Silence of the Labs: How a Censorship Campaign Failed to Kill a COVID Origin Theory; 5 Things We Know and Still Don’t Know About COVID, 5 Years After It Appeared, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jan 13, 2025

Silence of the labs: How a censorship campaign failed to kill a COVID origin theory:

This week, the Wall Street Journal released an alarming report on how the Biden administration may have suppressed dissenting views supporting the lab theory on the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Not only were the FBI and its top experts excluded from a critical briefing of President Biden, but government scientists were reportedly warned that they were “off the reservation” in supporting the lab theory.

The chilling suggestion is that, despite the virus ultimately killing more than 1.2 million Americans and over 7 million people worldwide, there was still an overriding interest in the administration to downplay the Chinese responsibility for the pandemic.

The Journal lays out how that unfolded, but the more disturbing question is why.

The article provides many examples of how dissenting views were marginalized and discouraged within the government. After President Trump described the virus as the “China virus” and alleged that it likely came from a lab, dismissing the lab theory became an article of faith in politics and academia.

The problem was that FBI researchers had concluded that the lab theory was the most credible explanation. But their lead researcher, Dr. Jason Bannan, was kept out of the key meeting, and their opposing research was discounted or ignored.

They were not alone. The Journal reported that Defense Department experts John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien conducted a genomic analysis that found evidence of human manipulation of the virus. It also concluded that it was done using a specific technique developed by the Chinese at the Wuhan lab. They suggested that the Chinese appeared to have altered the “spike protein” that enables the virus to enter the human body in a “gain of function” operation.

They were reportedly told to stop sharing their work and warned that they had to effectively get with the team. Later, the three wrote an unclassified May 2020 paper that was prevented from being shown outside the medical intelligence center.

At the same time, letters and articles that dismissed the lab theory were organized for public consumption. The government worked with social media companies to censor those with opposing views.—>READ MORE HERE

5 things we know and still don’t know about COVID, 5 years after it appeared:

Five years ago, a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus never before seen in the world.

The germ didn’t have a name, nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.

The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It’s less deadly than it was in the pandemic’s early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. But the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.

Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from?

We don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses. They think it then infected another species, probably raccoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.

That’s a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS. But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one.

It’s a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political sniping around the virus’ origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.