SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: ggersh who wrote (175924)8/7/2021 11:39:51 AM
From: maceng21 Recommendation

Recommended By
ggersh

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217587
 
In Britain we are braced for more bad news as the fate of Geronimo hangs on a thin thread.

Boris has shown zero compassion, that wont earn him any friends

Geronimo the alpaca’s fate appears sealed as No 10 rules out further tests | Evening Standard




To: ggersh who wrote (175924)8/7/2021 7:30:04 PM
From: TobagoJack3 Recommendations

Recommended By
ggersh
maceng2
marcher

  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217587
 
Re <<Do I hear 6, 6 anyone, 6? -nfg->>

6. 7, 8 and 9.

Remains true that Fauci ought to worry.

Frankly I do not understand why he is still in his job. He is no longer effective. Either he is a protected asset, or knows too much and self-protected w/ expose writings distributed at various law firms, one might surmise. It is almost as if he is being set up to take the blame right before everything get shutdown as far as any operation is concerned, per basic Hollywood script.

Regarding tin foil conspiracy coincidences, pattern of behaviours, track record, whatever, etc etc ...



... would observe that it does not take much effort to string together a bunch of suspicious dots w/ pattern of behaviour thread and inexorably reach inevitable conclusion that would explain the weaponisation of Covid by any or many geopolitical as well as multi-domestic political actors, against each other internationally, intentionally, inadvertently, and / or against each other domestically.

One can obviously point finger at Xi's CCP China China China, anti-Xi's China China China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, N Korea, Israel, UK, US, or less likely, a five-Eyes combo unless of course by rogue elements of such a combo, etc etc etc, and whomever actually did it, either screwed up big time or was successful beyond their wildest fantasy, depending on who if anyone responsible.

Would say the many threads of circumstantials all can be easily and therefore ought to be investigated.

In a related matter, re how World Trade Center #7 experienced a pan-cake collapse when supposedly not struck by anything, per the conspiracy folks, now we know by Miami incident that buildings can indeed collapse in its own footprint without use of choreographed expositions.

In any case, for the copybook, to keep it all together

Tuskegee cdc.gov
In 1932, the USPHS, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis. It was originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (now referred to as the “USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee”). The study initially involved 600 Black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. Participants’ informed consent was not collected. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance.
By 1943, penicillin was the treatment of choice for syphilis and becoming widely available, but the participants in the study were not offered treatment.
In 1972, an Associated Press story about the study was published. As a result, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. The advisory panel concluded that the study was “ethically unjustified”; that is, the “results [were] disproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved.” In October 1972, the panel advised stopping the study. A month later, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs announced the end of the study. In March 1973, the panel also advised the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) (now known as the Department of Health and Human Services) to instruct the USPHS to provide all necessary medical care for the survivors of the study.1


Crack Epidemic oig.justice.gov
THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY:A REVIEW OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT'SINVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTIONS
Chapter I: Introduction
A. The San Jose Mercury News Articles
On August 18, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the first installment of a three-part series of articles concerning crack cocaine, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Nicaraguan Contra army. The introduction to the first installment of the series read:
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

The three-day series of articles, entitled "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," told the story of a Los Angeles drug operation run by Ricky Donnell Ross, described sympathetically as "a disillusioned 19-year-old . . . who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles." The Dark Alliance series recounted how Ross began peddling small quantities of cocaine in the early 1980s and rapidly grew into one of the largest cocaine dealers in southern California until he was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in March 1996. The series claimed that Ross' rise in the drug world was made possible by Oscar Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, two individuals with ties to the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN), one group comprising the Nicaraguan Contras. Blandon and Meneses reportedly sold tons of cocaine to Ross, who in turn converted it to crack and sold it in the black communities of South Central Los Angeles. Blandon and Meneses were said to have used their drug trafficking profits to help fund the Contra army's war effort.


Plutonium Files en.wikipedia.org
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold Waris a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune.[1][2]
Overview
The experiments began in 1945, when Manhattan Project scientists were preparing to detonate the first atomic bomb. Radiation was known to be dangerous and the experiments were designed to ascertain the detailed effect of radiation on human health. Most of the subjects, Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.[3]
From 1945 to 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium by Manhattan project doctors. Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of Plutonium on April 10, 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[4][5] This experiment was under the supervision of Harold Hodge.[6]Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commissioncontinued into the 1970s.


Operation Sea Spray en.wikipedia.org
was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California.[1][2][3][4]
Military test
From September 20 to 27, 1950, the U.S. Navy released the pathogens off the shore of San Francisco. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the particles.[5][6][7][8]
Illnesses
On October 11, 1950, eleven residents checked into Stanford Hospital for very rare, serious urinary tract infections. Although ten residents recovered, one patient, Edward J. Nevin, died three weeks later. None of the other hospitals in the city reported similar spikes in cases, and all 11 victims had urinary-tract infections following medical procedures, suggesting that the source of their infections lay inside the hospital.[5]


Agent Orange en.wikipedia.org
Agent Orange is a herbicide and defoliant chemical, one of the "tactical use" Rainbow Herbicides. It is widely known for its use by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand,[1] during the Vietnam Warfrom 1961 to 1971.[2] It is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, traces of dioxin (mainly TCDD, the most toxic of its type)[3] found in the mixture have caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed, and their offspring.


The Fauci / CoVid-19 Dossier davidmartin.world
Over the past two decades, my company – M·CAM – has been monitoring possible violations of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (the Geneva Protocol) 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (the BTWC). In our 2003-2004 Global Technology Assessment: Vector Weaponization M·CAM highlighted China’s growing involvement in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology with respect to joining the world stage in chimeric construction of viral vectors. Since that time, on a weekly basis, we have monitored the development of research and commercial efforts in this field, including, but not limited to, the research synergies forming between the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), Harvard University, Emory University, Vanderbilt University, Tsinghua University, University of Pennsylvania, many other research institutions, and their commercial affiliations.


