The Fauci Story Arc Misfires

The most interesting story yesterday was the Washington Post's publication of selections from 866 pages of Dr Fauci's e-mails from March and April 2020 obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Legacy US media has scrambled to scrub the revelations, doing its best to make them non-controversial or even slightly favorable, but among them are some fascinaing data points. Via RedState:

Another email dated April 11, 2020, from Janet Tobias, CEO of Ikana Health Media, was addressed to Fauci with a cc to Patricia Conrad, NIH Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff. This email lets the cat out of the bag that Fauci allowed himself to be filmed in the midst of the pandemic response, because Robert Iger, executive chairman of The Walt Disney Companies and NatGeo, wanted to maintain momentum on an already established documentary on Fauci’s life and work.

The e-mail read:

“I think we have landed in the right place for the film about your life. Nat Geo, Disney, and Bob Iger himself, all understand the need for discretion now but are wildly supportive about releasing a film that will celebrate the importance of your life, science and public health.

The piece notes that this was during April 2020, when very little was known about the virus, its origins, or its potential effect. Neertheless, it sounds as though the lizard people who run the media had already focused on Fauci as the central figure of the pandemic. This focus continues. Fauci is set to release a book in November, clearly as part of a media strategy:

The book, titled “Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward,” recently became available for pre-order.

Jordan Peterson, though, has already issued 12 Rules for Life. In fact, he's about to issue 12 more. How can Fauci keep up?

Another revelation is an effort in April 2020 to label the lab leak hypothesis of COVID's origin a "conspiracy theory". Via the New York Post,

The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China was dismissed as a “conspiracy” by National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in April of last year, newly released emails show.

The email from Collins to current White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and others is part of a tranche of more than 3,200 pages of emails obtained by Buzzfeed News and published Tuesday.

On April 15, 2020, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported that US officials were increasingly confident that the virus “likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory. . ."

. . . The following day, April 16, Collins forwarded a link to a Mediaite writeup of Baier’s “Hannity” appearance to Fauci, NIH Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Deputy Director Clifford Lane, and NIH spokesperson John Burklow under the subject line “conspiracy gains momentum”. The rest of the message is redacted.

Fauci sent a reply to Collins at 2:45 a.m. April 17. That response is also redacted.

. . . The following day, April 18, Fauci received an email from Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, thanking him “for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Via The Australian:

America’s top medical adviser Anthony Fauci was informed as early as February 2020 that Covid-19 exhibited unusual viral characteristics which could have potentially been engineered in a lab, according to emails published.

. . . In one email from Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, Dr Fauci was told that Dr Andersen and his fellow scientists had to “look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered”.

. . . In another email from that same day, Dr Fauci wrote to his deputy at the NIAID, Hugh Auchincloss, attaching a 2015 research paper which described the so-called “gain-of-function research on coronaviruses”, which is designed to make them more deadly and transmissible.

Dr Fauci, who has repeatedly denied involvement in gain-of-function research, wrote: “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM … Read this paper … you will have tasks today that must be done.”

Dr Auchincloss replied: “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by (the US National Institutes of Health) … will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad”.

The Australian last week reported that Dr Fauci had previously supported the contentious gain-of-function experiments, which some virologists suspect might have led Covid-19 to inadvertently escape from a Wuhan laboratory.

I think these are signs the narrative has also escaped from the lab.

I'm Keeping My Eye On The Wuhan Lab Leak Story

Over the past month, the story has gradually been emerging that the COVID virus almost certainly did not jump from bats to humans but instead was developed artificially in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which according to Wikipedia

is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory. The institute has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.

Last week, a peer-reviewed paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery that made a number of "explosive" claims about the origin of the virus. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Much of the work was centered around controversial 'Gain of Function' research – temporarily outlawed in the US under the Obama administration.

Gain of Function involves tweaking naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious, so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab, allowing the virus's potential effect on humans to be studied and better understood.

. . . 'A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the COVID-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,' the scientists wrote.

'The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.

'Because of wide social impact, these decisions cannot be left to research scientists alone.'

