So It Was Probably A Lab Leak

Within a matter of a couple weeks, the Overton window of COVID's origin has shifted, from Facebook completely banning the lab leak theory to just about everyone saying, well, it's a possibility, and well, it does seem credible, but of course, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Wait a moment. Let's take a look at this kind of accident. On March 6, 1970, members of the Weather Underground were building a bomb in Greenwich Village when it accidentally went off, killing three. But that's OK, it wasn't deliberate, it was just an accident. On August 21, 1945, physicists playing around with the plutonium core of a nuclear bomb in Los Alamos mistakenly dropped part of its shield, causing a criticality incident that killed one physicist and exposed others to dangerous radiation. But that's OK, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate.

Nobody seems to want to ask what's behind this kind of accident. It seems to me that in our examples, people were messing around with material they knew -- and which any sensible adult would conclude -- was part of a highly destructive final product. In one case, it was clearly part of a larger terrorist plot. In the other, it was part of a project deemed essential to national security. But the mistakes were integral to the nature of the devices, they just didn't occur exactly as intended.

We now have video of Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance launders US grant money to Chinese gain-of-function labs, explaining that gain-of-function is exactly what they were doing:

“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.

“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,” he adds.

So it sounds more and more like US government agencies were knowingly sending what the NIH director estimates were hundreds of millions to Daszak and his "colleagues in China" to play around with some extremely dangerous stuff. There was a lab leak, but it wasn't deliberate. Huh? Why were they funding this kind of work in the first place? What was the intent?

Commentators have pooh-poohed the idea that this might have been some kind of weapon -- they ask why China would want to kill millions of its own citizens as well as millions of others worldwide. It's a good question.

But visitors here know I'm fascinated with pieces of pop culture that are also perceptive indicators of what may really be going on. Animal House is one very good example. The Fringe TV series is another. It merges classic mad scientist stereotypes with real-world figures like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy Leary and comes up with theories of how the world works that we can't just completely toss out.

So the Overton window is open just wide enough at the moment to allow us to think the Wuhan lab leak was just an accident, but that's OK, it wasn't deliberate. But one implication of even this is that the US and China were working jointly on a very big project to develop a virus with the potential to kill lots of people. An accident with a beta version, as far as I can see this, did escape from the lab and kill lots of people. The production release will probably be even more deadly.

Harvard graduates will sneer, as they already have, that China won't build a weapon that would kill millions of its own people. And why would the US countenance such a thing, much less fund it?

Fringe has a possible answer, another merger of the mad scientist stereotype with real world figures like J Robert Oppenheimer, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Howard Hughes, the reclusive multidimensional tech magnate William Bell. In Season Four, Bell plots to create a new third alternate universe that suits his vision of what a universe should be, but to do this, he needs to destroy the two existing alternate universes, one of which is ours. In other words, to someone like William Bell, apocalyptic destruction isn't a bug, it's a feature.

So shy would US and Chinese elites collaborate to kill many millions of people worldwide with a technologically enhanced superbug? Don't neglect that radical environmentalists currently believe there are already far too many people in the world, and Planned Parenthood isn't up to the job of reducing population to the levels we need for true sustainability. We're in William Bell territory here, but that doesn't mean it's just a wacky fantasy. We've already seen how quackery can drive civilized nations off the rails in the real world. What do people like Gates, Zuckerbrg, and Musk really believe about where world population should be headed? If they're serious about lowering it by, say, 95% or more, even gas chambers and ovens will be far too inefficient.

A new Black Death would do a much better job. People come out of Harvard believing crazy stuff. We need to keep this in mind as this scandal develops.

"Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates"

I ran into this op-ed at yesterday's Wall Steet Journal that somehow escaped their paywall, so I'm not sure how long it will be up. The thing that strikes me is that the author, R R Reno, who according to the thumbnail is editor of First Things, thinks something changed about elite schools after he graduated (but they were at one time fairly recently, i e, when he was an undergraduate, definitely OK places):

I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.

I went to the First Things website, and immediately I got a pop-up message from the same R R Reno, Editor, that informed me:

First Things is firmly grounded in the truths that endure. We enter the fray of contemporary cultural and political discussions with the confidence that it is God above who oversees our victories and setbacks. This confidence allows us to see clearly and speak soberly during uncertain times.

So I have a few questions for R R Reno, Editor. The first is, precisely when did the big change in the Ivies take place? He implies it must have been just within the past decade, certainly since the turn of the millennium. And Reno is clearly a very smart guy. I mean, he went to Haverford, although this is a safety school, not actually an Ivy. Exactly what changed, and when?

As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.

It's almost as if he was cruising along and happily attending class reunions and alumni dos, but last fall, somebody flipped a switch, and the students suddenly became thin-skinned narcissists, while the administrators became self-abasing poltroons. Just like that. Almost overnight.

R R Reno, Editor, did you ever watch Animal House? I especially liked the "road trip" episode, where the Delta guys visit Emily Dickinson College, see a campus paper headline, "Sophomore Dies In Kiln Explosion" and pick up dates from sorority sisters of the deceased sophomore on the claim that Otter is the distraught fiancé of the explosion victim.

That was the Ivy campus culture of the 1960s, which I lived through. I had lots of dates from sister schools of Emily Dickinson. The Delta guys saw their fellow Ivy students as shallow, self-congratulating, pampered, sheltered, marks. They saw their classes as worthless, and their professors often as not as corrupt opportunists on the make for pretty coeds. Dean Wormer, when it suited him, was a self-abasing poltroon. According to Wikipedia,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was No. 1 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". It was No. 36 on AFI's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list of the 100 best American comedies. In 2008, Empire magazine selected it as No. 279 of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time".

I've loved Animal House since it came out. We have it on DVD. It spoke to the not fully formed insights I had at the time about Dartmouth -- one of the schools it was based on -- in a very basic way. I'll grant that most of my schoolmates at the time didn't see things through the same eyes. The whole Ivy admissions routine, then as now, was that the Ivies select the best and the brightest, based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, and prepare them to be the next generation of blah blah blah. The students are the first to buy into this; they've played the game, and they've been told they won it. But they're pampered, sheltered, marks.

It's not unusual for Ivy alums to follow campus news and get some inkling that all wasn't as represented to them when they got their letter from admissions telling them they'd made it. The reaction is pretty much uniform -- something's changed! That wasn't how things were at Faber College back then! And generation after generation, decade after decade, there are little alumni revolts.

Maybe R R Reno, Editor of First Things, can get another one going. He's convinced that back in the day, the Ivies produced nice, talented kids. I would suggest he's got some image roughly like the sophomore who died in the kiln explosion at Emily Dickinson. What concerns me is that the editor of First Things shows so little insight into a key cultural issue.

But then, I can't think of even half a dozen pieces I've read in that mag over the past several decades.

The State Of Play

The standard line of the COVID moral entrepreneurs has continued to be that we can't really drop the mask-and-social-distance routine, because there may be variants.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned last week that the variants could fuel a new surge and that states should not rapidly relax restrictions.

The question nobody is asking -- and I'm not sure why -- is, "If you're so concerned about more dangerous COVID variants, what can you do to assure us that the Wuhan lab isn't cooking these up itself?" The current position of the legacy media and the public health elite appears to be, "Well, of course, maybe the origin of the virus was a lab leak, or maybe it was still just a really, really sick bat. We don't know. Maybe the intelligence community can give us a clearer answer when it makes its report next fall."

So, why has nobody asked whether the Wuhan lab is still getting US taxpayer money -- my bet is that it certainly is -- and why the payments aren't on hold until we get a clear answer?

The closest we've come has been this past weekend's remarks from Rep Kevin McCarthy:

The American people don't have trust in Dr. Fauci,' McCarthy told the Breitbart News Saturday radio show. 'Let's find a person we can trust. Take politics aside, I mean we're talking about American lives here.'

Dr Fauci and Mrs Biden were up in Harlem to talk down to African-Americans and address the perceived problem of vaccine hesitancy. African-Americans have been particularly reluctant to take the government shots in view of the government's past history of using African-Americans as medical guinea pigs. So of course, two phony white elitists from the government, one the wife of a southern-state segregationist, will be just the folks to address this problem. The tone deafness here is astonishing.

This is, though, also an indication that the moral entrepreneurs are steadily losing their prestige. If the public health types want to continue a go-slow approach on reopening due to "the science", they're going to have to reset the scientific arguments, which are increasingly in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. If they seriously want to address vaccine hesitancy, they need to clear up the uncertainty on where the virus came from and who benefits from it and its putative remedies.

But so far, the narrative isn't on the establishment's side:

A top-secret report from a "respected national laboratory" dated May 25, 2020 during the Trump administration declared a potential COVID-19 lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology plausible and in need of more investigation.

The contents of the classified document prepared by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California were the basis for the State Department investigation begun under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to The Wall Street Journal.

President Joe Biden ended that investigation and called on U.S. intelligence agencies to deliver a report in 90 days on the origins of the global coronavirus pandemic.

. . . Sources told the Journal the LLNL study was prepared by the lab's intelligence arm, called the "Z Division." The lab is focused on national security, including biological weapons, and "drew on genomic analysis," according to the Journal.

. . . Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are conducting an investigation into COVID-19 origins and have requested a classified briefing from LLNL Director Dr. Kimberly Budil, the Journal reported.

Trump is taking the lead here. In North Carolina he raised the question of Chinese reparations, although a problem there is that the US was complicit in funding the Wuhan lab. The whole scandal is going to run very deep and require serious investigation and serious remedies. But at least it's the Republicans who are just starting to ask the right questions.

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.