The Ich Kann Nicht Anders Syndrome

One thing that strikes me about the traditionalist movement is the essentially Protestant subtext of so much that comes out of it -- the ich kann nicht anders insistence on speaking out over some perceived, often liturgical, abuse in the Catholic Church. For an example, I had only to return to Fr Hunwicke's blog and today's post. Oddly, he quotes an Anglo-Catholic priest's bombastic remarks from 1921:

Let us remind ourselves that the grand possession of Western Christendom, this great prayer, the Canon of the Mass, this noble Consecration prayer, for at least 1300 years, intact and immutable, formed the basis of the Western Rite.

and comments on it, almost as bombastically,

A hundred years later, most ordinary Latin Catholic churches have abandoned it. Those that use it in celebrations of the Ordinary Form use a version in which, at its most sacred heart, the text has been messed around with. And from Bergoglian Rome come rumours of new liturgy wars.

Surely, this is the time when all who see themsaelves [sic] as Catholic should be sure that they use the Canon and only the Canon; that they use it without the daft tinkerings of the 1960s.

I'm back to Francis's remarks about ritualism. An Anglo-Catholic priest -- that is, a Protestant priest who fancies himself in some way Catholic -- says good things about the Catholic mass taken out of its Catholic context. This is no different from, say, an atheist professor in a religion department (I'm sure there are many) using the same words to admire the esthetic beauty of the mass's language, all of it removed from any question of belief. Somehow the ritual has an existence independent of its Catholic context. But a sacrament must be valid through form, matter, and intention. You can't just separate the words out of it.

I personally would stay away from any mass celebrated by Fr Hunwicke due to what I think is a valid question of intention. Just how Catholic is he? What reservations and substitutions of private judgment does he bring to the celebration? He'll use the words, but he doesn't recognize the council's or the pope's authority? It seems you can take the man out of Anglo-Catholicism, but you can't take the Anglo-Catholic out of the man. Why did he bother to become an unhyphenated Catholic, especially if Anglo-Catholic attitudes from 1921 remain so attractive to him?

But let's look at the context of Fr Hunwicke's blog. A visitor brought me up to date on the UK ordinariate after yesterday's post:

Bp Lopes has aspirations for a career beyond the ordinariate and I am sure he does not want it to be publicly associated with Vat II-haters and quasi-sedevacantists, so they are not given any sort of official platform. Msgr Newton is the captain of a sinking ship —- UK ordinariate membership down by half from its high point five years ago, clergy deaths outnumbering ordinations, etc. Reining in Fr Hunwicke the least of his concerns.

According to this page on the UK ordinariate's official website, they have eight priests under fifty years of age. Fifty of their priests will retire in the next five years. The UK orfdinariate has only a handful of stipendiary positions. Most of its active clergy work in diocesan ministry. About ten percent of the diocesan Catholic priests in the UK were formerly CofE clergy. Those who have chosen to be ordained through the ordinariate were probably attracted to its quicker formation requirements, which, while considerably more rigorous, even in the beginning, than the distance webinars offered by the US ordinariate, did not require the up front two years of study and discernment required of former Anglican clergy by local dioceses.

According to the Annuario Pontificio the UK ordinariate has a priest for every nineteen members, so from a ministry perspective the lack of vocations probably means little. But it does suggest that the long-term future of the UK ordinariate is in some doubt.

When I think of Fr Hunwicke, surely the most visible priest in the UK ordinariate, I can think only of the deconsecrated church used as El Indio's headquarters in For a Few Dollars More. Yet again, we know them by their fruits.

Can Someone Clarify For Me The Difference Between Vaughn Treco And Fr Hunwicke?

I guess the obvious answer is that Vaughn Treco was removed from active ministry as a priest in the US ordinariate, while Fr Hunwicke continues as a priest in good standing in the UK ordinariate. But my question is why.

In January 2019, Treco was removed from his post at the ordinariate Church of St. Bede the Venerable in Minnesota for remarks in a homily that, by this account, criticized the Second Vaican Council and the post-Conciliar popes:

Father showed us a clear picture of the post-conciliar church and the concessions to modernity and the world that the post-conciliar popes have made. He pointed out how this faithlessness is what allowed this rot in the Church to fester for so long and provided several ways for us simple faithful to move forward.

