The COVID Thing Is Starting To Look Like Watergate

Except that in Watergate, nobody died. One big currernt similarity, though, is that calls go out for the resignation or removal of key figures -- in this case, Dr Fauci -- that are stubbornly, and even arrogantly, resisted by the administraion, until after months of pressure and successive revelations, they're finally removed. I lived through Watergate; to refresh my memory, I went to the timeline on Wikipedia.

John Ehrlichman, whose photo is above, was one of the more annoying figures in the scandal. He was one of those who resigned or was fired from the White House on April 30, 1973, following months of demands for such action. He eventually served 18 months for perjury and conspiracy. I'm beginning to have a sense of inevitability to the departures of current, similar figures like Fauci, Collins, Daszak, and no doubt others whose names we hardly know.

In fact, another similarity to Watergate is the constant emergence of new names and new details. For Watergate, which was in comparison a fairly simple scandal involving a single burglary and subsequent coverup, the time between the crime in 1972 and Nixon's resignation in 1974 was more than two years. The COVID-Wuhan lab story is much bigger, involving millions of deaths worldwide, enormous worldwide economic damage, and general disruption to much of the world's population.

Among other issues, there's a question of how the world can stop China from continuing its lab research on making viruses more deadly, which is probably more critical to human health and survival than banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere. This isn't going to blow over. Biden clearly doesn't yet understand this, if he ever will.

One data point that just emerged this morning is Dr Kristian Andersen, one of those new names that, as in Watergate, is likely to keep emergine from obscurity. Andersen surfaced last week as an e-mail correspondent of Dr Fauci, advising him on Januaary 31, 2020 that the COVID virus appeared to have been "engineered". However, in public statements made at the same time, Andersen denounced Sen Tom Cotton's similar theory, and later published a paper insisting the virus was natural. Andersen received NIH grants after his change of opinion, raising the question of conflict of interest.

Over the weekemd. after first blocking journalists asking him about his change of stance, Andersen deleted his entire Twitter account. This contained about 5,000 posts, which suggests his use of social media had been at best imprudent prior to this time.

But he seems to be the first of the figures suddenly reaching the public eye to realize the best couse is to stop talking. This is a fast-developing story that I think will be much more significant than Watergate. Other figures need to start reassessing where they stand.

Remember Dr Birx?

One of the names that's faded in the COVID-Wuhan story is Dr Deborah Birx, who was something of a co-spokesperson for the public health elite with Dr Fauci until she was caught traveling to Delaware to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family, in violation of CDC guidelines. After a few days of trying to scold the plebs about it, she announced her retirement.

This is unusual for public figures caught in hypocrisy during the crisis. Others, like Govs Newsom, Whitmer, and Cuomo, have simply had their flacks make oopsie-type statements and scolded the plebs about their own mask wearing -- "the governor's inadvertent oversight is a reminder to all of us" blah blah blah -- but nobody remotely thinks of retiring. And it appears that for Dr Birx, this was no empty promise, she did retire and has taken a new corporate sinecure.

Although she turned 65 just this past April, It's worth noting that her colleagues Drs Fauci and Collins never saw any particular urgency to retire at 65 and have stayed at their jobs well past that age. (And I would guess that Dr Birx's duties were less than demanding even before she retired.) So why did she cash out?

Here's my theory. We can make a pretty good inference from the heavily redacted e-mail exchanges between Collins and Fauci that both knew by late January 2020 that there had been a lab leak in Wuhan. By late February 2020, when both Birx and Fauci were appointed to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, we must assume that she had been briefed to the same level as Fauci, and their walking orders were to deflect as much as possible from any mention that Wuhan COVID could have been manufactured by a Chinese lab, or that it had leaked from such a lab.

Their job was to keep the focus on masks, social distance, ventilators, hospital ships, and lockdowns. They certainly played a part in what's beginning to emerge as a coordinated media narrative that to refer to the virus as coming from China, or to refer to it as the Wuhan flu, was racist. Instead, they led a charade that masks and lockdowns were the answer, when Dr Birx's own conduct made it clear that she saw no particular danger in violating the CDC's guidelines.

But it's also worth stressing that although Fauci is clearly compromised at this point, and Birx must be equally so by association, neither originated any plan to dismiss the Wuhan lab leak as a conspiracy theory. This came from higher up. Their boss Francis Collins was clearly aware of it, and his interviews last week are a careful attempt to minimize NIH's involvement in the much more widespread deep state funding of the Wuhan lab. There almost certainly had to be a consensus among deep-state actors at Collins's level -- but also not at the cabinet level -- on how to limit the potential scandal. Fauci and Birx were doing what they were told, which included building a narrative that the virus was Trump's fault.

Birx continued to reinforce this narrative even after she left the White House task force. According to Wikipedia,

On January 20, 2021, her term ended. Afterwards, Birx stated that she often considered quitting her position as White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration due to the administration's hyper-partisanship, especially during the 2020 presidential election. Birx also asserted that the Trump administration "censored" her "science-based guidance" and that she was also "being deliberately blocked from appearing on national media outlets for a time."

We're learning, though, that the "science based guidance" she and Fauci issued varied simply by who was asking for it, and Birx herself didn't take the guidance seriously. Once the game became uncomfortable, she simply dropped out.

Birx was doing only what she'd been told. She didn't like that, to be sure, and she ducked out of it as quickly as she could, although her post-retirement statements, and her revolving-door sinecure with a company with business before the COVID establishment, suggest this had nothing to do with the promptings of conscience. Dr Birx is definitely still with the program, but I suspect she had an inkling that the charade was going to be harder and harder to maintain.

The question that needs to be investigated is who cooked up the underlying frammis? Who thought it would be a good idea to create a myriad of separate gain-of-function grants, bundle them into a single pool, and hand that pool over to the EcoHealth Alliance and send it all to China? And why? Birx was a bit player in a much bigger game, and she left it only because she didn't want to work that hard at it.

The Frammis Part II

When I posted about the frammis on Thursday, I came up with several questions that I thought would go to the base of the con: money was going to the Wuhan lab; someone benefitted from that money; if we find out who, we make some progress. Indeed, we're making some progress.

The story is developing quickly, and information trickles out by the day. This story in Independent Science News provides what I think are productive clues about the money.

For much of this year, [Peter] Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance garnered a great deal of sympathetic media coverage after its $3.7 million five-year NIH grant was prematurely cut when the Trump administration learned that EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research at the WIV.

The temporary cut was widely depicted in major media as Trump undermining the EcoHealth Alliance’s noble fight against pandemics. The termination was reversed by NIH in late August, and even upped to $7.5 million. But entirely overlooked amid the claims and counter-claims was that far more funding for the EcoHealth Alliance comes from the Pentagon than the NIH.

. . . Only buried under their “Privacy Policy,” under a section titled “EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,” does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the “recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.”

Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID); whereas the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which accounts for a minuscule $74,487, comes before either.

Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”

Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000. These two sources thus total over $103 million.

According to the New York Post,

Daszak received more than $410,000 in annual compensation from EcoHealth and “related organizations” during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2019, according to an IRS filing posted online by the ProPublica news organization.

The nonprofit, which says it’s “dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergency of disease,” has received as much as $15 million a year in grant money from various federal agencies, Vanity Fair said.

EcoHealth has used those grants to fund controversial “gain-of-function” research — which can increase the infectiousness and virulence of viruses — at facilities that include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Vanity Fair.

The Vanity Fair story referenced gives more detail:

British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

Thus NIH Director Francis Collins was less than fully ingenuous in his PBS interview this week with Judy Woodruff:

We never authorized any support of a virus that would infect a human to make it more lethal or more transmissible. That would have been absolutely off-limits.

The amount of money that went to that particular institute was quite modest. I can't tell you whether they, with their millions, tens of millions, or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of other research, were doing other things that they didn't tell us about. But I will tell you that what NIH supported, what we approved is not something that would have contributed to the arrival of this very dangerous pandemic.

Collins was implicitly acknowledging that the NIH piece of the total in grant money that went to the Wuhan Institute was modest -- we see estimates in the $600,000 range -- but he's implicitly referring to "maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in other research" that are coming from other US agencies for Chinese gain-of-function research, apparently all, or almost all, funneled through Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance.

There's much, much more to this story, but clearly Collins and Fauci are aware of much more than they've said so far. This is clear in a Daily Caller story:

The director of the National Institutes of Health wants to answer congressional inquiries about the agency’s links to a Wuhan lab in private, he told the Hugh Hewitt Show on Wednesday.

Referring to a congressional letter on his agency’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said, “in our response, we offered to have a chance to simply get into a secure space and have a conversation. . . . Much of the information they’re asking for, we don’t have the answers to. Some of it is pretty sensitive, not quite classified, but getting close to that.”

So it seems like the US deep state has more or less secretly laundered hundreds of millions (by Collins's own estimate) to China via EcoHealth Alliance for virus gain-of-function research, which almost certainly resulted in a lab leak that killed millions worldwide, threw millions more out of work, and severely disrupted the lives of just about everyone.

And Collins wants to chat about this in private, strictly entre nous.

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.

Here's The Frammis

I've always been drawn to the vocabulary of the gamblers, pimps, thieves, and con artists in Jim Thompson's noir thrillers. In that world, "frammis" has a specific meaning, roughly the structure of the whole nefarious deal, the outline of the con. The Wuhan lab leak story is fast-moving, but I think I'm beginning to see the frammis here.

In 2014, the Obama White House announced a "pause" in funding for the type of gain-of-function research that led to the Wuhan lab leak. According to the NIH at that time:

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced(link is external) today that the U.S. government will undertake a deliberative process to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in order to develop a new Federal policy regarding the funding of this research. . . . “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of these infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets.

In light of the quickly-emerging consensus that the whole COVID pandemic was the result of a gain-of-function lab leak, the "pause" could hardly have been more justified. But in 2017, the "pause" was lifted, and this meant that funding for GOF research resumed. According to the NIH in a December 19, 2017 release:

Today, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is lifting a funding pause dating back to October 2014 on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. GOF research is important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.

There are two interesting issues here. One is that the 2014 pause is described as a White House initiative, but the 2017 lifting of the pause was apparently the initiative of the NIH, the deep state, not the White House. By 2017, the White House was the Trump administration, and quite possibly nobody there was familiar with the policy decisions that led to the 2014 pause. Did NIH clear lifting the pause with any higher authority? The second question is that the 2017 announcement lifting the pause goes on to describe an "HHS P3CO Framework" that reviews and approves GOF funding. This designation appears in the Fauci e-mail trove. I'll return to it below.

But more important, we're at the linchpin of the frammis: a decision was made to resume funding GOF research. This means somebody got money that hadn't got it before the pause was lifted. Who was this? For whose benefit? Who drove the process of lifting the pause in NIH? If we answer these questions, we're going to make some progress.

There's a subtext to the whole early 2020 Fauci e-mail trove, and that's that by late January-early February, it was plain to Fauci and a few others that a lab leak of a dangerous virus had occurred some months earlier in Wuhan. They immediately undertook a high-priority hush-hush effort first, to minimize the danger of the leaked virus, and second, to cover up the leak. This suggests to me that Fauci and others at his level in NIH had guilty knowledge of circumstances behind the 2017 lifting of the pause.

(This also explains Fauci's flip-flops as the crisis arose in late winter 2020: he first minimized the virus, telling people to go on cruises, saying masks weren't necessary, and decrying Trump's China travel ban. They were part of an early strategy of nothing-to-see-here, which broke down, at which point Fauci had to adopt a pose of benevolent tyranny and lockdowns, accompanied by a coordinated media effort to apotheosize him.)

A Feb 1, 2020 e-mail from Fauci to his chief deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, reflects this urgency and suggests some of the structure in the frammis:

“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Keep your cell phone on … Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”

. . . “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause [in October 2014] but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss emailed Fauci later in the day. “Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

The P3 framework Auchincloss mentions is presumabvly the NIH approval process noted in the 2017 release from NIH. But it appears that Fauci bypassed the P3 framework as it applied to the Wuhan lab. A little-noticed story from this past April says,

A board created to oversee research that could make dangerous pathogens more contagious did not review a National Institutes of Health grant that funded a project in Wuhan, China to genetically modify bat-based coronaviruses, according to a new report.

The nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance received federal funding for its research without undergoing an independent review by the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO), according to the Daily Caller.

The grant included $600,000 in funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab where some experts believe COVID-19 first leaked into the human population in late 2019.

Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright told the Daily Caller that the offices of the director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the subagency that funded EcoHealth — and the NIH have “systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the NIAID while Dr. Francis S. Collins leads the NIH.

So the 2014 pause was lifted in 2017, under puzzling circumstances, but a P3 framework was implemented to review GOF research -- except that Fauci then bypassed the framework that allowed the pause to be lifted.

Somebody really, really wanted EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab to get money. There's a closely related story at RedState on how Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, began soliciting signers via e-mail on February 10 for a letter to The Lancet denouncing the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. (Nearly all the signers had financial ties or relationships to Daszak and EcoHealth that weren't disclosed.)

I think this story has legs. My guess is that whistleblowers and disgruntled people will be coming forward, more each day.

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.