts with the project were first reported in October by Axios, which showed that he had signed on to serve as a consultant for one year starting in August 2018 and was to be compensated at least $1 million. Axios also reported on a second, unsigned contract that specified Bannon would serve as a senior editor for G News starting in August 2019. According to BuzzFeed, “Guo and Bannon frequently appear together in videos on G News that attack the Chinese government.” (According to The New York Times, Guo described his connection to Bannon in a 2018 interview: “We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we’ve become partners.”) Episodes of War Room: Pandemic are also cross-posted to the G News website.
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CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill Gertz from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz had an amazing piece in the Washington Times about the biological labs that happen to be in Wuhan.
The episode also featured J. Kyle Bass, a China critic and hedge fund investor with connections to G News owner Guo, on the same day that Bass tweeted out a CBC article from July 2019, falsely claiming that “a husband and wife Chinese spy team” smuggled viral samples out of a Candian research facility to Wuhan. “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who tweeted the CBC link that day with the same unsubstantiated claim, was also a guest on the episode.
Later in the show, Gertz and Bannon delved further into the thinly sourced theory. Despite admitting that “we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute,” Gertz speculated that “it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.” The U.S. Department of State has raised concerns regarding China’s compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, but has not affirmatively identified the existence of such a program.
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CitationFrom the January 25, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Bill, can you briefly summarize the article that you did yesterday? Talk about these biological labs that are in Wuhan and what aspect do you think they may have in this crisis?
BILL GERTZ: Sure, yeah, good to be on the show, Steve. This is a significant development in the sense that what I’ve identified is the sole declared facility in China capable of handling deadly viruses. In other words, this is the place where they do all of their civilian research. And I spoke with a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied the Chinese biological warfare program and he says that this institute is clearly linked to this covert Chinese biological warfare program. Now, we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute, but in China and the way secrecy works and the lack of controls, it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.
There’s also a second facility in Wuhan that’s also linked to the biological weapons program. Again, that’s a secret program that last year the State Department in it’s annual report on arms compliance stated fairly bluntly that they believe that China is engaged in a covert offensive biological weapons program.
Gertz returned to the show on January 27, claiming, “Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here.” Bannon replied, “Your point is that there are no coincidences” related to the coronavirus, and the lab facility raises “certain suspicions.”
CitationFrom the January 27, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
BILL GERTZ: Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here because, you know, there is only one declared hospital, research center, laboratory in Wuhan -- in all of China -- and it’s in Wuhan, capable of dealing with this level 4 of infectious diseases. And then you have then --
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Your point is there are no coincidences, if the level 4 [facility] that was built by the French for them in 2007 is in Wuhan, then that leads to certain suspicions.
GERTZ: Absolutely. This has, you know, the Chinese have to respond to this.
Bannon’s guest Dr. Steven Hatfill, an expert who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, told the host repeatedly that the theory about coronavirus leaked out of an infectious disease research facility was incorrect, adding, “You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy could get in.” From the January 29 edition of War Room: Pandemic:
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CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Today, The Washington Post is out there, mocking and ridiculing The Washington Times, Bill Gertz, one of our colleagues reporting about the Wuhan level 4 laboratory, saying it’s a fringe theory, that anything could have come out of that laboratory, et cetera. We’re not trying to make an assertion that they were building a biological weapon. But given the fact that there’s now no direct link at least as shown today between patient zero and the market, it maybe some that’s later. How do you think this thing started?
DR. STEVEN HATFILL: I think it was natural. You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy can get in. The people around me are of the highest professional caliber, both mentally, technically, emotionally, and every other consideration. I'm sorry but I kind of downplay the fact that this came out of a BW laboratories.
BANNON: Well, I think that’s fantastic. I think people need to hear that. I think that’s great. And why do you come to this conclusion?
After this exchange, Bannon ignored Hatfill’s expertise and returned to his irresponsible speculation, declaring that “there are no coincidences.”
CitationFrom the January 29, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Now, people will tell you that’s also where biological warfare are done, those types of places. That’s why there’s so much focus -- Bill Gertz’s articles in the Washington Times focus very much on this level four lab that is in Wuhan, right. And I’m not a believer, as you know, I’m not a conspiracy guy, I always tell you it’s out there in plain daylight. The party at Davos, the way they roll is right up in your grill and there are no coincidences.
On February 1, Bannon again asked Hatfill about the theory, and again Hatfill rejected it:
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CitationFrom the February 1, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Also Zero Hedge, who I'm a huge fan of, Zero Hedge has had this analysis of what the Chinese lab and the two Chinese -- the Canadian lab in I think Winnipeg, that there are now issues -- one of the Chinese scientists took some of the viruses back to Wuhan. I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, not a deep state guy, never have been because I say it’s all up there in your face, the party at Davos, the way the whole thing rolls is in your grill you just have to see it. But there are no coincidences.
...