As I observed on the old blog, it isn't entirely clear precisely what statements or other factors were the proximate cause of his removal; he appears to have rubbed people the wrong way in his duties as a hospital chaplain as well. But a video of his homily was published on the web and seems to have drawn the wrong sort of attention from authorities in the local archdiocese, who spoke to Bp Lopes. It does appear highly likely that publishing remarks critical of the Second Council and later popes was a key factor.

Move to Fr Hunwicke. In today's post at his blog, he says

On June 24, I published a piece explaining that the essence of PF's heresy is his claim that, just as Jesus supplanted Moses as Teacher, so he, PF, Voice of the Holy Spirit, is now supplanting Jesus as Teacher. (I first made this point, with copious supporting evidence, at Gardone in 2017, in a lecture now published in Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies, Arouca Press.)

Thanks to Professor Tighe, I have read a fine piece by John Zmirak in The Stream, advancing precisely the same analysis, and pointing out the relevance of the condemnation of the heretic Marcion to the Bergoglianite errors.

So let's pause a moment. If someone says to me the pope is a heretic (PF is Hunwicke's less than respectful designation for the pope), I would expect a detached, serious, and systematic explication, starting not least with the question of how a pope can be a heretic, since this has a specific definition. But I went to Hunwicke's June 24 post, and all I found was

PF claims that those who disagree with his own new dogmas are in a situation analogous to that of those who disagreed with the Lord ... or (in this recent address) disagreed with S Paul.

But this is not only arrogant almost beyond belief. It is also blasphemous. PF is not Jesus. There is to be no Third Age with new teaching. Moses' version of the Law was "fulfilled" by that of Jesus, but PF is not a Third Lawgiver sent to supersede Jesus.

This is nothing but a paraphrase of what Hunwicke thinks "PF" intended to say. If you're going to call the pope -- or Martin Luther, for that matter -- a heretic, don't you need to quote his words and show how they specifically conflict with specific Catholic doctrine? In addition, Hunwicke refers favorably to a piece by John Zmirak, but without a link. This must be the one that he's referring to. In it, Zmirak quotes variously from himself and Life Site News, which again largely paraphrases statements Francis made in last month's general audience about rigid priests:

Drawing from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, the Pope seemed to be accusing conservative and traditionalist Catholics of being in league with the Evil One and of being no different from those who sowed discord and mistrust by demanding that the new Christians in Galatia subject themselves to Mosaic Law.

Zmirak concludes,

Marcion claimed that Jesus came to completely negate the Old Testament. Francis pretends that Vatican II negates parts of the New, and key teachings the Church passed on until he came along. Why else would Francis claim that taking literally Jesus’ own teaching on divorce is pharisaical, worthy only of “doctors of the law”? Especially since the position Francis promotes is exactly … that of the Pharisees whom Christ rebuked.

This is Zmirak's paraphrase and interpretation of Francis's remarks. He quotes only individual words and short phrases of what Francis actually said, and Zmirak is veering pretty close to Treco's pre-Conciliarism. But as Bp Barron has been pointing out, you don't find any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. We can debate the meaning of council documents and how a pope interprets them, but we also have to acknowledge this is serious business that calls for a dispassionate, reasonable tone and specific references to specific statements.

This isn't what Fr Hunwicke is giviing us, and it's disturbing that he refers us to a hysterical figure like Zmirak. I've got to think both his posts of June 24 and today are getting pretty close to the sort of thing that got Vaughn Treco removed from the priesthood.

But leaving even that aside, Hunwicke is a convert, having joined the Catholic Church only a year or two ahead of me. I believe that at the time, there was some type of hesitancy over his ordiniation, which in hindsight strikes me as justified. It is simply not a good look for any Catholic convert to come into the Church and announce that the Church has it all wrong. But why did he come in if the Council and the Holy Father are just a big mistake that he has to fix? Is he maybe the next Jesus after all?

