• Tag Archives COVID

  • Lawmaker: ‘It Is Not Anti-Science’ to Hold NIH Accountable for Coverup

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The effort to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19 is more than four years in the making. And while shockingly little progress has been made, evidence suggests that a plot to conceal answers is unraveling before our eyes.

    The latest evidence comes from David Morens, a top adviser to former National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci, who last month testified before the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about emails he sent to colleagues concerning Freedom of Information Act requests.

    “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts,” Morens wrote. “So I think we are all safe.”

    While questioning Morens, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed shock and dismay over the emails as well as Morens’s repeated excuses and dissembling.

    “Sir, I think you’re going to be haunted by your testimony today,” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD).

    Morens may not be the only one haunted.

    In several emails, Morens referenced “Tony,” Dr. Fauci, with whom he claimed to have a “secret backchannel.”

    “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote to Peter Daszak.

    Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, was the recipient of a multimillion-dollar NIH grant to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab many government agencies, including the FBI, believe was the likely source of COVID-19.

    The fact that EcoHealth Alliance was conducting risky experiments on coronaviruses at Wuhan with NIH dollars, something Fauci had repeatedly denied, explains why the NIH might have felt a need to deliberate in secret. Emails say that the NIH was working to protect EcoHealth Alliance’s and the NIH’s reputations.

    “Peter, from Tony’s recent numerous comments to me … they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputation,” Morens wrote.

    At least for some, this protection apparently extended to hiding communications from the public and deleting correspondences to conceal the truth from the public.

    Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) read aloud no fewer than half a dozen emails written by Morens in which he discussed not just how to avoid FOIA but how to “erase” emails so they could not be retrieved.

    Just who will be implicated in the fallout from the apparent conspiracy to hide the truth is unclear, but it’s not a trivial question, considering how the matter has been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation. (Willfully avoiding FOIA is a federal crime.)

    At least one person, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has frequently sparred with Fauci, said the conspiracy goes higher than Morens.

    “I believe Anthony Fauci was in charge of the entire conspiracy,” Paul said.

    For his part, Morens told lawmakers he had no recollection of talking with Fauci about emails. Evidence, however, suggests that Morens is either lying or suffering from a fuzzy memory.

    In one June 2021 email to a recipient whose name is redacted, Morens discussed an email correspondence between himself and Daszak that he “erased long ago,” adding, “I feel pretty sure that Tony’s was too.”

    How Morens could be “pretty sure” Fauci had deleted the email in question without ever having discussed emails with the former NIH director is a question that investigators might ponder.

    Whether justice will be delivered to those involved in the effort to avoid oversight and deflect scrutiny from EcoHealth Alliance’s research at Wuhan is uncertain. What’s clear is that the NIH is a broken institution.

    The relationship between Daszak and Morens reeks of cronyism, and it includes Morens editing grant application materials for Daszak and then wondering if any “kickbacks” would be coming his way.

    It’s easy to believe that the worst part of big government is its inefficiency. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” Milton Friedman famously quipped, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

    Yet the costs of government gigantism go beyond dollars and cents. It’s now apparent that the NIH, freed from the market forces that ensure scarce resources are allocated efficiently, was spraying money around in reckless fashion without proper oversight.

    With its $47 billion budget, the NIH was doling out grants to fund research it clearly should not have been funding. And instead of coming clean following the emergence of COVID-19, officials at the NIH leveraged its power and resources to silence critics, marginalize other scientists, and accuse anyone who opposed NIH policies of being “anti-science.”

    Fortunately, the political cover the NIH has enjoyed up to this point seems to be vanishing.

    “It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA), the panel’s top Democrat, flatly told Morens.

    We’ll see whether these words also apply to Fauci, who is scheduled to appear before Congress on June 3. The wheels of justice turn slowly, they say. We may soon learn whether, in Washington, they still turn at all.

    This article originally appeared in The Washington Examiner.

    https://fee.org/articles/lawmaker-it-is-not-anti-science-to-hold-nih-accountable-for-coverup/


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  • Rand Paul Exposes the ‘Great Covid Cover-up’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In an explosive new op-ed, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed that at least 15 separate federal agencies knew that attempts to create a COVID-19-like coronavirus were being undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as early as January 2018.

    Yet, heads of these agencies did not reveal this information to the public; for years, they actively refused to release information on the project to lawmakers such as Paul, who were attempting to provide congressional oversight.

    “For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project,” wrote Paul, who in March revealed he was formally launching a bipartisan investigation into the virus’s origins with Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan.

    The DEFUSE project refers to a proposal submitted by EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization headed by British zoologist Peter Daszak, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The purpose of the proposal was to “insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus.”

    Paul also identified two additional parties who were part of the original plan to create chimeric coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the federal agency formerly headed up by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Dr. Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology and one of the authors of the now-disgraced “Proximal Origin” paper. The authors of the paper, which was published in Nature in March 2020, stated that evidence clearly indicated that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, even though privately, the authors expressed clear concerns that evidence suggested the virus was genetically designed.

    Some scientists have already raised ethical concerns in response to the revelation.

    “We now know Ian Lipkin was part of the initial DEFUSE proposal,” said Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, in response to the revelation. “Everything he has said about COVID origins and his role in the fraudulent ‘Proximal Origins’ paper must now be reconsidered in the wake of these new revelations.”

    It’s not just Lipkin, of course.

    All of these parties failed to speak up when COVID-19, one of the deadliest viruses in a century, emerged from Wuhan, Paul says, and details of the DEFUSE project may not have come to light at all if not for a whistleblower (identified as Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy).

    More details of what the Kentucky senator calls “the Great COVID Cover-up” are likely to materialize as Paul and Peters continue their investigation. But an abundance of evidence already shows it’s no exaggeration to use that word: cover-up.

    Paul is hardly the first government official to use the term.

    Nearly a year ago, David Asher, a bioweapons specialist who led the State Department’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19, sat down with New York magazine journalist David Zweig and explained why there has been so little progress made in discovering the origins of COVID: Those with institutional power don’t want answers.

    “It’s a massive coverup spanning from China to DC,” Asher said. “Our own state department told us, ‘Don’t get near this thing, it’ll blow up in your face.’”

    Other government whistleblowers have also attempted to expose the cover-up.

    In August, the CIA confirmed that the agency was “looking into” allegations from a CIA whistleblower who claimed that analysts tasked with determining the origins of COVID were offered “significant” financial incentives to change their assessment that COVID likely emerged accidentally from the Wuhan lab. (It’s worth noting that Fauci allegedly was admitted to agency headquarters “without a record of entry” while the CIA was conducting its investigation into COVID’s origins.)

    The reason the government would cover up DEFUSE becomes obvious when one analyzes the nature of the proposal, which British author Matt Ridley weeks ago noted included a great many “wacky” (and reckless) ideas such as spraying vaccines into bat caves to immunize them.

    “In the end, what they were doing was making more dangerous viruses, with a view of understanding them,” Ridley said. “It looks very strongly as if in trying to prevent a pandemic they may have caused one.”

    While we still do not know this for certain, it looks increasingly likely that COVID-19 was born of gain-of-function research that was partially funded by the U.S. government.

    Though this result would be shocking to many, especially those who see the state as virtuous and infallible, it’s far less surprising to students of history and economics.

    “The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments,” Ludwig von Mises explained in Omnipotent Government. “The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”

    The reason for this is obvious. The more power is concentrated, the less accountable it becomes, and power without accountability is a recipe for disaster.

    This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

    Source: Rand Paul Exposes the ‘Great Covid Cover-up’ – FEE


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  • ‘Laissez-Faire’ Sweden Had the Lowest Mortality in Europe From 2020–2022, New Analysis Shows

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Gore Vidal once said “I told you so” are the four most beautiful words in the English language.

    Perhaps this is why it’s difficult to resist sharing new data that show how Sweden’s much-maligned pandemic response was right after all.

    For those who’ve forgotten, Sweden was excoriated by corporate media and US politicians for its lighter-touch Covid-19 strategy. Many were downright hostile to the Swedes for refusing to shutter schools, lock down businesses, and ramp up police to enforce mandates.

    Here’s a sample of headlines:

    • “Why the Swedish Model for Fighting COVID-19 Is a Disaster” (Time, October 2020).

