Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his Democrat constitutes attempted damage control when news started to break that the virus originated from a Wuhan lab leak. 

Guardian reporter Jimmy Tobias obtained unredacted emails through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that details a teleconference between Fauci and several virologists discussing the coronavirus and its possible origins on February 1, 2020. 

Although Fauci and health officials downplayed the fact that the virus came from a lab leak, the emails indicate that at the time they were very concerned that that possibility was true. 

In one thread of emails, scientist Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, warned Fauci of the “wild west,” referring to either the landscape of infectious disease research in China or the WIV specifically.

Infectious disease researcher Kristian Andersen put the idea of alerting the FBI and MI5 regarding the furin cleavage site on the spike protein of COVID-19, however, Fauci ignored her concern and decided not to take her advice. 

Because he knew.

Related: The Chinese have finally had enough. It’s about damned time.

Daily Mail: …largest anti-government protests since Tiananmen Square

There have been developments (go to the original for the links);

On Instagram follow China Uncensored, Northern Square or Shanghai Observed. On Twitter, follow the Wall Street Journal’s chief China correspondent Lingling Wei or the WSJ’s Stella Yifan Xie, Fan Wenxin and Cao Li, and Deutsche Welle’s East Asia correspondent William Yang has been doing amazing work. Also Songpinganq, who monitors Chinese TikTok posts that the censors can’t keep up with and transmits them via a VPN that burrows under Xi Jinping’s Great Firewall, formally known as the Golden Shield Project.

The media is always the last to know: The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

Be sure to read it all.

I have a couple of observations, here and here.

Oh.

For a long time, there was a large and seemingly ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that a lab leak or accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. But there wasn’t a smoking gun, something akin to a confession or a contemporaneous internal communication indicating there had indeed been some sort accident.

Today ProPublica and Vanity Fair report on Toy Reid, a China specialist for the RAND Corporation and a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department, who reviewed hundreds of dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Reid worked as part of a team assembled by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

Oh, a warning that these viruses “come without a shadow and leave without a trace” in November 2019, you say? Hey, did anything unusual happen in Wuhan, China, in the following weeks?

For those wondering about the reliability and authenticity of the documents:

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

Whatever was going on, it was serious enough to be communicated to Xi Jinping, around November 21…

And this is why you come to SDA each day: To get 2022’s news two years in advance.

John Solomon;

Scientists are entertaining the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 not only leaked from a lab but had been genetically modified, based on new research into the “peculiar pattern of unique restriction endonuclease recognition sites” in the virus.

This pattern allows “efficient dis- and re-assembly of the viral genome characteristic of synthetic viruses,” according to the Oct. 20 preprint by mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, Duke University pharmacologist Antonius VanDongen and University of Wurzburg molecular immunologist Valentin Bruttel.

The “fingerprint” of this “stitching” and the “pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses,” the researchers wrote.

“The BsaI/BsmBI restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any wild-type coronavirus, and it is unlikely to evolve from its closest relatives.” […]

“I tried to poke holes in this study, really hard, and I hate its findings,” University College London Genetics Institute Director Francois Balloux wrote in a tweet thread that concluded the preprint “looks solid both conceptually and methodologically.”

Balloux said he was “able to replicate the key findings” and called the paper “by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin.” He predicted “Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint.”

And,

Fauci’s official work calendar from November 2019 to March 2020 suggests he feared the virus didn’t have natural origin, according to Open the Books, which recently obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

It shows Fauci had several previously unreported “top-secret” and “restricted” meetings with the National Security Council in January and February 2020, in venues including the White House Situation Room. Do these meetings “give the impression people-in-the-know thought the virus had a natural origin?” Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski wrote.

See how they narrate: When the most likely explanation becomes “extraordinary claim”.

“I was threatened, my life was threatened”

The former Center for Disease Control and Prevention director who was cast as a conspiracy theorist for saying the evidence supported the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19 – allegedly provoking death threats – claims that the real “conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community.”

Robert Redfield told former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “knew” he funded gain-of-function research that makes viruses more dangerous, and “misled Congress” when he denied it,” but “[n]othing’s going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here.”

“Tony and I are friends, but we don’t agree on this at all,” Redfield said in an interview published in Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle newsletter.

“Everyone had to agree to the narrative” pushed by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, not the Fauci-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away, to avoid becoming a public target of the two officials, he said.

The virologist Redfield told the immunologist Fauci from the “second or third week in January” 2020 that “I’m very concerned that he was championing this theory that it came from animals.”

The particulars of the novel coronavirus, such as the furin cleavage site and the “human” sequence in it, make clear that it’s not from bats, he said. “This thing was manipulated, orchestrated. That cleavage site was created.”

Transmission doesn’t make sense under natural evolution, according to Redfield. “You have a virus that is one of the most infectious viruses in the history of humanity, and yet that virus no longer can infect the bat? … No, this is highly abnormal.”

Via @HansMahncke;

Epic thread from @gdemaneuf who shows in forensic detail how two Chinese “scientists” pushed natural origin while privately saying the opposite.

Tellingly, the two brought in gullible Western scientists as “co-authors” but deliberately hid info from another lab leak from them.

It is epic, grab a beverage.

If at first they don’t succeed;

With all the controversy about gain-of-function research and all the concerns about how dangerous it is, you might think that scientists have stopped doing that kind of work.

Well, no.

In the latest news, a team of scientists in Canada and the U.S. report that they have re-created the 1918 influenza virus and used it to infect macaques. Let’s be clear here: the 1918 flu vanished from the Earth, long ago. It’s simply not a threat, or it least it wasn’t, until someone figured out a way to bring it back.

Interview: Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal the Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.

Prof. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity. In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent.