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World News See other World News Articles Title: American Pravda: Covid, Wuhan, Iran, and Several Red Herrings Table of Contents The Alleged Wuhan Lab-Leak and Its Scientific Skeptics During most of the last year theories regarding the origins of Covid, whether conspiratorial or otherwise, had disappeared from the public debate, pushed aside by the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and the final stages of the heated presidential campaign. In early January, prominent liberal author and public intellectual Nicholson Baker had tried to revive the issue with a 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine, only to see his Covid lab-leak theory swamped and forgotten when the DC Capitol was stormed by a mob of outraged Trumpists two days later. The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …? Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words But then on May 2nd, a revolution occurred after former New York Times science journalist and editor Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article on Medium. His careful 11,000 word analysis mustered the strong evidence that the virus was the artificial product of a human lab, suggesting that it had probably leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most advanced viral research facility. That laboratory was known to have been working with those types of coronaviruses and was located in Wuhan, the site of the initial outbreak, raising all sorts of obvious suspicions. The Origin of Covid Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? Nicholas Wade • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists • May 5, 2021 • 11,000 Words The floodgates soon opened and over the next few weeks far more was written on that subject than had been produced during the previous twelve months combined. In just one example, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., the forty-five year veteran of the Times who had spearheaded his paper’s Covid coverage, published a striking mea culpa and embraced the lab-leak hypothesis, admitting that he and other Timesmen had previously dismissed the idea as “far right” lunacy, closely associated with “Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.” How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory Donald G. McNeil, Jr. • Medium • May 17, 2021 • 4,700 Words McNeil had already retired from the Times the previous December after an unrelated controversy, but others at his former newspaper had also experienced a similar change of heart. For more than a year, the editors had been fiercely critical of the lab-leak theory, heavily promoted by Donald Trump and his allies, but with Trump now safely gone, their perspective changed. In late June, Zeynep Tufekci, one of their opinion columnists, published a 5,500 word article harshly criticizing China and arguing that the global epidemic had probably been the consequence of a Chinese lab-leak. Prof. Tufekci’s field of study was sociology rather than the biological sciences and her expertise lay in social media, but the appearance of her long piece surely reflected a seismic shift in the views of her top editors. Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling. Zeynep Tufekci • June 25, 2021 • The New York Times • 5,500 Words A far longer exposition of this emerging American media consensus had appeared at the beginning of that same month in Vanity Fair. The 12,000 word article strongly favored the lab-leak theory and focused upon the bureaucratic infighting regarding that issue within the national security apparatus of the Trump Administration. Based upon months of investigative reporting and numerous interviews, the piece seemed to heavily rely upon anonymous Trump intelligence sources, while generally taking our government claims at face value. The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark. Katherine Eban • June 3, 2021 • Vanity Fair • 12,000 Words Moreover, although the suggestion was presented in a defensive, insinuating manner, the long article also raised serious suspicions that Covid had been developed as a Chinese bioweapon, with that particular word appearing nine times in the text. Millions had already died around the world, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, so some might find it troubling that such inflammatory accusations had appeared in one of America’s most prestigious general interest magazines, especially considering the near-total lack of any supporting evidence. This article demonstrated the drastic shift in elite media sentiment, with theories previously confined to the extreme anti-China ideological fringe now occupying the center of American journalism. This situation carried disturbing echoes of how those same mainstream media organs had played a similar role twenty years ago in fostering the hoax of Saddam’s WMD and promoting our disastrous Iraq War. Indeed, I found it rather ironic that one of the main Trump Administration Covid experts quoted in that article and others was David Feith, whose father Douglas Feith had been one of the leading Neocons involved in that notorious Bush Administration intelligence fraud. Moreover, the lead author of the front-page Wall Street Journal story