I debated first sending Msgr Newton, the UK Ordinary, a version of this in an e-mail, but ordinaries are likely not to respond to people like me. No doubt this will reach him in due course.

This Isn't Cardinal Bernardin's Catholic Church

Somehow I ran into a piece in the National Review on the Catholic bishops' vote to draft a teaching document on eucharistic coherence, generally assumed to define the eligibility to receive communion for politicians who support policies that go against Church teaching. I had only time to scan it before a popup arrived to tell me I had to subscribe to read more.

Like the Wall Street Journal, NR now wants me to pay for nothing. The last time I spent much time at that site was around 1998, when they still ran Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg had a sense of humor. Anyhow, the point of the piece they wanted me to pay for was that the USCCB did nothing but debate and talk, and we couldn't expect much from the Catholic bishops. I can't quote from it, because they won't let me go back to the piece.

NR is generslly locked in a time warp. Under Buckley, it was a nominally Catholic publication, though as I reflect on things, Buckley himself was a Catholic for the 1960s, which is to say he was as much a Kennedy Catholic, a Bernardin Catholic, as anything else, just as he was a big-government, CIA Republican. But that kind of Catholic is a fading period piece, and NR isn't really even that kind of Catholic any longer. Of Cardinal Bernardin and the UISCCB, George Weigel wrote in 2011,

For the Bernardin Era and the style of governance characteristic of Bernardin Machine bishops were deeply influenced by the Roman-brokered “Truce of 1968,” an ill-fated attempt to settle the disciplinary situation in the Archdiocese of Washington, where dissent from Humanae Vitae was widespread and public. Whatever the Vatican’s intentions vis-a-vis the difficult situation in Washington, what was learned from the truce were two lessons that would shape an entire era of U.S. Catholic history. The first lesson was that the Holy See would retreat from rigorously enforcing doctrinal discipline if it could be persuaded of the danger of schism. The second lesson was that American bishops were ill advised to go out on a public limb in defense of Catholic teaching (as Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington had done by disciplining priests who had publicly rejected Humanae Vitae), for that could result in the Holy See sawing off the limb and leaving the bishop in question in a bad way.

Bernardin, as Weigel sees him, was an intensely political animal who was focused on making Catholics politically appealing in a post-Kennedy environment. But the US bishops of 2021 are no less political, as indeed is Abp Gómez, who now occupies Bernardin's one time position as head of the USCCB. But times, and politics, have changed. Last week I quoted from Abp Cordileone's preface to his challenge to the Catholic Democrats, with its strong implication that the Democrats have moved away from Catholics. Only days later, Bp Barron, who by the way works for Abp Gómez and is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman in the US, wrote in the New York Post,

I’m the son of a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Catholic Democrat. My father, whose family was very involved in city politics, would sooner have become a Lutheran than vote Republican. But my trouble with modern Democrats, I explained, has to do with abortion policy, where the party has lately staked out an especially extreme position.

The Church must operate, as it always must, in a political environment, something Cdl Bernardin clearly recognized. But the trouble is that politics have changed, something the US bishops are waking up to. The Catholic Church is on the side of the poor and vulnerable, which is where the US Democrats used to be, at least through the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, and even arguably Bill Clinton. But more recently, the Democrats have lost workers and legal immigrants, and their politics now reflect an alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, which includes the criminal class that preys almost exclusively on the poor.

Indeed, our own pastor in yesterday's homily that dwelt in part on the meaning of the Fourth, was careful to avoid conventional political alignment, but behind his remarks was a clear concern that leftist California policies toward the homeless were, whatever their expressed object, not working on behalf of either the homeless or the poor.

I think there's a real shift in alignment taking place in the Catholic Church, just as there's a shift taking place among Republicans. I'm not sure Cdl Bernardin would necessarily object on the Catholic side.

The Lizard People Mark To Market

The period leading up to major holidays, especially the Fourth, doesn't have much actual news. The big subject over the past week has been the condo collapse in Miami. But there are other data points.