Last week, Biden ordered intelligence officials to "redouble" efforts to investigate the origins of COVID and report back to him in 90 days. Clearly he's shocked, shocked. Ric Grenell, who was acting Director of National Intelligence under Trump, said

''If you go back to April 30, 2020, there is a statement that was issued when I was acting director of national intelligence that the entire intelligence community agreed to, and that’s a very rare thing when you can get all of the agencies to sign off on every verb and every comma. But they did and they made three very critical points and, in that statement – it’s still up on the DNI website – we said China was responsible for COVID-19.

. . . 'Now we have Joe Biden pretending to instruct the intelligence community to go review documents and catch up. Let me be very clear, the intelligence community every day looks at documents. They don’t need to be told to catch up or do a 90-day review. They do that review every single day. So, if one person is behind and wants a 90-day catch-up, it’s Joe Biden.''

The question that's still murky here is why the "gain of function" research was being done. In the Daily Mail link above, there are clearly ethical queations notwithstanding any other factor. The CDC was funding work at the Wuhan lab via a subgrant. A big question is how well this grant was supervised, and money is fungible. If I give my teen an allowance on the condition it's not to buy drugs, but the kid also has a part-time job, he can buy drugs and claim the bills he used to buy them weren't from his allowance -- but notwithstanding, the allowance made him able to buy drugs as well as gas for his car. Thus Dr Fauci:

During the Senate hearing on 26 May, [Louisiana Republican Sen John] Kennedy asked Fauci, who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whether the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) might have lied about conducting “gain-of-function” research.

. . . Kennedy retorted by asking how he would know if the WIV conducted research or not, to which Fauci said, “There is no way of guaranteeing that. But in our experience with grantees, including Chinese grantees…they are very competent scientists that you would expect would bide by the conditions of the grant, which they have done in the years that we have had interactions with them.”

Add to the questioins of ethics and effective supervision of the grant the additional very real possibility that the Wuhan research was conducted specifically to weaponize the virus. At that point Dr Fauci's position is simply untenable.

This is why Biden is happy to wait 90 days to hear back. But we've had a holiday break, and blood is in the water.

If Epstein Were Murdered In His Cell, Who Would Benefit?

Last week's plea deal for the jail guards who were asleep while Epstein hanged himself in his cell has revived interest in whether he was murdered or a suicide. I've already weighed in, it was suicide. But if it was a hit, it would be a potentially explosive development, a scandal with wide-ranging repercussions. What would be the benefit of a move with such a huge downside risk? More than a few people wouls have to be involved, and the chances they'd all keep quiet would be slim.

So let's say the initiative for such a conspiracy came from someone with so much to lose that the downside if the conspiracy came to light would be less than the downside if some much bigger secret came out -- a secret that only Epstein could know about, and so big that he had to be eliminated to keep it. So who might that person be, and what might the secret be?

The best we know of Epstein's scam from the mid-1990s until his 2008 guilty plea was that he ran a blackmail operation that laundered payments through philanthropic fronts. The best guess we have about his marks, from his known associates and the flight manifests of the Lolita Express, is that they were mostly corporate B-listers and fading celebrities, figures like Les Wexner, Jes Staley, and Kevin Spacey. The philanthropic fronts were things like the Clinton Foundation and projects at Harvard and MIT. The best-known passengers on the Lolita Express were Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton.

Andrew is a royal also-ran with no especially good reputation pre Epstein, while as best we can tell, Clinton associated with Epstein after he'd left office -- but given Monica Lewinsky, who cares if he fooled around with Epstein while he was still president? So it seems to me that neither of the two most powerful and prominent men in Epstein's circle had so much to lose that they'd risk more to put out a hit on the guy.

Donald Trump is said to have consorted with Epstein in the 1990s, but so far, there have been no credible allegatons that he had something to hide that was so egregious that he'd put out a hit -- and after Stormy Daniels, who cares? Even if Trump as president had the wherewithal to set up such a hit through the federal prison system, some number of people would have to be involved, and given the number of deep staters who'd make scandals up to hurt him, any attempt on Trump's part actually to set up a murder would bring whistelblowers out of the woodwork instantly.

