Why Parents, Teens, and Children Should Question the COVID-19 Vaccine
There is no immediate threat of severe COVID-19 in the majority of Canadian children and adolescents.
As of May 28, 2021, there have been 259,308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.048% were hospitalized, 0.06% were admitted to ICU, and 0.004% died1. Seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19.2 Pfizer BioNTech’s clinical data in children are limited and provide no information on rare but serious adverse effects or long-term safety as well as efficacy.
Pfizer BioNTech’s study included 2,260 children and adolescents, 12-15 years of age, 1,131 of whom received the vaccine. This is a very small number of adolescents and does not permit an evaluation of rare but serious side-effects, such as effects that may happen in only 1:5,000 adolescents. Furthermore, with most of the adolescents followed for only 1 or 2 months after their 2nd dose, there is no data to support long-term safety.
All of the COVID-19 vaccines in Canada are “Authorized under Interim Orders”.
This means that continued use of the experimental vaccines is contingent on the collection of additional data from Pfizer BioNTech’s on-going study as well as other surveillance systems, including studies that Canadian adolescents are being invited to enroll in at the time of vaccination, to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.
COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in Canada result in production of virus spike protein.
The Pfizer BioNTech vaccine is injected in a shoulder muscle. It was assumed that spike protein production takes place in white blood cells at this location, and then these cells present the spike protein on their surface so that a full immune response can take place. However, cells of the muscle and other organs also take up the vaccine.
It was assumed that the spike proteins do not end up in circulation; however, this is being challenged by recent studies.
Ogata et al., 20213 reported the detection of spike protein in the plasma of 3 of 13 young healthcare workers following vaccination with Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine. In one of the workers, the spike protein circulated for 29 days. The data are limited and warrant further investigation for both the Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines.
Recent studies indicate the spike protein, itself, may potentially be harmful.
Recent studies4 suggest that the spike protein produced in response to vaccination, may bind and interact with various cells throughout the body, via their ACE2 receptors, potentially resulting in damage to various tissues and organs. This risk, no matter how theoretical, must be investigated prior to the vaccination of children and adolescents.
Health Canada authorized the COVID-19 vaccines without biodistribution and pharmacokinetic studies on the virus spike protein.
Given the concerns about the spike protein, it is important that we fully understand:
• which cells are actually involved in the production of the spike protein, seeing that Pfizer’s own study submitted to the Japanese authorities shows the deposition of vaccine nanoparticles in various tissues and organs5; • whether the spike protein is gaining access to the circulatory system and, if so, for how long; • whether the spike protein crosses the blood-brain barrier; • whether the spike protein interferes with semen production or ovulation, • whether the spike protein crosses the placenta and impacts a developing baby, or • whether the spike protein is excreted in the milk of lactating mothers.
The same information is needed for the S1 subunit of the spike protein, which is the part that binds to ACE2 receptors; and which has also been detected in the plasma of individuals following mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccination (Ogata et al., 2021).
The toxicity studies conducted with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine do not allow for a safety assessment of the spike protein.
Although Pfizer BioNTech conducted toxicity studies, including a reproductive toxicity study, they used rats as their animal model. Although rats have ACE2 receptors, these receptors have a very low binding affinity for the spike protein. In fact, of 14 mammalian species evaluated6, ACE2 receptors of rats and mice had the lowest spike protein binding affinities, while ACE2 receptors in humans and rhesus monkeys had the highest. So, while the current toxicity studies have provided useful information on the vaccine components, they provide little value in understanding the safety of the spike protein they code for.
Where our children and adolescents are concerned, it is crucial that we carefully follow a precautionary principle. Children and adolescents have a miniscule risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. The risk of vaccination, no matter how theoretical, must be fully investigated and understood. Canadians must question the accelerated and indiscriminate vaccination of all children and adolescents with a vaccine for which critically important biodistribution, pharmacokinetic, and safety data on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are missing. The Canadian government should be called upon to immediately halt the mass vaccination program of children and adolescents until such time as these studies are conducted and the uncertainties about the potential pathogenicity of the spike protein can be addressed.
Franky, I don't see how or why the above article is controversial. What is the supposed current justification for injecting children with experimental COVID-19 vaccines other than "when it comes to any and all vaccines, more is always merrier"?
Sharing this here is largely moot at this point, and I realize much of what's happening now in the realm of 'dominant narratives' ties back to commentary made here earlier Re: limited hangouts, red herrings, and mis/disinfo.
Perhaps Fauci is being primed as the obligatory fall guy --
Belligerent Savant » Sat May 15, 2021 7:06 pm wrote: To me, rather then attempting to find out how this all started -- as it's moot, and other than a would-be fall guy or two in the coming year+ [beware, Fauci], justice will never be served -- i'm far more interested in the plans these beasts have in store in the months/years ahead, particularly in the areas of privacy and autonomy. Mandated shots, electronic health passport requirements and blockchain-related monetary tracking, UBI and related control mechanisms, etc.
That aside, placing a few sample emails here as added reference points:
alex g @galexybrane The Fauci emails prove that lockdowns were about control, not health. He knew about post-infection immunity, low asymptomatic spread, cheap therapeutics, and the uselessness of masks. Fauci’s lies pushed millions of Americans into poverty and despair. He has done so much damage. 12:37 PM · Jun 2, 2021
Maryanne Demasi, PhD @MaryanneDemasi · 8h Fauci knew Feb 2020 that SARS-COV-2 had “unusual features,” that it “potentially look(ed) engineered” & was “inconsistent with evolutionary theory”. Yet he continued to insist publicly, & in testimony to Congress that the virus must have come from nature.
@cordeliers · 3h One gets the impression that Fauci is being set up to take the fall for the transnational ruling class. In effect, we’ve reached the part of the heist film where the double-crosses are implemented.
Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog · 34m Two Fauci emails. In one he says that masks are for sick people. In the other he admits that asymptomatic spread is rare. So why were people with no symptoms wearing masks for a year? It’s almost like it was all a charade.
Dr. Birdle explains that the vax does not stay local to the deltoid muscle and enters the cardiovascular system and becomes toxic. The spike protein accumulates in the spleen, bone marrow, liver, and ovaries in high concentrations. It can bind to platelets. It can transfer to breastfeeding babies.
Pfizer Japanese government study (translated into English) acquired by Dr. Byram Bridle through a freedom of information request. https://files.catbox.moe/0vwcmj.pdf
Yes the mRNA drug - if the mechanism works as described - it's going to be producing the foreign spike protein in the ovaries.
If the immune system reacts to it and can't eradicate it safely it will destroy the tissue producing it.
To be clear this is a Japanese study that was acquired from a group of doctors including Dr. Byram Bridle from the Japanese government. The EMA report is public knowledge that was released in February of 2021 confirming accumulation in organs. "That's right. The ovaries." Don't worry, there's no depopulation agenda and Bill Gates never talked about population control with vaccines multiple times.
Reducing the death rate among children is thought to reduce population growth because people have less children if those they have are likely to survive. It's a basic evolutionary law. A turtle only lays so many eggs because the majority of its offspring that hatch will die before they reach the sea. Same with humans.
I don't bring this up to absolve Bill Gates of anything, but this is likely his thinking here. Though he is naive and doesn't recognize the need to explain this, which is why he is the perfect patsy for, perhaps, whatever is to come.
That was unexpected: Amazon, Barnes & Noble memory-hole Fauci’s book amid email revelations 2 Jun, 2021
Major book retailers have scrubbed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s book on “leadership” in times of the pandemic just a day after announcing it, as a massive cache of emails emerged painting the coronavirus czar in less than flattering light.
Searches for ‘Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward’ on both Amazon US and Barnes & Noble booksellers returned “page not found” results on Wednesday...
Vaccines - Did you know that the USA allowed the Surgeon General for the NAZI 3rd Reich to come to the USA. Annie Jacobsen talks about him in this interview with Joe Rogan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MZr5J5DOfk&t=220s
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
Consider the comparable and even more recent 180° pivot of the US government and its tame media over the origins of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Until quite recently, the party line was that the new virus had jumped from bats to humans via a Wuhan “wet market” where shoppers purchase live animals as food. Any suggestion that something else might have been involved— say, any suggestion that Wuhan was also the site of a major Chinese government medical research installation where scientists carried out extremely risky “gain-of-function” research on bat coronaviruses—was instantly slapped down by supposedly impartial fact checkers in the media as a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Now all of a sudden US government flacks and the corporate media have turned on a dime and are admitting that, well, yes, there’s a major Chinese government medical research installation in Wuhan, and scientists there were conducting gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses—that is to say, studies in which viruses are genetically modified to make them more dangerous—and yes, there’s some evidence that viruses thus modified got out of the installation by way of inadequate biosecurity procedures and caused the pandemic. What was a crackpot conspiracy theory a few months ago is now being taken seriously all over the front pages, and the sudden pivot on the part of the supposedly impartial fact checkers is getting a lot of raised eyebrows.
Is there more going on here than meets the eye? Of course there is. Those gain-of-function studies in Wuhan were partly funded by US tax dollars, via one of the many slush funds that our federal government uses to prop up the medical industry here and abroad. (The reason seems to be that these extremely risky studies can’t be done in the US due to safety regulations, and so the US medical industry promptly offshored them so they could keep playing with their dangerous toys.) Specific US officials approved that funding and the studies it paid for—and some of those officials ended up also playing a significant role in pushing the narrative that the Covid-19 virus must have come from the meat market and couldn’t possibly have escaped from a lab. It’s pretty clear that covering certain highly placed and highly exposed rumps took precedence over the truth for a good long time.
One question for which I don’t have an answer yet is why the narrative has shifted so suddenly. No new data has surfaced—the information about the facility in Wuhan and the evidence that the virus was manmade have been around for more than a year, and yet suddenly they’ve gone from fringe subjects to front page news. I confess I wonder if this is connected to the equally sudden swerve that’s turned Bill Gates from media darling to media punching bag. Until quite recently, Gates was one of the principal celebrity flacks promoting the medical industry’s response to the Covid-19 virus, and his charitable foundation was heavily involved in funding that response. From at least one angle, it looks rather distinctly as though he’s being set up to take the fall for something. Still, we’ll just have to wait and see.
More generally, public skepticism about official pronouncements concerning the coronavirus outbreak has risen to remarkable levels, and not just on one side of the social landscape. For every person who insists that the virus isn’t a problem and refuses to take the vaccine, there’s another person who claims that the vaccine isn’t good enough and insists on wearing a mask and staying six feet away from everyone else even when official pronouncements insist that these steps are no longer necessary. It’s the same phenomenon on both sides, driven by a spreading distrust in those who claim to be able to speak with authority but have changed their minds too publicly, too often, with too little scientific justification. Meanwhile websites are springing up for people to talk about the health problems they’ve had after getting one of the Covid-19 vaccines—complications the media won’t talk about and, in many cases, doctors won’t treat.
None of this is particularly surprising, since official pronouncements on the virus have been driven by political pressures rather than scientific or medical concerns since the beginning of the outbreak. It somehow never occurred to anyone in power that hearing authority figures talking out of both sides of their mouth does not inspire confidence in their claims. Do you recall, dear reader, how health officials insisted early last year that masks weren’t necessary? Coronavirus advice from official sources during the outbreak has resembled nothing so much as the weather here in southern New England: if you don’t like it, wait a little while and it’ll be different.
All this comes, furthermore, at a time when public confidence in the official pronouncements of the scientific and medical establishments was already at an all-time low, for the same reason. Over and over again, the claims of supposedly authoritative figures have turned out to be just plain wrong. Take a look sometime at the number of pharmaceuticals that were approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and then had to be withdrawn in a hurry when it turned out they were neither. For that matter, look into the way that official attitudes toward, say, cholesterol have veered back and forth over the years, and ask yourself this: why should you believe that this year’s fashionable opinion is any more correct than last year’s, when you know as well as I do that it’s going to be replaced by some different opinion in another year or two?
Behind this is a far more drastic problem that cuts to the heart of the scientific enterprise. The power of science as a way of finding out truths about nature depends on replicability—that is, when one set of researchers publish a paper saying that they’ve done some experiments and gotten certain results, anyone else with access to the necessary hardware ought to be able to repeat the same experiments and get the same results. That was the basis on which science broke free of the pack of competing methods of making sense of nature and became our culture’s core way of understanding the world. Unfortunately, in a great many cases, it’s no longer true.
The replication crisis, as this far from minor problem is called, has been the subject of a great deal of worried conversation in the pages of scientific journals for years now. The difficulty is that a huge number of experiments that have been taken seriously, and used as the basis for influential theories, have turned out to be irreproducible: when other researchers repeated the same experiments they didn’t get the same results. Some of that is due to scientific fraud of various kinds, ranging from outright faking of experimental results to increasingly arcane statistical gamesmanship that extracts the illusion of meaning from random data.
Much more, however, it is due to a culture of sloppy science in which experiments are set up to support fashionable prejudices rather than putting them to the test. It’s indicative of this, as a recent survey of published studies showed, that studies that failed the test of replication were cited literally hundreds of times more often than studies that passed that test. Tell people what they want to hear and they’ll splash your name around in the journals that matter: that’s the logic that makes for a successful career in too many fields of scientific research these days. It also means, unfortunately, that medical care and public policy these days are quite often being guided by studies worth a lot less than the hot air that promotes them.
Very interesting indeed to see how quickly the narrative has shifted. This article by Jonathan Cook makes the case that the initial scrambling against the idea of COVID emerging from the Wuhan lab was all about Western complicity in the biowarfare research, and now that the initial cover story has failed, the establishment is moving on to a substitute official story that holds China solely accountable:
A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents – often found in animals such as bats – to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.
Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s many times before. And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?
No interest in truth Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth – or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate media.
The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia – when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.
No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.
Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
Virus experiments Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.
But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.
Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.
But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments – what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci – yes, the US President’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic’s saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators.
And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.
Colluding in deceit This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.
If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.
He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.
The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences – and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet – is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend.
The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.
Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.
Media blackout So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?
The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.
Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory”.
The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both – a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.
And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)
The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade’s research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade’s revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.
Evasion tactic Biden’s so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact – just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.
Illusion of truth The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us – to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.
In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system – despite all its flaws – is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.
The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively – but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive – debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The media’s task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty – that the pandemic had an animal origin – to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:
How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter – in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid’s animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?
Class interests Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests – or those of their class or professional group.
Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community’s failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.
Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.
And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
I will also say that if we end up at the point of a lab "leak" being acknowledged, I will still suspect that of merely being a limited hangout to distract from an international release. But that, of course, would be far more difficult to prove.
MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought. The University of Barcelona team, who had been testing waste water since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples. They first found the virus was present in Barcelona on Jan. 15, 2020, 41 days before the first case was officially reported there. Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
Marionumber1 » 04 Jun 2021 04:42 wrote:Very interesting indeed to see how quickly the narrative has shifted. This article by Jonathan Cook makes the case that the initial scrambling against the idea of COVID emerging from the Wuhan lab was all about Western complicity in the biowarfare research, and now that the initial cover story has failed, the establishment is moving on to a substitute official story that holds China solely accountable:
A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents – often found in animals such as bats – to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.
Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s many times before. And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?
No interest in truth Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth – or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate media.
The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia – when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.
No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.
Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
Virus experiments Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.
But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.
Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.
But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments – what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci – yes, the US President’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic’s saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators.
And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.
Colluding in deceit This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.
If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.
He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.
The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences – and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet – is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend.
The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.
Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.
Media blackout So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?
The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.
Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory”.
The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both – a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.
And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)
The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade’s research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade’s revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.
Evasion tactic Biden’s so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact – just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.
Illusion of truth The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us – to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.
In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system – despite all its flaws – is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.
The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively – but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive – debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The media’s task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty – that the pandemic had an animal origin – to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:
How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter – in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid’s animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?
Class interests Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests – or those of their class or professional group.
Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community’s failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.
Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.
And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
I will also say that if we end up at the point of a lab "leak" being acknowledged, I will still suspect that of merely being a limited hangout to distract from an international release. But that, of course, would be far more difficult to prove.
In Australia the "narrative shift" you are talking about seems to match a ramping up of the potential conflict with China.
By the way, was there a 'pandemic' in Sweden in 2017-2018?
There were severe outbreaks of h3n2 influenza around the world in 2017/18. Its the same flu varient that caused the 1967/68 pandemics. In Australia the death rate from flu was about three times higher than the previous year.
A few months ago, my best friend got a little hot under the collar when I expressed amusement at the taboo status of any suggestion that Covid-19 might have escaped from the Wuhan lab. He naturally associated such queries with Trump, and yelled, "What difference does it make?!"
The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
By Katherine Eban June 3, 2021
[...] for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?
Facebook will no longer remove claims that COVID-19 is man-made By Chris Morris
May 27, 2021 9:49 AM PDT
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
