The claim of a premature announcement is not in any way believable. This was not a leak of, say, the key art in a surprise release of an unannounced work. There were announced dates of release, a cover price of $18 declared, and the availability of preorders through the book vendors, to go along with the ad copy one normally sees with an official rollout. This was the usual publishing push taking place — and for all of that to disappear in a wisp is telling.

So who are the scientists who signed this letter? Numerous experts in the field from across the world have one thing in common: All roads run through Peter Daszak. Daszak, as you may remember, is the President of EcoHealth Alliance, and how NIH grants were funneled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Shi Zhengli. Daszak himself teamed up with Dr. Shi on gain-of-function research studies that created mutated coronavirus versions and then tested those viral strains on animal and human cells. Daszak, who also signed the Lancet letter, has every reason in the world to want to eradicate the lab-leak theory, ultimately because his rear end may be in the sling if it is revealed to be from there.

In my research, I came across a trove of emails from the University of Colorado and the University of Maryland that shows exactly how this letter came to be and that the final words of the piece “we declare no competing interests,” were absolute hogwash.

To start, of the letter’s 27 signatories, 5 of them are either employees or board members of EcoHealth Alliance. //

As we have pointed out, there has already been a conflict of interest for at least 5 of the signatories, but is there more?

Why yes, there is. The above-mentioned email was released by Colorado State University after questions were raised regarding the relationship between the University and EcoHealth Alliance. Turns out, in 2017, Jonathan Epstein, VP with EcoHealth Alliance, attempted to work with the university to import bats to Colorado as a means of studying bat-bourne viruses and how they may transmit to humans. The arrangement was going to be between EcoHealth Alliance, Colorado State University, and…the NIAID, the organization run by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

It seems that every single person who acted as a signatory had a conflict that they didn’t disclose. //

Beyond the fact there is no scientific way that Daszak could have proved that the viral outbreak was absolutely a natural spillover, why was he rushing to immediately call any question regarding the lab a conspiracy theory? This effort started in January of 2020, long before we even knew how severe this was going to be. What did Daszak know that the rest of us didn’t? Would this letter have ever happened had it not been for Peter Daszak? Why would Daszak be circling the wagons before the start of the pandemic?

It has been known for a long time that Dr. Anthony Fauci has supported the gain-of-function research conducted by the EcoHealth Alliance about bat coronaviruses in China. While Fauci has been attempting to distance himself from having any knowledge of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, including those of Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of the organization, newly released emails detail the praise Daszak heaped upon Fauci for his dismissing of the lab-leak theory. //

For Fauci and Daszak to be exchanging emails regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, just months after the initial outbreak goes to show the lack of serious credible look taken into the potential of this lab leak. As previously reported, it took Chinese researchers 14 years to determine with certainty, the source of the SARS-CoV virus from 2003. The same determination about SARS-CoV-2 was made by Chinese Officials and then later by the WHO (in which Daszak participated as a lead) in just a few short weeks.

If this research is for the defense against viral threats, why was it utterly worthless with the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2?

Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:

In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.

It’s extremely significant that Dr. Baric is saying that we need to investigate the potential of accidental release, considering how intimately he has been involved in the gain-of-function research that could have led to this pandemic. Certainly, one possibility is that scientists and our government officials (like Fauci) believed that an accidental lab leak occurred or perhaps even had evidence of such a leak, and Baric saw the writing on the wall and wanted to salvage what has been a stellar career to this point and not be thrown under the bus by Fauci. Remember, Fauci was aware that US diplomats had serious concerns about the security of the research happening in Wuhan and did nothing about it.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) challenged Anthony S. Fauci over whether the U.S. government funded dangerous research in China. Here’s what they were talking about.

During a Senate hearing on May 11, Sen. Paul grilled Fauci about NIH/NIAID funding of gain-of-function research (a/k/a “Dual-Use Research of Concern) in coronaviruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Fauci gave provably false answers to the Senator’s questions. When asked whether “the COVID-19 virus could not have occurred by serial passage in a laboratory,” though, Fauci wasn’t quite so adamant. He said:

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China.”

That raised a few eyebrows since Fauci has repeatedly said that all of the scientific evidence pointed to the virus “evolv[ing] in nature and then jumping species.”