Seems that all Youtube versions of David Martin's videos re CoVid cannot be accessed from all main VPN domains, and are only available here ...

bitchute.com Video Part I
bitchute.com Video Part II
bitchute.com Video Part III

Interesting circumstantial stuff re Fort Detrick clusters and why death from vaping only happened in material numbers in USA


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick-biohazard.html
Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns
Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center.
Aug. 5, 2019


https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offers-new-evidence-early-sars-cov-2-infections-us
NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
A new antibody testing study examining samples originally collected through the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in five states earlier than had initially been reported. These findings were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The results expand on findings from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that suggested SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was present in the U.S. as far back as December 2019.
In the All of Us study, researchers analyzed more than 24,000 stored blood samples contributed by program participants across all 50 states between Jan. 2 and March 18, 2020. Researchers detected antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 using two different serology tests in nine participants’ samples. These participants were from outside the major urban hotspots of Seattle and New York City, believed to be key points of entry of the virus in the U.S. The positive samples came as early as Jan. 7 from participants in Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most positive samples were collected prior to the first reported cases in those states, demonstrating the importance of expanding testing as quickly as possible in an epidemic setting.


Oh, and re vaping illness that took storm-shape in US and US only at same suspicious time reuters.com
Vaping illness, deaths likely very rare beyond U.S., experts say
...“What’s happening in the U.S. is not happening here (in Britain), nor is it happening in any other countries where vaping is common,” said John Britton, a professor and respiratory medicine consultant and director of the UK Centre for Tobacco & Alcohol Studies at Nottingham University.
“It’s a localised problem,” he told a London briefing.


etc etc etc
pattern recognition exercise ...


newrepublic.com

The Great Germ War Cover-Up
When Nicholson Baker searched for the truth about biological weapons, he found a fog of redaction.
Daniel Immerwahr
July 13, 2020

In late September of 1950, just as U.S. armed forces were surging up the Korean peninsula, residents of the San Francisco Bay Area noticed an odd odor. The unidentifiable smell hung around for a week. People scratched their heads and pointed fingers—they thought the problem could be their neighbors cooking brussels sprouts, or maybe it was sewer gas. What they didn’t suspect is that they were being sprayed with microorganisms by their own government.

But they were. From offshore ships, researchers working for the Army, Navy, and CIA engulfed the area in Serratia mar­cescens, Bacillus globigii, and zinc cadmium sulfide particles. Residents, not realizing they had become unwitting test subjects, breathed it in—“nearly everyone of the 800,000 people in San Francisco,” according to a governmental report. In theory, the germs and chemicals were innocuous, but a local hospital was surprised by the sudden appearance of nearly a dozen cases of Serratia marcescens bacterial infections, never seen in that hospital before. One infected patient, a retired pipe fitter, died.

It wasn’t the only time the U.S. government did this. Federal researchers secretly fogged Minneapolis and St. Louis during the Korean War. In 1966, they would run a similar experiment on New York City, dropping light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis variant niger into subway stations during rush hour to see how far the bacilli would spread—more than a million New Yorkers were exposed. In all, the Army acknowledged having conducted bacteriological tests on 239 populated areas between 1949 and 1969.

The tests were part of a large-scale, secret program of germ warfare research and development. The CIA researched possible targets, such as the Moscow subway, and military researchers designed a biological balloon bomb that could carry infectious spores far into enemy territory. The Pentagon tested and stockpiled means of inducing illness. By 1971, its arsenal of weaponized disease contained, among other articles, 220 pounds of anthrax, 804 pounds of tularemia, 334 pounds of Venezuelan equine encephalitis, 5,098 gallons of Q fever, and tens of thousands of bombs.

Did the United States ever drop one of those bombs, spray some of that anthrax, or splash a little Q fever on its enemies? Did it ever purposefully release bacteria known—perhaps even modified—to make humans ill? Did it ever, in other words, wage biological war? That is the question of Nicholson Baker’s engaging, bracing, and moving new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. As his subtitle suggests, it is an exasperatingly hard one to answer.

There is something about scouring classified documents for long-hidden military secrets that attracts a certain type of obsessive. Nicholson Baker, who once wrote a 147-page essay tracking an archaic use of the word lumber through centuries of Anglophone literature, is that type. He somersaulted onto the literary scene in 1988 with The Mezzanine, a heavily footnoted novel about an office worker’s uneventful lunch hour. Baker’s learned notes, down-the-rabbit-hole digressions, and verbal flash have invited comparisons with the virtuoso meanderings of David Foster Wallace, though Baker comes off as gentler, less tormented by his demons, and, frankly, nicer.

In the late 1990s, Baker’s career took an unexpected turn when he got caught up in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The pair had exchanged books as gifts: The president had given his young intern Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and she’d given him Baker’s Vox, an experimental novel in the form of a phone-sex conversation (one character reports seeing “the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” as she climaxes). Both choices were telling. Clinton offered an erotic but classroom-safe—and thus technically aboveboard—collection in which one of the most famous poems is about loving a president. Lewinsky, less inhibited and less of a narcissist, tossed back a fresh bouquet of surreal horniness.

Baker has not stopped writing weird sex novels. But he has also turned to more overtly political investigations with impressive and admirable zeal. His powerfully argued Double Fold (2001) took libraries to task for needlessly throwing out books. In Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids (2016), he offered a painful account of Maine’s public school system, where he worked as a substitute teacher. In Human Smoke (2008), his history of World War II, writing as a pacifist, he excoriated the Allied leaders for their moral blindness.

Soon after Human Smoke, Baker turned to the Korean War, in which the United States faced persistent accusations of having used biological weapons. Baker researched the topic for nearly 10 years without reaching conclusions as firm as he would have liked. That is in large part because whenever he asked for the relevant documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, he received nothing. “Really, nothing.” Years went by, “presidents came and went,” and he continued to wait. Some requests were refused, others idled in bureaucratic limbo. On occasion, documents arrived but were slathered in redactions—“a devil’s checkerboard of blackouts.”