NBC News, a stalwart of legacy media, caught a major Wuhan lab figure in an untruth:

In March, Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan-based virologist who has been accused of conducting risky experiments with bat coronaviruses, flatly denied allegations that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted studies with the military, an NBC News report said.

But the network reported that it uncovered evidence linking Shi to military scientists. She collaborated with Ton Yigang, a military scientist, on coronavirus research in 2018 and then with Zhou Yusen, another military scientist in December 2019. Zhou who was listed as deceased in the footnote of an article published in 2020, the report said. The report said it could not confirm the cause of his death.

For those who've been following this story, this is a big yawn. Fauci, Daszak, Baric, and many others connected with the Wuhan lab have been lying and tergiversating for a year and a half. What's important is that NBC has picked up the story, when legacy media has at best been saying there are multiple theories, and we'll never know the truth. The lizard people are recognizing the story has more substance than that, and they'd better start to get ahead of it.

But more important is the apparent new tack legacy media has suddenly taken with Vice President Harris:

Axios reported Friday Harris’s aides are panicked that she is “fucking up” and perhaps “shouldn’t be the heir apparent” for 2024’s presidential race because she “could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up.”

On Wednesday, a White House staffer told Politico Harris’s aides “are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment.”

“It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—,” one aide said.

. . . The establishment media additionally wrote Friday, “2024 is the elephant in the room. … While Biden aides overwhelmingly believe he’ll be the Democratic nominee, they also know he’d be 81 when seeking re-election.”

But “many Democrats, including some current senior administration officials, are concerned she [Harris] could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up — even if it were Donald Trump.”

One writer, observing the sudden shift, sees a culprit:

That leads me to this conflict between Biden’s office (which will be greatly weakened if Harris doesn’t shape up) and Harris’ office (which wants Biden’s torch handed over to her). This is where the pure speculation comes in, and I won’t even begin to declare that this is absolutely the case whatsoever, but I don’t think it’s Biden himself who is in conflict with Harris. I think it’s someone from the inner-inner circle.

It could very well be Dr. Jill Biden.

. . . Again, pure speculation here, but the POLITICO story does not happen by accident. Someone is leaking this. If it’s not Jill, it’s someone who is close to Biden and who wants to protect him while also using it as a springboard for their own agenda. Whoever it is, this is probably just the opening salvo.

Is it just 2024, or a problem that could come up sooner? Certainly since last year's election it isn't completely outside the Overton window to ask whether Biden can complete a four-year term. The lizard people conceivably have exactly the same problem they had in 1973: they wanted a Nixon resignation, but that woukld give them Spiro Agnew as president, so they had to get Agnew out of the way first. The result was the quintessential lizard people line of succession, Gerald Ford, who once he rose to the presidency was replaced by Nelson Rockefeller. Think about it. Nelson Rockefeller.

I think the lizard people are starting to realize Biden isn't going to make four years. "I want to talk about happy things, man" was Politico's headline yesterday. I don't think it's Dr Jill. I think it's the lizard people.

The Recovery Continues

California had a modified limited reopening on June 15, with certain exceptions for transit, large events, and medical facilities. But even at Kaiser, though we still have to wear masks, the attitude is more relaxed, and the Polizei at the entry yelling "pull your mask all the way up!" are gone. A retail store I visit apologized that the building owner still wants masks there, but I can live with it. About a third of the people at mass wear them, but so far, it's at individual discretion.

The Delta variant is an intereating case. Pretty clearly in the US, a fairly small minority has wanted renewal or continuation of masks and social distance due to the Delta variant. Los Angeles County has "strongly recommended" continuing masks and social distance, but detailed updates to the public health order as of June 28 are very limited. It's especially significant that CDC head Dr Walensky has reiterated that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear masks:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday that fully vaccinated people are "safe" from the current variants and do not need to wear masks, doubling down on CDC guidance as some others call for a return to mask wearing.

The question of mask wearing has come back to the forefront given recommendations from Los Angeles County health officials, and from the World Health Organization, that even fully vaccinated people should continue to wear masks indoors in public as a precaution due to the rise of the highly transmissible delta variant of the virus.

