Dr Fauci Says He's Not Hitler

A story from the weekend has Dr Fauci complaining to the New York Times that people call him Hitler. He insists this is not the case, he is not Hitler.

"The more extreme they get, the more obvious how political it is ... ‘Fauci has blood on his hands,’" the infectious diseases expert said of his critics. "Are you kidding me? ... Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives, and now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? You know, come on, folks."

This represents an escalation in Fauci's public defense, since earlier in the month he said only, "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." And I'm not aware of any public comparisons of Fauci to Hitler -- certainly not along the line of Trump or George Bush. So why bring it up?

Fauci continues to insist that his e-mails reflect only a willingness to evaluate new data as it comes in -- at one point, he believed masks were ineffective, but data suddenly arrived confirming that they were, so he changed his mind with The Science. But the e-mails that were revealed last month draw a more sinister picture. They reflect, for instance, what appears to have been a coordinated coverup with colleagues like Kristian Andersen and Peter Daszak to characterize the lab leak theory as conspiratorial and fringe, when acknowledging it from the start might well have saved time developing vaccines.

In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that the whole US-funded Wuhan project was focused on a particular set of bat viruses, engineered for transmissibility to and among humans in a particular way -- for instancre, via aerosol particles, not big, wet droplets. Fauci understood this as well as Daszak, Andersen, Collins, and other members of the club, and this was the reason for Fauci's early explanation that masks were ineffective.

But the narrative shifted to masks, first, to conceal what the COVID club knew, and also to create a visible impression on the public that something could be, and was being, done. But the public health measures like masks and distancing were window dressing and proved completely ineffective. By taking this course, Fauci concealed the club's complicity and caused much additional suffering and death, both by withholding information from vaccine developers and distracting from the need to find effective public health measures.

Beyond that, Fauci clearly advocated gain-of-function research that other virologists felt -- correctly in hindsight -- was risky and unnecessary. In 2012, he wrote that

the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is “important” because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.

Does he now believe a COVID world death toll of up to 5 million and rising was worth the risk? If so, I've got to think his views on scientific research are approaching the Hitler end of the scale. And the estimates of 3.5 to 5 million COVID deaths are also in Holocaust territory.

I tend to agree with the Chinese retort over holding them accountable for the COVID lab leak: hey, this was your research. You funded it. In fact, it looks as if you moved it to China to minimize the risk of a lab accident in the US.

It's likely that the main cause of Fauci's current unhappiness is simply that the media have stopped apotheosizing him. Questions are coming up, he's no longer useful as a foil to Trump, and he's a likely negative for the administration as events develop. On the other hand, it almost sounds as if may be responding now to belated promptings from his own conscience. The Hitler bit -- hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Gain Of Function Started In The US

The Fox News segment above from last Friday raises a little-noticed issue that's also been puzzling me: why had a pretty wide spectrum of US actors been funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? The segment begins with China raising an issue that was bound to come up -- they're saying don't blame us, this is a US funded project. It covers this starting at abouit 2:55. but Laura Logan also makes the point that gain-of-function research had been a Fauci agenda item for a long time, even before it moved to China.

This sent me to searching the web. I found this article from November 2015 in Nature:

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

. . . The findings reinforce >suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.

But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

It appears that the particular study in question here was done at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, and it may have led in part to the moratorium on such studies between 2014 and 2017 that Fauci was able to bypass.

It's clear that the risks implicit in this research were well known and fully understood, and Laura Logan's point in the Fox segment is partly that it was sent to China to minimize the risk in the US. That sure worked.

I also went looking for the USA Today story cited in the Fox segment. The story by Alison Young was carefully isolated in the opinion section, and it ran on news dump Friday. It focuses on a February 1, 2020 conference call with Fauci and other gain-of-function researchers:

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . Perhaps that’s because the early concerns among key scientists – like the conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 – were kept private until now. That call likely would have remained secret if not for documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

That teleconference was urgent enough it was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon.

. . . A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab.

. . . Andersen did not respond to repeated interview requests since last week. Late Thursday, a spokesperson said Andersen was traveling and unavailable.

Discussion of Andersen’s concerns had begun earlier on that Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, Fauci told me, when he had conferenced Andersen into a three-way call with Jeremy Farrar, director the Wellcome Trust, an influential and wealthy foundation based in London that funds global health research.

. . . “We agreed to convene by phone the next day,” Fauci told me. . . . Emails show the agenda for the one-hour meeting was short. . . . But details of what was said in the meeting, including extensive notes taken by one participant and further thoughts shared by others, were blacked out by the NIH before the emails were made public.

. . . Yet just three days after that Feb. 1 meeting, Andersen’s position on the virus’ potential origin changed dramatically. He had gone from having concerns about possible genetic engineering to telling another group of scientists “the data conclusively show” the virus wasn’t engineered, and calling suggestions of engineering “fringe” and “crackpot” theories.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fauci, once it became clear that COVID was an engineered virus developed in a Chinese lab in a US-funded funded project, engineered a consensus to distract attention from this information and deflect blame from the people behind the project.

More is bound to come out. The USA Today story is potentially explosive, but the aggregators and blogs have so far completely missed it.

Kabuki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Defector?

One of the aggregators has a headline that eventually traces back to a story at the RedState blog saying it's "confirmed" that a high-level Chinese counterintelligence official, Dong Zingwei, defected this past February and in part provided information that COVID was in fact a lab leak. It's no coincidence that the still from Topaz above has a big mirror overshadowing the scene, and neither legacy nor most of independent media seems willing to cover the story, so it is what it is.

This is actually the third supposed Chinese "defector" in recent months, the other two being Yan Limeng and Wang Liqiang. RedState has been the main reporter on these as well.

The RedState report on Dong says,

RedState’s sources confirmed that the defector is, in fact, Dong, that he was in charge of counterintelligence efforts in China, and that he flew to the United States in mid-February, allegedly to visit his daughter at a university in California. When Dong landed in California he contacted DIA officials and told them about his plans to defect and the information he’d brought with him. Dong then “hid in plain sight” for about two weeks before disappearing into DIA custody.

One of the strongest arguments for the authenticity of the Dong story is the sudden reversal of the received narrative on COVID's origin. As Victor Davis Hanson noted this week,

For over a year, the American establishment and media borg have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Chinese military-sponsored, level-4 biosafety Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” concede that the nearby Wuhan lab may well be the most likely genesis.

Why the abrupt change?

It's also worth noting that the received version of Yan Limeng's story appears to have been overtaken by events. Her Wikipedia entry pretty clearly dates from before the Great Revision:

Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng (simplified Chinese: 闫丽梦; traditional Chinese: 閆麗夢) is a Chinese virologist, known for publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. These publications have been widely criticised by the scientific community.

. . . Since around February 2020, conspiracy theories as to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have circulated on cable news and social media, including the idea that it had been manufactured in a laboratory.[15] This hypothesis was rejected by most scientists, who deem claims of laboratory origin to be implausible and lacking evidence. The laboratory leak idea may be related to political campaigns that utilize anti-Chinese sentiment and global geopolitical tensions.

Yan stated that evidence of genetic engineering was censored in scientific journals, allegedly as part of a conspiracy to suppress information on the topic. However, other scientists disputed the validity of the papers, pointing to poor methods, undisclosed funding from politically-motivated sources, the use of pseudonyms for the papers co-authors, and the paper having never been submitted to a journal for review. The papers were described by virologists as "non-scientific," "junk science," and written to spread "political propaganda."

The main takeaway I have from this story as it now stands is that control of the COVID narrative has been a high priority for the Chinese, and they've apparently now lost at least an initial skirmish, though they'd held the line for over a year. But US public figures like Dr Fauci and Peter Daszak had clearly been enabling the Chinese version for this entire period. We'll have to see whatever other shoes, if any, drop in coming weeks. But Boris Kusenov, the KGB defector in Topaz, certainly set important events in motion. This story has similar potential.

Take Us To Your Leader

Via the UK Daily Mail, I learn of another round in the debate about space aliens:

A group of astronomers are pushing back on humanity's preoccupation with communicating with aliens beyond our galaxy, warning that alien contact could result in 'the end of all life on earth,' physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

I think the last time I brought up space aliens here, it was to cite Fr Sam, the smartest man I've ever met, who spoke in a homily about a question he raised in a session with seminarians: if we encounter space aliens, should we offer them baptism?

This is all a reminder to me that there's no real science or philosophy in the current talk about life on other planets. Fr Sam has this right. Nobody else does.

I was watching a TV show about the European Space Agency's Mars rover mission, which made the point that the agency is spending a billion euros to send a new-model rover to Mars for the specific goal of finding life there. This in fact has been a major purpose, if not the driving one, behind all Mars missions, and the most recent was named Perseverance, which can only be an indication of how frustrated the space elites have been at finding nothing of interest there to date.

An Italian scientist explained in the show I was watching that the problem has been that solar radiation has "sterilized" the top meter and a half of the Martian surface. However, the ESA rover will be equipped to drill a full two meters into the surface, which will be beyond the sterilized layer, and this will most certainly either bring up live microbes or fossils of old ones.

The narrator indicated this would be a major, major discovery. Except, first, it hasn't happend yet. Second, so what? On Earth, we keep finding microbes that live in boiling water or under Antarctic ice. The space elites have already told us this should make life possible in oceans under nitrogen ice on the moons of Uranus. Why should we even need to go looking for it? But if we don't find microbes two meters down on Mars, we can still have missions to the moons of Uranus anyhow. Nice work if you can get it.

The reason the space elites keep wanting to find microbes on Mars is that they think this will finally scorch away the unscientific, terracentric, homocentric Biblical world view once and for all. But there's a problem with their basic assumption. Let's go ahead and grant that the 83rd mission to the moons of Uranus drills through the nitrogen ice to find microbes in the ocean there. The technology in 2096 lets us not only find them, but bring them back.

Except there's a lab leak. Even by 2096, they haven't cured the problem of screwups. The Uranus moon microbes break out of the lab, but the life form is so different from ours that we haven't got the first clue on how to make a vaccine, and within two weeks, the Uranus moon virus wipes out all life on Earth.

Naturally, the space elites haven't figured this one out even now, which is why the scientists are writing worried op-eds. But the elites are acting under the unconscious assumption that the universe is benevolent -- as Bp Barron puts it, the universe acts in a way that can be understood, which is an argument for the existence of God. But this is also behind the science fiction fantasy that if there are space aliens, they'll also form intergalactic federations and either play the usual Earthbound political games or fight the usual Earthbound wars. Nobody's seriously thinking they're just gonna harvest the planet, eat everything, and move on.

The science fiction writers basically feed the thinking of the science elites; there's an assumption in particular that if a species is advanced enough to understand and manipulate the matter in the universe, light or dark, it's working under conditions in a consistent universe created by God, that this will be done by intelligent beings capable of reason, created in God's image. Otherwise, eveything is absurd. Among the absurdity is that the grants and tenured professorships and perks that go to the space elites are completely random, and any efforts they put forth to get or retain them are meaningless.

No matter how I circle around this, I can't escape from the conclusion that Fr Sam has this right -- if we run into space aliens, it's our duty to offer them baptism.

The Recovery Continues

Although our priests have been predicting this development for a while, the actual announcement comes as something of a shock (click on the image for a larger copy). Although there've been gradual loosenings -- indoor celebrations allowed, then no need for reservations, the choir gradually expanding, nevertheless, pews have still been roped off with six-foot calibrations in the aisles, and masks were required with temperatures taken on entry. No missals, no singing. Last week, one of our pew friends was still wearing two masks, not one, as Dr Fauci had instructed. I'll be interested to see how he responds this Sunday.

California mostly reopened on Tuesday, fully three months after other states like Texas. But it's worth noting that the UK, whose COVID performance has been equivalent to the US after vaccinations, got cold feet over a June 21 reopening and has pushed it back to July 19, although this may not involve lifting mask requirements even then. Meanwhile, Canada lags far behind even the UK, with Ontario maintaining strict limits on "non-essential" retail and even outdoor gatherings.

I think Gov Newsom would have extended COVID controls in a similar way in California had he not been subject to recall. By he same token, I don't think houses of worship would be able to reopen this way without the legal action the observant churches and synagogues brought last year.

But maybe just as significant, reality ride-along police programs are starting to make a tentative return to cable. Body Cam on Investigation Discovery appears to be the first of these, as we saw a new episode this week. Live PD, which was one of the most popular shows overall until A&E was forced to cancel it in the wake of George Floyd, has made no public announcement. Cops resumed limited production last fall to meet contract commitments outside the US but has made no other announcement.

Again, I think the COVID moral panic was directed at the plebs as the folk devils, with the moral entrepreneurs in the political and credentialed elites. The folk devils were the middle and working classes who objected to lockdowns or business closures, resisted masks and social distancing and threatened to hold block parties or family reunions or take vacations, notwithstanding the elites clearly felt entitled to do just those things. The BLM riots exploited the preexisting panic, adding the attribution of racism to whites among the plebs.

The problem for the elites is that as the panic subsides and the plebs is allowed to resume their jobs and the parties, reunions, and vacations -- indeed, to resume watching the police shows -- the country at large is beginning to ask what the fuss was about, as questions begin to come up about how the COVID panic took shape and for whose benefit.

A good example is this week's episode of Deadliest Catch, a reality show that's portrayed, among other things this season, how the COVID panic affected the Alaska crab fleet. (This sort of coverage is rare anywhere.) In this week's episode, Sig Hansen's daughter Mandy, who works as relief captain on his boat, has a false positive COVID test and has to go into quarantine until she can have two successive negative tests. The result is to delay the boat's departure and throw the whole operation into uncertainty until, after two days in quarantine and two negative tests, she can return.

This wasn't scripted, it was just how things happened with the camera watching. The result, with no judgment from writers or producers, was to show the destructive effect not of COVID but of the COVID panic. The plebs has gotten this messsage. It doesn't hurt that Mike Rowe narrates the series. The timbre of his voice alone reflects his underatanding, from bottom up, of how these things work.

I see ads on Facebook for a color-coded bracelet or amulet that lets people make it known what type of interaction they prefer post-COVID -- one color for handshakes, another for hugs, and so forth. I hope this dies a quick death, but it's an indicator of how profoundly the COVID panic affected everyone. There's going to be an adjustment to make in California, but I have the impression that people in Texas and Florida accommodated themselves to the old normal without much trouble.

Pope Francis On Rigidity

I said in yesterday's post that I wasn't sure what Pope Francis meant by "rigid" when he spole of rigid priests. This morning, looking for something else, I went to Church Militant and found an informative post, "Rigid" Seminarians. (I was originally looking to find the rad-trad take on the reported non-eucharist of President Biden from Francis, but intriguingly, Church Militant carries no mention of this.)

The post actually clarifies Francis's meaning quite helpfully:

[H]e offered [seminarians in Ancona] advice on four aspects of their seminary experience: the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions. He extended his definition of rigidity to include "ritualism," saying "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always."

. . . Regarding the intellectual life of a seminarian, Pope Francis advised them to study hard to encounter and "proclaim [their] faith and proclaim Christ." He made no mention of proclaiming the truths that Christ passed on to His apostles. Rather, it is proclaiming one's faith, which is a nebulous idea.

But worst of all, he secularized the role of the priest, saying, "Go enthusiastically to meet the people," adding, "One is a priest to serve the People of God, to take care of the wounds of all, especially the poor."

As it happens, I saw a Bp Barron video not long ago where he said to those who oppose Vatican II that in the Catholic Church, you don't get any higher authority than an ecumenical council. A few days later, I got an e-mail. from his Word on Fire organization promoting a collection of the Vatican II constitutions edited by Bp Barron and containing reflections from post-Conciliar popes and Barron as well. So I sent for a copy. I've been working my way through Lumen Gentium.

Lumen Gentium strikes me as an extended explanation of the Church's whole function, dwelling especially on the roles of bishops. priests, deacons, and laity. Without question it gives bishops and priests a sacramental and pastoral role, but it also specifies an evangelical role. I would note that the post at Church Militant makes the point that Francis touched on the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions of the priesthood. We must assume he spoke of pastoral and sacramental roles elsewhere in his address.

But certainly intellectual abilities are key for evangelism. G K Chesterton, Fulton J Sheen, and Bp Barron were and are all smart men. As far as I can see, Francis's reasoning is that since the Church has an evangelical role, its priests must prepare themselves intellectually for that role.

And in in section 17 of Lumen Gentium, we see:

As the Son was sent by the Father, so He too sent the Apostles, saying: "Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world". The Church has received this solemn mandate of Christ to proclaim the saving truth from the apostles and must carry it out to the very ends of the earth. Wherefore she makes the words of the Apostle her own: "Woe to me, if I do not preach the Gospel", and continues unceasingly to send heralds of the Gospel until such time as the infant churches are fully established and can themselves continue the work of evangelizing.

In section 28, we see

Because the human race today is joining more and more into a civic, economic and social unity, it is that much the more necessary that priests, by combined effort and aid, under the leadership of the bishops and the Supreme Pontiff, wipe out every kind of separateness, so that the whole human race may be brought into the unity of the family of God.

My take from reading Lumen Gentium is that it characterizes the Church as an extension of heaven into this world, and to be this faithfully, it has to face outward. What Francis is telling the seminarians in Ancona strikes me as unexceptionable post-Conciliar Catholicism. When I listen to Bp Barron on the problem of pre-Conciliarism in the Church, I've got to think Church Militant's objection to Francis's remarks on "rigidity" fits Barron's characterizations.

According to Wikipedia, "This dogmatic constitution was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 21 November 1964, following approval by the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,151 to 5." It appears that for whatever reason, writers at Church Militant are deeply uncomfortable with it. If so, I can't disagree with Bp Barron that there's a problem here.