The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to respond to requests within 20 business days or, if multiple agencies must be consulted, “with all practicable speed.” “Yet there is no speed,” Baker finds during his researches. “There is, on the contrary, a deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness.” Baker waited seven years for one set of documents without receiving them. Five federal agencies have requests that have been pending for more than a decade, and the National Archives has one that’s more than 25 years old. The issue isn’t that we don’t know what the government is currently doing. It’s that we don’t know what it has done, and we may never know.

The mists of secrecy swirl particularly thickly around potentially embarrassing topics, such as the use of biological weapons. This has made the question of germ warfare in Korea nearly impossible to answer satisfactorily. It’s an intellectual briar patch in which well-intentioned scholars have lacerated and ensnared themselves for decades without reaching a consensus. Nevertheless, there are things we can see through the dark fog of redaction.

To start, we know that waging biological war was not unthinkable for the U.S. military in the years following World War II. Five days after the Korean War started, a committee charged with studying unconventional weapons issued a set of emphatic recommendations, known as the Stevenson Report. The United States “must not arbitrarily deny itself” the use of biological weapons or use them only in retaliation, the report stated. It should prepare “to wage biological warfare offensively.” This view was championed by General Jimmy Doolittle, famed for having bombed Tokyo in 1942. “In my estimation, we have just one moral obligation,” he told his fellow officers at an interservice symposium. “And that moral obligation is for us to develop at the earliest possible moment that agent which will kill enemy personnel most quickly and most cheaply.”

Not everyone agreed with him, but the Pentagon nevertheless backed a crash program, spending nearly $350 million on biological warfare development during the Korean War. Scientists were put to work weaponizing diseases, from familiar scourges like plague to epidemiological deep cuts like coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. At no point while fighting in Korea did the military acquire the ability to wage all-out germ war with dedicated units of trained biological weapons handlers and mass-produced stockpiles of tested weapons. It could make small, experimental attacks, though.

Within a year of the Korean War’s start in June 1950, China and North Korea announced that the United States had used its biological weapons. There were ultimately two charges: that retreating U.S. forces had purposefully spread disease in their wake in late 1950, and that U.S. planes had dropped infected feathers, insects, rodents, and bacteria bombs on villages in Korea and China in early 1952. Such accusations possessed an obvious propaganda value, and the North Korean and Chinese governments worked with the Soviet Union to plant evidence—including, it seems, injecting condemned prisoners with cholera and plague and then burying their infected corpses at sites of alleged U.S. attacks. As the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union summarized the situation in a note to Mao Zedong: “The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.”

Yet, Baker asks, did those elaborate lies contain truthy kernels? Whatever disinformation flowed from the top, Chinese and North Korean troops in the field believed there truly had been biological attacks. U.S. intercepts of panicked communications from Chinese and North Korean units on the scene in 1952 confirm this—one Chinese unit, reporting that an enemy plane had dropped a flood of “bacteria and germs” nearby, made an urgent request for DDT. “Are we really supposed to think they were engaging in an elaborate ruse?” asks Baker.

His case would be stronger with firm testimony from the perpetrators, but that has proved elusive. In 1952, Radio Peking and Pravda started publicizing statements by dozens of captured U.S. airmen who confessed to having dropped “germ bombs.” Yet upon their release to the United States, the airmen recanted, and some reported having been tortured.

An international commission, including the prominent British biochemist Joseph Needham, visited alleged attack sites and interviewed some 600 people. The commission concluded there had been bacteriological war, and a pillar of its case was the Kan-Nan Incident, in which, it found, U.S. planes had dropped more than 700 rodents over four Chinese villages. But that commission had been convened and somewhat guided by the Chinese government, and, more important, nobody in the Kan-Nan area actually got sick or died.

The most tantalizing testimony Baker cites concerns the earlier alleged attacks, from November 1950, when U.N. forces were legging it down the Korean peninsula, pursued by the People’s Liberation Army. A British sergeant saw men in unmarked fatigues wearing gloves, parkas, and masks going house to house, pulling feathers from containers and spreading them around. “They were very surprised and unhappy to see us,” the sergeant remembered. “It was obvious that something suspicious was going on, and that it was a clandestine affair.”

In the wake of the U.N. retreat, North Korea’s foreign minister announced that thousands of smallpox cases had broken out. “Areas which have not been occupied by the Americans have had no cases of smallpox,” he added. That sounds damning. But wait—isn’t it just what a North Korean official would say if he wanted to tar the United States? If you’re straining to keep track of the charges and countercharges, all I can say is: Welcome to the annual meeting of the Korean War Biological Weaponry and Related Propaganda Studies Association. You can pick up your tote bag at registration.

“Let me just blurt out what I think happened with germs and insects during the Korean War,” Baker writes in a late chapter. “I believe that something real and infectious happened in the last, subzero months of 1950.” The masked commandos with feathers were spreading diseases, and indeed people in that area got sick, some with a “gruesome new disease, Songo fever,” that had previously been unknown in the region but has hung around and “is still a problem in Korea today.”

Baker thinks the rain of rodents over Kan-Nan in 1952 was something different. He believes the U.S. military basically dumped a bunch of its discarded lab animals—wolf spiders, flies, clams, voles—over enemy targets, not to spread infection but to spread fear. Baker notes a declassified military plan from the time to terrorize communist troops by pretending to contaminate the northern border of North Korea with radioactive dust. Perhaps the voles and wolf spiders were a modified version of that tactic.

Perhaps. A skeptic would need to hear more. That the U.S. military had the idea, ability, and at least in some quarters the inclination to do the things Baker describes is hard to deny. What’s missing is the last and vital link, the official document that says, “Yes, we did it. We doused turkey feathers with Songo fever and spread them around people’s homes. We introduced contagious new diseases into the land we were trying to help. And then we scooped up all the test animals from our germ warfare laboratories and threw them out of F-82s onto inhabited villages because we wanted to scare the bejeezus out of people, even if those people were children.”

