• Tag Archives COVID

  • The Federal Government Was Funding the Research of Alleged COVID ‘Patient Zero,’ Documents Show

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In June, The New York Times ran an exposé detailing the tragedy that we may never know the origins of COVID-19.

    “For three years, the U.S. government has been tied in knots over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, frustrated that China’s hindrance of investigations and unwillingness to look critically at its own research have obscured what intelligence agencies can learn about whether the virus escaped from a lab,” reported Julian Barnes. “Inquiries during the Trump and Biden administrations have yielded no definitive answers.”

    That the conversation on the origins of the virus is shifting from “preponderance of evidence” to “definitive answers” is itself evidence that we may be closer to answering the mystery of COVID’s origins than many realize. 

    In November 2019, three lab researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China became severely ill, according to a U.S. intelligence report obtained by the Wall Street Journal in 2021. The researchers, whose identities were not disclosed, became so sick they were hospitalized, the report stated. The timing of the event is noteworthy. The three lab workers, the Journal noted, were hospitalized in November 2019, “roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, first began circulating around the central Chinese city of Wuhan.”

    Two years later, the identities of the three lab workers allegedly hospitalized were revealed. US government sources identified the three lab researchers as Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, according to recent reporting from Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag in Public. 

    The Atlantic noted the “extraordinary” nature of the findings, if true.  

    “These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeroes aren’t merely employees of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing since the start of the pandemic,” writes Daniel Engber. “Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses.”

    Hu’s name is especially important. The man many are dubbing “patient zero” didn’t just work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to documents published by the White Coat Waste Project obtained via a FOIA request, Hu was receiving US grant money to perform gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

    “The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci,” the Intercept reports. “Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.”

    These are not the only important details that have many suspecting Hu is “patient zero.” There’s also the fact that he was a top lieutenant of Shi Zhengli, a scientist literally named “batwoman” for her extensive research on viruses taken from bats in caves. And then there’s the fact that unreleased intelligence reportedly says the sick lab workers lost their sense of smell—one of the telltale signs of COVID. 

    “That doesn’t medically prove that they had COVID but that’s some pretty specific symptoms,” Josh Rogin of the Washington Post noted in an interview with Bari Weiss.

    Finally, as Science notes, Hu is an “appealing suspect” because he “was a lead author on a 2017 paper in PLOS Pathogens describing an experiment that created chimeric viruses by combining genes for surface proteins from bat coronaviruses that would not grow in cultures with the genome of one that did. This paper has received intense scrutiny because it was partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) … .”

    None of this is a “definitive answer,” of course. And Hu claims the entire story is “fake news.”

    “The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,”  Hu wrote in an email to Science. “In autumn 2019, I was neither sick nor had any symptoms related to COVID-19.”

    That Hu would deny involvement in the incident is hardly surprising.

    “Denials of culpability and dismissals of evidence by a likely culpable person cannot be taken at face value,” said Rutgers Professor Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist.

    That those responsible for the deadliest pandemic in a century would not wish to take responsibility for it should not surprise us. And I’m not just talking about Ben Hu. 

    There’s little reason to believe the Chinese government would be forthcoming if their investigation determined they were responsible for COVID-19. Similarly, there’s little reason to believe the US government, which was funding China’s coronavirus research, would be eager to get to the truth either.

    Let’s not forget there was a serious effort by the US government to prevent Americans from even openly speculating about the lab-leak theory. In February 2021, almost certainly at the behest of federal agencies, which were working with social media platforms to combat COVID “misinformation,” Facebook announced it would remove posts that suggested “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” Months later, after it became widely accepted that the lab-leak theory was not “a crackpot idea” after all, Facebook was forced to backtrack. 

    Today many agencies within the federal government itself concede that the lab-leak theory isn’t just possible, but the most likely cause of COVID. 

    “The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2,” a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found.

    Indeed, a preponderance of evidence is emerging that points to the Wuhan lab, and Hu may turn out to be the key. 

    “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else,” Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing told Public. “That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

    That the deadliest pandemic in a century might have been triggered by scientists pursuing risky genetic research in pursuit of a “greater good” should not surprise us. 

    “Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some ‘noble’ goal,” the philosopher Leonard Read once observed. 

    Nor should it surprise us if it’s found that the Chinese government (with help from the US) was responsible. Governments have been responsible for the worst atrocities in history, usually while using collective force to advance utopia. This includes famous genocides like the Holocaust, the Holdomor, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but also eugenics policies that forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of Americans to create a “purer race.”