A surprising chain of events was somehow set in motion that day, bringing us to a point where PolitiFact had to retract their own fact-checking of Tucker Carlson’s reporting on the origins of COVID-19 – based on Fauci’s comments at a PolitiFact event titled “United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking.”

But now, after the relentless reporting of sites like this one, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the persistent questions being raised about the Wuhan virus lab leak theory by prominent Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, Facebook has suddenly and curiously done a rather dramatic about-face, telling Politico today that the ban on claims made about the possible origins of the coronavirus has been lifted:

Cristiano Lima
@viaCristiano
Scoop: Facebook will no longer remove posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, as support mounts for probes into the virus’ origins & the Wuhan lab-leak theory https://politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 tip @Techmeme //

As I noted in an earlier piece, what was once considered a wild conspiracy theory straight out of Wackoville is only now viewed as credible simply because Biden’s senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci recently opened the door to it being so – and that only happened thanks to Senators like Cotton and Paul and websites like RedState and others continuing to bang the drum well after the media and Democrats pretended the issue had been put to bed. //

But as President Trump, Cotton, Paul and other Republicans were raising red flags all last year about the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan, China lab, the media admittedly allowed their liberal biases to dictate what claims they treated seriously and which ones they mocked, ridiculed and supposedly “debunked.” The lab leak theory was one of them.

Because it was coming from Republicans, the approach from reporters was to treat the claim as suspect right from the start – unlike how they would have had it been made by Democrats. Journalists started out believing that the claim was false and set about proving it was rather than just simply asking questions and making determinations as to its validity after doing careful research and due diligence. And because of that it took over a year of the same Republicans and publications not backing down that got us to the point where Fauci finally said what he did and the media all of a sudden admitting for the record that the lab leak theory should be taken seriously.

writeofcenter
6 hours ago
What was stopped was a Trump initiative to get at the cause. This administration can't have any of that because COVID is Trumps fault. So HIS study can't be the one that shows there was actually a Wuhan Lab leak.. It must be a Biden initiated study that produces the smoking gun.

That's how it works in the Swamp.

“Can we agree that if you took President Xi Jinping and turned him upside and shook him,” Kennedy said, “The World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?”

“I don’t think I can answer that, sir,” Fauci said laughing. Kennedy inquired, “Do you think that President Xi Jinping has undue influence over the World Health Organization?” Fauci responded, “I have no way of knowing the influence of the president of China over the WHO.”

The visual is just priceless, because it’s so accurate. Now, of course, Fauci knows it’s true. But in typical Fauci fashion, he refuses to commit on the question or put his opinion of the obvious on the record.

We know China has covered up aspects of the virus right down the line. But WHO has been right there, repeating Chinese propaganda on Jan. 14 last year claiming the virus wasn’t transmissible from person to person. As the virus then began to spread and President Donald Trump moved to cut off travel with China at the end of January, the WHO argued that wasn’t necessary because it might hurt trade and travel from China. There was also the report that Xi Jinping, told WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Jan. 21, to “hold back information about a human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning.” WHO has denied that report. Taiwan also said they warned the WHO about the virus but they were ignored. The WHO has shown over and over again there are issues.

This series of articles thus far could be summed up with two very simple questions:

• What research has Dr. Fauci Funded?
• Where was that research conducted?

It is indisputable that Dr. Fauci’s NIAID has funded gain-of-function research at the University of Wisconsin, The University of Tokyo, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, as well as other universities and labs across the country and around the world. As I have previously covered, there are two statements made by Dr. Fauci that either make him woefully misinformed about his own organization or a bald-faced liar.

• That the Dr. Ralph Baric did not conduct gain-of-function research.
• That if he did, that the research was within the bounds established by the HHS.