Baker has no such document, and he doesn’t pretend to. Yet if that evidentiary gap weakens his case that the United States probably waged small-scale bacteriological war, it strengthens his case for declassification. Because even with all that we already know about official plans, capabilities, and desires for biological war, governmental agencies are still aggressively whiting out memos, withholding reports, and putting off legitimate requests for information with illegal and absurd delays. What military secrets are so vital that, nearly 70 years later, we still cannot know them?

There’s another reply to Baker’s evidence, not that of the skeptic but of the cynic. Who cares if the United States took a tentative step over the line into biological warfare in Korea? Have you seen what else it was doing there?

Indeed, it was doing a lot. The president of South Korea was the massacre-prone anti-communist Syngman Rhee, and the United States backed him even as he slaughtered political prisoners and other suspected enemies of the state both before and during the war. U.S. forces were sometimes drawn in, as at the village of No Gun Ri in 1950, when troops from the 7th Cavalry Regiment opened fire on fleeing civilians, killing hundreds. “We just annihilated them,” remembered a former machine gunner.

The men in charge of the war contemplated far worse. If the Chinese did not withdraw, President Harry Truman believed, the United States should “eliminate” not just Shanghai, Beijing, and Port Arthur, but also Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Odessa. He signed an order authorizing the use of atomic bombs on Chinese and North Korean targets. General Douglas MacArthur, for his part, explained in a 1954 interview that, if he’d had a free hand, he “would have dropped between 30 and 50 tactical atomic bombs” and spread “a belt of radioactive cobalt” across the peninsula to prevent Chinese troops from crossing for 60 years.

The nukes were never used, but that was no mark of restraint. U.S. planes released an unrelenting torrent of munitions over Korea, dropping 635,000 tons of bombs over the course of the war, more than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. “Whereas sixty Japanese cities were destroyed to an average of 43 percent,” writes historian Bruce Cumings in The Korean War, “estimates of the destruction of towns and cities in North Korea ‘ranged from forty to ninety percent’; at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.” In 1951, the former commander of the Air Force’s Far East Bomber Command testified to a Senate committee that there were simply “no more targets” to strike. “Everything is destroyed,” he said. “There is nothing standing worthy of the name.”

That testimony wasn’t a secret. Newspapers reported it. Once you understand how brazenly psychotic the war was, it’s much easier to imagine the United States using its biological weapons. It’s just harder to think it matters.

There’s no evidence that can answer the cynic. In fact, the higher the evidence of war’s horrors piles up, the stronger the urge to stop caring becomes. Rebutting the cynic means making a moral appeal, and that is where Baker glows incandescently. Ultimately, what is so compelling about Baseless is not the prosecutorial brief. It’s watching Baker, a thoughtful, sensitive, and vividly expressive soul, grapple with the pathological secrecy of his own government and with the heinousness of what he suspects it has done.

“There are two ways to live,” Baker writes. “You can live in a way in which you do your best not to kill people, or you can live in a way in which you attend meetings and perform experiments that are aimed at refining ways to cut lives short.” The bulk of humanity lives the first way, and Baker—his desk cluttered with redacted documents about how to induce anthrax and brucellosis—takes the occasional break to remember that. Baseless is punctuated with quiet moments from Baker’s life in Maine: observing the “tiny leaves unscrolling themselves” as spring arrives, or holding a dog’s forepaw and feeling the “braille of joy of his paw pads.”

These small eruptions of humanity establish nothing about the Korean War, but they provide a sanity check. Beyond the environs of Washington, D.C., people’s thoughts are filled with their hobbies and pets, not with weaponizing diseases or nuking China. Their worldviews are not hardened by the national security state. “If they’d known what some American bacteriologists were doing between 1943 and 1971, what would people have said?” asks Baker.

Probably many would have said, Don’t breed diseases for heightened virulence by passing them through guinea pigs and monkeys. Don’t find exotic maladies whose symptoms resemble other diseases in order to delay a diagnosis, so that people or animals will stay sicker longer. And don’t, absolutely do not, breed diseases for resistance to antibiotics.


If that’s what most people would have said, they would have been right—we’re now painfully aware of what an out-of-control disease looks like. But the public didn’t make the call. The mandarins of U.S. foreign policy did, and that is what is so terrifying. George F. Kennan, James Forrestal, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger—“these are not normal people,” Baker notes. They are men who, in pursuit of freedom, advised staging coups, propping up dictators, and raining napalm down on Asia. “They should not be allowed near a diplomatic pouch or a negotiating table,” Baker writes. “They should not have the ear of the president. They are people who make things worse.”

Preparing and possibly using biological weapons wasn’t the most horrendous thing the Pentagon has done. But it’s an occasion to contemplate the yawning chasm between the moral instincts of most individuals and those of the men in charge. This is the controlling fact of U.S. foreign policy after World War II. A country full of kindhearted, interesting people—the land of Aretha Franklin and Jim Henson—has, through its government, repeatedly tormented other nations in ways it’s hard to imagine its voters approving of.

That’s what profound inequalities do, and the sheer concentration of so much global power in so few hands is the main problem. But secrecy, insulating policymakers from even their own compatriots, has not helped. A foreign policy establishment confident that its secrets will not get out operates in a bubble. A code of silence gets you a clubby, closed world: bishops shuttling molesting priests to new parishes, cops planting evidence. Or it gets you men who think it’s OK to soak San Francisco in bacteria for a week just to see what happens. Men who would choose to destroy every city and town in North Korea rather than let communists prevail.

After journalists learned more about the biological warfare program in the 1960s, the Nixon administration called it off. The United States finally agreed to stop developing and stockpiling bacteriological weapons. Yet the redacteurs have continued mutilating and hiding records to this day. And the more stingily federal agencies withhold decades-old documents, the more they degrade the principle that the public should ultimately know what its officials have done.

This perpetual secrecy must stop, Baker insists. “Every government document that’s more than fifty years old should be declassified in full, right now. As a first step.” It’s not just a matter of settling historical debates. It’s a bare-minimum requirement of a democratic foreign policy. Of having a government that, when contemplating a horrifying course of action, would think of posterity and choose something saner.



To: ggersh who wrote (175924)8/7/2021 10:44:15 PM
From: TobagoJack2 Recommendations

Recommended By
ggersh
marcher

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217587
 
During breakfast I pondered the vaping angle noted here Message 33430919 <<Vaping illness, deaths likely very rare beyond U.S., experts say>>

did a cursory look-see and went down a few rabbit holes, found a lot of rabbit droppings, some fur, as well as possible rabbit tracks, and now back more alarmed than ever, such that metaphorically candles flickered, music tempo sped up, and volume progressively higher and higher still

remaining agnostic, have no particular conclusion other than a lot of threads require investigation, should be investigated, all assuredly for the greater-good, just in case the smoke leads to fire source. So, anyway, if vaping injury can be mistaken for Covid, it follows that Covid can also be mistaken for vaping injury, but strangely mostly happens in USA even as vaping is a worldwide exercise

Puzzling, in the aggregate.

healthimaging.com
Vaping-related lung injury symptoms are easily mistaken for COVID-19, doctors warn
The individuals analyzed in this study all came to the hospital with fever, nausea, cough, quick heart rate, rapid breathing and low blood-oxygen levels. Lab testing suggested inflammation commonly seen in COVID-19 and chest imaging depicted nonspecific ground-glass opacities.
“While everything indicated COVID-19 infection, their SARS-CoV-2 testing returned negative,” Nandalike explained.


scoop.co.nz
WHO’s Attempts To Link Vaping To COVID, Discredited
The World Health Organization’s attempts to link vaping with COVID-19 have been completely discredited by a significant study out of the United States, says Asia Pacific’s leading Tobacco Harm Reduction consumer advocacy group.


scmp.com
Chinese supercomputer and American doctors clash over AI coronavirus diagnosis of young US vaperChina’s Tianhe-1 machine says white patches detected on lungs suggest probable Covid-19 But North Carolina doctor says five patients with similar symptoms were not evidence of an earlier outbreak


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/03/24/coronavirus-vaping-michigan-whitmer-stay-home-order/2908032001/
Michigan governor suggested possible link between vaping and coronavirus. What do doctors say?


time.com
Is There Actually a Link Between Vaping and Coronavirus?
... Speculation about a link between vaping and COVID-19 has grown in recent weeks. News reports have noted that some young, hospitalized COVID-19 patients also vaped, and at a tele-town hall on March 19, a constituent asked New York Rep. Anthony Brindisi about the possibility of a connection. The National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote on its blog that people with substance-use disorders, including those who vape, could be especially hard-hit by COVID-19. In various corners of the internet, fringe theories with little-to-no scientific evidence have popped up making connections between a prior outbreak of vaping-related lung illnesses in the U.S. and COVID-19.
But is there any actual link between vaping and coronavirus? Experts say it’s impossible to say for sure.


https://www.nbcnews.com/health/vaping/teen-vapers-7-times-more-likely-get-covid-19-non-n1236383
Teen vapers up to 7 times more likely to get COVID-19 than non-e-cig users, says new Stanford study


Hmmn accidentally went down the wrong rabbit warren news-medical.net But rather alarming nevertheless
Research suggests Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reprograms innate immune responses


Back to vaping, a thread that suggest vaping death is afraid of other nations and only happens in USA at around the same time Covid took flight, soon after Fort Detrick was shut down

2019–2020 vaping lung illness outbreak - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2019–2020_vaping_lu...
[Vaping] Deaths [edit]
As of 21 January 2020, a total of 60 deaths linked to vaping products have been confirmed in 27 states and the District of Columbia: Alabama, California (4), Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia (3), Illinois (5), Indiana (4), Kansas (2), Louisiana, Massachusetts (3), Michigan, Minnesota (3), Mississippi, Missouri (2), Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York (2), Oregon (2), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee (2), Texas, Utah, and Virginia.[2] The median age of deceased persons was 51 years and ranged from 15 to 75 years, as of 14 January 2020.[2]
Other countries[edit]
What has occurred in the US has not occurred in other places where vaping is frequent such as the UK.[4] In European countries such as France, there is no evidence of an outbreak of the vaping-associated lung illness that occurred in the US.[36]


manilatimes.net

Now the world cries: Investigate Fort Detrick

Sunday, August 8, 2021

Reacting to my column on Saturday, August 7, various sources swamp my desk with information on a worldwide call for investigation of Fort Detrick in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic. The agitation necessarily began with Chinese citizens petitioning the World Health Organization (WHO) to look into allegations that the origin of the coronavirus could be the US military camp in Maryland.

It was normal in any case, the Chinese reaction. Because of impulsive media accounts, largely explained by the hardline anti-Chinese stance taken by US President Donald Trump during the US presidential campaign, the initial reported outbreak of the killer pathogen in Wuhan placed China as the culprit for the pandemic. Credible accounts, however, have zeroed in on Fort Detrick as the real origin.

Still part of the article of Herman Til Laurel that I quoted in my column Saturday is this account: One of the most intriguing reports concerns the early presence of a "strange flu" in other countries and the mysterious issues such as the "vaping deaths" emanating from the US around the middle of 2019. Those reports emerged from the US revolving around Fort Detrick, which had been ordered by the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to shut down for "national security reasons" in August 2019. More aggravating reports followed, such as the admission by Belleville Mayor Michael Melham that he tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies months after a severe November 2019 flu-like illness. This was followed by former CDC chief Robert Redfield admitting in March 2020 before a US congressional hearing that some flu deaths were posthumously discovered to be Covid-19 deaths."

But why is it that there appears to be a clampdown every time Fort Detrick's probable role in the worldwide spread of coronavirus is at issue?