But Walensky said that the CDC's guidance has not changed and that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear masks, echoing other health experts who note that the vaccines are highly effective even against the delta variant.

"If you are vaccinated, you are safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States," Walensky said on NBC's "Today," adding it was "exactly right" that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks.

Let's get real. Dr Fauci has controlled the narrative for 18 months, and Dr Walensky, Fauci's boss but new to the job this year, has been letting him do it. But that she would make such a definitive public statement of CDC policy, with Fauci remaining silent on the issue, is new. In fact, Fauci's latest utterance has been nothing but a tautology:

Fauci declared that “When you have such a low level of vaccination super-imposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions, states, cities or counties you’re going to see these individual types of blips. It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.”

Two Americas, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Two Americas, the male and the female. Two Americas, those sleeping and those awake. It sounds as though Fauci has been given the word, and policy statements are now to be made by Dr Walensky. Fauci, if he chooses, may make general statements about how the world is, if anyone is interested.

I read this as an indication of Fauci's impending retirement.

What Was That Pope Francis Was Saying About Ritualism?

As I've said, I've got no dog in the fight over the Latin mass. There's no canonical requirement that I attend it, and I'm more than pleased with our novus ordo parish. I have, though, taken a contnuing interest in the fate of Anglicanroum coetibus. Pope Benedict XVI's constitution setting up a personal prelature for former Anglicans, which over more than a decade has not had a happy life. The latest controversy is over a second volume of its liturgy, covering the daily office and liturgy of the hours.

Let's remember that the total world population of ordinariate members under Anglicanorum coetibus is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000, divided about evenly between the US and UK, with essentially miniscule and declining memberships in Australia and Canada. [A visitor reports that according to the latest official figures available from the 2020 Annuario Pontificio, the membership of the North American ordinariate is 6,040 while that of the UK is 1,850. (At its highest to date, 2016, it was 3,500) Canadian membership probably accounts for about 250 of the North American total.] However, the liturgical authorities have issued two editions of the daily office, one for the US and Canada and one for the "Commonwealth", although Canada is in the Commonwealth.

This is, I think, a reflection of the way any attempt by any Christian denomination to respond to the decline of Anglicanism takes on a comic-opera quality. On the other hand, Anglicanism is no longer a subject that would even be worth the attention of a latter-day Trollope.

The current controversy surrounds the North American edition. According to Wikipedia,

The Divine Worship: Daily Office: North American Edition is printed by Newman House Press and was released in late 2020. The first printing of 500 books quickly sold out to parish communities, with further printings being announced shortly after. The first editions were bound in blue cloth hardcover and printed in red and black text.

The psalm translation is that of the 1928 Episcopal revision of the Coverdale Psalter. Permutations of the Coverdale Psalter are used in many Anglican Books of Common Prayer including the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England and 1928 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. Collects and other excerpts come from Divine Worship: The Missal, which itself sources from the Anglican Missal and other Anglo-Catholic texts.

Following the initial printing, several significant textual errata were noted, along with several dozen typographical errors. Among them, the latter half of the hour of None was missing. There were also complaints regarding specific omissions–such as prayers for popular English saints like Thomas Becket–as well as several popular hymns from the English Christian tradition. These concerns and other were anticipated to be in part addressed during the North American Edition’s second printing. The second printing was released in May 2021 and featured several corrections, including adding the missing portion of None. However, this new edition also introduced the omission of other portions of None–specifically the readings for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday–as well as errors in collects and commons.

Visitors have referred me to the Breviary and Divine Office Discussion Facebook group, as well as various Anglican ordinariate Facebook groups for examples of the complaints. One visitor suggests the Wikipedia entry aptly summarizes the objections, but another says

The Wikipedia account is quite restrained compared to the feedback on the two Ordinariate Facebook fora I lurk. Besides the many errors in the text, the binding has been criticised as unlikely to survive regular congregational use, and Canadians aren’t happy that they have to use an American-themed Divine Office when there is a “Commonwealth” edition in the works.

