The UK government considered whether it might have to ask people to exterminate all pet cats during the early days of the Covid pandemic, a former health minister said.
It was unclear whether domestic cats could transmit coronavirus, James Bethell said.
He told Channel 4 News: “What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease.
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
Was the U.S. furtively funding the lab research that unleashed Covid-19?
Slowly but surely, new cracks are appearing in the wall of silence denying Chinese culpability in causing the nearly 7 million deaths attributed to Covid. In a classified intelligence report on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded, based on new but still secret intelligence, that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. The DOE — which runs biosecurity labs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a biological-safety program, and the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program to fund research into organisms’ genetic codes and how to “reengineer” them — now agrees with the 2021 assessment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak.
In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during COVID:
Much of the time, they were wrong.
To be clear, public health officials were not wrong for making recommendations based on what was known at the time.
That’s understandable. You go with the data you have.
The time has come for yet another media reckoning. The U.S. Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory leak, according to a new Wall Street Journal report that offers the latest piece of evidence that the media were wrong to roundly dismiss the theory as a conspiracy for much of the last three years.
Scandalized critics are branding him an ‘anti-vaxxer’
In 2022’s Triangle of Sadness, the first English language film from Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund, Woody Harrelson plays an addled Marxist captain of the Cristina O — in real life, the former yacht of the Onassis family, in the movie a doomed cruise vessel for the ludicrously rich. Harrelson is a jaded observer and capitalist critic who despises his passengers, choosing to order a cheeseburger and fries when others dine on oysters and caviar. He reads passages from Noam Chomsky into the microphone as the wealthy devolve into a roiling pile of puke and shit: “There are very few that are gonna look in the mirror and say, ‘the person I see is a savage monster.’ Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.”
A State Department-backed “disinformation” tracking group blacklisting conservative news outlets pressured advertising companies to punish websites boosting the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, has continued to come under fire for feeding conservative news blacklists to advertising companies. This same government-funded entity repeatedly applied pressure on companies to cut ties with websites promoting the once alleged right-wing “conspiracy” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab — which the Energy Department recently concluded is probable based on intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak.
The conclusion is reportedly based on a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. Many will be exploring why the scientific evidence of a lab leak was so slow to emerge from intelligence agencies.
However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science.
IN TCW on Friday Rupert Lowe, the former Brexit Party MEP and ex-chairman of Southampton Football Club, argued for the public right to know the truth about the Covid vaccines and that Parliament, rather than denying and vilifying Andrew Bridgen, should be leading the way in uncovering it.
His call chimed with two senior American scientists’ case for a Covid Truth Commission published on Tuesday in the New York Post. Like Lowe, Professor Martin Kulldorff and Professor Jay Bhattacharya believe the public deserve an awful lot better. Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard University (on leave) and Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. Co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, both are founding fellows of the Academy for Science and Freedom, a Hillsdale College initiative to restore integrity and trust in science and public health. Both were mainstream but treated with scant regard by politicians; both have been subject to demonisation and silencing. Both were placed on Twitter ‘trends blacklists’, guaranteeing that few would hear their message when the government got the science wrong. Now they are speaking out again …
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
Another ‘conspiracy theory” bites the dust.
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?
“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.
Opposition MPs on the House of Commons public accounts committee want to view the contracts for billions of dollars between the federal government and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, but the Liberals are seeking a requirement that the MPs sign a non-disclosure agreement before doing so.
Bloc Québécois MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné had tabled a motion in committee on Feb. 13 to have MPs look at the contracts free of any redactions and in a controlled setting where no electronic devices would be allowed.
h/t Mauser
We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