According to Laurel, "Fort Detrick is at the center of many questions because of its history and the nature of its mission. It had been associated with the infamous World War 2 Japanese germ-warfare Unit 731, obtaining biological information in exchange for leniency to Japanese biowarfare war criminals. Fort Detrick went on to be linked with mind-control drug experiments with LSD in the secret MK Ultra program, anthrax virus leaks, Ebola and smallpox experiments, and then the 2019 shutdown."?"Fort Detrick," he says, "is too dangerous a mystery to remain shrouded in secrecy. This would open the door to hundreds of other US biolabs, including 200 in other countries and regions. Efforts to interview civilians living around the military base have been met with sewn lips. This includes an interview at the Greenspring Village five kilometers out of Fort Detrick at a seniors' home where five seniors died after an outbreak of respiratory illness in the summer of 2019. All these circumstances and questions arising from them make it imperative that the next focus of the virus origins-tracing investigation be done at Fort Detrick, Frederick, State of Maryland, the United States of America.

"When we read that the international petitions for the opening up of the Fort Detrick investigation starting with the Chinese netizens' petition have so far passed 24.9 million signatures, I thought of the thousands of Filipinos who agree that Fort Detrick mysteries must be brought to the light of day. They must have a chance to petition the WHO, too. This is the only way for the global community to make progress and not go around in circles as some elements in the US insist on doing by pressuring the WHO to avoid scrutiny of their own possible accountabilities."

Laurel is upheld in his perception of Fort Detrick in the Covid-19 pandemic by a number of experts. Dr. Peter Ben Embarek of the WHO called it highly unlikely that the pathogen that has now claimed 2.3 million lives worldwide originated in Wuhan, China. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in fact, has stated that the world owes it to China for its prompt action in containing the contagion in its confines; China was free of the virus after more or less some three months of lockdowns.

How was it possible that a nation supposedly the origin of the pathogen could have proceeded to have it spread worldwide and at the same time stopped its spread in its limited confines?

In other words, you don't kill a virus right at its onset and yet let it spread elsewhere in the world.

International media reported the outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, yet as early as September of that year, there had been recorded cases of coronavirus attacks in Spain, Italy and France.

All this goes to show that Covid-19 had already been on the upsurge even before it hit China.

And yet for all of America's blame-shifting, China saw to it to cooperate with the WHO's effort in combating the pandemic. Certainly graver consequences could have befallen the world had not China done so.

Last Thursday, the now-legendary Pandesal Forum sponsored a book launching of Ado Paglinawan's No Vaccine for a Virus Called Racism to coincide with a forum organized by the Phil-Brics and hosted by Wilson Lee Flores purposely to add momentum to the now-burgeoning worldwide movement to have the mysteries of Fort Detrick unearthed once and for all.

The Manila Times Newsletter

manilatimes.net

Fort Detrick stench oozes on

Sunday, August 8, 2021

LAST September 2020, my friend Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan released a book entitled No Vaccine for a Virus Called Racism, not just portraying how President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were politicizing the virus in the lead-off to the US presidential elections in November 2020, but more significantly, presenting a chronology of newspaper and television reports, showing what could be a plausible historical readback prior to the confirmation of a coronavirus in China, specifically Wuhan, in December 2019.

The earliest he could dig up was WJLA-TV, an ABC News affiliate reporting on July 11, 2019 that two people had died and 18 others hospitalized after a "respiratory outbreak" at a Virginia retirement community.

ABC News indicated that the outbreak occurred on June 30, 2019.

Paglinawan pursued the matter with astonishing detail.

He wrote that the Fairfax County Department of Health said that 54 individuals had become ill with "respiratory symptoms ranging from cough to pneumonia lasting 11 days from June 30 at Green spring Retirement Community in Springfield. The symptoms described were fever, cough, body aches, wheezing, hoarseness and general weakness.

Greenspring Village is in Fairfax County, Virginia. The facility in Greenspring is home to 263 residents, Paglinawan quoted Benjamin Schwartz, director of epidemiology and population health in Fairfax County's health department as saying, "One of the things about assisted living is when you have a lot of older people in close proximity who have medical conditions, there is increased risk for outbreaks."

The Washington Post also picked up the story.

What was curious - and according to Paglinawan we must pay close attention to - was that Director Schwartz said, "[S]wabs have been taken and initial tests showed those infected have come back negative for common virus, or bacteria-bone respiratory illness including influenza and Legionnaire's disease."

By July 15, a third person had died, 23 were hospitalized and dozens more fell ill. The infection also spread to Greenspring's staff, affecting 19 employees at the complex.

Is it sheer coincidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a letter of concern to Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland on July 12, 2019, followed by a cease-and-desist order three days later?

The world's largest facility of bioweapons finally closed a month after in August.

I quote a substantial portion of a piece written by Herman Tiu Laurel for the Global Times:

"SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus behind the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Since then, it has been said to spread to 192 countries around the world, infecting over 177 million people as of last month.

"The United States reported its first case of SARS-CoV-2 on Jan. 21, 2020, in a 35-year-old American citizen traveling from Wuhan, China to his home in Washington state. This individual had a symptom-onset date of Jan. 19, 2020. Importantly, two other individuals of the 12 cases that were first identified in the United States around this time identified their symptom-onset dates to be Jan. 14, 2020.

"It was not until much later in 2020 as reported by Bloomberg on Dec. 1, 2020, that researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discovered that people in several states in the US were infected with SARS-CoV-2 much earlier than January 2020.

"I will repeat, a testing found SARS-Cov-2 infections in the US a year before, providing further evidence indicating the coronavirus was spreading globally weeks before the first cases were reported in China."

According to Laurel, in the interest of global scientific inquiry and the world's peace of mind, China fully cooperated with the WHO to open Wuhan, its environs and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to a team of 15 expert virologists, epidemiologists and other scientists of international composition from the US, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam. The WHO mission spent up to four weeks in China. Dr Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO team, concluded that the "lab-leak" theory was "extremely unlikely."

The reference, of course, was to an instant widespread perception that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan laboratories. No, the virus did not leak from a laboratory in Wuhan but, as subsequent developments would disclose, like the very testimony by the CDC director before the US Senate, that examination of bodies exhumed revealed they had died of Covid-19 and not pneumonia as contained in the death certificates.

Early on the reported outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan in 2019, a source provided me with information that the new pathogen is laboratory-made, said to be sanctioned by the CDC which supplied them for multiplication to the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases inside Fort Detrick, Maryland. At a time when media dissemination pictured the outbreak as a natural phenomenon emanating from a leap of the pathogen from bats which found its way in the wet markets of Wuhan, my reported notion of a laboratory-made Covid-19 was instantly unpopular and it dealt me a beating from many quarters. With the revived interest on the Fort Detrick controversy, my early perception of the Covid-19 pandemic may just prove to be the correct one.

The Manila Times Newsletter

By the weight of proof proposed by Mosher, himself a suspect mouth piece, the blame can be assigned every which way in a lot of ways

So, investigations all around called for, one can reasonably suppose, I suppose

nypost.com

Here’s all the proof Biden needs to conclude COVID-19 was leaked from a lab

By Steven W. Mosher

Biden administration officials are suddenly everywhere in the news, warning that the origins of the COVID-19 virus may remain shrouded in mystery for all time.

This curious effort to lower expectations comes as our spy agencies are halfway through the 90-day review that Joe Biden loudly and publicly “ ordered” them to conduct back on May 26.

May 26 was, as it happens, the very same day we learned that, a few weeks earlier, Biden had secretly canceled an investigation launched by the Trump administration into exactly the same question.

Damage control? You may draw your own conclusions.

In announcing the probe, the present occupant of the Oval Office tried to frame the “origins” issue by claiming that the virus “either emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

Enlarge ImagePresident Joe Biden ordered US spy agencies in May to do a 90-day investigation into whether COVID-19 was released by a Chinese lab.Shawn Thew/UPIWrong, and wrong again. It wasn’t an innocent bat or a lab “accident” that produced the deadly virus, but highly classified gain-of-function research carried out under the direction of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The only thing that remains a mystery is how it made its way out of the lab. I was among the first to question China’s original cover story — that someone had gotten a bad bowl of bat soup in something called the Wuhan Wet Market — in my Post article of February 22, 2020.

In my article, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab,” I marshaled several plausible pieces of evidence — all of which pointed to the lab:

Scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Barcroft Media via Getty ImagesChina had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in ­microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’?”
As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.Even at the time there was other evidence available, which likewise pointed to the lab — and to the PLA’s involvement:

The authorities ordered all of the early samples of the coronavirus collected by private and university labs in China — vital for tracing the origin and early spread of the disease — to be destroyed.
China’s civilian Center for Disease Control was completely shut out of the picture in favor of the PLA, suggesting a classified military program was involved.
Military academies and installations in and around Wuhan were closed around January 1, well before the Chinese public was notified that there was a problem.
China lied about human-to-human transmission, leaving the US and other countries unprepared for the rapid spread of the virus, ensuring that more lives would be lost.The evidence was circumstantial, to be sure, but I was fairly certain by that point that I could have convinced a jury of China’s culpability. Even so, while I waited for more facts to surface, I was careful to call the “lab origin” just a possibility.

Facebook, however, didn’t wait. It quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17. The mainstream media likewise piled on, slamming The Post for publishing the writings of a “conspiracy theorist.” Others who raised questions about the pandemic’s origins were heavily censored as well — if not “canceled” entirely.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Thomas Peter/REUTERSChina locked down the Wuhan lab, and the US virology establishment closed ranks, both denying that gain-of-function research — or a PLA bioweapons research program — had anything to do with the pandemic.

It has taken over a year, but the attempted cover-ups on both sides of the Pacific have gradually unraveled.

During that time China has burned through a half-dozen increasingly implausible cover stories. After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolins and raccoon-dogs, oh my! — for harboring the virus. We seem now to be back to bats, and are being told that many years ago, in a cave far away from the Wuhan lab, minors fell ill from being peed upon, pooped upon, and even bitten by those same nasty, virus-harboring creatures.

But the wildest tale by far being bandied about by the Chinese authorities is that CoV-2 was a US bioweapon, created in the U. Army’s research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. As to how the “American Virus” — as they unabashedly call it — got to China, they have an answer for that too: it was secretly released on the unsuspecting Chinese population of Wuhan by the American soldier-athletes who participated in the October 2019 Military World Games in that city.

Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at US Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.Andrew Harnik/APWho makes up such bat-sh*t crazy stories about secret bioweapons and superspreading soldiers? The same people, it seems, whose fever dream for decades has been to do exactly the same thing. There are numerous scientific publications that prove Chinese labs were engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research, along with new evidence that these techniques were being used in an active bioweapons program that included the Wuhan lab. As China defector Dr. Yan Limeng has taught us, the PLA itself isolated the original bat coronavirus that served as the “backbone” or “template” for CoV-2. Additional genetic material was then spliced into this virus to make it more infectious and deadly to humans. This is not speculation.

Those doing the splicing left “signatures” behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.

The dwindling ranks of lab “deniers” continue to insist that the vast laboratory of nature is capable of infinite surprises. Of course that’s true. And it’s also true that if you have enough monkeys typing the four DNA bases A, C, G, and T on enough computer keyboards they will eventually produce a complete and accurate copy of the human genome, which is 6.4 billion such bases long. But what are the odds?

And what are the odds that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans?

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment in China on Feb. 18, 2020. China Daily via REUTERSDr. David Asher, who headed the now-canceled State Department investigation, put that very question to a biostatistician, and was told that the odds were roughly … 1 in 13 billion. In the face of that vanishingly small probability, Asher remarked, “to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous.”

What we do know, as former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger pointed out in a February interview, is that the PLA had been “doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. While the Wuhan lab poses as a “civilian institution,” Pottinger said, US intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated with China’s military on publications and secret bioweapons projects.

That’s David Asher’s opinion as well. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” he says. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Dr. David Asher believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was running a biological weapons program.Rod Lamkey/CNPA Chinese book that recently fell into the hands of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) further confirms that Chinese military scientists have been focused on what they called the “new era of genetic weapons” since at least 2015. They begin by asserting that World War III would be fought with biological weapons, and go on to describe how viruses can be collected from nature and “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.”

Sound familiar?

In fact, the scientists even singled out coronaviruses as a class of viruses that can be readily weaponized, and they suggest that the ideal candidate for a bioweapon would be something like the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. It is worth noting that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus, which is why the World Health Organization insists that we call it SARS-CoV-2. As in, the “second” SARS virus.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of ASPI, said the new document “clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed. It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use.”

After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolin.AlamyThe document, he went on to say, is the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got.”

Is it really that surprising that the same murderous regime that has brought us forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, and genocide in real time would also be developing deadly bioweapons to release upon the world?

China had both the intention and the capability to take a harmless bat virus, turn it into a deadly pathogen, and then release it upon the world. And the evidence suggests that it did just that.

More than half of all Americans — including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — now believe the virus was made in a lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. Indeed, there has been a massive hardening of public opinion against the communist giant across the board, with 89 percent of adults now seeing the country as hostile or dangerous.

By killing 600,000 Americans, China has proven that it is both.

But whether the Biden administration makes China pay for its crimes is another question.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of the forthcoming “ Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).



To: ggersh who wrote (175924)8/7/2021 11:21:38 PM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217587
 
Following on to the too many threads indicated by

Message 33430919 , and

Message 33431047

I chanced upon a fresh piece by WSJ, arguably preparing for the way the Team Biden conclusion might veer, that the conspiracy folks shall remain conspiracy folks and nothing more.

Am in favour of full and thorough investigation, globally, everywhere, and for the Greater-Good, and call out to discredit conspiracies irrespective where found.

BTW, the links provided by Jenkins embedded as part of his article say nothing about what he cited, which makes Jenkins a suspect, and by inference, WSJ a suspect. A shocker - call me surprised.

In such a setup, the entire Covid episode might point to a lab leak, but says nothing about which lab.

Now let us wait for 25th August or thereabout, for the release of Team Biden report.

wsj.com

Does the U.S. Want the Lab-Leak Truth?

It’s hard to see political upside from anything but intelligence agency shoulder-shrugging.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Aug. 6, 2021 5:40 pm ET

Independently in 1978, two groups in New York City and Germany came to the same conclusion: The previous year’s flu was so genetically similar to a variant last seen in the early 1950s that it could only have started from a stored lab specimen. The obvious candidates: China or Russia, in whose border regions the virus first manifested itself.

It was only in 2004, thanks to a Chinese virologist’s private word to a U.S. counterpart, that the world at large finally learned the release was likely the result of a vaccine trial in which Chinese military recruits were intentionally exposed to the 1950s virus.

“Virologists and public health officials with the appropriate sophistication were quickly aware that a laboratory release was the most likely origin,” wrote clinical pathologist Martin Furmanski in a 2014 examination of the incident, “but they were content not to publicize this, aware that such embarrassing allegations would likely end the then nascent cooperation of Russian and Chinese virologists.”

Suppressing such a finding today wouldn’t be easy, but the incentives are larger given the West’s economic relationship with China.

In assigning the intelligence community its 90-day mission to examine the lab-leak hypothesis, the results of which are due this month, Joe Biden may have been doing less than meets the eye, but he wasn’t doing nothing. Impetus is always needed to get the agencies looking into their vast trove of unexamined intercepts, laboriously figuring out whether a coded or whispered communication, when matched with other evidence, reveals more than intended.

Our intelligence community doesn’t like to say “we don’t know.” It likes to “estimate” probabilities. Unless they surprise themselves with a smoking gun that can’t be interpreted away, watch their body language. Do they emphasize the evidence or the uncertainty?

Here’s betting it will be the latter. Nothing gleaned by the intelligence snoops can put Covid back in its bottle. It’s hard to see any political upside for Democrats. Unless the Biden administration’s popularity is in free fall in three weeks and needs a foreign conflict to revive it, every incentive points toward changing the subject.

A study of the public record by House Republicans shows that reasons to suspect a lab leak are not in short supply: evidence that China moved to conceal records of the Wuhan lab before the outbreak became publicly known, doctored scientific data on the web, and distorted the history of a lab strain most closely related to the Wuhan virus.

Hospital parking-lot photos and Baidu search terms hint that Covid symptoms were rampant in Wuhan three months before Beijing acknowledged the virus’s existence. This evidence supports only the perception, strange enough, that Covid-19 sprang up out of nowhere in Wuhan. It doesn’t clarify whether it did so naturally or unnaturally. But a suggestive detail stressed in the House report is China’s failure to invest in the search for Covid’s origins after January 2020, as if it already knew the answer.

In the unlikely event the U.S. wanted to take the question further, how might it proceed? Recruit the right people, issue unambiguous marching orders and provide them a very large budget. One plausible avenue would be to scour the world for early Covid samples and the travel histories of their carriers. Thousands likely traveled through Wuhan during the period when Beijing seems to have suppressed news of the outbreak. If some sought care, if tissue samples are recoverable, a genetic family tree might shed light on the virus’s emergence. The scale of such a project would be daunting: finding the evidence, sequencing the fragments, analyzing their relationship. Going down this road does not lend itself to flexibility. If you invest humongously in finding the truth, you are then obliged to do something about it.

A little history: When Vladimir Putin rose to the presidency on the strength of his response to a terrorist bombing campaign that, by much credible evidence, was conducted by his own security forces, Western governments faced a choice. Acknowledge the evidence or look away to preserve Mr. Putin as somebody they could do business with, who might keep a lid on an unstable and potentially troublesome Russia.

In the case of the Wuhan lab-leak theory, wild cards might yet take a hand. Scientists and others will be poking around, trying to make sense of evidence in the public domain. Covid’s catastrophic nature, with the evolution of vaccine-resistent variants, is coming into sharper focus and a popular groundswell for accountability may arise. As Delta blows up in China itself, undermining its Covid smugness, Beijing’s power to intimidate is likely to wane. For the moment, the forecast of this column is that most of the world’s governments, not to mention the World Health Organization, are of one mind in preferring the mystery of Covid’s origins to remain a mystery.