Leaving aside the allegations of sex with underage girls that surround Epstein and his circle, the biggest secrets otherwise would be blackmail payments laundered through philanthropic fronts. While this could potentially mean money laundering charges and tax issues, non-profits like the Clinton Foundation, Harvard, and MIT have so far been protected from investigation and are likely to remain so. No need to whack Epstein to keep things quiet on that front.

In addition, secrets have time value. Businessmen retire, politicians leave office, and everyone passes away. Memories fade. The public grows jaded. One more grope? One more affair? And 20 years ago? Epstein's activities appear to have been restricted after his 2008 guilty plea. He could no longer afford to fly the Lolita Express, Ghislaine cashed out, and people were more reluctant to deal with him. By the time of his 2019 death, his juiciest sercrets were likely at least 11 years old and losing value by the day.

This would also apply to the theory that Epstein was some type of spy, either for the Mossad or the CIA. Those secrets have time value, too. And successful spies keep a low profile, which Epstein never did. One of the biggest ways spies get caught is by conspicuous spending. If anything, Epstein was a cheesy con artist. He might have convinced his marks he was a spy, but I don't think he ever was part of a serious intelligence network.

I just don't think there was enough benefit to anyone to have Epstein murdered in his cell, vis-a-vis the downside of having the conspiracy to do this come to light. This doesn't rule out a murder by a freelance lone prisoner who would do it for the sake of his reputation among other prisoners, but the appeal of an Epstein-was-murdered theory is that it involves a conspiracy by powerful people to keep secrets.

I just don't see that. By 2019, Epstein was old business, which is why they were finally able to arrest him.

The Amazon Nooses And The Folk Devil

I've been saying all along that we've been in a moral panic, and I think it's just about run its course. That doesn't mean we won't continue to see local outbreaks of one sort or another, but I think the country in general is George Floyded out. A current late-phase local outbreak stems from an old, pre-panic device, the noose, or as some accounts now put it, the "apparent noose". These have kept popping up over the past several decades, but they're all almost immediately discredited as hoaxes or misunderstandings.

This latest noose brouhaha is at an Amazon construction site in Windsor, CT. According to the New York Post,

Amazon halted construction at a facility in Windsor, Connecticut for the second time in as many weeks on Wednesday — after an apparent noose was found in the building for the eighth time in recent weeks.

Workers found a red rope “with a noose tied at the end” entangled in yellow electrical cables on the 5th floor of the planned fulfillment center, Windsor Police Chief Donald Melanson said at a press conference.

. . . Investigators believe the rope found Wednesday had been there for at least two weeks, since that area of the site hadn’t been worked on for that period of time.

“This one was clearly a noose,” Melanson told reporters, calling the act “unacceptable” and “a hate crime.”

Police evacuated the facility and called in the FBI, which is also investigating.

Melanson said “in all likelihood, it’s a worker” who is responsible.

The police evacuate a facility because someone finds a two-week-old knotted rope? They used to evacuate facilities for suspected anthrax powder, which always turned out to be hysteria. but at least if the powder was actually anthrax, it would justify evacuating a facility. When I was in grad school, students would call in bomb threats on the day of exams to get the classrooms evacuated, but that was only until the dean figured out that was why they were doing it and just stopped evacuating the buildings. Nobody got blown up.

Somebody needs to say get over it. The Windsor police chief is naturally terrified that if he doesn't evacuate the building and call in the FBI while denouncing the hate crime, the local race hustlers will get him fired.

But every moral panic has a folk devil. Chief Melanson identifies him: in all likelihood, it’s a worker. One of those neanderthal construction workers, of all people, and we know about those, don't we. Probably goes to Klan meetings after work. But by extension, this must clearly be a member of the plebs at large, some of whom are known to work construction.

People are getting tired of being gratuitously insulted. This is becoming manifest in numerous ways, and the smart money is beginning to bet that one way will be in the 2022 elections.

Doesn't the FBI have profilers? Those guys who look at patterns of criminal activity and decide the likely perp is between 25 and 35, male, unemployed, lives with his mother? What do you think an FBI profiler would actually come up with as a likely suspect who surreptitiously left a noose? Doesn't it almost always turn out to be the person who discovered the noose was the one who tied it in the first place? But even if it wasn't, how much money and time will the FBI spend chasing after some guy who tied a knot and left it tangled in some electrical cord?