These are the elite institutions in the world the french built one from the ground up for the Chinese, it just randomly happened to be in Wuhan, right? And relatively in geospatial terms relatively close to the market, a mile or two. There’s been tons of things, they’re using HIV serum to cure people there. This report comes out and it’s been tweeted out all over. Bill Gertz, Washington Times, done some good reporting. The Post calls it a fringe kook theory Miles Guo put something up, said he had a report from inside the CCP and Politifact saying he’s lying so it’s all over the map.
But in your assessment, at what you see in [INAUDIBLE], I asked you to look overnight at this, where do you think we stand as people know the information today? Is this something that’s naturally occurred? Do you think there’s a possibility in what you read so far that it gives you even a scintilla that this could be some sort of weaponization thing gone wrong that somehow got out of the lab.
DR. STEVEN HATFILL: From what I’ve looked at I think the authors of these papers are overreaching a bit. Now that said this is an odd virus its genome. It’s got a very, very, long, very different from the other SARS virus.
Now, the unsubstantiated theory is being repeated by U.S. government officials in a position of power to take action. According to a report from Business Insider, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pointed out the proximity of the outbreak to “China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
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LNX
ormer Trump adviser Steve Bannon has pushed a debunked theory about the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China on his daily radio broadcast War Room: Pandemic. The claim echoes fake news pushed by G News, a website that has reportedly paid him at least $1 million for consulting and offered him a position as senior editor.
War Room: Pandemic launched on January 25 as a spin-off to War Room: Impeachment, Bannon’s rapid response operation defending President Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial. Since the new show began, Bannon has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from a covert biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes a secure research facility where scientists study highly contagious and infectious diseases.
The unfounded narrative that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from the lab has been wholly rejected by experts, with The Washington Post labeling it a “fringe theory,” PolitiFact calling the claim made in the G News article “false,” and Foreign Policy describing it as “an outbreak of nonsense.” Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Post that “based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus.”
But evidence is no object when Bannon is on a mission to propagandize. On the podcast, Bannon has repeatedly cited stories by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times that suggest, based on speculations from a single source, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is researching biowarfare, and that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from there. Bannon kicked off the show’s inaugural episode by interviewing Gertz to promote his flimsy reporting.
BuzzFeed recently reported on Bannon's ties to G News, a digital media outlet launched by Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui that has also published two false stories about how the coronavirus was first introduced to residents of Wuhan. One G News story falsely alleged that the Chinese government would imminently confess that the virus was genetically engineered and leaked from a lab near the densely populated city. The other included a document purporting to validate a conspiracy theory that the Chinese military spread the disease on purpose.
Bannon’s contracts with the project were first reported in October by Axios, which showed that he had signed on to serve as a consultant for one year starting in August 2018 and was to be compensated at least $1 million. Axios also reported on a second, unsigned contract that specified Bannon would serve as a senior editor for G News starting in August 2019. According to BuzzFeed, “Guo and Bannon frequently appear together in videos on G News that attack the Chinese government.” (According to The New York Times, Guo described his connection to Bannon in a 2018 interview: “We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we’ve become partners.”) Episodes of War Room: Pandemic are also cross-posted to the G News website.
[vid]
BANNON (HOST): Bill Gertz from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz had an amazing piece in the Washington Times about the biological labs that happen to be in Wuhan.
The episode also featured J. Kyle Bass, a China critic and hedge fund investor with connections to G News owner Guo, on the same day that Bass tweeted out a CBC article from July 2019, falsely claiming that “a husband and wife Chinese spy team” smuggled viral samples out of a Candian research facility to Wuhan. “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who tweeted the CBC link that day with the same unsubstantiated claim, was also a guest on the episode.
Later in the show, Gertz and Bannon delved further into the thinly sourced theory. Despite admitting that “we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute,” Gertz speculated that “it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.” The U.S. Department of State has raised concerns regarding China’s compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, but has not affirmatively identified the existence of such a program.
[vid]
BANNON (HOST): Bill, can you briefly summarize the article that you did yesterday? Talk about these biological labs that are in Wuhan and what aspect do you think they may have in this crisis?
BILL GERTZ: Sure, yeah, good to be on the show, Steve. This is a significant development in the sense that what I’ve identified is the sole declared facility in China capable of handling deadly viruses. In other words, this is the place where they do all of their civilian research. And I spoke with a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied the Chinese biological warfare program and he says that this institute is clearly linked to this covert Chinese biological warfare program. Now, we have no evidence that this current coronavirus leaked from that institute, but in China and the way secrecy works and the lack of controls, it’s certainly possible that this outbreak of this animal virus could have come from one of their biological weapons labs.
There’s also a second facility in Wuhan that’s also linked to the biological weapons program. Again, that’s a secret program that last year the State Department in it’s annual report on arms compliance stated fairly bluntly that they believe that China is engaged in a covert offensive biological weapons program.
Gertz returned to the show on January 27, claiming, “Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here.” Bannon replied, “Your point is that there are no coincidences” related to the coronavirus, and the lab facility raises “certain suspicions."
[vid]
GERTZ: Obviously, the question of their covert biological weapons program should come into play here because, you know, there is only one declared hospital, research center, laboratory in Wuhan -- in all of China -- and it’s in Wuhan, capable of dealing with this level 4 of infectious diseases. And then you have then --
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Your point is there are no coincidences, if the level 4 [facility] that was built by the French for them in 2007 is in Wuhan, then that leads to certain suspicions.
