Early on in the pandemic, those who suggested the virus had escaped from the Wuhan lab were promptly labeled ‘conspiracy theorists.’
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- House Oversight Committee Republicans recently released the contents of emails sent between Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and his boss, then-National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins in 2020
- The emails show Fauci and Collins rapidly agreed to suppress the theory that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. While questions of intentions remain, it seems this decision was made for political reasons
- Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London, who also helped promote the narrative that the lab leak theory was nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory, has publicly stressed that he feared then-president Trump might use evidence of a lab leak to start a war against China
- Grant applications from the EcoHealth Alliance to the NIAID reveal the U.S. was funding the very research that could have resulted in this novel virus. Some of that research was even conducted in the lab in Wuhan, China
- It appears the scientific establishment will cover for China, no matter what the cost, out of fear of being defunded and/or losing scientific credibility and standing. The willingness of U.S. authorities to cover up the origin of SARS-CoV-2 means that countries can now assault us with bioweapons indefinitely, with full impunity
House Oversight Committee Republicans recently released the contents of emails sent between Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), his boss, then-National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins in 2020.
February 1, 2020, Fauci, Collins and 11 other scientists joined a conference call convened by Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London, during which they were told the virus appeared to have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, and that it might have been genetically engineered.
The emails show Fauci and Collins rapidly and unanimously agreed to suppress this evidence and quash anyone promoting the lab leak theory. While questions of intentions remain, it seems this decision was made for political, and not scientific, reasons.
On the one hand, it seems they didn’t want to sour relations with China, and on the other, they may have feared what might happen were their own gain-of-function research, done at the WIV, to be tied to the novel virus.
The COVID Origin Conspiracy
As reported by Nicholas Wade, writing for the City Journal, January 23, 2022:1
“From almost the moment the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now a string of unearthed emails … is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci.
The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.”
In his article, Wade goes through the chain of events, recreated in part using the released emails. The day before that February 1 conference call, four virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute emailed Fauci about the genomic sequence of the virus, which had been published three weeks earlier.
According to Andersen, the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Andersen and his three collaborators, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, Robert F. Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan at Scripps Research, unanimously agreed that the virus wasn’t natural and may have escaped from a lab. Wade writes:2
“… the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells.
Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family.
The furin cleavage site in the COVID virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family — a group called Sarbecoviruses — possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?
A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature:
‘I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature … it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.’”
In his 2021 book, “Spike: The Virus Versus the People,” Farrar admits worrying about the political fallout were these preliminary findings to be true.
“With extremely tense U.S. relations and an unpredictable American president determined to see a biological threat through the distorting lens of nationalism, it didn’t feel too melodramatic to wonder if an engineered virus, either accidentally leaked or intentionally released, might be the sort of thing countries could go to war over,” he wrote.3
A Lie to Prevent War?
Three days after Farrar’s conference call, February 4, 2020, Andersen suddenly changed his tune. In an email, he derided “crackpot” ideas that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent.”
That same day, Farrar sent Fauci a draft of a paper signed by Andersen, Garry, Holmes and two other colleagues, Andrew Rambaut and Ian Lipkin. The paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,”4 was published in its final form in mid-March 2020. In it, they roundly dismissed the lab leak theory and insisted the virus had a natural origin.
Now, even if Andersen was convinced that there was no ill intent involved, why did he scrap the evidence that initially convinced him the virus had to be engineered?
Farrar, in his book, claims that fears of a lab leak were only put to bed after intensive analysis and emergence of new data,5 but the email correspondence doesn’t seem to fit this narrative — unless you believe that a thorough scientific investigation can be neatly wrapped up in three days.
Be that as it may, with “The Proximal Origin” paper, the mainstream press had the ammunition it needed to “debunk” claims of genetic engineering and/or a laboratory release.
Farrar also cosigned an open letter in The Lancet, denouncing the lab leak theory as baseless conspiracy theory. Together, these two “scientific consensus statements” were, for well over a year, used to silence discussion about a lab leak.
Politics, Not Science, At Play
Like Farrar, Collins and Fauci were also more concerned about political ramifications than the scientific truth itself. February 2, 2020, after being told point-blank that the virus appeared manufactured and likely escaped from the WIV, Collins complained that “voices of conspiracy” could do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.”
Even after Andersen’s natural origin statement was published, Collins still fretted about the fact that the lab leak theory wasn’t going away. “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” he asked Fauci in an April 16, 2020, email. Fauci told him to just ignore it, saying it would eventually fade away.
The problem was that emerging data kept pointing to genetic engineering and a lab leak, so the theory just wouldn’t stay buried. Worse yet, grant applications from the EcoHealth Alliance to the NIAID reveal the U.S. was in fact funding the very research that could have resulted in this novel virus.
Those involved still maintain that science, not politics, directed their actions,6 but the evidence tells a different story. How can one explain how initial concerns about genetic engineering within three days shifted to a rock-solid consensus that we were dealing with natural evolution?
