From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

“the federal government supported dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without adequate transparency or oversight, and that former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci “played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research” to deny it

The U.S. House Oversight & Accountability Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has released its long-awaited After Action Review on COVID-19 and the government response, which affirms the verdict that COVID most likely originated in a lab through gain-of-function research and broadly condemns the lockdowns of personal freedom and economic activity but attempts to walk a far finer and sometimes contradictory line on the COVID vaccines.

Worked on for almost two years, the 520-page report is billed as the “single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date,” according to a press release from the committee.

“This work will help the United States, and the world, predict the next pandemic, prepare for the next pandemic, protect ourselves from the next pandemic, and hopefully prevent the next pandemic. Members of the 119th Congress should continue and build off this work, there is more information to find and honest actions to be taken,” said Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, the chairman of the subcommittee. “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”

The report concludes that COVID most likely “emerged as the result of a laboratory or research related accident,” that the federal government supported dangerous gain-of-function research (that entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects) in Wuhan, China without adequate transparency or oversight, and that former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci “played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research” to deny it, as well as prompting creation of the controversial “Proximal Origins” paper to attempt to discredit the lab-leak theory.

It further found that officials within NIAID actively attempted to flout Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents on the matter, such as by intentionally misspelling various names and terms so they would be harder to find in word searches.

The report goes on to conclude that the enormous sums of money the government doled out in the name of COVID relief was rife with waste and abuse, including more than $191 billion in unemployment fraud, $64 billion worth of fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program, and the loss of $200 billion due to the Small Business Administration failing to implement proper oversight and controls.

Meanwhile, the infamous “social distancing” guidance for people to stand at least six feet apart was based on “no scientific trials or studies,” but despite admitting as much, Fauci declined to push back because, in his words, it was “not appropriate to be publicly challenging a sister organization.” Face masks were similarly unsupported by the science and ultimately proven to be ineffective at limiting COVID’s spread, and widespread lockdowns of businesses and public gatherings caused significant harm to the economy, to physical and mental health, and to children’s education and social development far outweighing whatever good they may have done.

On the subject of the controversial COVID vaccines, however, the report is far more deferential. It acknowledges that the shots “had adverse events that must be thoroughly investigated,” and discusses various shortcomings in the government’s reporting systems for adverse vaccine events but still concludes that, overall, the vaccines were “largely safe and effective,” and credits them with saving “millions” of lives.

Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration initiative to develop vaccines for COVID in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take, “was a tremendous success,” the subcommittee says, and the resulting vaccines “undoubtedly saved millions of lives by diminishing likelihood of severe disease and death.” It even faults President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who were running against Donald Trump for the White House at the time, for “question(ing) the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations” before they were released.

At the same time, the report faults the following Biden administration for mandating the shots and rushing approval of vaccine booster doses, downplaying natural immunity, failing to properly adjudicate vaccine injuries, and exaggerating the vaccines’ value.

“COVID-19 vaccines were tremendously important in reducing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and were extremely effective in doing so,” the report claims. “However, the Biden Administration oversold the power of these vaccines. On more than one occasion, President Biden himself overstated the vaccine’s ability to prevent infection and transmission. These false statements likely contributed to Americans’ confusion about COVID-19 vaccines and reduced overall vaccine confidence.”

The subcommittee report largely reiterates and aligns with a wealth of previous findings on the failures of lockdowns and forced masking, as well as the origins of COVID-19. On the subject of the vaccines, however, it neglects a large body of evidence of far more widespread harm.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,068 deaths, 218,646 hospitalizations, 22,002 heart attacks, and 28,706 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of October 25, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.

In Florida, an ongoing grand jury investigation into the vaccines’ manufacturers is slated to release a report on the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, and a lawsuit by the state of Kansas has been filed accusing Pfizer of misrepresentation for calling the shots “safe and effective.” The findings of both efforts are highly anticipated.

All eyes are currently on returning President Trump, and whose health team, which will be helmed by prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health & Human Services, has given mixed signals as to the prospects of reconsidering the shots for which he has long taken credit, and has nominated both critics and defenders of establishment COVID measures for a number of administration roles.

From Todd Bensman from the Center for Immigration Studies as posted in The Federalist

Americans deserve a full-scale investigation into what happened in Chicago and how to prevent the next open-borders-enabled attack on U.S. soil.

Surprisingly little news coverage followed America’s first terror attack by an illegal border-crossing immigrant on U.S. soil. On Saturday, 22-year-old Mauritanian Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi was found dead of an apparent hanging suicide in his Cook County, Illinois jail cell. America must learn from this to prevent the next attacks on U.S. soil by border-infiltrating jihadists.

Abdallahi illegally jumped the border from Tijuana to San Diego in March 2023 and was freed by U.S. Border Patrol. Under orders from the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol has released millions of illegal entrants into the United States in the last four years.

On October 26, Abdallahi allegedly hunted down and shot in the back an identifiably Orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue, then tried to up the body count by attacking responding police while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Abdallahi still didn’t quit shooting even after police wounded him. Somehow he, the police, and the victim all survived.

This benchmarking story of America’s first terror attack by a border-crossing jihadist was largely ignored by national news media even though it came just before the brewing political war between pro-illegal immigrant Democrats and an incoming Trump administration promising an illegal immigration crackdown largely on national security grounds.

Now there will not even be a trial. Abdallahi’s sudden exit is no doubt privately regarded as a gift to pro-open borders advocates, their media sympathizers, and Democrat elected officials. But independent media and elected government must press for further details to prevent the next border-crossing terrorist attack.

What We Know So Far

At a late November arraignment reported on by a Chicago Fox News affiliate and the Chicago Sun-Times, prosecutors revealed that, while working at an Amazon warehouse, Abdallahi carefully planned his attack on Jewish targets due to jihadist ideology.

“This was not anything but a planned attack…an attempted assassination of these people,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne McCord Rodgers told the court. “This was a calculated plan, on a public street…and attempted slaughter of that person and law enforcement officers.”

Abdallahi had mapped out the locations of two Chicago synagogues and a Jewish community, the conservative Chicago Sun-Times reported November 21. The search history also included “Jewish Community Center” and a gun store in suburban Lyons.

Once he shot the man in the back, Abdallahi displayed a relentless desire to increase his body count and seemed tactically aware of how to take out hard human targets like police officers. For example, his gun apparently jammed after shooting the Jewish victim, prosecutors said. He reportedly had the presence of mind to retreat to cover, fix the jam, then return to finish off the victim, but then retreated to cover again as first responders approached.

Abdallahi drove a few blocks around them, then returned on foot from a new direction and opened fire on four police officers and two paramedics tending the wounded man, prosecutors alleged. He then allegedly fired on the ambulance, hitting it twice as a fifth police officer returned fire.

Wounded, finally, Abdallahi fell. But he rose repeatedly to allegedly fire on the police even more before finally collapsing. Miraculously, none of his intended victims were hit.

This Case Has National Implications

The untold full story of Abdallahi’s illegal border crossing and attack in Chicago the next year, of course, goes beyond the evidence so far showing Abdallahi followed a violent ideology. Americans can no longer regard the possibility of Islamic terrorist infiltration from the southern border as merely a hypothetical bogeyman. Because of Chicago, no longer can the warnings of homeland security professionals like those quoted in my America’s Covert Border War book be dismissed as anti-immigrant fearmongering.

This terror attack and police gunbattle with an alleged border-crossing jihadist instead firmly justifies bipartisan public inquiry, public and private investigation, and analysis about border security policy that can stop future Abdallahis. After September 11, 2001, America justifiably worried about fixing the broken U.S. visa systems that 9/11 hijackers easily defrauded to enter the United States for that larger attack.

So far, the institutional media and government powers-that-be have managed to box up the Chicago incident as a mere local affair. It’s not even charged as a federal terrorism case.

Under pressure from Chicago’s Jewish community for Chicago officials to publicly acknowledge that a local Jewish man was violently attacked based on his religion, Cook County’s far-left, George Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (who leaves office next year) eventually charged Abdallahi with terrorism, under Illinois’ circa-9/11 terrorism statute.

This case demands intense national attention. Chicago’s attack is an uncontestable confirmation of the terrorism threat inherent in open borders policies. President Donald Trump promised throughout his campaign to reverse Democrats’ open border, catch-and-release policies. Yet open-borders advocates are organizing to wage political, information, and legal warfare to defeat Trump’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. Front-and-center attention on the Chicago terrorist attack would provide Americans the context they deserve during the melee over Trump’s planned illegal immigration fixes.

If the Chicago terror attack is allowed to fade away after Abdallahi’s burial, Americans will have been robbed of their ability to loudly petition for protection from the next such terror attack. The next attack could easily target the towns now vowing to “Trump-proof” themselves against policies that would deport other Abdallahis before they also can attack.

Questions Americans Deserve Answered

Failing to investigate this incident will likely leave the doors open to more such attacks. So far, there’s been no public sign of FBI or Department of Justice involvement in the Chicago case, as would be ordinary when Islamic terrorism is indicated in any attack on U.S. soil.

Ceding this case entirely to state and local authorities with less counterterrorism training and intelligence resources leaves too much on the table. For example: are co-conspirators or sympathizers who urged Abdallahi on still out there? Did foreign terrorism masters direct Abdallahi? Chicago police may be well-meaning and reasonably resourced, but counterterrorism is the FBI’s unique province.

If the bureau is not involved, why not? If it is, good, but to what extent did the FBI follow leads and intelligence and provide the results to Chicago PD (which may not hold the security clearances to ingest such information)? Might Chicago, a sanctuary city, even have refused to collaborate with the FBI for partisan reasons during a hotly contested presidential campaign?

Abdallahi reportedly did not flag on any terrorism or criminal databases when Border Patrol detained him in San Diego Sector. Was he ever detained and referred to the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team or Immigration and Customs Enforcement intelligence officers for extended terrorism-related interviews? That is supposed to happen with “special interest aliens,” who get assigned that tag if they hail from designated countries of terrorism concern like Mauritania.

According to material obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request, Border Patrol apprehended 18,260 Mauritanians illegally crossing the U.S. southern border from 2021 through December 2023. ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Mourabitoun, and other violent Islamist groups operate throughout the Sahel region of northwest Africa, which includes Mauritania, according to many credible sources about international terrorism.

Face-to-face interviews with Mauritanians and all other special interest aliens can be the difference between deporting a dangerous terrorist or letting one into the country. Have those happened with those 18,260 Mauritanians admitted to the U.S. in just three years? Will they?

Abdallahi is dead. But his case presents a rare opportunity for the traditional bastions of government accountability to get interested and get to work with this last question in mind: Is a Jewish Chicagoan the first American to be shot by a border-crossing jihadi, or the last?