GERTZ: Absolutely. This has, you know, the Chinese have to respond to this.
Bannon’s guest Dr. Steven Hatfill, an expert who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, told the host repeatedly that the theory about coronavirus leaked out of an infectious disease research facility was incorrect, adding, “You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy could get in.” From the January 29 edition of War Room: Pandemic:
[vid]
BANNON (HOST): Today, The Washington Post is out there, mocking and ridiculing The Washington Times, Bill Gertz, one of our colleagues reporting about the Wuhan level 4 laboratory, saying it’s a fringe theory, that anything could have come out of that laboratory, et cetera. We’re not trying to make an assertion that they were building a biological weapon. But given the fact that there’s now no direct link at least as shown today between patient zero and the market, it maybe some that’s later. How do you think this thing started?
DR. STEVEN HATFILL: I think it was natural. You know, I'm sitting in an SL4 laboratory right now, and there is no way you could get anything out of here. There’s no way a bad guy can get in. The people around me are of the highest professional caliber, both mentally, technically, emotionally, and every other consideration. I'm sorry but I kind of downplay the fact that this came out of a BW laboratories.
BANNON: Well, I think that’s fantastic. I think people need to hear that. I think that’s great. And why do you come to this conclusion?
After this exchange, Bannon ignored Hatfill’s expertise and returned to his irresponsible speculation, declaring that “there are no coincidences.'
[vid]
BANNON (HOST): Now, people will tell you that’s also where biological warfare are done, those types of places. That’s why there’s so much focus -- Bill Gertz’s articles in the Washington Times focus very much on this level four lab that is in Wuhan, right. And I’m not a believer, as you know, I’m not a conspiracy guy, I always tell you it’s out there in plain daylight. The party at Davos, the way they roll is right up in your grill and there are no coincidences.
On February 1, Bannon again asked Hatfill about the theory, and again Hatfill rejected it:
[vid]
BANNON (HOST): Also Zero Hedge, who I'm a huge fan of, Zero Hedge has had this analysis of what the Chinese lab and the two Chinese -- the Canadian lab in I think Winnipeg, that there are now issues -- one of the Chinese scientists took some of the viruses back to Wuhan. I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, not a deep state guy, never have been because I say it’s all up there in your face, the party at Davos, the way the whole thing rolls is in your grill you just have to see it. But there are no coincidences.
...
These are the elite institutions in the world the french built one from the ground up for the Chinese, it just randomly happened to be in Wuhan, right? And relatively in geospatial terms relatively close to the market, a mile or two. There’s been tons of things, they’re using HIV serum to cure people there. This report comes out and it’s been tweeted out all over. Bill Gertz, Washington Times, done some good reporting. The Post calls it a fringe kook theory Miles Guo put something up, said he had a report from inside the CCP and Politifact saying he’s lying so it’s all over the map.
But in your assessment, at what you see in [INAUDIBLE], I asked you to look overnight at this, where do you think we stand as people know the information today? Is this something that’s naturally occurred? Do you think there’s a possibility in what you read so far that it gives you even a scintilla that this could be some sort of weaponization thing gone wrong that somehow got out of the lab.
DR. STEVEN HATFILL: From what I’ve looked at I think the authors of these papers are overreaching a bit. Now that said this is an odd virus its genome. It’s got a very, very, long, very different from the other SARS virus.
Now, the unsubstantiated theory is being repeated by U.S. government officials in a position of power to take action. According to a report from Business Insider, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pointed out the proximity of the outbreak to “China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/steve-bannons-use-of-private-jet-linked-to-chinese-businessman-could-violate-campaign-finance-law/
no lnx
Steve Bannon’s use of private jet linked to Chinese businessman could violate campaign finance law
Written by Justin Elliott / ProPublica February 26, 2020
Former Donald Trump campaign CEO and chief strategist Steve Bannon used a private jet apparently owned by a wealthy Chinese businessman to fly to events to promote Republican congressional candidates in 2018.
The previously unreported flights could run afoul of a campaign finance law that bars foreign money from U.S. elections, according to campaign finance experts, though it depends on several factors that are not known. One of the unknowns is whether Bannon paid Guo Wengui — the Chinese businessman, who is a vocal critic of the Chinese regime, and with whom he has other reported financial ties — for the use of the jet.
Bannon flew on the jet, a Bombardier Global Express that can seat up to 13 people, to 2018 events supporting Republican candidates in New Mexico and Arizona. He also flew on it to Mexico City and New York, and possibly to other cities. The flights were confirmed by footage taken for “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, and by videos of Guo on the plane, interviews and FAA flight records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“The foreign-national prohibition is the broadest prohibition in the Federal Election Campaign Act,” said Brett Kappel, a government affairs partner at the Akerman law firm, speaking generally. “It prohibits foreign nationals from making any contribution or donation in connection with any election in the United States. It also precludes foreign nationals from making in-kind contributions, such as paying for campaign-related travel.”
