The Incentives of Deception: Gain-of-Function Research & the Lab Leak Hypothesis
With big questions— from the incentives of Gain-of-function to the connecting dots of Fauci's emails— there are little definitive answers. But where there's an incentive there is a potential motive.
Here’s an audio version of this article:
Editor’s Note: This article references a Wall Street Journal report indicating that workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick enough in Fall 2019 to seek hospital care. It should be noted that there is no way to identify whether or not those workers were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That does not, however, change the fact that the narrative regarding the virus’s origin has been incongruent and that the potential incentives for the global medical establishment warrants the suspicion of a potential lab leak cover-up.
To begin, all that follows is backed by evidence, scientific data, and the opinions of professional minds. Any disagreements or discomforts with the information in this piece should not be met with an instinct to turn your back on it, but rather to debate it— it's not opinion, it's all data and evidence. However, I don't purport to be an expert in virology or any scientific field, but my sources of understanding come from either those who are experts or from data peer-reviewed by experts.
The primary thing to remember here is that from the beginning of the pandemic, the public has witnessed a complete assault on science, data, and the process of deciphering the truth. Through the hyper-politicization of the pandemic, we have created two polarizing sides that claim to be the side of truth, but in reality both of the sensationalist extremes reach their conclusions without much science at all— one side takes Fauci at his word and unwittingly neglects the wider scientific process, and the other side distrusts any supposed science as bunk.
Regarding all the incongruity surrounding this pandemic, the fact is that there is no clear answer or conclusion that can be drawn at this point, but there are plenty of questions that, as time goes on, grow in both volume and pressing importance.
Lab leak shuffle
In 2020, as much of the global population was experiencing a frightening wave of the unknown, one thing was understood: you cannot say that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed it, and EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak said the hypothesis was "boloney." Media outlets like CNN followed the medical establishment's lead, saying the theory was demonstrably false, and as a result, a significant chunk of the population was told, almost programmed, to dismiss any contemplation of a potential lab leak hypothesis.
What was most remarkable about this belief was not that the natural, or zoonotic origin of the virus was the established narrative, but that any challenge to it was discouraged, stigmatized, and censored. In fact, just uttering the words "lab leak" was enough to be labeled a xenophobe and a racist, even as hundreds of millions of westerners were scrunching their faces in disgust at the misconstrued perception of wet markets and the idea of bats in China.
"I think we should shut these things down right away," declared Dr. Fauci in April 2020. "It boggles my mind how, when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we don't just shut it down. . . What we're going through now [the COVID-19 pandemic] is a direct result of that."
Something about the forceful implementation of a single narrative should have emanated some fishy aromas, but it was a difficult position for many considering almost everyone, at the same time, began to feel their backs being pressed against a wall. What else was there to do but trust the supposed trustworthy?
Of course, it only gets fishier when you realize that the lab leak hypothesis, like scrawny men and 80's synth pop, is suddenly cool again.
In late May, to a symphony of grinding teeth, Dr. Fauci said he was "not convinced" about a natural origin of the virus. What was the reason behind such a sudden and sharp pivot? It was not too long ago that Fauci had cast off any notion of the virus being engineered as the notion of a crackpot.
Fauci's shift was abrupt, but the public shift had a moment to adjust in the time following Biden's inauguration. The matters surrounding the pandemic had been, at the expense of science and public trust, heavily politicized where one side with a false sense of grace and intellect, took the words of Fauci and traditional media outlets as the word of Christ, and the other side sat, with their arms crossed, equally distrustful that 2 + 2 = 4 and that Trump lost the election.
Of course, the political climate of America as directed by the business ventures of news outlets has made for an intensely polarized divide. However, the biggest factor of polarization was, without a doubt, Donald Trump. (Trump was so polarizing he was likely the influence behind PolitiFact's terribly embarrassing September 2020 declaration of the lab leak hypothesis as a "pants on fire" lie— something that, at this point, we can only shake our heads at.)
Once Trump was out of office, the term lab leak had considerably less of a disgust factor among the public. Evolutionary biologists and husband-wife podcast duo Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying went on Bill Maher in late January 2021 to discuss the fact that the lab leak hypothesis is and always has been a potential origin.
As the months went on, the topic picked up some interest. Josh Rogin of The Washington Post was covering the matter and wrote a book on it. And oddly enough, traditional outlets were talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it had always been on the table. This all ultimately culminated with Fauci's declaration that he's "not convinced."
Around that same time, The Wall Street Journal came out with a report that put the debate of the virus's origin back onto the scene. Their article pointed out that in Fall 2019, according to undisclosed intelligence reports, three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology got so sick that they had to seek out hospital care.
Seemingly the one established "fact" from the start of the pandemic— that the virus originated from a natural reservoir rather than being engineered in a lab— was now completely detached from the evidence. Questions are mounting, and as more information comes out, the more there are that all require very large answers.
Ultimately, it's impossible, at this point, to know for sure what person or organization or institution did what and why. That is not to say inferences cannot be supposed: when there's an incentive, there's a potential motive.
As has been widely circulated among those interested in this conversation, Fauci is directly tied to gain-of-function research (he wrote a 2012 paper advocating for it), the method by which researchers try to improve the ability to fight a potentially catastrophic virus by experimentally engineering and altering viruses to make them more transmittable and deadly. It's important to note that if the lab leak hypothesis is indeed true (and at this point there's no conclusive evidence, technically), the pandemic can be explicitly blamed on this type of research.
It is not peculiar to view such a method of research as potentially risky for global health— even the Obama administration felt that way. In 2014, the administration put a moratorium on domestic funding of gain-of-function research.
As Science Magazine put it in October of 2014:
"Three years ago, two separate research teams revealed that they had made a version of the H5N1 avian influenza strain that spread between ferrets. Many scientists worried that if the potent new lab strain were accidentally or deliberately released, it could result in a deadly pandemic."
The gain-of-function matter is the epicenter of these pressing questions that we have raging still, about a year and a half after this pandemic began. However, some get answered along the way. Like: Who would have reauthorized the government funding of gain-of-function research?
The answer: none other than Dr. Fauci, himself. Here's The Washington Post's Josh Rogin’s explanation, as he put it as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience (emphasis my own):
"So, Anthony Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, is the most important person in the world of gain-of-function research there is . . . Basically, he is the one disbursing all the grants for this, he is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it off. That’s another crazy story: he turned it back on without really consulting the White House.
"He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is part of the White House, but the White House put a pause on it and he undid the pause. The details are a little sketchy. I’m not saying he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal, but I’m saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea that he had turned this back on. He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns, so you could get things done if you knew how to work the system."
This all seemed to collide in a moment where Senator Rand Paul was questioning Dr. Fauci in what became a viral exchange.
"Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?" Senator Paul asked in the exchange.
This prompted Fauci's reply: "Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Well, Fauci is lying when he says that.
As it turns out, through EcoHealth Alliance and its president Dr. Peter Daszak, there were grants administered by the NIH— which Fauci oversees— that sent money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The bit about funding became clear as Fauci lost his grip on that aspect of the narrative. However, he remained adamant that the research in question was not, in fact, a form of gain-of-function and that he does not favor such practices. As biosafety expert at Rutgers Dr. Roger Ebright explains:
"The Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric [altered and enhanced by humans] SARS-related coronaviruses able to infect human cells and laboratory animals. This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens (i.e., potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in a lab, not in nature). This research matches — indeed epitomizes — the definition of ‘gain of function research of concern’ for which federal funding was ‘paused’ in 2014-2017."
While no definitive conclusions can be drawn about why this kind of confusion exists in the first place, it should be noted that Fauci and Daszak, sadly, have plenty of incentive to push the narrative that the virus's origin is zoonotic in order to protect the future funding and reputation of their main game: gain-of-function research.
And last week, Sky News Australia broke the story that Daszak was lying about crucial details of the story he maintained about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak said there were no bats at the facility being tested, throwing around hollow definitive statements to distract from the facts and maintain the authoritative narrative.
A potential cover-up
But how did we get here? How is it that for seemingly a whole year, not a word about gain-of-function was uttered?
A few weeks ago, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), thousands of pages of emails containing the correspondences of Dr. Fauci through the early days of the pandemic were compiled.
When this entered the ether, the resulting take on the story was very much a microcosm of any other piece of news that broke during the pandemic. Democrats, through the bullhorns of CNN and NPR and others, urged a lull upon the land so that all could stop to get a good idea of just how stressed and tired Tony Fauci was in his mythological battle against all the world's muck. Republicans, through the beating drums of Fox News, were jumping to any and all conclusions about any and all little things.
Sure, in this case the Democrats, in an illogical defense of everything Fauci, were obfuscating the matter more than the Republicans, but overall, the revelations were kinked, wrinkled, and torn in such a way that the clear crux of the bombshell was muddied by passive denial and a litany of little distractions.
With all the confusion and deception surrounding the pandemic, it is vital that a revealing bomb of information needs to be trimmed of its fat and expressed as concisely as possible so as to get across the crux of what is alarming here. To many, the clear story of the FOIA request was mainly the email correspondence between Fauci and others between January 31, 2020 and February 2, 2020.
(In case the reader would prefer or would be interested, Dr. Chris Martenson breaks down a chunk of these emails as well, and quite compellingly, in the video below.)
On January 31, 2020, with the time listed as 10:32 pm, Dr. Fauci received an email from Kristian G. Andersen, an infectious diseases and genomics expert, as well as a professor at Scripps Research Institute:
Look at the bottom of the body's second paragraph: "The usual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look closely at all sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered."
Now remember, it was first established to the public that the virus definitely had a zoonotic origin. But why was it that these experts saw the characteristics that point to the virus being engineered from the start? Is this not a clear contradiction of the initial narrative sold?
From here, with this bombshell, one follows the chain of emails to find that only more unanswered questions are arising.
Within a few hours of Andersen's email, Fauci wrote one to Hugh Auchincloss, the NIAID Principal Deputy Director who oversees portfolios of critical and applied research (you know, the same research that people suspect is gain-of-function):
Here, Fauci sends Auchincloss an attachment of a paper from 2015 entitled "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence." This paper was the result of gain-of-function research, specifically testing chimeric SARS viruses to run through human lung tissue.
It states at the end of the paper that this particular gain-of-function research— completed a year after the Obama administration's moratorium on funding— was allowed to continue because it had been initiated before the pause on funding. Moreover, it finishes by saying: "This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH."
So despite the pause, this research was authorized by somebody at the NIH to continue, and Fauci sent it to Auchincloss with the direction that he will "have tasks" to complete, and just a few hours after Andersen's email about the look of being "engineered." Something was at work.
What kind of tasks could Auchincloss have had that day? That's impossible to say. But when thinking about potential incentive, Fauci and Auchincloss, two of the prominent heads that ostensibly oversee gain-of-function research, knew they could very well face scrutiny, embarrassment, and loss of funding if word got out that their favored research method caused the largest global health crisis ever.
Continuing with the emails, there is another one from February 1 from Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar to Fauci and Patrick Vallance, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, with the subject line of "re:Teleconference." There, he wrote: "Kristen and Eddie have shared this and will talk through it on the call . . . Hope it will help frame the discussions."
CC'ed on that email are a list of high level medical minds related to government's and agencies: Kristian G. Andersen; Christian Drosten, German virologist who rose to national prominence with the pandemic; Marion Koopmans, Dutch virologist, Head of Viroscience at the Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC), and on WHO's advisory board; Ron Fouchier, Dutch virologist, Deputy Head of Viroscience at Erasmus MC; Edward Holmes, Australian virologist and evolutionary biologist, fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council; Andrew Rambaut, British evolutionary biologist, and a member of the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE); Mike Ferguson, a fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, as well as Deputy Chair of the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust; and Francis Collins, the Director of the NIH.
The Wellcome Trust is, of course a trust, not a government agency. The trust was left behind by since-deceased pharmacologist, Henry Wellcome, and uses it's tens of billions of dollars going around paying for and funding various things.
And it's not just Farrar from the Wellcome Trust, it's also Paul Schreier, the Cheif Operating Adviser for the trust, and Ferguson, who is also the trust's Deputy Chair.
So (as Dr. Chris Martenson asked) why would a harmless, seemingly philanthropic trust be included in a planned teleconference with some of the top medical professionals just hours after one of those professionals (Andersen) pointed out the clear appearance of an "engineered" virus? Moreover, why is it the trust's director coordinating it?
So, a very important conference call is set up including high-level individuals associated with the NIH and NIAID, the Wellcome Trust, the WHO, as well as other researchers.
This email was sent 56 minutes into the conference call from Farrar to Fauci, Collins, Ferguson, and Vallance:
So the call ends, and a smaller group dials back in, all key members of either the Wellcome Trust, the NIH and NIAID. The director of the trust is almost certainly running this effort. Why? It's not clear. But only more questions arise.
After the call, Marion Koopmans writes an email following the conference call:
Yes, all of what she wrote in follow-up to the conference call has been redacted, which leads us to an important point. There are different kinds of redactions put in place for various reasons. For instance, the most common redaction is exemption (b)(6), which protects personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, etc.
But the above redaction of Koopmans's email was assigned exemption (b)(5), which exempts mandatory disclosure for "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency, provided that the deliberative process privilege shall not apply to records created 25 years or more before the date on which the records were requested." Furthermore, "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that to qualify for Exemption 5 protections, a document must satisfy two conditions. First, 'its source must be a Government agency.' Second, the document 'must fall within the ambit of a privilege against discovery' recognized under Exemption 5."
No need to over complicate an already complicated legal definition, but one thing is clear: Marion Koopmans is not associated with a U.S. Government agency. So why is she getting a (b)(5) exemption?
Again, we have little answers to these questions. All we have are even more questions.
On top of that instance, the (b)(5) exemption does its job obscuring any potential light on this matter. Ron Fouchier, another Dutch virologist from Erasmus MC that is not a part of a U.S. Government agency got the same exemptions:
But wait, maybe the extensive notes Fouchier took will be free of redaction. . .
Think again:
And Farrar, director of a trust, not a Government agency, got the same treatment. . .
. . .In response to Fouchier's notes:
. . .Laying out his planned actions:
. . .Addressing the chunks of knowledge discussed:
. . .And in opening up for additional feedback:
Then comes the sense of urgency. Farrar writes an email to Fauci and Collins, with a CC for Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Director of NIH as well as the agency's Deputy Ethics Counselor. He writes the following, including a link at the bottom:
Again, more questions arise. What is the decision that they are waiting on Tedros and Bernhard for? And why is it that the the link that seems related to whichever decision needs to be made that day is titled "Coronavirus Contains 'HIV Insertions', Stoking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon"?
Recall, the frenzy started with Andersen pointing out that the virus looks engineered, which led to the coordinated conference call and the subsequent follow-up emails. And now this.
Now, since the redactions are practically suffocating the meaty email exchanges, the only way to gain insight on this suspiciously obscured correspondence is to see what happened next with those involved. Maybe that way, some inference could be made as to what may have been the reason behind a high-level conference call initiated from Andersen's email citing that the virus looks "engineered."
Well, as chance would have it, about 8 days after the email exchange, a preprint of an influential manuscript was posted to Nature Medicine titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2."
This document became the ultimate reference, the holy scripture, if you will, on the virus's origin. Predictably— given all the obfuscation, inconsistency, and redactions— this paper established the origin of the virus as zoonotic.
The actual paper was not officially published until March, but about a week after the email exchange, the document that established the authoritative narrative was completed by its authors, four out of five of whom were part of Farrar's conference call: Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Edward Holmes, and Robert F. Garry (who works on countermeasures to dangerous pathogens).
So within 8 days this group of high-level minds went from frantic email correspondence set on figuring out what to do in the face of the fact that a dangerous virus clearly displays all the signs of one that was engineered in a lab, to finishing up a paper that establishes otherwise— and a paper, no less, that is authored by scientists who all had something to lose if initial reports pointed to a lab leak.
What kind of new data could be retrieved in roughly a week's time that would ease all these medical minds? Don't forget there would also need to be ample time to write the manuscript. Is there any data?
Well, again: we just don't know. That is kind of why we're in this spot. However, we do know that this particular set of exchanges are remarkably fishy and raises more questions than it answers.
Excluding some of those (b)(5) exemptions would be a tremendous help. It would appear that they're unlawful, anyway, and those redactions are blocking out any insight on what the goal of the conference call was, what the role of the Wellcome Trust is in all of this, and if there was any blatant corruption at play.
What's perhaps most frustrating at this point in time is that despite the clear signs something is peculiar about many of the larger aspects of this apparent cover-up, any skepticism or concern is met with wise-guy condescension. There are inherently questions— important questions— and it's insulting to all justifiably curious minds when a pompous professional, like Kristian G. Andersen posts something like this:
Andersen has since deleted his Twitter account, and did so shortly after that tweet. So the ship took on some water and now his Twitter account is gone. But Andersen and others' justification for the "confusion" utilizes the strategy of a tyrant; the same way a dictator hides behind the state, Andersen, Fauci, and others hide behind the "science". . .
[Skip to ~5:08 in the video below where Fauci refers to himself in the third person and says, “you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.”]
That's more of a slap in the face when authoritative scientific minds spent a year and a half violently stomping on scientific principles and the standard ethical process. Unfortunately, it would appear some of the world's top experts, amid an unfathomable pandemic, chose to go their own way, possibly in the pursuance of personal gain, and certainly at the expense of the global population's health and intelligence. The facts will be illuminated in time.
The cracks in this whole thing are beginning to show, all around. From the FOIA request, to Fauci's deceptions, to Andersen's pedantic cowardice, the people are gaining a better ability to sniff out malarkey.
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