    A half-century ago, F.A. Hayek warned about humanity becoming essentially drunk—“dizzy with success”—in their faith in the physical sciences, “which tempts man to try…to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.” He feared humanity’s faith in its ability to control the physical world stood to make those who controlled it a “destroyer of a civilization.”

    Hayek was alluding to collectivism when he made these remarks in his Nobel Prize-winning speech, but it’s a similar Frankenstein-like hubris that lurks in gain-of-function research—which NIH continued to pursue despite warnings and pauses.

    If the lab-leak theory turns out to be true, don’t expect these officials to be any more forthcoming than Ben Hu.

    This article originally appeared on AIER. 


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

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


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  • Two New Medical Studies Show How Mask Mandates Failed—and May Have Harmed Countless People

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    I have a friend, a very smart fellow, who early in the pandemic began masking. At the time, masks were not being recommended by health authorities, let alone mandated.

    I didn’t think much about his decision. It didn’t affect me. I was what you might call a mask agnostic. Perhaps masks were beneficial, perhaps not.

    As the pandemic continued, however, I found myself more and more in the “anti-mask camp.” I didn’t suddenly begrudge my friend or think he was a fool for masking, but I was bothered that personal decisions had become public decisions.

    To make matters worse, a kind of mask dogma had taken hold. To publicly question the benefits of masking or point out possible adverse effects was verboten, a crime punishable by social media bans or blacklisting from fact-checkers. (This didn’t stop me from writing about masks—see here, here, and here—but I was very, very careful when doing so.)

    Like most people, I didn’t know how effective masks were in preventing the spread of Covid. I did have doubts, however, doubts that were supported by an abundance of scientific research and public health experts.

    Just as importantly, as a student of economics, I understood that all actions come with tradeoffs. (Some public health experts learned this lesson the hard way.) What were those tradeoffs? And who could determine if the public health benefit of masks outweighed the adverse consequences?

    We didn’t have much time for those questions in 2020, in large part because few people wanted to consider them. The public health bureaucracy certainly didn’t. It had its plan, and it wasn’t interested in exploring science that might undermine their directives. Three years later, however, research has emerged that helps answer these questions.

    A study published earlier this month in Frontiers in Public Health conducted a systematic review of more than 2,000 studies on the adverse effects of masking, finding “significant effects in both medical surgical and N95 masks.”

    As one might expect, covering the breathing orifices of humans for long periods of time carries health consequences, among them decreased oxygen saturation and increases in heart rate, blood pressure, blood-CO2 levels, and skin temperature, as well as dizziness, speech impediments, headaches, and dyspnea (labored breathing).

    Study authors said it was imperative that these findings are considered in future public health policies.

    “Face mask side-effects must be assessed (risk-benefit) against the available evidence of their effectiveness against viral transmissions,” the authors concluded. “In the absence of strong empirical evidence of effectiveness, mask wearing should not be mandated let alone enforced by law.”

    We now know some of the negative consequences of masking (and mask mandates). But what about their effectiveness in reducing the spread of Covid?

    As it happens, a massive study conducted in the UK, which examined one of London’s largest hospitals for 10 months during the highly contagious Omicron variant, sheds new light on this question.

    Though the full research has yet to be published (it will be presented at the 2023 European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in April, officials say) study authors make it clear that the hospital’s masking requirement made “no discernible difference.”

    “Our study found no evidence that mandatory masking of staff impacts the rate of hospital SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron variant,” said lead author Dr. Ben Patterson of St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London.

    “The bottom line is that lifting the hospital mask mandate did not lead to a measurable increase in hospital-acquired COVID infections,” Jeanne Noble, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Healthline, adding that the research was more robust than previous observational trials.

    In other words, the two most recent studies on masking suggest masks were terribly ineffective in reducing the spread of Covid, but came with clear health harms. Yet countries across the world and states across the US were mandating their use for months if not years.

    How does something like this happen? Economics holds a clue.

    In his 1974 Nobel Prize speech, F.A. Hayek talked about the dangers of acting with “the pretense of knowledge.” In some ways, this knowledge was worse than no knowledge at all, because it stood to lead government officials and experts to believe they possessed sufficient knowledge to engineer society successfully.

    As many have noted, history has shown that Hayek was right to be worried. And for decades historians and economists have highlighted Hayek’s warning about this “fatal conceit” rooted in the pretense of knowledge, stressing the importance of demonstrating “to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

    Fewer, however, have noted a separate paragraph from Hayek’s speech, in which he notes what drives public officials to act with insufficient knowledge.

    “The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power.”

    This paragraph perfectly describes the phenomenon witnessed during the pandemic.

    Public officials clearly did not have enough knowledge to make rational decisions for hundreds of millions of Americans. But they had to pretend they did (and perhaps some actually believed they did, as Hayek suggests) because that was the popular demand. Influential conservatives and progressives both largely bought into the fiction that public health officials could rationally plan society—through mask mandates, lockdowns, and social distancing—to protect humans from the coronavirus.

    The pandemic was not just a failure of science. It was also clear evidence that government, freed from its constitutional and rational limitations, has grown far too large, as have our expectations of it.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

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


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  • The New York Times’ Stunning Confession on Sweden’s Pandemic Response

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an article that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

    “How Did No-Mandate Sweden End Up With Such an Average Pandemic?” the headline asked.

    Times writer David Wallace-Wells doesn’t accept claims that Sweden—which drew intense criticism for refusing to go into lockdown in 2020—had the lowest excess death rate in Europe, with just 3.3 percent more deaths than expected, the lowest percentage among OECD countries. But he does concede that “it’s hard to argue on the basis of Sweden’s epidemiological experience that its policy course was a disastrous one.”

    This might not sound like much of a concession, but it is.

    The Grey Lady reported in 2020 that “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” for its Covid response, and the Times was joined by a chorus of media outlets (and President Donald Trump) who alleged Sweden had “botched the pandemic” and amplified the virus.

    Today we know this was not the case. And though Wallace-Wells seems to begrudge Anders Tegnell—the architect of Sweden’s policy—taking a “victory lap through the media,” it’s worth pointing out that the epidemiologist received death threats for his pandemic response, which looks better with each passing week.

    Just how successful Sweden’s approach was is still subject to debate. While Wallace-Wells is skeptical of Swedish claims that the country had the lowest excess mortality in Europe—he says the data set is imperfect and is not adjusted for demographics—it’s clear Sweden performed better than many lockdown nations. World Health Organization data he references show Swedes had an excess death rate average of 56/100,000—far better than Italy (133), Germany (116), Spain (111), and the UK (109).

    Whatever data one chooses, one fact is undebatable: this is not what modelers predicted.

    It’s important to remember that one of the reasons nations went into lockdown in the first place was that the Imperial College of London predicted as many as 40 million people would die in nine months if the virus was left unchecked. Those same modelers predicted that Sweden would suffer 96,000 deaths by July 2020 if the nation didn’t close.

    That didn’t happen. (The actual death count by July 2020 was 5,700.)

    So whether one accepts claims that Sweden had the lowest excess death toll in Europe or merely performed “average,” it’s clear modelers were horribly wrong.

    While Wallace-Wells doesn’t address these modeling errors, he does highlight the ineffectiveness of government regulations, conceding that “mandates may matter somewhat less than social behavior and the disease itself — and surely less than we want to believe.”

    People will continue to debate mandates, of course. They’ll point out that countries like Finland and Norway had lower Covid mortality than Sweden, ignoring that (as Wallace-Wells also notes) these countries actually had policies less stringent than Sweden for much of 2020, according to Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. (Neighbors were apparently quick to adopt Sweden’s “lighter touch” approach.)

    This does not mean we don’t have clear answers, however. Early in the pandemic, I asked a proactive question: “could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?”

    Though Wallace-Wells never quite says yes, he includes a telling quote from Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute and a professor of computational biology at University College London.

    “What the ‘Swedish model’ really suggests is that pandemic mitigation measures can be effectively deployed in a respectful, largely non-coercive way,” writes Balloux.

    This is as close to an admission of “Sorry, we were wrong” as we’re likely to see in the New York Times.

    After all, the non-coercive measures Balloux mentions are precisely what proponents of Sweden’s approach, including signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had advocated all along. (Wallace-Welles is correct when he notes that Sweden never adopted a “let it rip” approach, as many claim.)

    Sadly, most countries instead adopted highly-coercive measures, even tyrannical ones, believing they had the knowledge to plan society. In doing so, they ignored the warning of Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, who cautioned that “if man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of events possible.”

    This is the biggest lesson of the pandemic: Central planners do not possess the knowledge to effectively organize society, but they do possess the power to wreck the social order—quickly. This is precisely why Hayek said it was imperative that those with power approach society with humility.

    Some people appear to have learned this lesson. Wallace-Wells said it’s “humbling to acknowledge” that mandates simply were unable to do what many believed they could.

    Let’s hope others learn this lesson as well—and offer the Swedes and Dr. Tegnell a well-deserved apology.

    This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

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


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