Tuesday, June 29, 2021

The Legacy Media And The COVID Origin Story

There's a particularly annoying offshoot of the TV true crime show, the unsolved murder genre. In this, a crew revisits yet again the scene of the crime and the relatives, still weepy and ready to cry on prompt after 30 years, to rehearse the whole unsolved routine one more time. With nothing new and the case getting older and older, there's little entertainment value other than to prove the continuing popularity of watching people cry on camera. I've always thought the interlocutors get a bonus for each time they can do it.

The odd thing is that legacy media coverage of the COVID origin story, just weeks after it became OK to cover it at all, is already starting to look like an unsolved murder show. There are different thories about how the virus arose. One of them, unconfirmed, is that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. But the Chinese will never cooperate with investigations, so we'll never know. Ain't it awful? Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis, where he interviews the niece of a man who passed away in 2020. . . and the boo-hoo rolls.

The latest version of this is in the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall (why would I pay for nothing?), but I found a summary here.

A Journal investigation found China resisted international pressure for an investigation it saw as an attempt to assign blame, delayed the probe for months, secured veto rights over participants and insisted its scope encompass other countries as well.

China withheld data on potential early cases and delayed sharing information on animals sold at a market where the first cluster was found.

The question of whether a lab accident was the cause of the pandemic remains unanswered. [Does it, really?]

International pressure for a fuller inquiry into the origins of the virus grows.

Other efforts to trace the path of the pandemic continue.

And Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis. The one question that nobody in legacy media is asking is why the whole Wuhan bat lab seems to have been funded by US actors through Peter Daszak's eleemosynary foundation. the EcoHealth Alliance. This has been reported almost exclusively by independent researchers and independent media. They've done their work almost entirely via diligent web searches of public documents, something legacy journalists have stopped doing.

And I hate to say it, but we learned not long ago about another hinky guy who laundered payments through non-profits and took a skim off the top, Jeffrey Epstein. There are money trails that need to be followed and haven't been.

Legacy media, including the Wall Street Journal, isn't asking any of the people on the US side, Fauci; Collins; Daszak; Auchincloss, Fauci's assistant; Andersen; Baric; or any of the other figures about any of this, though they must surely know as much if not more than the Chinese. But in the meantime, all these people have smartened up and have stopped speaking in public, not only to keep the virus money flowing but to avoid indictment.

Now, thanks to Natalie Winters at The National Pulse, one of those who uses public documents for research, Hunter Biden of all people has come into the story.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

. . . Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”

As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes.

. . . Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”

But wait. Rosement Seneca isn't a medical non-profit, it's a venture capital firm that aims to make a profit. It funded Metabiota for the same reason venture capitalists fund any startup, in hopes it will be the next big thing and they can take it public and make a bundle.

So this says, even excluding Hunter Biden, there's big potential money in bat virus pandemics. Big US money that's somehow involved in everyone getting sick with new diseases. There's going to be more to this story.

Come to think of it, yet another hinky guy's been in the news lately, John McAfee. Back in the day, when he was an innovator in the computer virus field, people said computer antivirus was a racket. McAfee's people were suspected of creating the same computer viruses their product was meant to cure.

Big money in that. Look where it took McAfee. Just sayin'.