As far back as 2021, I was calling for a COVID reckoning to ascertain who was responsible for the Titanic failure of (in order), public health bureaucrats, the executive branch under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and the media who suppressed vital information and passed on terrible advice without so much as a fact check.
Dr. David Morens, a senior adviser to Fauci during the COVID years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently pleaded guilty to charges that he and two associates tried to hide evidence and used a private email account in defiance of public record laws.
The evidence that Morens was trying to hide from the prying eyes of the inspector general and the media was emails from "Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," writes UnHerd's Christian Parenti.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been uncovering some incredibly risky research that would never have been performed in the United States. But Daszak (a close collaborator with Antony Fauci) received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses.
The purpose of gain-of-function research is to take a bad virus and manipulate its genetic structure to make it worse, i.e., more lethal, more contagious, etc. Some evidence (not a smoking gun but compelling nonetheless) points to the particular strain of bat coronavirus that became COVID-19 escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sometime in the Spring-Summer of 2019.
What exactly were Morens and his pals trying to hide?
"Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China," writes Parenti. "One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the COVID-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019."
Daszak got the grant ostensibly with U.S. intelligence approval, given that the lab was in enemy territory. It's not unreasonable, posits Parenti, to assume that Daszak was tasked with keeping an eye on the Chinese military, who shared space at the WIV with civilian scientists.
Fauci was hip-deep in this conspiracy. One email dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod.
Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.
"According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature," Parenti notes.
However, we no longer need to tramp around in the jungle to find dangerous pathogens. We can just whip one up in a U.S. lab at a prestigious university.
Dr. Huff told Parenti in a phone call, “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain-of-function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”
Thanks to AI, it will be even easier.
We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.
It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.
In the waning hours of the Biden administration, the president's autopen was overheating due to the more than 4,000 mass pardons, clemency actions, and commutations granted to drug dealers, rapists, and Dr. Antony Fauci. No other public health official — such as former CDC Directors Dr. Rochelle Walensky or Dr. Robert Redfield, or former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins — was granted individual preemptive pardons.
What is needed is a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" to get to the bottom of the whole range of failures by society's elites. The Commission should be made up of very few politicians and former public health officials. Most members need to be drawn from the general public, including lawyers, doctors, and ordinary citizens. I think the people who suffered due to the incompetence, the machinations, and the authoritarian rules and regulations created by Fauci and his minions need to be represented on any official or unofficial body looking into this botched response. Until leadership is held accountable under the bright light of full public transparency, the dangerous intersection of unaccountable bureaucracy and high-risk research will remain a ticking time bomb for the next global crisis.