The same law also prohibits receiving such a donation. Bannon’s one-way trip from New York to New Mexico alone would be worth around $35,000, according to public jet charter rates.
Lawyers for Bannon and Guo (who is also known as Miles Kwok) did not dispute that Bannon used the Chinese businessman’s plane for trips. But Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing Bannon’s nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic, wrote in an email, “The meetings and rallies hosted by COAR in 2018 were to promote thefilm, Trump\@War, and to encourage Trump supporters to vote in 2018. These were not candidate or campaign rallies.” Guo’s attorney said in a statement that “Mr. Guo has not participated in or supported, directly or indirectly, any political activity or party in the United States or elsewhere. To the contrary, Mr. Guo has consistently emphasized that he has no desire to participate in politics anywhere.”
Nothing about the trips appears to have been disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, either by Bannon or the congressional candidates he traveled to support.
Guo told Vice in 2017 that he owns two private jets. Han Lianchao, a Guo associate, told ProPublica, “I know he allowed Steve to use his private jet from time to time.” Han said he did not know the specifics of their arrangement. A Bannon aide also told Alison Klayman, the filmmaker who made “The Brink” and flew on the jet, that it belonged to Guo, Klayman told ProPublica.
In one scene in the film, Bannon is shown on the plane praising Guo’s analysis of Chinese politics while on a flight from New York to Dallas in October 2018.
Official records don’t identify the ultimate owner of the jet, which bears the tail number T7-GQM. The jet is registered in the tiny Republic of San Marino to Whitecroft Shore Limited. That, in turn, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, an offshore dominion known for secrecy. There are multiple videos online of Guo that appear to be taken on the plane that match independent photos of the interior and exterior of the jet with the same tail number. Other articles link the jet to Guo.
Bannon left the Trump White House in the summer of 2017 and has spent the past couple of years jetting around the country and the globe to promote right-wing causes, candidates and his own brand. It is a continuing mystery who is supporting his efforts. His use of the Guo plane helps fill out the picture.
The unlikely relationship between Bannon and Guo is one of the defining features of Bannon’s post-White House career. It continues through the present, with Bannon and Guo frequently appearing together on Bannon’s podcast and Guo’s news site commenting on Trump, China and the coronavirus, among other topics.
Guo, who has described himself as a successful real estate developer and investor, left China for the U.S. in 2015 and is reportedly seeking asylum. He is a critic of Chinese leaders, churning out a stream of online videos commenting on the news of the day, from the coronavirus to his “crusade against communism.” The Chinese government has, in turn, sought Guo’s arrest on corruption allegations, which he has denied. Guo frequently appears in videos with Bannon, who has predicted a war between the U.S. and China and says he is currently producing a “takedown” film about Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The New York Times recently reported that Bannon’s relationship with Guo began with a $150,000 loan to Bannon shortly after his 2017 departure from the Trump administration. Axios reported that a company linked to Guo had contracted with Bannon for at least $1 million for “strategic consulting services,” beginning in August 2018. (A Guo spokesman told Axios that the contract was for media investment and other consulting, and that Guo “had no involvement in [Bannon] being retained.”)
In fall 2018, Bannon and his dark money organization, Citizens of the American Republic, were pushing to keep Republican control of Congress during the midterm elections. A Bannon aide told ABC at the time that the group had an election war room focused on “explaining that a vote for any House Republican is a vote to stop the Democrats.”
Bannon made the trips to promote GOP candidates on the Bombardier jet in October 2018, under the aegis of Citizens of the American Republic. (The organization raised a total of $4.5 million in 2018 from a handful of donors, according to its filing with the IRS. But as a “social welfare” nonprofit organized under section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code, it is not required to reveal its donors.)
One of the trips was to Arizona in support of congressional candidate Wendy Rogers. Bannon told the Arizona Daily Star at the time: “If she can beat [Rep. Tom] O’Halleran, we’ll hold the House. We’ll hold the House by one or two seats. And that’s why it’s so important, and that’s why I wanted to come down here.”
Rogers, who ultimately lost the race, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The trip to Roswell, New Mexico, featured U.S. Senate candidate Mick Richand a screening of Bannon’s film “Trump\@War.” According to video from the Roswell event viewed by ProPublica, Bannon and Rich strategized about the campaign before Bannon’s public remarks. “Tell me about this race,” Bannon said in the video. “How are we going to win this thing? I’ll come back here as many times as — ” Rich interjected: “Getting you out here is number one.” Rich also asked if Bannon could get President Trump to tweet about the race, and Bannon said he would try.
During the public event, Rich introduced Bannon, who in turn praised the Senate candidate as a “real populist.” Bannon urged the audience members to vote for pro-Trump candidates.
Rich lost the 2018 race and is running again this year. A spokesman told ProPublica in a statement that “Mick and his campaign had no knowledge of Bannon’s transportation to or from the event. Mick and his campaign had no coordination of any kind with Steve Bannon or any Steve Bannon group before, during, or after this event.”
Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, said that the New Mexico event “could well implicate Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui for violating the law that prohibits foreign nationals from paying for campaign activities,” if the Federal Election Commission deemed the event to be an “independent expenditure” by Bannon’s group, or a Rich campaign event.
The FEC doesn’t currently have a quorum and it, along with the IRS, have historically done little to scrutinize political nonprofits like Bannon’s.
Apart from the use of the jet, there’s also the question of whether the event would run afoul of the rules barring an outside group like Bannon’s from coordinating with the candidate, Rich.
Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center said political nonprofits are operating in a grey area because of the FEC’s failure to outline rules for what sort of contact they are permitted to have with a candidate. “To any rational person that looks at this, of course it’s a campaign event. But it might be allowed, which is the scandal.”
In a March 2018 filing in an unrelated lawsuit, an attorney for Guo noted the prohibition on Guo making expenditures in connection with U.S. elections. He wrote that “Because Plaintiff Guo is a foreign national, he is prohibited, by 52 U.S.C. 30121, from making any contributions, monetary donations or expenditures in connection with any federal, state or local election in the United States.”
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INFLECTION PT? POST IMPEACH TRIAL
when did he cave to trump cult?
omfg
omg 1st guaido sotu and now:
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-to-feature-authoritarian-brazilian-politician-eduardo-bolsonaro/
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fauci-kristian-andersen.html
Scientist Opens Up About His Early Email to Fauci on Virus ...https://www.nytimes.com › 2021/06/14 › science › covid-...
Jun 20, 2021 — In early 2020, Kristian Andersen wrote to Anthony Fauci about the possibility of an engineered coronavirus. His research has since dispelled ...
no lnx
A CONVERSATION WITH …
Scientist Opens Up About His Early Email to Fauci on Virus Origins
In early 2020, Kristian Andersen wrote to Anthony Fauci about the possibility of an engineered coronavirus. His research has since dispelled those suspicions.
“Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available,” Kristian Andersen said.
By James Gorman and Carl Zimmer
Published June 14, 2021
Updated June 20, 2021
Among the thousands of pages of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s emails released recently by BuzzFeed News, a short note from Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., has garnered a lot of attention.
Over the past year, Dr. Andersen has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But in the email to Dr. Fauci in January 2020, Dr. Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion.He told Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.
The researchers published those results in a paper in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that a laboratory origin was very unlikely. Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab.
When his early email to Dr. Fauci was released, the media storm around Dr. Andersen intensified, and he deactivated his Twitter account. He answered written questions from The New York Times about the email and the fracas. The exchange has been lightly edited for length.
Much has been made of your email to Dr. Fauci in late January 2020, shortly after the coronavirus genome was first sequenced. You said, “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
Can you explain what you meant?
At the time, based on limited data and preliminary analyses, we observed features that appeared to potentially be unique to SARS-CoV-2. We had not yet seen these features in other related viruses from natural sources, and thus were exploring whether they had been engineered into the virus.
Those features included a structure known as the furin cleavage site that allows the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to be cleaved by furin, an enzyme found in human cells, and another structure, known as the receptor binding domain, that allowed the virus to anchor to the outside of human cells via a cell-surface protein known as ACE2.
Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.
You also said you found the virus’s genome to be “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
This was a reference to the features of SARS-CoV-2 that we identified based on early analyses that didn’t appear to have an obvious immediate evolutionary precursor. We hadn’t yet performed more in-depth analyses to reach a conclusion, rather were sharing our preliminary observations.
I cautioned in that same email that we would need to look at the question much more closely and that our opinions could change within a few days based on new data and analyses — which they did.
In March, you and other scientists published the Nature Medicine paper saying that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Can you explain how the research changed your view?
The features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that features that initially looked unusual to us weren’t.
Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, while we worked around the clock, which allowed us to reject our preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered, while other “lab”-based scenarios were still on the table.
Yet more extensive analyses, significant additional data and thorough investigations to compare genomic diversity more broadly across coronaviruses led to the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine. For example, we looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses.
Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available and analyses are completed.
Some people, including virologist David Baltimore, say the presence of the furin cleavage site could be a sign of human manipulation of the virus, whereas you and other virologists have said it naturally evolved. Can you explain for readers why you don’t think it is proof of an engineered virus?
Furin cleavage sites are found all across the coronavirus family, including in the betacoronavirus genus that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to. There has been much speculation that patterns found in the virus’s RNA that are responsible for certain portions of the furin cleavage site represent evidence of engineering. Specifically, people are pointing to two “CGG” sequences that code for the amino acid arginine in the furin cleavage site as strong evidence that the virus was made in the lab. Such statements are factually incorrect.
While it’s true that CGG is less common than other patterns that code for arginine, the CGG codon is found elsewhere in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the genetic sequence[s] that include the CGG codon found in SARS-CoV-2 are also found in other coronaviruses. These findings, together with many other technical features of the site, strongly suggest that it evolved naturally and there is very little chance somebody engineered it.
Do you still believe that all laboratory scenarios are implausible? If not an engineered virus, what about an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab?
As we stated in our article last March, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove specific hypotheses of SARS-CoV-2 origin. However, while both lab and natural scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely — precedence, data and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative hypothesis based on conjecture.