that helped to revive the lab-leak theory in late May was Michael R. Gordon, who had previously shared a byline with Judith Miller on most of the fraudulent Iraqi WMD stories that had propelled us into war. And in early 2020, former Mossad agent Dany Shoham had been one of the earliest figures suggesting that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon leaked from the Wuhan lab, with few remembering that in 2001 he had falsely fingered Saddam’s regime as the source of the Anthrax mailings. It almost seemed that members of the old Iraqi WMD cast were reassembling for a revival. A useful roundup of this sudden wave of supportive lab-leak coverage came in a 4,500 word article published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning watchdog organization. The article documented this rapid media shift by citing examples from the Washington Post, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and ABC News, and strongly pushed back against it, continuing to argue for a natural origin of the virus. US Media Give New Respect to Lab Leak Theory—Though Evidence Is as Lacking as Ever Joshua Cho • Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) • June 28, 2021 • 4,500 Words Unfortunately, although this piece was quite useful as a compendium of media links, the analysis provided was far from persuasive. Author Joshua Cho was described as a recent college graduate and former FAIR intern, presumably placing him in his early 20s, so I was hardly surprised to notice quite a number of factual and logical errors in his presentation. Most egregiously, he devoted half his article to attacking Wade, whom he ignorantly and insultingly denounced as a notorious promoter of “pseudo-science” and he seemed rather dismayed that prominent left-liberal journalists such as Thomas Frank and Jonathan Cook had taken Wade’s views so seriously. Perhaps this rather self-important former intern should recognize that they probably know some things that he does not, and might consider that Wade had become the science editor at the New York Times almost a decade before Cho was even born. However, others possessing far greater credibility and scientific expertise have also recently challenged the lab-leak hypothesis on much stronger grounds. The day before Cho’s article appeared, Bloomberg had run a long interview with Danielle Anderson, an experienced Australian virologist who had been the only Westerner working at the Wuhan lab during the period in question. By her account, the description of the lab and its operations provided by the Western media had been totally at odds with what she had seen working there, and the likelihood of a virus leak seemed nil. The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute Michelle Fay Cortez • June 27, 2021 • Bloomberg • 2,200 Words Based upon a few sentences in American government cables, our media has repeatedly alleged that the operating standards of the Wuhan lab were poor, but Anderson’s own experience had been entirely different, with the safety protocols so impressive that she later suggested they be adopted at her own research organization. For many months, former members of the Trump Administration had been promoting some questionably-sourced “third party” intelligence claiming that three lab workers became seriously ill in November 2019 with Covid-like symptoms, but Dr. Anderson could recall no such cases, and believed that she would have heard about them. She had generally enjoyed a very friendly and open relationship with her Chinese colleagues, with scientific gossip regularly being shared back and forth. Under these circumstances, she felt certain that if a suspected lab-leak had occurred, she would have heard about it, but there had never been a hint of any such incident. Furthermore, the creation of a dangerous virus such as Covid would have required many layers of official authorization by lab administrators, and she doubted that a decision of such importance could have been taken without word getting around. While she admitted that it was theoretically possible for some rogue Chinese lab researcher to have secretly undertaken such a project and bioengineered the virus, then accidentally infected himself or others, she rated the likelihood as “exceedingly slim.” So based upon her personal experience at the Wuhan lab, she thought it very unlikely that the Covid virus was developed there and equally unlikely that any lab-leak had ever occurred. For these reasons, she still leaned towards a natural source for the viral outbreak. Similar conclusions had been made in an early June interview with Christian Drosten, a German virologist ranked as one of the world’s leading experts on both SARS and Covid. Although the discussion appeared in a small German-language publication and has received minimal attention, the magic of Google Translate has made this important material available to a worldwide audience: Mr. Drosten, where did this virus come from? Marie-Jose Kolly, Angela Richter, and Daniel Ryser • June 5, 2021 • Republik • 4,500 Words Although Dr. Drosten fully accepted a natural origin for the virus, speculating that the undiscovered intermediate host might be found somewhere in China’s huge fur-farming industry, he also gave his opinion on the possibility of a bioengineered virus or a lab-leak. In particular, he broached the possibility that the virus was created and released as a bioweapon, but deliberately shied away from discussing it: There are actually two laboratory theses. One would be malice that someone has intentionally constructed such a virus. The other would be the research accident, that in spite of good intentions and curiosity an experiment went wrong. The malicious thing, to be honest: you have to talk to the secret service about it. As a scientist, I cannot judge that. He went on to say that the structure of the virus made it very unlikely that it would have been produced as a product of an innocent scientific research project, or that it came from the Wuhan lab and was accidentally released: This idea of a research accident is extremely unlikely for me because it would be far too cumbersome. The idea of malicious use by some secret service laboratory somewhere: If anything, something like that would probably not come from the Wuhan Virology Institute. This is a reputable academic institute. Although their reasons differ, the combined testimony of virologists Anderson and Drosten raises considerable doubts about the accidental Wuhan lab-leak scenario that now increasingly represents the conventional wisdom of the American mainstream media. Both experts are very skeptical that Covid could have been the product of innocent scientific research, and they also think it quite unlikely that the Wuhan lab either created or accidentally released it. Thus, although they both still prefer the natural virus theory, they seem to regard the likely alternative as an illegal or malicious project, seemingly implying the creation and deliberate release of a deadly bioweapon. But under such a scenario, the initial outbreak in Wuhan, one of China’s largest cities and a key transport hub, would obviously tend to exculpate that country, while logically pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction. It is noteworthy that we have one of the world’s leading scientific authorities on Covid gingerly raising the possibility that it was a non-Chinese bioweapon, and doing so in a small-circulation German-language publication. Yet this very brief and glancing speculation seems to be the only time I have encountered this obvious idea anywhere in the 100,000 or more words of mainstream articles I have read on the possible origins of Covid during the last year or more. Surely many other journalists and scientists must have considered such a possibility, yet virtually none of them had allowed such an idea to appear in print. How can we best understand this complete intellectual embargo? I think part of the explanation may be found in an interesting exchange late last year on entirely different matters between prominent liberal journalists Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, formerly of Rolling Stone and the New York Times respectively. As they described it, working journalists greatly rely upon social media, especially if they are not directly affiliated with a major publication. And such individuals recognized that a few wrongly-chosen words can provoke a swarming Twitter lynch-mob, possibly leading to the deadly fate of deplatforming. So writers and their employers must necessarily exercise a great deal of self-censorship, fearful of the disastrous consequences of a careless sentence. Given this reality, the sudden, striking collapse of the natural virus propaganda-bubble that had so completely dominated the mainstream media for more than a year becomes much less surprising. Probably a considerable number of individuals had had their doubts all along, but fearful of being purged, they had kept silent. However, once Wade’s article appeared and began attracting some favorable discussion on social media, they gradually lost their fears and jumped on board, soon demonstrating that those views had been far more widespread than anyone realized. The Plausible Deniability of Bioweapons and Their Effectiveness in Economic Warfare Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
When this all started, the main scary thing was that sudden seziure then death. Folks not even coughing, folks walking, folks working then BOOM! Sudden seziure followed by death. ....... I haven't seen that anywhere outside of Chinese media,not in any US hospital or canadian hospital or itallian hospital, what they showed us in the mainstream isn't reality. So what lab leak? What variant? What fucking virus? Aint nobody suffering sudden seziure death. ______________________________________ Suspect all media / resist bad propaganda/Learn NLP everyday everyway ;) If you don't control your mind someone else will.
I believe that the virus was made in a lab at the University of North Carolina and that it was enhanced to be made more deadly at Wuhan using NIH funds sent by Dr Fauci. 2) I do not believe in the lab leak theory, I believe that the Chinese who are the worst vaccine makers in the world made a vaccine to protect themselves from the virus they had just had helped to perfect.And the first vaccine they made back in 2019 made everyone sick. The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
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