Apparently those in North America still dissatisfied with their edition of the daily office are now instructed to order a copy of the forthcoming "Commonwealth" edition. However, a commenter on that site remarked,

This is essentially the North American Ordinariate giving up, and asking its faithful to buy an office book from the UK that won't entirely match up with its own calendar. Furthermore, the UK edition uses unrevised Coverdale psalms, and the North American uses 1928 US BCP. You could not pray out loud from the UK edition at an Evensong in North America.

As a member of the [North Anerican ordinariate], and someone with years of publishing experience, I feel justified in saying that this is a ridiculous own-goal from the Chancery. There is a blueprint to follow to properly edit and publish a liturgical book, and at every turn Houston did not follow the blueprint.

One thing that interests me is that, with all the other issues occupying the diocesan Church, like eucharistic coherence, the continuing issues posed by COVID, the decline of vocations, and the overall decline in mass attendance, this little clique is focused on an enormous and unwieldy book of liturgy produced to gratify a tiny, insular faction of hyphenated Catholics.

I've got to say this, for all the skepticism I see over Francis's supposed agenda, when I look at what's gone on in the ordinariates, it drives me more and more to the view that the Holy Father actually has a point. He had some remarks to make about "ritualism" just last month. Two weeks ago, I cited his observation "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always."

In a general audience on June 9, he expanded on this:

At the same time, a prayer that alienates itself from life is not healthy. A prayer that alienates us from the concreteness of life becomes spiritualism, or worse, ritualism. Let us remember that Jesus, after revealing his glory to the disciples on Mount Tabor, did not want to prolong that moment of ecstasy, but instead came down from the mountain with them and resumed the daily journey.

A visitor remarked of Bp Lopes, the North American ordinary,

I wonder if he hasn’t a mandate to screw everything up until Benedict dies. He can’t be that stupid.

I think the answer may be simpler -- we know them by heir fruits. The ordinariates are so tiny and insignificant, even in comparison with the Latin mass groups, that they haven't even attracted Francis's notice.

COVID And Money

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse, dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”

In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength.

The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic.”

“I wanted to give you good news. There are winners out there, right? So if you ever want to be prepared and make money in the next pandemic, if that’s what you want to do, buy stock in Hazmat suit makers and protective clothing or companies that make antiviral drugs for that particular pandemic,” he notes.

Baric adds that the aforementioned sectors and stocks would “probably do pretty well” before highlighting that “there are actually mutual funds for pandemic preparedness.”

. . . “There is an opportunity for people to have political gain, financial gain, and personal gain during times of social upheaval, and that will probably occur,” he adds.

In yesterday's post, Winters uncovers a colleague of Ralph Baric who works with him as an assistant professor at UNC, Dr. Timothy Sheahan. Sheahan, with financial and professional conflicts, remains on the Lancet COVID task force from which Peter Daszak was recently recused.

Sheahan has worked alongside Baric for nearly two decades, including working at his lab while in graduate school and later teaching at the same institution: the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Prior to the current likely lab outbreak of COVID, Baric and Sheahen were working with the for-profit biotech company Gilead Sciences to test the drug Remdesivir to treat coronaviruses.

If nothing else, this paints a continuing picture of the close relationship between the virology establishment, which is already rife with personal and professional conflicts, and the for-profit drug industry, where the credentialed doctors and professors are routinely paid to work as consultants and researchers. Baric's 2018 presentation makes it plain that these figures are all acutely aware of the opportunities for personal aggrandizement that this enviornment fosters.

Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal,

Biden administration officials are cautioning that a 90-day review into the origins of the Covid-19 virus may not produce a definitive explanation as intelligence agencies take on the challenge of unraveling the global pandemic.

Spy agencies conducting the review have yet to find conclusive evidence that would settle the debate over whether the virus came from human contact with an infected animal or was leaked from a Chinese government virology lab, a person familiar with the efforts said.

Did anyone seriously expect any other outcome? The WSJ just spent x amount of staff time -- though probably far less than it would had it wanted a different outcome -- to establish yet again that opinions are divided, there are different theories, nobody knows how COVID started, and that'll likely never change.