That doesn't mean bodies in the street. It means the hospital no longer functions the way it should. It can't deal with other people because so many resources are used on covid.
Never before had Australian hospitals been in a position where ambulances were lined up waiting to access emergency and unable to respond to call outs as a result. And we didn't even have it bad here. But that is still the hospital system failing under the stress of the situation. If an ambulance can't be responded to a call out cos so many are in a line waiting to unload patients in A&E then that means the system has been over run.
Its like the cargo ships off your coastline.
The ambulance services became overrun after lockdowns ended because people weren't allowed to see doctors when they had the symptoms of being sick for the good part of a year, elective surgeries were postponed, and everyones general lifestyle had been sedentary. Then they fired all the unvaccinated healthcare workers. Then they started to furlough vaccinated healthcare workers who tested positive for covid. Then healthcare workers started to quit because State governments had only paid them in hero worship.
Any ensuing health care crisis will be manmade. If I was a state leader I could solve it easily, of course I'd be taken out for doing so though. Victoria alone has spent more money this year recruiting and funding the police force than healthcare workers and healthcare system.
A neglected healthcare system means there can be more justification for future lockdowns, and with more police to enforce them.
That doesn't mean bodies in the street. It means the hospital no longer functions the way it should. It can't deal with other people because so many resources are used on covid.
Never before had Australian hospitals been in a position where ambulances were lined up waiting to access emergency and unable to respond to call outs as a result. And we didn't even have it bad here. But that is still the hospital system failing under the stress of the situation. If an ambulance can't be responded to a call out cos so many are in a line waiting to unload patients in A&E then that means the system has been over run.
Its like the cargo ships off your coastline.
The ambulance services became overrun after lockdowns ended because people weren't allowed to see doctors when they had the symptoms of being sick for the good part of a year, elective surgeries were postponed, and everyones general lifestyle had been sedentary. Then they fired all the unvaccinated healthcare workers. Then they started to furlough vaccinated healthcare workers who tested positive for covid. Then healthcare workers started to quit because State governments had only paid them in hero worship.
Any ensuing health care crisis will be manmade. If I was a state leader I could solve it easily, of course I'd be taken out for doing so though. Victoria alone has spent more money this year recruiting and funding the police force than healthcare workers and healthcare system.
A neglected healthcare system means there can be more justification for future lockdowns, and with more police to enforce them.
100% right. I just don't get how anyone used to questioning authority cannot see this. The total ICU bed capacity in the US, for example, is at its lowest point right now than at any other time since the beginning of this pandemic.
We the undersigned reject vaccine passports or any similar form of medical certification in the United Kingdom and invite you to add your voice to ours by signing this open letter.
Together, we represent more than 200 organisations, business groups, campaigners and professionals who have come together because we are gravely concerned about where the introduction of vaccine passports could lead.
In the UK, we enjoy many hard-won liberties and rights, all fought for and defended by our ancestors. These rights are not only fundamental to our understanding of democracy, they are rights we believe all humans should have.
Some of us are lucky enough to have been born with these rights, but others have experienced the perils of segregation, suppression, and surveillance first hand.
However with vaccine passports in the picture and digital IDs under consideration, some of our hard-won rights are now under serious threat.
We have already come together and made incredible sacrifices throughout the Covid-19 crisis. What began with ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ turned into months of isolation with millions missing out on medical treatment, children deprived of education, businesses and livelihoods lost, families unable to visit elderly loved ones, and weddings, funerals, and social gatherings restricted or cancelled.
The glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel — ‘15 million jabs to freedom’ to protect the most vulnerable — soon faded as the goalposts kept on moving. When ‘freedom day’ finally arrived, the accompanying announcement of vaccine passports meant the prospect of returning to ‘normal' had once again slipped away.
We are human. We know this makes us seek safety above everything else. We seek it for ourselves, we seek to protect those we love, and we strive for a safe world for our children — and sometimes rules and restrictions can help us to feel safer.
But we also know life is about balance and catching ourselves when we go too far in response to our own fear.
Being ordered to produce medical certification at pubs, clubs, theatres, on public transport, at schools, universities, or anywhere else, is unwarranted and risks deepening the inequalities already present within our society.
Today it could be a vaccine passport to enter a pub, but what could it be tomorrow?
We can already see from where these measures have been introduced elsewhere in the world that they lead to many a free society would wish to avoid. Among the consequences are segregation, suppression and surveillance, being unable to dine together, long queues to enter venues, children barred from taking exams or socialising, and the nightmare scenario of being denied access to healthcare.
We want a free, fair and open society for ourselves, our friends and our families. We want to eat, work, dance, and pray together. We want our children to be able to play, learn and grow together.
This is therefore the moment when we must catch ourselves, when we recognise we are going too far by requiring medical certification just to participate in normal life.
Now it is our turn to protect the freedoms our forebears sacrificed so much to protect — for ourselves, for our children and for our communities. Now is the time to say ‘no’ to any mandate requiring permission to participate in everyday life.
If you agree that now is the time to work together to help keep each other safe whilst also safeguarding our democracy and normality, then this is your opportunity to make your voice heard.
Please join us by signing below and let's send the message loud and clear: No Vaccine Passports Anywhere.
We can change this, together.
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"
The left’s contempt for bodily autonomy during the pandemic is a gift to the right
Jonathan Cook, 21 December, 2021
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot
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"
The title below could arguably be made much more accurate by pointing out that the research wasn't "China's Coronavirus Experiments" in any sense, but in fact "the American head of public health Anthony Fauci's coronavirus experiments" funded directly by NIH grants to their vehicle EcoHealth Alliance who did in fact fund the research which probably led to what has been called the Coronavirus pandemic.
Peter Daszak, president of the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance, which received the $3 million NIH grant for coronavirus research and subcontracted the gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab.
In South Africa, it appears nature has taken a potentially dangerous man-made virus and within two years rendered it completely harmless by making a more infectious but harmless variant known as 'Omicron'. The message is very clear - trust nature, never trust TheScienceᵀᴹ.
How Dr. Fauci and Other Officials Withheld Information on China's Coronavirus Experiments
By Rowan Jacobsen On 11/22/21 at 3:10 PM EST
For half a year, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease official, and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic. Against Senator Paul's aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Dr. Fauci adamantly denied the charge. "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.
Recently, however, a tranche of documents surfaced that complicate Dr. Fauci's denials. The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humans—work that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function. The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research. The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci heads.
The resistance among Dr. Fauci and other NIH officials to be forthcoming with information that could inform the debate over the origins of COVID-19 illustrates the old Watergate-era saw that the coverup is often worse than the crime. There's no evidence that the experiments in question had any direct bearing on the pandemic. In the past, Dr. Fauci has made strong arguments for why this type of research, albeit risky, was necessary to prevent future pandemics, and he could have done so again. But the NIH has dragged its feet over FOIA requests on the matter, handing over documents only after The Intercept took the agency to court.
The apparent eagerness to conceal the documents has only raised suspicions about the controversial research and put the NIH on the defensive. Fauci told ABC, "neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we've done." The episode is a self-inflicted wound that has further eroded trust in the nation's public health officials at a time when that trust is most important.
While Dr. Fauci takes the political heat, the revelations center on another figure in this drama: Peter Daszak, president of the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance, which received the $3 million NIH grant for coronavirus research and subcontracted the gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab. The activities of Daszak and EcoHealth before the pandemic and during it show a startling lack of transparency about their work with coronaviruses and raise questions about what more there may be to learn.
Under Wraps
From the start, Daszak has worked vigorously to discredit any notion that the pandemic could have been the result of a lab accident. When the media was first grappling with the basics of the situation, Daszak organized a letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet from 27 scientists, to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," and got himself appointed to the WHO team investigating COVID origins, where he successfully argued that there was no need to look into the WIV's archives. Fauci Rand Paul COVID-19 origin hearing Infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci declared "I am not responsible," after Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul blamed him for having a hand in COVID-19's origin during a contention Thursday hearing. In this image, Fauci responds to accusations by Paul as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, July 20, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. J. Scott Applewhite/Getty
What Daszak didn't reveal at the time was that the WIV had been using the NIH grant money to genetically engineer dozens of novel coronaviruses discovered in bat samples, and that he knew it was entirely possible that one of those samples had contained SARS-CoV-2 and had infected a researcher, as he conceded to the journal Science in a November 17 interview: "Of course it's possible—things have happened in the past."
The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed.
The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing "chimeras" made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in "humanized" mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.
Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethal—it kills 35 percent of those who catch it—it's not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities.
Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn't.
In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn't anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH's prohibition on gain-of-function experiments. But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they'd figure out what to do next.
The NIH accepted Daszak's terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab's humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.
WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth's year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018.
Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth's relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)
In a letter to Congress on October 20, the NIH's Principal Deputy Director, Lawrence Tabak, acknowledged the screwup, but he placed the blame on EcoHealth's door, citing its duty to immediately report the enhanced growth that had occurred: "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant." In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post, NIH Director Francis Collins was more blunt: "They messed up here. There's going to be some consequences for EcoHealth." So far, the NIH has not elaborated on what those consequences might be.
As damning as the NIH grant documents are, they pale in comparison to another EcoHealth grant proposal leaked to the online investigative group DRASTIC in September. In that 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, EcoHealth sketched an elaborate plan to discover what it would take to turn a garden-variety coronavirus into a pandemic pathogen. They proposed widely sampling Chinese bats in search of new SARS-related viruses, grafting the spike proteins from those viruses onto other viruses they had in the lab to create a suite of chimeras, then, through genetic engineering, introducing mutations into those chimeras and testing them in humanized mice.
One piece of the proposal was especially Strangelovian. For years, scientists had known that adding a special type of "cleavage site" to the spike could supercharge a virus's transmissibility. Although many viruses in nature have such sites, neither SARS nor any of its cousins do. EcoHealth proposed incorporating human-optimized cleavage sites into the SARS-like viruses it discovered and testing their infectiousness. Such a cleavage site, of course, is exactly what makes SARS-CoV-2 wildly more infectious than its kin. That detail was the reason some scientists initially suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered in a lab. And while there's no proof that EcoHealth or the WIV ever actively experimented with cleavage sites—EcoHealth says that "the research was never conducted"—the proposal makes it clear that they were considering taking that step as early as 2018.
DARPA rejected the proposal, listing among its shortcomings the failures to address the risks of gain-of-function research and the lack of discussion of ethical, legal, and social issues. It was a levelheaded assessment. What's remarkable is that much of the same work that crossed a line for the Department of Defense was embraced by the National Institutes of Health.
Crisis Management Mode
The NIH and EcoHealth have asserted that none of the engineered viruses created with the NIH grant could have become SARS-CoV-2. On that, everyone agrees—the viruses are too distantly related. But the detailed recipe in the DARPA application is a blueprint for doing just that with a more closely related virus.
In September, scientists from France's Pasteur Institute announced the discovery of just such a virus—SARS-CoV-2's closest known relative—in a bat cave in Laos. Although still too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the direct progenitor, and lacking the all-important cleavage site, it was a kissing cousin.
The discovery was hailed by some scientists as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 must have had a natural origin. But the plot turned in November, when another trove of NIH documents—released in response to a FOIA request by the White Coat Waste Project—brought the evidence trail right to EcoHealth's doorstep.
In 2017, EcoHealth had informed the NIH that it would be shifting its focus to Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia, where the wildlife trade was more active, relying on local partner organizations to do the sample collecting and to send the samples to the WIV for their ongoing work. EcoHealth told Newsweek that it did not directly undertake or fund any of the sampling in Laos. "Any samples or results from Laos are based on WIV's work, funded through other mechanisms," says a company spokesman.
Regardless of who paid for the collecting portion of the project, it's clear that for years, a large number of bat samples from the region that harbors viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were sent to the WIV. In other words, EcoHealth's team was in the right place at the right time to have found things very close to SARS-CoV-2 and to have sent them to Wuhan. Because there's a lag of several years between when samples are collected and when experiments involving those viruses are published, the most recent papers from EcoHealth and the WIV date to 2015. The identity of the viruses found between 2016 and 2019 are known only to the two organizations, neither of which has been willing to share that information with the world.
A lack of evidence proves nothing, but neither does it put EcoHealth's or the WIV's actions in the early days of the pandemic in a good light. Why choose not to share valuable information on SARS-like coronaviruses with the world? Why not explain your projects and proposals and give scientists access to the unpublished virus sequences in your databases?
For whatever reason, they chose crisis-management mode instead. The WIV went into lockdown. Databases were taken offline. Daszak launched his preemptive campaign to prevent anyone from looking behind the curtain. And EcoHealth and the NIH tried hard to keep the details of their collaboration private.
Congressional inquiries focusing on Dr. Fauci and the NIH's decisions to fund unnecessarily risky research by a lab in Wuhan are probably forthcoming if, as appears increasingly likely, Republicans take control of Congress after the 2022 midterms. While it's important to understand how the NIH came to use such poor judgment in its dealings with EcoHealth Alliance, that won't tell us much about the WIV's research in the months leading up to the pandemic, especially since China is not likely to open its books. Answers are more likely to lie in the records of EcoHealth Alliance. Republicans and Democrats alike should be eager to find them.
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"
The study also showed that those with omicron may have higher viral loads.
The study is “important,” though its use of so-called historic controls when comparing to the delta infections between April and November means its outcome may be biased by time issues, said Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia.
“So even though cases of omicron were less likely to end up in hospital than cases of delta, it is not possible to say whether this is due to inherent differences in virulence or whether this is due to higher population immunity in November compared to earlier in the year,” Hunter said.
We the undersigned reject vaccine passports or any similar form of medical certification in the United Kingdom and invite you to add your voice to ours by signing this open letter.
Together, we represent more than 200 organisations, business groups, campaigners and professionals who have come together because we are gravely concerned about where the introduction of vaccine passports could lead.
In the UK, we enjoy many hard-won liberties and rights, all fought for and defended by our ancestors. These rights are not only fundamental to our understanding of democracy, they are rights we believe all humans should have.
Some of us are lucky enough to have been born with these rights, but others have experienced the perils of segregation, suppression, and surveillance first hand.
However with vaccine passports in the picture and digital IDs under consideration, some of our hard-won rights are now under serious threat.
We have already come together and made incredible sacrifices throughout the Covid-19 crisis. What began with ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ turned into months of isolation with millions missing out on medical treatment, children deprived of education, businesses and livelihoods lost, families unable to visit elderly loved ones, and weddings, funerals, and social gatherings restricted or cancelled.
The glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel — ‘15 million jabs to freedom’ to protect the most vulnerable — soon faded as the goalposts kept on moving. When ‘freedom day’ finally arrived, the accompanying announcement of vaccine passports meant the prospect of returning to ‘normal' had once again slipped away.
We are human. We know this makes us seek safety above everything else. We seek it for ourselves, we seek to protect those we love, and we strive for a safe world for our children — and sometimes rules and restrictions can help us to feel safer.
But we also know life is about balance and catching ourselves when we go too far in response to our own fear.
Being ordered to produce medical certification at pubs, clubs, theatres, on public transport, at schools, universities, or anywhere else, is unwarranted and risks deepening the inequalities already present within our society.
Today it could be a vaccine passport to enter a pub, but what could it be tomorrow?
We can already see from where these measures have been introduced elsewhere in the world that they lead to many a free society would wish to avoid. Among the consequences are segregation, suppression and surveillance, being unable to dine together, long queues to enter venues, children barred from taking exams or socialising, and the nightmare scenario of being denied access to healthcare.
We want a free, fair and open society for ourselves, our friends and our families. We want to eat, work, dance, and pray together. We want our children to be able to play, learn and grow together.
This is therefore the moment when we must catch ourselves, when we recognise we are going too far by requiring medical certification just to participate in normal life.
Now it is our turn to protect the freedoms our forebears sacrificed so much to protect — for ourselves, for our children and for our communities. Now is the time to say ‘no’ to any mandate requiring permission to participate in everyday life.
If you agree that now is the time to work together to help keep each other safe whilst also safeguarding our democracy and normality, then this is your opportunity to make your voice heard.
Please join us by signing below and let's send the message loud and clear: No Vaccine Passports Anywhere.
We can change this, together.
Harvey, while completely sympathetic of your situation, please be cautious when signing petitions. You might just be adding your name to a list of dissenters circulated by your government to make their round-up of same. First, be sure of its source.
Iamwhomiam » Wed Dec 22, 2021 10:27 pm wrote:Harvey, while completely sympathetic of your situation, please be cautious when signing petitions. You might just be adding your name to a list of dissenters circulated by your government to make their round-up of same. First, be sure of its source.
Happy to be on that list. Fuck 'em.
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"
