Kabuki

Two data points in yesterday's news struck me in the wake of rumored reports of a Chinese defector with the goods on the Wuhan lab leak. The first was this story in The National Pulse, which has been consistently ahead of the game in its reports on COVID's origins and funding.

Google.org, the charity arm of the tech behemoth, has also been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth alliance researchers including Peter Daszak since at least 2010.

The decade-plus relationship is evident in a 2010 study on bat flaviviruses, which lists Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance Vice President Jonathan Epstein as authors, that thanks Google.org for funding. A 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, which was authored by Daszak, similarly declares it was partly “supported by Google.org.”

And a 2015 paper focusing on herpes, which lists EcoHealth’s Daszak and Epstein as authors, reveals it was “supported by funding from the US Agency for International Development’s Emerging Pandemic Threats: PREDICT program, the Skoll Foundation, and Google.org.”

The other data point is a report of White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's interview on Friday’s “CBS This Morning”:

[U]ltimately, we need access and the international community needs access to China to be able to get that initial data that will tell us the most about where this virus came from and how it entered into the world. And you’re right, so far China has said, no, we won’t allow that.

But of course, if Dong Zingwei and two other defectors have actually come over with data on the Wuhan lab, we've already learned far more than we could ever hope to get from China no matter what. And the abrupt change in the Overton window of permissible discussion suggests something like this may have happened.

But even if it hasn't, don't we have a very good source of information at 520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1200, New York, NY 10018, the headquarters of EcoHealth Alliance? How hard can it be for the funding agencies to ask for a complete audit? Who donated, for what, and where were the funds routed? If nothing else, this is a non-profit, apparently a very big and influential one. I doubt if Peter Daszak flies commercial. Might it be appropriate for the IRS to ask whether it's following all the rules?

All things considered, it's starting to look to me as though EcoHealth's board should already have hired outside counsel for an investigation, with Daszak already announcing he's leaving to pursue the usual. It's puzzling that nothing like this has happened.

It seems to me that somewhere on the list of important issues in the COVID story is the degree to which US agencies and foundations have been complicit for years in creating the conditions that led to Holocaust-level deaths and worldwide disruption. The complicity includes massive conflict of interest -- if Google was funding some of this work via its eleemosynary arm, no wonder its YouTube arm was suppressing stories about a lab leak. And again, I doubt if Daszak flies commercial. He and his colleagues have been living quite well under these arrangements.

What I'm seeing so far, though, is boy, we've got to get to the bottom of this! But WHO is on the case! And Biden has ordered a full report! We and our partners, indeed the entire international community, must press China for greater transparency!

This is kabuki. I'm not sure how long it can last.