What's the charge? What's the penalty?

At some point we'll inevitably get over it.

The Morning After Phase Is Well Under Way

One of the first academic postmortems onthe COVID response indicates that masking was ineffective:

The first ecological study of mask mandates in U.S. states released by the University of Louisville finds mask mandates were not effective at slowing the spread of coronavirus (Covid-19), meaning they did not work. The results challenge the prevailing wisdom of pandemic policy that continues to dominate corporate media narrative and policy-makers.

Damian D. Guerra (Biology at University of Louisville) and Daniel J. Guerra (Biochemistry at VerEvMed, Clarkston) hypothesized that statewide mask mandates and mask use would be “associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates” in the U.S. However, after calculating total COVID-19 case growth and mask use, the authors of the study entitled “Mask mandate and use efficacy in state-level COVID-19 containment” stated “case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high transmission rates, and surges were equivocal.”

“Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-19 growth surges,” the study concluded. “Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies.”

As a lowly English major, I didn't need a degree in biology to tell me this was the case. All I needed was to google the statistics. At right is the US COVID curve as of this morning. Mask mandates were imposed in most US states in March 2020 and vigorously enforced by tbe most assiduous Karens, as well as by businesses in fear of losing their licenses if they dared to open in defiance of edicts. However, the other ingredient was that states varied in the severity of their mandates, giving the opportunity for statistical comparison on the efficacy of restrictions at different levels.

But the common-sense interpretation of the curve we see here is that no set of restrictions at any practicable level (people need to eat, after all, you can lock down only so far) stopped the late 2020 surge, even though the only measures available had been in force with extensive compliance for many months prior to the surge. The states with the strictest controls in fact had consistently worse results than states with fewer or no restrictions. In addition, by imposing the strictest lockdowns at the start of the crisis, authorities had exhausted their repertory of remedies as the pandemic progressed.

In addition, although Los Angeles County began aggressively vaccinating the most vulnerable population in mid December 2020, the curve there peaked and began a rapid descent in mid January 2021 -- but nobody could be "fully vaccinated", that is two weeks after the second shot, which had to be administered at least four weeks after the first shot -- until late January 2021 at minimum. This suggests that natural immunity played a major role in defeating the pandemic.

The normal definition of herd immunity says that it's a combination of vaccination and the natural immunity of those who've contracted the disease and recovered. Since the case mortality rate was normally 2% or less, 98% of those who contracted COVID recovered and became immune. Los Angeles County's estimate is that by spring 2021, this was about 20% of the population, but this is just among those who were tested. Those who had caught the disease but were asymptomatic would be the least likely to test, so the actual number is likely higher.

Masking and social distancing at best slowed transmission among a population at large that could benefit from the great majority who would contract the disease and become immune, often after mild or no symptoms. Instead, public health authorities spread panic and encouraged measures that were at best superstitious.

I think this is shaping up to be a public policy blunder, led by credentialed Ivy League elites, comparable to the Viet Nam war. The plebs has overwhelmingly responded to the situation with prudence, temperance, and fortitude. This doesn't exempt the authorites who perpetuated this blunder from eventual accountability.

The Moral Panic Continues To Abate

All Right Thinking Opinion has suddednly done a complete 180:

Facebook said Wednesday it would no longer ban posts suggesting COVID-19 is man-made amid mounting calls from President Biden and other officials for further investigation into the pandemic’s origins.

The announcement marked a reversal for the social media giant. In February, Facebook said it would remove posts claiming the virus was man-made or manufactured "following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization" who had "debunked" the claim.

Meanwhile,

A professor with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has said that there is a general dismissal of the fact that more than half of all Americans have developed natural immunity to the coronavirus and that it constitutes “one of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership.”

Dr. Marty Makary made the comments during a recent interview, noting that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to vilify those who don’t want the vaccine because they have already recovered from the virus.

Makary criticised “the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history” for not clearly communicating the scientific facts about natural immunity compared to the kind of immunity developed through vaccines.

Even s few months ago, doctors who made public statements outside the received narrative risked professional repercussions, including loss of license. But the high water mark of the panic has clearly fallen short of vaccine passports.