As covered in Part II, Baric and UNC were requested to cease gain-of-function research on the SARS virus as well as other Influenza and Ebola research, and the NIAID was ordered to cease funding gain-of-function research after the end of the “[then] current active budget period,” or, the annual period in which the funding was authorized. In the case of Dr. Baric’s research, that was May 31st, 2015, or just over seven months after the ordered gain-of-function research pause. When May 31st, 2015 rolled around, Baric’s research was reauthorized by the NIAID, the same in 2016. In 2017, the project was again reauthorized this time, including over $835,000 in funding. The HHS did not lift the NIAID ban on funding until December 2017. For Dr. Fauci to state that Baric didn’t perform gain-of-function research (he does) and that if he did it was within the bounds established by the HHS (it wasn’t), is flat-out untrue. The HHS would not have oversight of research conducted without their authorization or (presumably) their knowledge.

Fauci reversed course. Now we’ve gone from “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology” to “there’s no way of guaranteeing” that it happened, and what’s more, than we, the American people, paid for it.

RedState has been driving the news cycle surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funding that went there for gain-of-function testing. The obvious indication here is that Fauci, via grants he did not exercise proper oversight of, actually played a role in COVID-19 being developed and released into the world.

Scott Hounsell has covered that topic extensively, recently noting that Fauci’s denials to Sen. Rand Paul appeared to be a lie (see Dr. Fauci’s Testimony to Rand Paul on ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research Certainly Seems Like It Was Untrue). His article is extremely thorough so make sure and go read it.

It looks like Scott’s painstaking research and highlighting of the issue has paid off because Fauci is now suddenly changing his tune. While speaking to Sen. John Kennedy, the supposed “top doctor” in regards to COVID began to hedge, now claiming that there’s “no way of guaranteeing” that the funding in question didn’t go toward gain-of-function research to produce COVID-19.

Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
🚨 The Biden administration shut down the work to identify the origins of COVID.

If "quality of the evidence" was the problem, why hasn't the Biden Team launched their own investigation?
Pompeo-led effort to hunt down Covid lab theory shut down by Biden administration over concerns...
cnn.com //

But if “politicization” was the issue, why didn’t the Biden folks just launch their own investigation? The answer seems clear: They weren’t interested in the truth, despite the fact that they should have been looking into it. That’s concerning.

Earlier this week, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings from a study indicating that people who experienced mild cases of COVID-19 may, in fact, have a long-term — perhaps lifelong — antibody protection against re-infection.

In the early part of 2003, doctors around the world became baffled by thousands of cases of people with flu-like symptoms and pneumonia. Originally beginning in the Hong Kong region and then spreading around the world, this mystery illness was killing people faster than they could be diagnosed.

So if I’m reading all of that correctly, it looks like the mainstream media approached the entire issue with deep skepticism from the start, not necessarily because they didn’t believe it was possible, but because they didn’t like the guy making the claims. And every bit of their reporting and fact-checking on the claim from that point forward was framed around that belief and was clouded by their hostile, mistrustful feelings towards Trump.

While a healthy dose of media skepticism towards claims made by politicians is always warranted, it’s not an excuse to slack off of doing exhaustive due diligence when it comes to investigative reporting and fact-checking, especially on a topic as important as this one. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened here. Also unfortunate is that this visceral anti-Trump mindset was pervasive in other reporting on the administration as well on issues that had nothing to do with the coronavirus.

Ever since Kentucky Senator Rand Paul grilled NIH head, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on his department granting the CCP funds to perform gain-of-function research on coronaviruses (or, in other words, genetically engineer coronaviruses) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the entire political world has begun focusing on what could be one of the biggest scandals the world has ever seen.

If it’s true, then then it proves two things. Firstly, that the virus was engineered by the Chinese in a lab and, either through neglect or intent, released the virus into the world – which is something that even Fauci now admits could have been the case. Secondly, it proves that U.S. bureaucrats helped them do it by providing research funding.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton also has Fauci in his figurative crosshairs, but he’s hinting that he’s not stopping at Fauci. Cotton seems to be suspicious of the entire network of public health bureaucrats. //

“So, the money that the NIH gave went to an American organization, which turned around and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Wuhan labs to investigate coronaviruses and, yes, to find ways to make them more contagious and more dangerous,” Cotton added. “And we asked Francis Collins, who’s Dr. Fauci’s boss, to come clean, to tell us exactly what was happening, why this research was being funded, as you point out, Maria, during a time in which the Obama administration had explicitly banned this kind of gain-of-function research, research into making some of the world’s deadliest pathogens even more dangerous.”