Speaking of the
Faucisti, our old nemesis Richard Carrier has signed up to join. He issued
a pronouncement about the recent FOIA email dump. I'm especially interested in what he had to say about the lab-leak theory.
Carrier's claim is that there's only one email in the entire treasure trove that's relevant, which is the one in which Kristian Anderson wrote to say that the virus had features that "
suggested manipulation in a lab." Importantly, the letter went on to say that "
Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." The context makes it clear that he's referring to Edward Holmes, Robert Garry, and Michael Ferguson.
Holmes is a virologist who wrote the book "
The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses". Robert Garry is a virologist at Tulane University and is "
managing a consortium of scientists who are developing countermeasures, including diagnostics, immunotherapeutics and vaccines, against Lassa virus, Ebola and Marburg viruses, and other high consequence pathogens."
Mike Ferguson was a PhD biochemist and Professor of Molecular Parasitology at the University of Dundee until 2014. Now he's
Deputy Chair of the Board of Governors at Wellcome Trust. So, this is a group of massive heavy hitters who are in agreement that there's something unnatural about the SARS-cov2 virus.
This email is dated Jan. 31, 2020.
Carrier thinks the only other marginally relevant email is another one in which Fauci "responded politely to someone thanking him for his public denunciations of counter-productive conspiracy thinking". He's probably referring to Fauci's reply to an email from Peter Daszak dated April 18, in which Daszak thanks Fauci for helping to "dispel the myths being spun around the virus origins".
Just two emails? Well, if all Carrier read was the Washington Post debunk of the significance of the emails, that's all he would know. Tucker Carlson did a considerably better job of explaining the seriousness of the situation, and he found several more important emails. (
Chris Martenson also did a video about this, with even more detail, but essentially following Carlson's outline. Hat tip to Chris for explaining this to me first.)
(The first 7:20 deal with the lab leak theory; after that, Carlson talks about vaccines for people who have already had covid-19, and about masks.)
As Carlson points out: immediately after receiving the email from Anderson, Fauci shot back a quick email thanking Anderson for the information. His very next step was to send an email to Hugh Auchincloss, an MD "transplant immunologist" who was Fauci's second-in-command at NIAID. Fauci asked Auchincloss to read Baric & Shi's 2015 paper on gain-of-function research in SARS coronavirus. He told Auschincloss that "Tasks Must Be Done!"
By that afternoon of Feb. 1, a conference phone call had been arranged by Jeremy Farrar, who is the director of Wellcome Trust. According to Wikipedia, the Wellcome Trust is the fourth wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, with an endowment of 29.1 billion British pounds. Carlson shows an email from Farrar to the assembled virologists, reminding them that "Information and discussion is shared in total confidence and is not to be shared until agreement on next steps." The virologists will be discussing a document called "Coronavirus Sequence Comparison".
On Feb. 9th, eight days later, a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-Cov-2" appeared in Nature Medicine correspondence, claiming to offer proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the virus was zoonotic and natural. Its final published form was dated March 17. The authors included Kristian Anderson, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry, all of whom had been convinced of the opposite just days earlier.
On March 19,
a post on Dan Sirotkin's blog absolutely shredded the Nature paper. Sirotkin had already posted
an excellent review of the case for lab origins as of Jan. 31, 2020.
As I remember, that blog post was widely referenced in the alt media at that time, including at Zero Hedge. So it may well have been the actual cause of the hubub in the emails. Or if not, at any rate the lab origins theory was "in the air" at the time.
Writing recently about the "Proximal Origins" paper and another similar one that appeared in The Lancet, the weaponized anthrax specialist Meryl Nass wrote:
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-real-conspirators-who-lied-about.html
These two extraordinarily influential pieces, each simply titled as a "Correspondence," were parroted by the mainstream media for a year. Each was plainly intended to shut down any discussion of a possible lab origin.
I happened to read both Correspondences in March 2020 and it was immediately apparent to me that each was designed as a propaganda tool. Neither had anything to do with science. In fact, the Andersen et al. Correspondence in Nature Medicine butchered the science.
Now, getting back to the Carrier blog post, he writes:
Originally the Wuhan lab-leak theory was solely about the Wuhan lab wholly creating and releasing the coronavirus as a deliberate bioweapon, a theory that remains whackadoo and contrary to all evidence (there is no biowarfare program at that lab; actual bioweapons are vastly deadlier than Covid-19, so it is inherently improbable it would be one; and genetic assays have confirmed there are no human-engineered structures in the virus).
Now, let's review the meaning of "evidence" in a Bayesian framework. If we are comparing two hypothesis, then "evidence" is any information which is more probably under the first hypothesis, than under the second.