Based on detailed analyses of the virus conducted to date by researchers around the world, it is extremely unlikely that the virus was engineered. The scenario in which the virus was found in nature, brought to the lab and then accidentally release[d] is similarly unlikely, based on current evidence.
In contrast, the scientific theory about the natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2 presents a far simpler and more likely scenario. The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to that of SARS-CoV-1, including its seasonal timing, location and association with the human food chain.
Some people have pointed to your email to Dr. Fauci, suggesting that it raises questions about whether scientists and government officials gave more credence to the lab-leak theory than they let on to the public. And some recent reports have suggested that certain government officials didn’t want to talk about the lab-leak theory because it would draw attention to the government’s support of so-called gain-of-function research.
What is your response to these suggestions? Were you worried in the spring of 2020 about the public latching on to a lab-leak theory?
My primary concern last spring, which is true to this day, is to perform research to discern exactly how SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the human population.
I won’t speak to what government officials and other scientists did or didn’t say or think. My comments and conclusions are strictly driven by scientific inquiry, and I strongly believe that careful, well-supported public messaging around complex topics is paramount.
Many scientists have now expressed an openness to the possibility that a lab leak occurred. Looking back over the past year, do you have any regrets about the way you or the broader scientific community have communicated with the public about the lab-leak idea?
First, it is important to say that the scientific community has made tremendous inroads in understanding Covid-19 in a remarkably short amount of time. Vigorous debate is integral to science and that’s what we have seen regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
It can be difficult at times for the public, I think, to observe the debate and discern the likelihood of the various hypotheses. That is particularly true where science becomes politicized, and the current vilification of scientists and subject matter experts sets a dangerous precedent. We saw that with the climate change debate and now we’re seeing it with the debate around various facets of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Throughout this pandemic, I have made my best efforts to help explain what the scientific evidence is and suggests, and I have no regrets about that.
Do you support President Biden’s call for U.S. intelligence agencies to further investigate these various possibilities? Could they find anything that would change your mind?
I have always supported further inquiries into the origin of SARS-CoV-2, including President Biden’s recent call, as it is important that we more fully understand how the virus emerged.
As is true for any scientific process, there are several things that would lend credence to the lab-leak hypothesis that would make me change my mind. For example, any credible evidence of SARS-CoV-2 having been at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the pandemic — whether in a freezer, in tissue culture or in animals, or epidemiological evidence of very early confirmed Covid-19 cases associated with the institute.
Other evidence, were it to emerge, could lend further weight to the natural origin hypothesis. That includes the identification of an intermediate [animal] host (if one exists). Also, now that we know that live animals were sold at markets across Wuhan, further understanding of the flow of animals and connected supply lines could lend additional credence to natural emergence.
It seems that you’ve shut down your Twitter account. Why? Will you come back?
I have always seen Twitter as a way to interact with other scientists and the general public to encourage open and transparent dialogue about science.
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Increasingly, however, I found that information and comments I posted were being taken out of context or misrepresented to push false narratives, in particular about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Daily attacks against scientists and the scientific method have also become common, and much of the conversation has steered far away from the science.
For those reasons, I felt that at present, I could no longer productively contribute to the platform, and I decided it would be more productive for me to invest more of my time into our infectious disease research, including that on Covid-19.
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
A Top Virologist in China, at Center of a Pandemic Storm, Speaks Out
June 14, 2021
Scientists Don’t Want to Ignore the ‘Lab Leak’ Theory, Despite No New Evidence
May 27, 2021
The Lab-Leak Theory
May 27, 2021]
James Gorman is a science writer at large and the author of books on hypochondria, penguins, dinosaurs and the ocean around Antarctica. He writes about animals, viruses, archaeology and the evolution of dogs.
Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of fourteen books, including “Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.” @carlzimmer • Facebook
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The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora's ...https://thebulletin.org › ... › Biosecurity
May 5, 2021 — Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he ...
Why many scientists say it's unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 originatedhttps://www.science.org › content › article › why-many-sc...
Sep 2, 2021 — During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “lab leak” theory gained little traction. Sure, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested ...
I was sceptical of 'lab leak' theory. But new info, China's cover ...https://theprint.in › opinion › i-was-sceptical-of-lab-lea...
Jun 13, 2021 — The Occam's Razor argument — the likeliest explanation — keeps shifting in the direction of the Wuhan lab, writes former New York Times' ...
They spent 12 years solving a scientific puzzle. It yielded the ...https://www.nationalgeographic.com › science › article
Dec 31, 2020 — It was Barney Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center. Two days earlier, ...
Missing: fauci | Must include: fauci
COVID-19 MISINFO | Misinformation Page - COSMOShttps://cosmos.ualr.edu › misinformation
False Claim : Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros and Jeffrey Epstein are connected with Moderna, Inc., and its efforts to create the coronavirus vaccine.
The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about 'gainhttps://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2021/10/29
Claim: “At a Senate hearing in May, Dr. Fauci said, ‘The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ That...
Claimed by: Ted Cruz
Fact check by The Washington Post: Two Pinocchios
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duck 1 22
wuhan protein spike scripps nine thousand fauci
Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but ...
Jan 11, 2022Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.
Wuhan scientists wanted to release coronaviruses into bats
https://nypost.com › 2021 › 09 › 22 › wuhan-scientists-wanted-to-release-coronaviruses-into-bats
Sep 22, 2021Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were planning to genetically enhance airborne coronaviruses and release aerosols containing "novel chimeric spike proteins" among cave bats in ...
Fauci Gain of Function Docs! | Judicial Watch
https://www.judicialwatch.org › fauci-gain-of-function-docs
The records revealed that NIAID gave nine China-related grants to EcoHealth Alliance to research coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH's top issuer of grants to the Wuhan lab itself. In June, we announced FOIA lawsuits against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the State Department for information on the ...
SARS-CoV-2 variants, spike mutations and immune escape
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pmc › articles › PMC8167834
Spike protein sequence variability and structure. a | The domain organization of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein showing amino acid sequence variability. The spike protein is synthesized as a 1,273 amino acid polypeptide, and the frequency of amino acid variants, including both substitutions and deletions, at each of the positions is shown.
David Martin: Fauci Funded COVID-19 Development in Wuhan
https://awesomeprophecy.com › david-martin-fauci-funded-covid-19-development-in-wuhan
He should be cuffed, he should be tried", said David Martin on the David Knight Show. Martin gave a detailed explanation of COVID-19's history as a project funded by the NIH. He described how research on it was continued even after doing so was made illegal. Martin also states the ways Fauci violated antitrust laws and laundered money in ...
The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory | The ...
https://www.newyorker.com › science › elements › the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
Part of its spike protein, the receptor binding domain, could bind more tightly to human ACE2 than SARS-CoV-2's. Back in February, 2020, Andersen had been suspicious of SARS -CoV-2's ACE 2 ...
Coronavirus Conspiracy Evidenced by Fake Science
https://medicalveritas.org › coronavirus-conspiracy-proven-by-fake-science
Furthermore, the spike protein glycan group "can be excellently released from the glycoprotein by alkaline" treatments, according to Vliegenthart and Kamerling. (15) Alkalizing water for improved body hydration, therefore, is a reasonable investment, as are the alkalizing foods and nutrients, as previously reported.
The Coronavirus Exposed. Part 1: Main Body - Common Sense ...
https://common-sense-in-america.com › 2022 › 01 › 18 › the-corona-virus-exposed
Did Dr. Fauci Fund research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab in China? (Updated 1/27/2021) Dr. Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has shelled out a total of $7.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab — which has become the focus of theories about the origin of COVID-19.
Does anyone have the video where Fauci refuses to answer ...
Does anyone have the video where Fauci refuses to answer whether spike protein modification made in Wuhan study is the same as the one in covid? Close. 11. Posted by 2 days ago. Does anyone have the video where Fauci refuses to answer whether spike protein modification made in Wuhan study is the same as the one in covid? I saw this somewhere on ...
Explosive COVID National Security Crime Syndicate Exposed
https://medicalveritas.org › national-security-covid-crime-syndicate
The 'silence,' censorship, gross 'redactions,' and key correspondence in Fauci's e-mails from January 31 thru February 2, 2020, evidences the National Security Crime Syndicate's most important cover-up. These e-mails evidence panic in Fauci's 'inner circle.'. Panic over emerging scientific evidence of COVID-19's lab origin ...
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COVID-19 BIOWEAPON | Simone Super Energy
www.simonesuperenergy.com › covid-19-bioweapon
This Spike protein attaches to the ACE2 docking sites on human cells of the heart, respiratory tract, intestine, kidney, eye, and blood vessels. The Spike protein allows the virus to invade the human cell. The Spike proteins of the natural strains do not infect human cells at all - this has all been published since 2007 from Wuhan.
The Covid 19 Chronology They Aren'T Showing You ...
https://www.balanta.org › news › covid-chronology
In addition, the RBD of the spike protein from WHCV was only one amino acid longer than the RBD of the spike protein from SARS-CoV (Extended Data Fig. 7a). By contrast, other bat SARS-like CoVs—including the Rp3 strain that cannot bind to human ACE2 14 —had amino acid deletions at positions 433-437 and 460-472 compared with the sequence ...
Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists Opens The Wuhan Virus ...
https://www.theburningplatform.com › 2021 › 05 › 07 › bulletin-of-atomic-scientists-opens-the-wuhan-virus-pandoras-boxAuthored by Nicholas Wade via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (emphasis ours), The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of…
The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory ...
https://defence.pk › pdf › threads › the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory.725844
In 2014, N.I.H. had awarded a New-York-based nonprofit called the EcoHealth Alliance a five-year, $3.7-million grant, a portion of which—roughly six hundred thousand dollars—went to the W.I.V. Fauci and the N.I.H. have maintained that the W.I.V.'s work, like Baric's, did not qualify as gain-of-function research, and so did not violate ...
Mainstream Media Finally Accepts That COVID Lab Leak Is ...
https://invesbrain.com › mainstream-media-finally-accepts-that-covid-lab-leak-is-most-likely-theory
During the early days of the pandemic, America's mainstream media outlets blithely amplified claims by Dr. Anthony Fauci that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had made its great leap to infecting humanity via "zoonotic" transmission, and that the Hunan wet market in downtown Wuhan - a market that just happened to be located a few miles away from a Level 4 Biosafety Lab dedicated to ...
Numerous Reports Show That Covid Came From A Lab - Walid ...
https://shoebat.com › 2021 › 06 › 09 › numerous-reports-show-that-covid-came-from-a-lab
The initial narrative was that the first cases of covid were found in a wet market just nine miles from the Wuhan lab. This, unto itself, is a cause to suspect that the virus leaked out of the lab. But later discoveries on the first cases makes the out-of-lab theory even more probable: the first cases were not in a wet market just nine miles ...
Peter Daszak Eco-Fascist Who Orchestrated Global Pandemic
peterdaszak.comThe spike protein is what gives the Corona Virus its unique name. It is the part of the virus that plugs into the ACE2 receptors in human lungs and allows the nano-particle to infect the human body just like plugging a USB cord into a port on your computer. ... like India and African nations. It took nine months for the virus to kill one ...
Wuhan Labs China & Covid-19 | Alien Hub
https://www.alienhub.com › threads › wuhan-labs-china-covid-19.79484
All the dots point to Wuhan labs as producers of a bio weapon known as a bat tweaked virus a.k.a the Corona Virus. It all started in October of 2019 when employees of Wuhan labs became sick and within this pdf there are written phone records of cell phone black outs near the lab occurring. A China Government State Censor immediately cracked down on all the employees at Wuhan labs.
Can we trust Fauci anymore? - Quora
https://www.quora.com › Can-we-trust-Fauci-anymore?share=1
Answer (1 of 15): There isn't anybody ELSE to trust. Fauci is a scientist devoted to his job. Because this virus is new, everybody including Fauci are learning about it as they go. That is, his information will not always be perfect, but he is being as accurate as he can be at the moment. Fauci ...
1351: Bug Appetit! - No Agenda
https://www.noagendashow.net › listen › 1351
Consider one of the first examples of Fauci's commentary on Covid-19, given to CNN on January 24, 2020 '' the day after the Wuhan region of China went into draconian lockdown. Asked about the Chinese government's decision, Fauci declared ''That's something that I don't think we could possibly do in the United States, I can't imagine shutting ...
Covid RICO-Level Crime Syndicate Exposed As Never Before ...
https://stateofthenation.co › ?p=73486
Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, DMD, MA, MPH, DNM (hon.), DMM (hon.) is considered a "polymath" by his peers.This award-winning medical science scholar, author, film-maker, consumer health advocate, drug industry critic, and intelligence industry analyst has published twenty-two books (including three American bestsellers), dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, and seven (7) documentary ...
Covid is a accidental Lab leaked bioweapon - International ...
On 9 December 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.
The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory _ The ...
10/23/21, 9:48 PM The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory | The New Yorker 3/19 nucleotides, called a furin cleavage site, might also increase the virus's transmissibility, and lower the species barrier, allowing the virus to jump more easily to humans. "One has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered," he wrote.
Covid 19 and anti-vaxxers | Page 9 | CARM Forums
https://forums.carm.org › threads › covid-19-and-anti-vaxxers.4364 › page-9
Fauci argued in favor of gain of function research, that's not me saying that, that's not right wing ideologues saying that, that is Fauci saying that. Fauci authorized money to the Wuhan lab for gain of function research. The fact that this virus can clearly be identified as engineered, is a big problem for Fauci.
Was covid-19 made in Chinese lab? in a US lab?
https://www.scaruffi.com › politics › covidcon.html
November 2015: Shi's team (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and Ralph Baric's team (University of North Carolina) announce that they have bioengineered (created) a novel coronavirus that can infect human cells. They modified a human SARS virus adapted for mice with a "spike" protein (SHC014-CoV) taken from a horseshoe bat virus.
WUHAN FLU Archives - Timothy Spearman Shakingmyspear.com
shakingmyspear.com › tag › wuhan-flu
A laboratory-based study has revealed that the mutated virus was better at entering human cells than previous versions, say professors Hyeryun Choe and Michael Farzan, at Scripps University in Florida. Changes to the spike protein the virus uses to latch on to human cells has allowed it to "stick together better and function more efficiently."
sf says...: Evidence has been available all along that ...
https://sfsays.blogspot.com › 2021 › 05 › evidence-has-been-available-all-along.html
Mutation is how the SARS1 spike protein gradually got better at targeting civet cells instead of bat cells, then started targeting human cells. But mutation is far less likely to have created the furin cleavage site in Covid-19 because the site requires four specific amino acids together, in the right order and in just the right place between ...
Wuhan Institute of Virology « Lawrence Person's ...
https://www.battleswarmblog.com › ?tag=wuhan-institute-of-virology
But since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can't have been manipulated. But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage.
Where Covid Came From [6nq9o2v101lw]
https://idoc.pub › documents › where-covid-came-from-6nq9o2v101lw
On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice: "And we have now found, you ...
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