“China eats weird animals disease”

A municipal councillor from West Nipissing in Ontario has issued an apology to community members who were affected by a mandatory vaccination policy that lasted a year.

At a council meeting on Jan. 3, immediately after the council rescinded the municipality’s mandatory vaccination policy, Councillor Anne Tessier said she wanted to apologize for the policy and proceeded to read a statement. An excerpt of her speech surfaced on social media on March 2, while the original full-length council meeting was posted on the council’s YouTube channel.

It remains remarkable that ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic was none other than the Chinese city of Wuhan — the world centre for the study and storage of exactly the type of coronavirus that caused the outbreak.

The city is a thousand miles from the areas in the southwestern province of Yunnan that have been identified by scientists as the likely bat virus breeding ground for Covid-19.

Yet of all the 662 cities in China, it was in Wuhan, more than a two-hour flight away, that the first cases emerged.

National Public Radio has always dismissed the “lab leak” hypothesis regarding the origin of the coronavirus as a debunked, possibly racist conspiracy theory. If Trump implied China was responsible, “science” had to be the opposite. Now NPR and the rest of the media look ridiculous after the Department of Energy concluded the virus did indeed most likely arise from a laboratory leak in China, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology biolab, and not from a nearby wildlife market (the “zoonotic origin” theory).

During the latest episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” liberal comedian Bill Maher praised all the COVID “dissenters” who’d refused to blindly accept the establishment’s narrative on both the virus itself and also the vaccine.

Bill Maher on the pandemic "I feel like the people who were the dissenters are looking pretty good."

Russell Brand: "I think dissent is a great duty around all topics." pic.twitter.com/NUQgGIQ1Yw

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 4, 2023

Denials from authorities seemed political all along, and public trust will take a long time to recover.

Government finagling and misdirecting, especially in crises, are destructive to the long-term public good. And in the end they’re always destructive to personal reputations.

The Journal last Sunday upended an old debate with a big exclusive: The Energy Department has told the White House it believes a lab leak was the most likely source of the Covid-19 pandemic. As reporters Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel noted, the department’s new stand is important because it results from new intelligence and because of the agency’s expertise—it oversees a network of labs. Two days later Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the FBI’s view that it was “most likely a potential lab incident . . . a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

We now know just how drunk on tyranny the political class was during the pandemic.

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph’s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: ‘Hilarious.’

During George Washington’s first term as president, an influential faction in Kentucky wanted to separate from the newly formed United States and join the United Kingdom. The group spread lies and deceived the public into accomplishing its goals. Washington denounced those “spreading mischief far and wide either from real ignorance of the measures pursuing by the government, or from a wish to bring it, as much as they are able, into discredit.” Frustrated and perplexed by the falsehoods, the president put his faith in honesty.

New study casts doubt on effectiveness of COVID-19 border closures

A new study comparing data from 166 countries that closed their borders during the first 22 weeks of the pandemic says most targeted closures – aimed at travellers from COVID-19 hotspots – did little to curb the crisis.

By contrast, total border closures barring all non-essential travel did slow the spread of COVID-19, but at such a high cost that the writers warn they should only be considered in the future as a last resort.

A Canadian intelligence officer has been fired for speaking publicly about what he felt were inadequate COVID-19 policies at CSIS headquarters during the height of the pandemic.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service dismissed Gary Vos Smith for giving an interview to Global News about the lack of mandatory masking at the agency’s building in Ottawa.

Righteous Kill.

Of all the acrimonious debates in Covid science — and there have been many — the one about laboratory leaks has been the most unpleasant.

One reason there is so much heat is that there has been so little light. Fundamentally, the debate hinges on what happened, unnoticed, in a previously unremarkable city in central China, involving a couple of particles so small that a million would fill this full stop.

New government intelligence that found that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely caused by an accidental laboratory leak ignited criticism of mainstream news outlets that insisted the theory was “debunked,” including the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.

“How many employees of media corporations who repeatedly mocked the COVID ‘lab leak’ theory as a ‘debunked’ lie that only insane conspiracy theorists believe (because Fauci told them to say that) will apologize now that much of the USG (US government) believes this?” tweeted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident,” he told Fox News.

It is the first public confirmation of the FBI’s classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged.

Not an accident.

MUST WATCH TUCKER ON THE COVID CHINESE LAB LEAK: “The origins of Covid was never a secret.” “The people who knew lied about the truth.”

Chinese virologist who worked in the Wuhan lab tells Tucker that COVID was deliberately leaked from a Wuhan lab.https://t.co/cOHcriZvrI

— 🇺🇸 Pamela Geller 🇺🇸 (@PamelaGeller) February 28, 2023