    • “The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response” (Foreign Policy, December 2020).

    • “Sweden Stayed Open and More People Died of Covid-19, but the Real Reason May Be Something Darker” (Forbes, 2020).

    • “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” (New York Times, July 2020).

    • “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here” (Slate, April 2020).

    This is just a taste of the reactions against Sweden in 2020. By opting to allow its 10 million citizens to continue living relatively normal lives, Sweden was, in the words of The Guardian, leading not just Swedes but the entire world “to catastrophe.”

    Even then-president Trump got in on the action of smacking Sweden around.

    “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown,” the tweeter-in-chief warned.

    Despite the foreboding rhetoric, the worst-case predictions for Sweden never materialized. In fact, they were not even close.

    In March 2021, it was apparent that Sweden had a lower mortality rate than most European nations. The following year, Sweden boasted one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe.

    By March 2023, Sweden had the lowest excess death rate in all of Europe, according to some data sets. And though some weren’t ready to admit that Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe, even the New York Times, which had mocked Sweden’s pandemic strategy, conceded that the nation’s laissez-faire approach was hardly the disaster many had predicted.

    More recently, Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg shared a statistical analysis based on government data from all European countries from January 2020 to August 2022. The study demonstrated that Sweden had the lowest cumulative age-standardized mortality rate in all of Europe in that period.

    “Across Europe, Sweden saw [the] lowest total death during and after Covid,” Lomborg said on X (formerly Twitter).

    Lomborg’s analysis provides yet more evidence that the Covid state was a disaster.

    Some will say, How could we have known?

    The harsh truth is that some of us did know. In March 2020, I warned that government “cures” for Covid-19 were likely to be worse than the disease itself. The following month, I argued that Sweden’s laissez-faire policy was likely to be a more effective policy than the hardline approach favored by other nations.

    I wrote these things not because I’m a prophet, but because I’ve read a bit of history and understand basic economics.

    History shows that collective responses during panics tend not to end well, and economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explained why near the beginning of the pandemic.

    “In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs,” the authors noted. “This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, ‘if it saves just one life.’”

    The thing is, tradeoffs are real. Indeed, economics is largely a study of them. When you choose one thing, you give up another; and we evaluate outcomes based on what we get versus what we gave up. We call this opportunity cost.

    Throughout most of the pandemic, however, there were those who didn’t want to pay any attention to opportunity costs or the unintended consequences of government lockdowns—and they were legion.

    This is the great economic fallacy Henry Hazlitt warned of decades ago.

    Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, claimed that overlooking the secondary consequences of policies accounted for “nine-tenths” of the economic fallacies in the world.

    “[There is] a persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy,” he wrote, “and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be.”

    This was the fatal flaw—quite literally—of the Covid state. Its engineers didn’t realize they were not saving lives, but trading lives (to borrow a turn of phrase from Harrigan and Davies).

    Lockdowns weren’t scientific and proved ineffective at slowing the spread of Covid, but even if they had worked, they came with severe collateral damage: cancer screenings plummeted, drug use surged, learning was lost, and global poverty exploded. Depression and unemployment skyrocketed, businesses went bankrupt, and high inflation arrived. Babies were denied heart surgery because of travel restrictions, youth suicides increased…the list goes on and on.

    The dark truth is that lockdowns were not based on science and came with a rather unfortunate side effect: they killed people.

    The secondary consequences of lockdowns and other non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) did irreparable harm to humans that will be experienced for decades to come.

    In the words of New York magazine, lockdowns were “a giant experiment” that failed.

    Sweden’s top infectious disease expert, Anders Tegnell, was one of the few people to understand that lockdowns would probably not work. And though Tegnell is not a professional economist, he seemed to understand the lesson of secondary consequences better than many economists.

    “The effects of different strategies, lockdowns, and other measures, are much more complex than we understand today,” he told Reuters in 2020, when his strategy was under fire.

    By understanding this basic economic principle and having the courage to stand by his convictions, Tegnell was able to avoid the pernicious effects of lockdowns, a policy that seduced so many central planners.

    Today, many more people in Sweden are alive because of it. And Anders Tegnell should not be shy in saying, “I told you so.”


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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