Is there a biowarfare program at the Wuhan lab? What sort of evidence could conclusively favor the hypothesis that there is no such program? It's a lab in China, for crying out loud!! Under control of the CCP! It seems obviously conceivable that the CCP could be secretly running a bioweapons program there, and it would be easy to hide all evidence from Americans. If the CCP earnestly proclaims that the research is purely medical, that proves absolutely nothing!
But as it turns out, we do have evidence that biowarfare research could be conducted in Wuhan. I saw this behind the paywall at Martenson's site, but I don't respect his right to keep this private when it's just a link to someone else's website. It turns out that the EcoHealth alliance, which directly funded the gain of function work at Wuhan, also has
absorbed $40 million in Pentagon funding for "militarized pandemic science".
This is actually consistent with the obvious, that there is no conceptual dividing line between militarized GOF research, and medical GOF research. But in this case, we can say that there is also no institutional barrier or distinction, either.
"Actual bioweapons are vastly deadlier than Covid-19"?? Thus speaks Richard Carrier, military strategist? It all depends on the military goal. If the objective is to create fear and loathing, and to destroy a nation's economy, one could hardly do better than the novel coronavirus. But I will concede that it seems much more likely that the mRNA vaccines are the real bioweapon.
"Genetic assays have confirmed there are no human-engineered structures in the virus." Here, I have to give Carrier the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he's taken this Kool Aide straight from the Nature and Lancet papers. The trick was, what does "human engineered" mean? Is this restricted to the classic method of taking a viral substrate and tacking on an extra bit of RNA or DNA to perform some specific protein synthesis task? What about combining one natural virus with another to make a "chimera", is that engineering? Passing a virus through several animal hosts to enhance function through accelerated evolution, is that "engineering"? Because there's plenty of RNA evidence in the SARS-cov2 genome that is easy to explain if the virus is a chimera that has been passed through humanized mice, and virtually impossible to explain as a result of zoonotic processes.
Apparently, as of Feb. 1, 2020, four of the top virologists in the country agreed with Sirotkin and Martenson and me about that. And that fact was important enough that Fauci and Auchincloss and Farrar had to organize a cover-up.
Carrier continues:
Only subsequently was it proposed that it was a naturally-collected virus that that lab was studying and released accidentally (due to poor containment procedures, a known and real problem), which has never been ruled out (more on that point shortly).
This may very well have been suggested in some obscure MSM publication and/or scientific journal, but this is not what anybody has ever meant by the "lab leak theory". Carrier seems to be trying to say that if you parse some of Fauci's denials and/or later admissions carefully, maybe he was talking about this version of the lab leak theory. Which is just a pathetic pseudo-lawyer attempt to get the criminal charges dismissed. Fauci and everybody else knows what we're talking about here. To finish Carrier's train of thought:
Then these two theories became conflated into a third theory: that Covid-19 was a naturally-collected virus subject to a “gain-of-function” study at the Wuhan lab (a method of experimentally making a virus more virulent for medical—not military—research), and then it got out accidentally. This is far more plausible than the original “Wuhan lab-leak” theory, but it has more or less been ruled out. That kind of work leaves unmistakable evidence in the structure of a virus, yet genetic assays of the virus confirm its unique features are too inefficient to likely be of human design, and are entirely in line with known and probable natural viral evolution; indeed it’s evolved more since its release into the world population, than what originally made it virulent in humans.
"Too inefficient"? What the heck does that mean? Carrier provides a helpful link to a Washington Post article (also available at
archive.is if you don't want to send them your money) and here's what it says (my emphasis added):
Understandably then, some people have wondered whether these types of [gain-of-function and chimeric] experiments could have produced SARS-CoV-2. The answer is, in this case, not really. In theory, if you had the right viruses in your catalogue, sure. But there are no indications that anyone had ever seen this virus nor any viruses similar enough to serve as its genetic building blocks before SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the population.
The WaPo goes on to expound at great length, about how the WHO and CDC have asked the Wuhan lab very nicely for a catalog of their experimental virus genomes, and nothing has been released yet. Well, that's convincing! Here's how that's playing in Australia:
Which contains more fascinating revelations about Fauci, including a quote from a 2012 paper in which he explicitly states that GOF research is so important (in his mind) that it justifies the risk of sparking a world-wide pandemic. And a recent interview in which he says that if you're going to to GOF research, for Dawg's sake do it in China rather than risking American lives by doing the work in New Jersey.
Seriously, I kid you not. Now Fauci is just trolling us.
There is a lot more to say about Carrier's post, but I'm not going to say it yet. First I'm going to give him an opportunity to reply.
For some reason, comments on Carrier's website seem to be closed for this particular essay of his. But I am still sending the guy $10 a month on Patreon, so I can post a link there, and call his attention to my concerns.
[Edited Monday 6/7: Strikeout font for incorrect speculation about Sirotkin and Zero Hedge.]
[Edited Tuesday 6/8: Strikeout font to fix misinterpretation of comment box at Carrier's website.]
