The Biggest Data Point In Yesterday's News

I saw a remark at one of the news aggregators that Francis Collins, the Director of the Natioinal Institutes of Health in uber-elite Bethesda and the boss of Drs Fauci and Walensky, went on the PBS News Hour last night. The main subect of the interview was "vaccine hesitancy", which for Bethesdans translates into finding a way to force the conspiracy theorists to take the shot. But then, certainly by prearrangement, Judy Woodruff brought up the subject that until a week ago had been completely taboo:

[D]o you think — I mean, is it the case that, looking back on that time early in the pandemic — this was early in 2020 — that the possibility that this virus came from that lab was just not taken seriously enough?

Let's keep in mind that this guy is stratospheric in the deep state, if you can get your head around that -- it's a little like the backward hierarchy in The Screwtape Letters, where the higher up a demon is in hell, the lower down he is. Collins would not be going on this show, the deep-state show of record, just to chat about the jab. He answers,

You know, I think it was a confusing time back then, Judy.

First, let me say I do think we need to get answers here. An investigation is very much needed.

What was happening, though, back in February and March of 2020 were, a number of different theories were being floated. One that was particularly prominent was the idea that this vaccine — I mean — sorry — this virus was actually engineered intentionally, that it was a product of bioweapon manufacture.

This is your typical Ivy Leaguer (Yale MS, PhD) who says, with the detachment of authority, that "an investigation is very much needed", except that what's been coming out is that the CDC and NIH (Francis Collins, Director) had bypassed their own protocols to approve grants that went to Chinese virology labs that everyone, with a wink and a nod, understood were doing gain of function research. If there's an investigation, it needs to be undertaken only when Collins is on leave pending said investigation. But Collins goes on,

That, when you looked at the actual letters of the code of this virus, was not tenable. And there's a paper published about that in "Nature Medicine" by Kristian Andersen and others that I got very engaged in reviewing.

So, unfortunately, that particular conspiracy didn't seem supportable. And so the idea that it was, on the other hand, a lab accident, where they were studying this virus, which maybe did occur in nature, but it got loose in the lab, that theory didn't get nearly as much attention perhaps as it should have.

I will tell you, it was always on my mind. I know it was on Tony Fauci's mind. But none of us ran to the microphone to say, we need to worry about the fact this could have been a lab leak.

It — at the present time, we have no more data or less data to support that. Suddenly, it's emerged in a lot of people's minds as, oh, that's the leading explanation.

Collins took the same position in an interview with Peter Wehner in The Atlantic on Wenesday (Wehner characterizes Collins as "a longtime friend" and thus admits he shouldn't have done the interview, even though his thumbnail in the piece says he's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.)

Collins was careful to qualify that the coronavirus is “absolutely not” man-made. “The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unanticipated features that are not consistent with what international experts would have expected from an emerging and dangerous coronavirus,” he told me. “Thus, the hypothesis that this was a human-engineered bioweapon is hard to support. It’s unfortunate that the lab-leak hypothesis has been muddled up with the intentional-bioweapon hypothesis in 16 months of tortured and politically driven rhetoric. That has given way too much credibility to the latter and not enough to the former.”

But gain of function? No, no, no! That'as a completely different thing!

Such research, he explained, is different from enhancing viruses that affect people. “The gain of function that is of much greater concern, and for which the United States has in place stringent oversight guidelines, relates to experiments that might make a human pathogen more transmissible or more virulent,” Collins said. “NIH has never supported such experiments on human coronaviruses. . ."

Except that the record we have, even in an e-mail from Fauci's chief deputy to Fauci himself, is that none of the research money that went to China via the EcoHeath Alliance went through those stringent oversight guidelines, the P3 procedure. Collins's position is that this was all just a big unfortunate accident, in which maybe 5 million died and many more millions thrown out of work. But it was always on his mind, and Fauci's too! We just don't know what led to the accident. Maybe the Chinese will help. There very much needs to be an investigation!

That Collins is now suddenly running interference in the establishment media is significant. Up to this week, Fauci had been the face of the pandemic. This is an indication of how big the story is going to be.

I think in fact that at some level, Collins realizes that this story -- taken most generously, an accident at a lab in China funded at least in part by his agency that has a death toll comparable to the Holocaust -- is going to be one of the key events of the century. A Pearl Harbor-level cataclysm. In fact, a US president who's on the ball would be on the verge of removing both Collins and Fauci, putting them on leave pending investigation. Deep down, or maybe not so deep down. Collins is aware of this.

The Dean of Humanities approach he's taking isn't going to work.'

UPDATE: Ny wife, a retired attorney, just said, "These guys really need to start getting lawyers."

"But if they did," I said, "the lawyers would be telling them not to give interviews."

"That shows they aren't taking this seriously," she replied.