At the same time, Farrar, in his book, makes a big deal about his fears that then-president Trump was “seeking to blame the virus on China” and might misuse evidence of a lab leak to start a war.7
Yet we are asked to believe that this supposed fear of war played no role, and that science can indeed change on a dime and be sorted in a matter of days. No, if anything, what this tells us is that the scientific establishment will cover for China, no matter what the cost, out of fear of being defunded and/or losing scientific credibility and standing.
“The willingness of U.S. authorities to cover up the origin of SARS-CoV-2 means that countries can now assault us with bioweapons indefinitely, with full impunity.”
Without doubt, researchers involved in dangerous gain-of-function research want to continue their work — again, regardless of the cost to humanity. As noted by Wade:8
“The repudiation by Andersen, Garry, and Holmes of their original conclusion, expressed in the January 31, 2020, email was of enormous benefit to Collins and Fauci.
Though primary responsibility for any lab leak would rest with Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with Chinese regulatory authorities, Collins and Fauci could share a portion of the blame for having funded gain-of-function research despite its obvious risks and then failing to ensure that grant recipients were taking all necessary precautions.”
The end result of all of this may be just as bad or worse than open kinetic war. The willingness of U.S. authorities to cover up the origin of SARS-CoV-2 means that countries can now assault us with bioweapons indefinitely, with full impunity.
“If there really was a conspiracy surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Congress should search for it,” Wade writes.9 “First, in the still-closed records of the National Institutes of Health and the EcoHealth Alliance. Congress then needs to ask scientists free of outside pressures or conflicts to reassess the probable origin of a virus that has now killed some 5 million people worldwide.”
Not All Scientists Are Trustworthy
In related news, journalist Paul Thacker recently dove into yet another example of science gone wrong:10
“Why do people not ‘trust the science’?” Thacker asks. “Because like all people, scientists are not always trustworthy … It sometimes feels like researchers are striving to give people reasons to doubt science in the age of COVID.
In the most recent example, the DisInformation Chronicle discovered that, in one of the most widely read science journal articles of 2020, researchers wrote that it was a ‘conspiracy theory’ to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic could have started from a lab accident in China.
However, they violated publishing ethics by not disclosing that the article had been secretly edited by two scientists whose lab research involves genetically engineering coronaviruses.
The commentary titled, ‘No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2’11 appeared in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections, which is published by Taylor and Francis. The authors also appear to have bypassed the normal process of peer review, according to emails12 made public by U.S. Right to Know.13”
As reported by Thacker, the commentary was edited by none other than Shi Zhengli of the WIV, and Ralph Baric, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina — both of whom have been conducting the kind of risky gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses thought to have resulted in SARS-CoV-2.
Baric specifically asked not to be cited as having commented on the article prior to submission, which is a direct violation of Taylor and Francis authorship policy. Neither Baric’s nor Zhengli’s names appear in the final article. Funding sources were also omitted.
Beware the Vaccine Industrial Complex
The issue of whether or not we can simply “trust the science” becomes even more pertinent in light of the rise of “the vaccine industrial complex,” where vaccine company executives infiltrate government positions and vice-versa.
In a February 16, 2021, article14 in Singapore Business Times, associate dean at the California Western Law School, James Cooper, warns of the potential for a revolving door to develop between government and the vaccine industry in the wake of COVID-19. If you ask me, that revolving door has already existed for many years.
Cooper cites former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex speech, in which he cautioned against the insidious nature of relations between the government and suppliers of arms. Cooper fears the same kind of insidious relationship is now taking shape with Big Pharma, where science ends up playing second fiddle to profits.
“Since the end of World War II, a strong military-industrial complex has ensured massive profits for weapons suppliers in government procurement programs and prolonged armed conflicts around the world. Could the same be possible for the preventive medical solutions to the pandemic?” Cooper asks.
“After all, in order to maintain the current valuations that companies which make COVID-related vaccines and diagnostic tests enjoy, the pandemic will have to become perpetual …
[T]he unintended consequences of creating a multi-billion-dollar vaccine industry that did not exist just a year ago should not be ignored. In the previous U.S. administration, worries emerged that politics was crowding out science.
There is a risk that science may take a back seat to economics: When faced with the potential of even greater financial rewards, randomized controlled trials and peer-reviewed studies may turn out to be afterthoughts.
To quote Mr. Eisenhower at the end of his speech: ‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’”
Indeed, drug companies are not likely to willingly let go of the mRNA industry that was allowed to prematurely emerge thanks to the supposed emergency of COVID-19. New viruses and new vaccines are the proverbial lock and key to the biggest and most dangerous financial fraud the world has ever known.
The end result of this vaccine industrial complex is the rise of a worldwide totalitarianism and global genocide. Never before has it been more important to scrutinize our government leaders to ascertain their true loyalties.
Subscribe to Mercola Newsletter
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.
The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.
If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.1
City Journal January 23, 20222
City Journal January 23, 20223
The Times January 23, 2022 (Archived)4
Nature Medicine March 17, 2020; 26: 450-4525
The Times January 23, 2022 (Archived)6
The Times January 23, 2022 (Archived)7
The Times January 23, 2022 (Archived)8
City Journal January 23, 20229
City Journal January 23, 202210
Disinformation Chronicle January 11, 202211
Emerging Microbes & Infections February 13, 2020; 9: 505-50712