Even Michigan Gov Whitmer, one of the most vocal moral entrepreneurs in the panic, was forced to relax a few of her COVID restrictions when a photo showed her violating them herself:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration on Monday rescinded a rule that limits restaurant tables to no more than six people, a day after she apologized for ignoring the COVID-19 regulation while gathering with friends at an East Lansing bar.

The Democratic governor has said tables at the Landshark Bar & Grill were pushed together as more people arrived in her party of roughly a dozen fully vaccinated people.

A revised gatherings and face mask order, issued by the state health department, no longer includes the six-patrons-per-table provision, effective June 1. Whitmer had announced last week the planned easing of capacity restrictions on June 1 but had not specified if other changes would be coming in the new order, which was released as expected Monday.

Vaccines continue to be more effective than had been predicted. As of Tuesday, half the US population is "fully vaccinated", COVID statistics continue to drop, and states continue to eliminate all or most restrictions. California will drop nearly all mask and social distance restrictions on June 15, a little over two weedks away.

This amounts to a major readjustment in public attitudes. I think it's becoming more clear that, as public assent in the form of face masks to a particular set of moral panic assumptions disappears, questions about the performance of elites in the crisis will become acceptable. For instance,

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) introduced the Fauci Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal Act around the same time, saying in a statement, “Dr. Fauci represents everything that President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address: the scientific-technical elite steering the country toward their own ends.”

The final phase of a moral panic is the morning after.

The Dershowitz Dilemma

Alan Dershowitz's stock as a talking head has been tanking over thed past several years. Its downturn really started when he publishsd a book against impeaching Trump in 2018, at which time he complained

“But that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard,” he wrote. “For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.”

This fairly unremarkable claim ended up spurring a remarkable four New York Times articles with contributions from eight reporters[.]

In the wake of Jeffrey Epstein's 2020 jailhouse death, the run on Dershowitz stock intensified. Via Page Six,

Dershowitz — who in the past has been regarded as a close associate of Epstein — has distanced himself from the convicted sex offender.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” he told us. “We never had a friendship. I have no personal feelings. He was a client and someone who I had academic contact with. We didn’t have a personal relationship.”

But this isn't what he told Vanity Fair. In 2003, before Epstein's 2008 first case, Dershowitz told Vanity Fair:

In the Vanity Fair piece, Dershowitz told the magazine, "I'm on my 20th book. . . The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey."

Contoversies over how involved Dershowitz was in Epstein's sex trafficking have persisted since the 2014-5 lawsuits by Epstein victims. According to Wikipedia,

In a December 30, 2014 Florida court filing, Virginia Giuffre alleged she was sexually trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, who lent her to people for sex, including Dershowitz and Prince Andrew.

. . . Giuffre filed a defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz, in April 2019, alleging he made "false and malicious defamatory statements" against her, such as accusing her of perjury. The lawsuit sought punitive damages and included the previous claims that Giuffre was sex trafficked to Dershowitz by Epstein. Dershowitz stated that he would "prove without any doubt that she is lying about me. She is going to end up in prison." In June 2019, he filed a motion to dismiss Giuffre's suit (which was later denied) and a motion to disqualify David Boies' firm from representing her (which was later approved). Dershowitz accused Boies of pressuring Giuffre to provide false testimony, in response to which Boies sued Dershowitz in November 2019 for defamation. Giuffre repeated her allegations on camera as part of the May 2020 Netflix series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, by stating that Epstein had trafficked her to Dershowitz for sex at least six times. Dershowitz responded by saying he planned to sue Netflix and repeated his denial of Giuffre's account; he also accused Giuffre of selling false allegations to news outlets. As of November 2020, no such lawsuit has been filed.

Dershowitz's appearances as a media talking head, especially on CNN, have greatly diminished since both the Trump and Epstein controversies. Apparedntly unable to stay out of the public eye, he now has his own YouTube channel, The Dershow, which maybe gives an insight into his character, but which I haven't found engaging. We can say with some assurance, though, that he's at least partly yet another victim of Epstein's downfall. Whether he was ever much of anything beyond a smart lawyer who excelled at self-promotion is an open question, but as he ages, he's slowly trailing into obscurity.

If you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas.