Ingrained narratives are hard to correct. In his biographical essay “Why Orwell Matters,” Christopher Hitchens quotes George Orwell on the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” Orwell knew it was difficult but important to pull back from our political affiliations, biases and past conclusions to reckon with uncomfortable realities and potentially explosive questions — questions such as: What if Robert Redfield is right about the Wuhan labs?

Before Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the coronavirus outbreak, endorsed it, the mere discussion of the still-unproven theory that the covid-19 outbreak might have been connected to human error at a research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan was considered taboo. The issue of the virus’s origin has been horrendously politicized, by both the right and the left. The Chinese government and U.S. scientists who are close associates of the Wuhan scientists doing bat coronavirus research have tarred anyone who uttered it as conspiracy theorists, or worse (in their eyes), as pro-Trump.

And although it’s true the Trump administration contributed to this politicization, it’s also true that the Biden administration has confirmed some of the Trump team’s factual claims about suspicious and still-undisclosed work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which amounts to a direct challenge to the lab’s claim that it has been transparent and honest.



Then, on Tuesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rebuked the findings of the WHO’s own joint study with Chinese scientists into the origins and explicitly called for more investigation into the lab-accident theory. The United States and 13 other countries also issued a joint statement calling for a “transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence.”

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me we must begin a difficult, uncomfortable conversation about this investigation’s scope and the vast implications if the theory is true. He said the entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-of-function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined.

“The very fact that it could have been of laboratory origin, even if that cannot be substantiated, means we need to understand that there is risk in this research that may have triggered the current pandemic and surely could trigger a future pandemic,” he said.

Flinders University medical professor Nikolai Petrovsky, one of more than two dozen scientists, including Ebright, who signed an open letter calling for a full and independent investigation into covid-19’s origins, told me the Chinese government now realizes it can’t prevent a real investigation into the Wuhan labs and therefore is calling for all such labs worldwide to be investigated. And that, he says, is actually a great idea.

“I agree this is entirely appropriate, although clearly most of the immediate focus would need to be on the Wuhan labs, given their geography and the work they were doing,” he said.

If Redfield is right, that would mean China bears some accountability for the outbreak, which will greatly complicate already tense relations. If Redfield is right, that would also mean the U.S. government had a big role in supporting the research that resulted in the pandemic outbreak. If Redfield is right, the current response plan could greatly increase, not reduce, the risk of another pandemic.

These are all very unpleasant facts. But facts are stubborn things. And we have no choice but to pursue all possible theories and accept whatever truth the facts lead to. This must be done in a nonpolitical way, to show Beijing and the world that we still have the ability to place public health and truth above the narratives to which we have become beholden.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-if-the-former-cdc-director-is-right...

https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis_of_the_origins_of_c...

Page 34

Q. Do you recall at some point somebody,
anybody, raising concerns to you in January of 2020
at the beginning of the outbreak or near
the beginning of the outbreak that the virus might
have been genetically engineered or originated in a
laboratory?

A. There was a phone call in late January of
2020, I believe, from Jeremy Farrar. There was one
other person on the phone. I believe it was
Christian Anderson, who piped me in on a three-way
call, saying that they looked at the virus and there
was some concern about the molecular configuration or
makeup of the virus that made them think there was a
possibility that there could have been a manipulation of the virus.

Q. Before that, had anyone raised a concern like that to you?
A. To my recollection, no.
Q. How about Robert Redfield? Who's he?
A. Robert Redfield at the time was the
director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.

Q. Did he call you in mid January 2020 and
raise that kind of concern about whether or not the
virus originated from nature or in a laboratory?
A. To my recollection, no. I know that Bob
today talks about that. I don't recall back in
January of 2020 whether Bob was involved or not in
any discussion about the manipulation of the virus.
https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/135885afauci112322_full_re...

July 12, 202

(Natural News) Virologist Dr. Robert Redfield said he thinks the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) was modified by Chinese scientists before it leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China’s central Hubei province. The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) added that the COVID-19 virus’s ability to jump from an animal to a human is not “biologically plausible.” While earlier reports claimed that the pathogen came from bats, newfound evidence suggests it originated in the WIV lab, which has sparked an ongoing debate.

Redfield doubled down on his belief of the lab leak theory in a June 15 interview with Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel. He said that the virus’s ability to spread rapidly has never been seen in other coronaviruses. And while most coronaviruses can cross over from animals to humans, zoonosis usually occurs at a much slower pace than what was seen with the Wuhan coronavirus.

“I said before that I didn’t think it was biologically plausible that COVID-19 went from a bat to some unknown animal into [humans], and now had become one of the most infectious viruses. That’s not consistent with how other coronaviruses have come into the human species,” said Redfield, who suspects that the COVID-19 virus, although unintentionally leaked, had undergone genetic tweaks.

According to Siegel, Redfield had a hunch that the Wuhan coronavirus leaked from the WIV laboratory as early as January 2020. However, the White House Coronavirus Task Force at the time was focused on what was happening in country.

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters received criticism for espousing the lab leak theory in 2020. Just recently, President Joe Biden ordered the closure of a state department investigation led by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the possibility. But as evidence supporting the theory came to light, Biden himself announced a new 90-day investigation on the matter.

[highlight]Redfield criticizes Fauci and the World Health Organization
In his interview with Siegel, Redfield also took a swipe at infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci. Redfield compared the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to a “dog holding on tightly to a bone” with his insistence on COVID-19’s natural origins.

“Other individuals – Tony Fauci, for example – would prefer to support that it evolved from nature. I think Tony is holding on to this [theory] tightly. Why would that be? Sometimes, scientists bite into a bone on a hypothesis. It’s hard for them to move on,” the former CDC director commented.

True enough apparently, as recently publicized emails from the infectious disease expert showed his staunch support of the coronavirus’s natural origins theory. One email sent to him back in January 2020 warned that the COVID-19 virus appeared to be “possibly engineered” upon closer scrutiny — a warning Fauci seemed to have dismissed, as the NIAID director never once mentioned this information in any of his interviews.

In his email to Fauci, Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institutein California, wrote: “On a phylogenic tree, the virus looks normal and the close clustering with bats suggest [they] serve as the reservoir. [One] has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features ‘potentially’ look engineered.”
https://wwsg.com/speaker-news/former-cdc-director-scientists-modified-coronaviru...

Feb 2, 2023

It was first recognised in the UK in late January 2020 and a major wave of infection became obvious in February and March 2020, when the Government panicked and on the advice of SAGE and modellers introduced a totally unnecessary lockdown as, by the time it was introduced the first wave was decreasing.

It was rapidly established that the cause of Covid was a coronavirus and that it was different from the two previous outbreaks, namely SARS-1, which involved direct bat transmission to an intermediary animal known as the civet, and MERS, which broke out in the Middle East and involved camels as the intermediate.

When the virus was identified and sequenced and called SARS-COV-2 it was immediately assumed by all that this clearly had come from a bat and hunt for an intermediate, especially in the meat markets, was sought.

The narrative around the world that this was clearly a virus that had come directly from a bat (and possibly involving another animal) at the notorious wet markets in Wuhan, which were not that far from a major virology institute, known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). It was not unrealistic to assume that Covid was the cause of another jump from a bat to a human coronavirus because the last two epidemics had been shown to be just that.

As soon as the virus sequence was published my colleagues in Norway, Birger Sørensen and Andres Susrud immediately assessed the sequence with regards to designing an optimal vaccine.

Whilst looking closely for these features it became immediately obvious that this virus was extremely unlikely to have come from a bat, even via another animal, as it had inserts around the receptor binding region and - a feature not present on any similar virus - that would make it more infectious.

Moreover, these features had been previously published by researchers in Wuhan, which was the largest coronavirus research laboratory in the world.

We, therefore, concluded that the chances that this virus was not natural but had escaped from the laboratory were extremely high and pointed out that SARS-1 had escaped from high-security laboratories on over six occasions since its isolation.


We wrote a manuscript and shared it with the Government, Cabinet and scientific advisors saying that it was extremely likely that this was a laboratory escape and had clear and present security implications. Imagine our surprise when we were told quite categorically that there was no way it could have been a laboratory escape and was a natural zoonosis. We tried to publish this on many occasions and each and every one of the top journals, including Nature, Science, The Lancet and many others refused to publish this as it was not in the public interest.



Indeed, he was so intent on quashing any evidence of the origin that he commissioned a paper from a group of scientists, who we now know also had concerns that it may not be natural but nevertheless, they published the paper in Nature Medicine saying all the evidence showed it was completely natural and was not a laboratory leaked virus.

This paper was published in Nature Medicine and then used by Tony Faucci as absolute proof that it was not a lab leak.

What was incredible was that this narrative was picked by governments throughout the world, all the mainstream media and the majority of scientists, who should have known better than to accept the narrative rather than look at the evidence.

Birger Sorensen and I were only able to get our observations out under the disguise of a vaccine paper, which was published in QRB Discovery, a journal with a biophysics bent which appreciated our argument that the inserts affected the charge of the virus and this was why it was able to be so infectious.

Although ignored, this paper was soon to be downloaded a record of over a quarter of a million times!

The narrative that this could not have possibly come from a laboratory, even though it was very strange the outbreak should have occurred in a place not known for coronavirus outbreaks, was so strongly adhered to that even in the West any suggestion that it may have been due to a laboratory accident was shut down with cries of xenophobia.

Among many other put-downs was the allegation this was some sort of conspiracy theory.
The ‘lab leak as conspiracy theory’ narrative was so strong that it ended up censoring discussion on all the social media networks and only scientists who produced theories or suggestions that it came from a bat in an original roundabout way were allowed any voice.

China’s put-down was especially strong and it was so very obvious that they were covering up something as all specimens and databases were either altered or withdrawn

Anyone read the 364 pages where Fauci said i don't recall over 175 times?

A classified US report based on new intelligence has made a stunning assertion about what caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

February 27, 2023

The virus that causes Covid-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory, according to a classified US report based on new intelligence and recently sent to the White House.

The stunning assertion by the US Energy Department comes more than a year after the FBI concluded a lab accident in China was the origin of the pandemic, which has killed more than 6.8 million people around the world, including 1.1 million in the US and more than 19,000 in Australia, New York Post reports.

The FBI’s finding was made with “moderate confidence” and remains the bureau’s opinion, said The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Energy Department’s own finding on Sunday.

But the judgment is considered important because the Energy Department – which oversees the American nuclear weapons program – runs a network of national labs and has a great deal of scientific expertise, the Journal said.

Last year, Senate Republicans released an interim report that found the virus most likely leaked out of a Chinese lab and that “the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of accuracy”.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the centre of suspicion since US intelligence learned that three researchers there fell ill and had to be hospitalised in November 2019, shortly before China confirmed the Covid-19 outbreak.

Some former US officials previously told the Journal that the workers were involved in coronavirus research.

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/bombshell-new-us-report-about-c...

A total no-brainer. A mad Pommie scientist created BaronVonRort by capturing a wet fugitive fart, wrapping fetid carrion around it, and releasing it into the wild.