UPDATED: China, Covid, Coup?

Yesterday I speculated briefly that the hysterical calls for new, even more draconian, Covid shutdowns could be part of the campaign to get the American public to shut up and accept a Biden as president. That, of course, follows on a Dem presidential campaign that was largely predicated on the false claim that Trump mishandled the Covid pandemic. 

This morning we find an article by Lloyd Billingsley that speculates that Covid itself may have been part of the plot against the president:

How the Wuhan Coronavirus Gained a Function

What did Dr. Anthony Fauci know, and when did he know it?

Billingsley focuses on an article by Anthony Fauci that was written in 2012. In the article Fauci addressed the problem of "gain of function" research on viruses that was being done in super secure labs in the US. "Gain of function" (GOF) means that viruses are manipulated in ways that enhance their functioning--render them more transmissible, able to infect more species, more deadly, etc. In short, gain of function renders a virus more dangerous. Such research has

“the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs)” and has thus “raised biosafety and biosecurity concerns.”

 

The argument in favor of such research is that it may lead to more effective vaccines. Balanced against that theoretical advantage are two factors:

1. Few vaccines for naturally occurring viruses are, in fact, highly effective, and

2. There is a very real risk that the artificially enhanced virus could escape the lab and cause a pandemic. Or could be used to design "weaponized" viruses that would be potentially uncontrollable when released and easily portable by terrorists.

Fauci was perfectly familiar with this debate among scientists. Gain of function research had gained impetus in the wake of the original SARS epidemic (a very close relative of Covid-19), and in fact there had been multiple SARS escapes from labs in China. Fauci summarized the concerns succinctly:

“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?” 

 

The result of these concerns was that GOF research was shut down in the US in 2014.

At the time he was writing, Fauci was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which he has headed since 1984.

With that cutoff date for GOF research in the US--2014--firmly in mind, consider this chain of events that brings us up to today. Coincidence or not? Given the utter lack of transparency and widespread official disinformation which is a hallmark of this pandemic, we will all have to judge for ourselves:

As Talha Birk noted in The Lancet, the National Institutes of Health banned GOF research in 2014 but revived it in 2017 over the objection of many scientists. By that time, the National Institutes of Health and the State Department had approved as a collaborator the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the people find that puzzling, it would be hard to blame them. 

As a wholly-owned subsidiary of China’s Communist dictatorship, the WIV is not subject to American regulations and is not accountable to the American public. Researchers in the Wuhan lab are unlikely to be better trained than world-class American scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and so forth. 

Despite these concerns, the NIH funded the Wuhan lab. The amount of money is a matter of dispute, but it is clear that the funds were channeled through NIAID and funded research on coronaviruses that originated in bats. The whole process violated the concerns Fauci raised with such urgency in 2012. 

GOF research had not ceased to enhance the transmissibility of a virus and raise biosecurity concerns. The dangerous research had indeed been transferred to another lab, not subject to the same training, and not accountable to the American public. In 2019 and 2020, Fauci’s previous demand for transparency was nowhere in evidence and his concerns for “domestic and global” risks had disappeared. 

As he feared in 2012, there was an outbreak and global pandemic. Fauci led the charge for a lockdown that crushed a booming economy. “It’s inconvenient from a societal standpoint, from an economic standpoint to go through this,” Fauci said in March, “but this is going to be the answer to our problems.” 

The people might consider “inconvenient” a strange description for the rigors they have gone through, and they might wonder who Fauci means by “our.” Is that the general public, or was it a problem of the “multiple stakeholders”?

Democrats deployed the pandemic to order widespread voting by mail. That placed ballots in the care of a government union that endorsed Joe Biden. True to form, most if not all the mail ballots were for Joe Biden, a statistical impossibility. 

So, to summarize:

1. In 2014, as a result of an outcry among actual scientists, Fauci shut down GOF virus research in the US, amid concerns that such research posed a threat not only to public health (including our economic well being) but, potentially, to national security itself.

2. In November, 2016, there was a national election in the US as a result of which Donald Trump--abhorred by the liberal establishment--became POTUS. Fauci himself has long been a supporter of the most liberal US politicians.

3. In 2017, with no public debate--despite Fauci's 2012 endorsement of public transparency--Fauci's NIH began funding GOF research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

4. In late 2019, with a fake impeachment of Trump in the offing, a novel coronavirus emerged in China. That virus appeared to originate in Wuhan and exhibited suspicious characteristics that suggested the new virus was a result of GOF research and had escaped from a laboratory.

5. The Covid virus quickly became a pandemic, and led to significant shutdowns of societies and economies around the developed world--and nowhere more so than in the US. Fauci played a central role in undermining Trump's mitigation efforts against Covid.

Update: 6. A concerted media campaign was waged to suppress any inquiries about the origins of the China virus and to portray any such questions as unscientific "conspiracy theory."

7. Covid overshadowed much of the second half of Trump's first term and became the focal point of the Dem campaign--which was not so much a campaign for Biden as a highly coordinated and concerted campaign (enlisting the MSM and Big Tech) against Trump.

8. With Biden being pronounced the winner of a highly disputed and very obviously fraudulent election--with multiple new revelations of fraud emerging on a daily basis--the calls by Dem politicians for renewed shutdowns during the coming weeks of adjudicating the election are gaining in urgency.

Update: 9. In the wake of the election we learned of development of a Covid vaccine by Pfizer. The effectiveness as well as the rapidity of development of the vaccine exceeds all normal scientific expectations. Moreover, the development of the vaccine was hidden from the public until after the election--when it was revealed to the Biden team. It will become available in January, 2021--presumably after a Biden inauguration.

Coincidence or not? Given the lack of transparency surrounding all these events, who can be blamed for wondering?