For two years I have been amazed at the news media’s non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, “The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp”:

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as “racist,” up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn’t respond to our interview request, said it wasn’t worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

“Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically,” says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It’s also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed’s Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: “Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Here are some excerpts:

In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.

“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the article read.

The article assured much of the media, Washington and the broader infectious disease community that there was no need to scrutinize the labs at the pandemic’s epicenter in Wuhan, China. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is well known for research on SARS-like coronaviruses, including gain-of-function research. Though a “correspondence” and not a formal paper, the article has been cited in the press 2,127 times.

It took 15 months and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to reveal that each of the five authors had expressed private concerns about engineering or the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses.

Also troubling: A confidential teleconference organized by Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar had framed early drafts of the article. But several scientists on the call had undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Two authors were later found to have collaborated with the Wuhan lab or its American partner, EcoHealth Alliance. Another virologist who shaped the article’s central ideas without credit is synonymous with controversial viral engineering.

That article includes a long timeline summarizing important events. Here are the first seven entries of a much longer list:

Summary

January 27, 2020: Fauci learned he funds the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

January 29, 2020: Andersen discovered a paper describing gain-of-function techniques with coronaviruses involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

January 31, 2020: Fauci and Andersen spoke privately. Four virologists, including three authors of the article — Andersen, Holmes and Garry — found the virus to be “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

February 1, 2020: Farrar organized a secret teleconference between the virologists and NIH. Separately, Fauci sought to learn more about which projects NIAID funded at the lab.

February 2, 2020: The virologists exchanged thoughts. Several leaned toward a lab origin. Garry said he cannot understand how SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged naturally after comparing it to RaTG13.

February 4, 2020: A draft was circulated. Holmes, “60-40 lab,” said the draft “does not mention other anomalies as that will make us look like loons.” Andersen derided the idea of an engineered virus as “crackpot” and promoted the phrase “consistent with natural evolution” to scientists outside of the confab.

March 6, 2020: Andersen thanked Farrar, Collins and Fauci for their “advice and leadership.”

Bonus Material – I’ve long followed Vinay Prasad, Hematology Oncology Medicine Health Policy Epidemiology Associate Professor. He has written this article: “We need to strip CDC and Public Health of Powers.” Why? Here are the first 12 reasons from a much longer list:

Why? Public health misused and abused its powers with:

• Closing beaches
• Pouring sand into outdoor skateboard parks
• Discouraging people from outdoor activities
• Lying about the evidence for cloth masks in community settings (to this day)
• Lying about the evidence for masking outside
• Not running any randomized control trials of masking in high income nations
• Pushing masks on 2-year-olds in contrast with world health organization recommendations, evidence, and basic common sense
• Culling animals
• Using the police state to enforce lockdown
• Not letting people hold their father’s hand when their father dies
• Not letting people visit their mother when she’s hospitalized
• Restricting visitor access from parents & siblings to their sick, hospitalized, and dying children

To end things today, Comic Dave Smith responds to a recent article in the Atlantic that seeks pandemic amnesty: