COVID-19
Evidence on the origin of Covid leads to lab in Wuhan – Former NY Times Science Editor
In the millions of articles, opinion pieces, and news stories written about Covid there is one topic that is more important than all the others. It’s more important than masks, vaccines, or lockdown measures. The origin of the virus is critical because no matter how many people die from covid, or how many businesses are wiped out, it’s critical that IF the next virus can be stopped, it mu st be.
A science writer named Nicholas Wade has written the most thorough study on the origins of Covid to be released to the public. Wade has worked with Nature, Science, and the New York Times, but this article was released on the public platform Medium. In this article Wade goes through three possible scenarios and then draws the most likely conclusion. This is a long read, but it might be the most important article yet written during this pandemic.
Here is the beginning of this extensive article from Medium. Click here to read the full article on Medium.
Origin of Covid — Following the Clues
Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
Nicholas Wade
I’m a science writer and have worked on the staff of Nature, Science and, for many years, on the New York Times. [email protected]
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 obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.
In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.
By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.
The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.
I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.
A Tale of Two Theories
After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.
The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged to a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the only other point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.
Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.
From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.
Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”
Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.
A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.
The discussion part their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus”. But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.
The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.
First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.
If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). 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. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.
The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.
Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.
And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.
Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.
The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.
Doubts about natural emergence
Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.
This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.
And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.
Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic?
To read the rest of this article on Medium click here
Nicholas Wade
I’m a science writer and have worked on the staff of Nature, Science and, for many years, on the New York Times. [email protected]
By the way.. Medium is a fascinating place. If you haven’t checked it out yet here’s a link to medium.com.
From About Medium:
We’re an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Our purpose is to spread these ideas and deepen understanding of the world.
COVID-19
Pro-freedom Canadian nurse gets two years probation for protesting COVID restrictions
Ontario nurse Kristen Nagle
From LifeSiteNews
Ontario nurse Kristen Nagle, a well-known figure in Canada’s pro-freedom movement during COVID, said her sentence of two-years probation is effectively a way for the government to silence her for the foreseeable future.
A Canadian nurse found guilty of violating Ontario’s COVID rules for participating in an anti-lockdown rally and speaking out against COVID mandates says despite scoring a recent “half-win” in court, her two-year probation sentence is designed to stop her from “speaking out or going against public health measures.”
“The Crown wanted an egregious amount of $50,000. They saw my GiveSendGo, they saw the support, they saw that I was not deterred by the $20,000 sentencing and so they wanted to sentence me for $50,000- and two-years’ probation,” said Canadian nurse Kristen Nagle in a Facebook video posted on March 21.
“So, kind of a half-win, the JP (justice of peace) agreed to the two years’ probation, I don’t really know what that looks like, what that means yet, but I’m under two years’ probation, I don’t know, and $7,500. And $7,500, is really not that bad compared to $50,000.”
Nagle was heavily involved with the activist group Canadian Frontline Nurses and became a well-known face from those in the medical community in Canada who protested both the mRNA COVID jabs and lockdown dictates imposed by all levels of government.
She worked at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) in Ontario before being terminated in 2021 for attending anti-lockdown rallies in 2020. She resigned from the College of Nurses of Ontario in January 2023.
Nagle was found guilty by a court in February for violating Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Reopening Ontario Act (RAO), after she attended and spoke at an anti-lockdown rally on January 22, 2022, in London, Ontario.
At the end of March, a court ruled against the Crown’s requested $50,000 fine, and instead fined Nagle $7,500, plus a victim surcharge, which brought the total to $9,375, along with two years’ probation.
The event that led to Nagle being charged had a crowd size of some 150 people, which was over the allowed 10-person limit that was in place at the time.
Nagle’s current GiveSendGo fundraising page lists regular updates regarding the various charges incurred for speaking out against COVID mandates.
While the Ontario government and mainstream media consistently championed lockdowns as a means of halting the transmission of the highly survivable coronavirus, LifeSiteNews reported from the beginning that many experts were warning that lockdowns would inflict more harm than the virus itself.
Probation sentence a tool to discourage ‘speaking out,’ nurse says
Nagle said her two-year probation now means she “[c]annot commit a crime,” and “must keep the peace” and be on “good behavior and not commit the same offense,” which she said would impede her ability to speak freely.
“It just seems crazy that when this probation is over it will be 2026! That to me just seemed absurd to think this is still looming in the background until then,” she noted in a recent email to her followers.
“It was difficult to listen to them talk about the possibility of the next thing, and that we can’t have people going against public health measures in a crisis. It would be naive of them to think that we won’t find ourselves in something similar again, so this probation is to stop me from speaking out or going against public health measures should another ‘public health emergency’ find us again,” she added.
She also thanked everyone for their support in helping her, as well as everyone’s “encouragement, prayers, and financial contributions throughout the years!”
“You have no idea how much it has meant to me and my family and lifted up my spirits when I thought I could not go on!” she wrote in her email.
“Thank you for everything! It has meant more to me than words I am able to express!”
Earlier this year, Nagel was also found guilty of two charges under the RAO for attending as well as organizing another rally in November of 2020. She was fined $20,000.
Another charge against Nagle for attending an anti-lockdown protest was withdrawn.
In 2022, she was fined $10,000 for attending an Easter church service during Ontario’s COVID lockdowns in the spring of 2021, at the Aylmer Church of God. She appealed the fine, which was later reduced to $3,750.
As recently reported by LifeSiteNews, some healthcare workers who refused to get the COVID jabs were successful in getting positive rulings from arbitrators.
Indeed, two workers from a Toronto area hospital who chose not to get the COVID shots and were then fired from their jobs were wrongfully terminated, an arbitrator ruled.
Many other recent rulings have gone in favor of those who chose to not get the shots and were fired from their jobs as a result.
Draconian COVID mandates, including those surrounding the experimental mRNA vaccines, were imposed by both the provincial Ford government as well as the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In April 2021, the Ontario provincial government once again increased its COVID measures and declared a state of emergency over rising cases of the virus. It then put in place a complete ban on all outdoor gatherings that, in effect, made peaceful protests illegal in the province.
COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.
The jabs also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result of this, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.
Brownstone Institute
Deborah Birx Gets Her Close-Up
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
According to Birx, she intentionally buried the more draconian elements of the lockdowns in text at the end of long documents, theorizing (correctly apparently) that most reporters or readers would just “skim” the document and would not focus on how extreme and unprecedented these mandates actually were.
Most Americans will remember Dr. Deborah Birx as the “scarf lady” who served on the White House’s Covid Response Team beginning in February 2020.
According to a recently-released (but little-seen) 24-minute mini-documentary, it was Birx – even more so than Anthony Fauci – who was responsible for government “guidelines,” almost all of which proved to be unnecessary and disastrous for the country.
According to the documentary, the guidelines ran counter to President Trump’s initial comments on Covid, but ultimately “toppled the White House (and Trump) without a shot being fired.”
The mini-documentary (“It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump”) was produced by Good Kid Productions. Not surprisingly, the scathing 24-minute video has received relatively few views on YouTube (only 46,500 since it was published 40 days ago on Feb. 26).
I learned of the documentary from a colleague at Brownstone Institute, who added his opinion that “Birx (is) far more culpable than Fauci in the Covid disaster…Well worth the time to see the damage an utter non-scientist, CIA-connected, bureaucrat can do to make sure things are maximally bad.”
I agree; the significant role played by Birx in the catastrophic national response to Covid has not received nearly enough attention.
Brought in from out of Nowhere…
From the video presentation, viewers learn that Birx was added to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force as its coordinator in latter February 2020.
Birx worked closely with Task Force chairman Vice President Mike Pence, a man one suspects will not be treated well by future historians.
According to the documentary, “career bureaucrats” like Birx somehow seized control of the executive branch of government and were able to issue orders to mayors and governors which effectively “shut down the country.”
These bureaucrats were often incompetent in their prior jobs as was Birx, who’d previously served as a scientist (ha!) in the Army before leading the government’s effort to “fight AIDS in Africa” (via the PEPFAR Program).
When Birx was installed as coordinator of Covid Response she simply rehashed her own playbook for fighting AIDS in Africa, say the filmmakers.
The three tenets of this response were:
- “Treat every case of this virus as a killer.”
- “Focus on children,” who, the public was told, were being infected and hospitalized in large numbers and were a main conduit for spreading the virus.
- “Get to zero cases as soon as possible.” (The “Zero Covid” goal).
The documentary primarily uses quotes from Scott Atlas, the White House Task Force’s one skeptic, to show that all three tenets were false.
Argued Atlas: Covid was not a killer – or a genuine mortality risk – to “99.95 percent” of the population. Children had virtually zero risk of death or hospitalization from Covid. And there was no way to get to “zero cases.”
Atlas Didn’t Shrug, but was Ignored…
Furthermore, the documentary convincingly illustrates how the views of Atlas were ignored and how, at some point, his ability to speak to the press was curtailed or eliminated.
For example, when Atlas organized a meeting for President Trump with Covid-response skeptics (including the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) this meeting was schedule to last only five minutes.
The documentary also presents a report from the inspector general of the Department of State that was highly critical of Birx’s management style with the African “AIDS relief” program she headed.
Among other claims, the report said she was “dictatorial” in her dealings with subordinates and often “issued threats” to those who disagreed with her approach.
Shockingly, this highly-critical report was published just a month before she was appointed medical coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force.
A particularly distressing sound bite from Birx lets viewers hear her opinion on how controversial “guidance” might be implemented with little pushback.
According to Birx, she intentionally buried the more draconian elements of the lockdowns in text at the end of long documents, theorizing (correctly apparently) that most reporters or readers would just “skim” the document and would not focus on how extreme and unprecedented these mandates actually were.
The documentary points out that Birx’s prescriptions and those of President Trump were often in complete conflict.
Birx, according to the documentary, once pointed this out to Vice President Pence, who told her to keep doing what she believed.
Indeed, the Vice President gave Birx full use of Air Force 2 so she could more easily travel across the country, spreading her lockdown message to governors, mayors, and other influencers.
Several Covid skeptic writers, including Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute, have noted that President Trump himself went from an opponent of draconian lockdowns to an avid supporter of these responses in a period of just one or two days (the pivotal change happened on or around March 10th, 2020, according to Tucker).
Whoever or whatever caused this change in position, it does not seem to be a coincidence that this about-face happened shortly after Birx – a former military officer – was named to an important position on the Task Force.
(Personally, I don’t give Anthony Fauci a pass as I’ve always figured he’s a “dark master” at manipulating members of the science/medical/government complex to achieve his own desired results.)
This documentary highlights the crucial role played by Deborah Birx and, more generally, how unknown bureaucrats can make decisions that turn the world upside-down.
That is, most Americans probably think presidents are in charge, but, often, they’re really not. These real rulers of society, one suspects, would include members of the so-called Deep State, who have no doubt installed sycophants like Fauci and Birx in positions of power.
I definitely recommend this 24-minute video.
A Sample of Reader Comments…
I also enjoyed the Reader Comments that followed this video. The first comment is from my Brownstone colleague who brought this documentary to my attention:
“… As I said, things can change over the period of 20 years but in the case of Birx/Fauci, I do not believe so. I have never seen people entrenched in the bureaucracy change.”
Other comments from the people who have viewed the mini-documentary on YouTube:
“Pence needs to be held accountable.”
“What does Debbie’s bank account look like?”
“(The) final assessment of President Trump at the 23:30 mark is, while painful, accurate. He got rolled.”
“This is very hard to find on YouTube. You can literally search the title and it doesn’t come up.”
“Excellent summary, hope this goes viral. Lots of lessons to learn for future generations.”
“Eye opening. Great reporting.”
Post from One Month Ago…
“37 likes after 3 years of the most controversial and divisive action in recent history. How can this be?”
“Oh never mind. YouTube hid it from the public for years.”
“Probably hasn’t been taken down yet for that reason, relatively low views.”
“Thanks for this! Sounds like everyone below President Trump was on a power trip and I didn’t think it was possible to despise Pence more than I already do.”
“…the backing of CDC, legacy media, WHO and government schools, business folding in fear are ALL responsible. Accountability for every person and agency is paramount!”
“Should be noted that her work on AIDS in Africa was just as useless and damaging.”
“First, any mature, adult woman who speaks with that much vocal fry should be immediately suspect. And the glee with which she recounts her role at undermining POTUS is remarkable and repulsive. This woman should NEVER be allowed to operate the levers of power again.”
Republished from the author’s Substack
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