Bloody Shovel 3

We will drown and nobody shall save us

This is the first of three essays on the topic of Biological Leninism, the organizational principle of the contemporary left. You can find the second part here, and the third part here. I also gave an interview with some more thoughts on the topic which you can read here.
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The point again is, that you can't run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don't need to be loyal. They'll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn't have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they're gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It's worse than that really. It's the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It's the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.

There's a reason why there's so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn't want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don't even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left's patronage. There's a devil's bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what's behind Larry Auster's First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.

This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was into Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.

If you think it can't get worse than transexuals or pedophiles, you're really not understanding how this works. Look at this NYT article: a black woman, ex-con, convicted of murdering her own 4 year old son. She served 20 years in prison, which she spent studying sociology or something. After leaving prison, she applied to study a PhD at Harvard, which rejected her. Progressives were up in arms. How could you!

Go to the link, and look at that woman. Look at that face. She never expressed any remorse over killing her children. She lied about it in the PhD application. She disposed of the body and never told the cops where her son's corpse is! This is utter and complete psycho. Nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with this woman. But that's precisely the point. In most human societies before 1900 she would have been killed, legally or extralegally. But precisely this kind of person, someone who should in all justice be the lowest status person on earth; that's exactly the people that the Left wants on its team. You can count on her extreme loyalty to any progressive idea that the party transmits to her. And so, yes, of course, she finally got her PhD, at New York University. And unlike 97% of PhD students out there, you can bet on her getting a full tenured professorship very soon.

Yes, it's all madness, but it works. It really works like a charm. The richest parts of America, California and New York, are now a one-party state. America has legislation which forces every private enterprise of size to have a proportion of women, of black people and sexual deviants; who of course know they don't belong there, and thus are extremely faithful political commissars. More faithful than the actual official political commissars that Communist China has also in their private companies.

And Biological Leninism is extremely powerful overseas too. The same way that Soviet Communism all had natural fifth-columns across the world, with industrial workers forming parties and all doing Moscow's bidding across the West; American Biological Leninism is also an extremely strong means of agitation all over the world. (read more)

Activism for Dummies

REVIEW: Make it Happen and How to Think Like an Activist

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Still, for the aspiring activists approaching these two books, being angry at everything—even at vague "systems" and "constructs"—can be a heavy burden. Syfret says activism is "very tough and can expose individuals to extreme stress and trauma." It could help explain why young white liberals, a group enthralled with the activist worldview, report significantly higher rates of mental illness, including anxiety and depression, than their moderate and conservative peers.

Thankfully, chipping away at structural injustices can alleviate your psychiatric disorders. Syfret says activism "serves your mental health" in an "endlessly enriching journey" and quotes another activist who says protests are a "collective opportunity for group therapy." Forget MDMA: "Finding your crowd is like snuggling under a warm blanket, or being squished in the fold of a hug that tells you you're not battling alone," George writes.

It is fitting that both authors close their books with the same message to would-be activists: Prioritize yourself. Practice self-care. There's no point in protesting "if you're not demonstrating compassion towards yourself and prioritizing your own needs, health, and happiness," George says.

What else is activism for? Who's stupid enough to die for a cause and leave behind their mangled remains? "By its nature, activism is never done. There is always another cause that needs championing." In other words: Enjoy your career. read more)

A New Segregation?

As many of our readers who are parents know, it’s college planning time, and high school seniors scanning the amenities of the campuses they’ve chosen may be surprised by a particular feature they hadn’t expected: dorms and events for persons of color only, no whites allowed.

I heard Dennis Prager discuss one example on the radio the other day, and it appalled him, as it does many conservatives and many liberals as well. It sounds like the return of Plessy v. Ferguson, and a betrayal of the integrationist vision of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s spreading, however, because students of color themselves demand separate treatment. It happened at Harvard in 2017 when black students organized their own restricted graduation events, and at Stanford when students of color insisted on a “cooperative theme house” for themselves alone. The Class of 2025 shall witness many more of these efforts.

What’s going on here? Social conservatives probably aren’t surprised by the development, or at least they shouldn’t be, not after having witnessed identity politics creeping through higher education for such a long time. But this step seems even to liberals to go too far. Liberalism’s great moral victory was to strike down those barriers. Why would the very victims of those old segregationist practices seek them out?

College leaders have no choice, of course. They can’t say no, not when they’ve already admitted to systemic racism on their campuses and pledged to stop it once and for all. For years, too, they have promised students of color a happy diversity at their schools, as if that was the solution. But here is what the Stanford students said: “Please do not respond to our demands by highlighting diversity . . . we need the university to do more, to do better.” Diversity, inclusion, tolerance . . . they’re not interested.

This is, indeed, the collapse of liberalism in race relations, but to understand it we have to dig deeper than racial reasons. Yes, the students spotlight the persistence of racism, they envision a society free of discrimination, and they want more people of color in the professional ranks, all of which are consistent with the liberal outlook of Martin Luther King, Jr. But that only begs the question of why the students' dissatisfaction now takes a separatist path.

The answer lies in plain sight, but it’s hard to absorb because it gainsays everything higher education has been doing to support historically disadvantaged students. In the hundreds of demand lists, open letters, and petitions that groups have issued since the upheaval at the University of Missouri in fall 2014, the students always single out a heritage of their own that should be passed on by teachers like them. (You can find 80 of these lists here.) College officials take this as a plea for more multiculturalism, more diversity, but that’s not what the students are saying. They’ve seen how multiculturalism works in practice: a token here, a smattering there, this culture and that one, none in a sustained way.

They want something stronger and deeper than that, a more meaningful relationship to the past that will strengthen their identities. Colleges now have “diversity” course requirements that are presumed to evince the respect and “inclusivity” that the officials promised students of color during recruitment times, but the students aren’t impressed. They don’t want to share space with other heritages. They want antecedents that are uniquely theirs, events and art that they can claim as special to them, nobody else. They want their own stories, their own roots. No Melting Pot for them and no Rainbow Coalition, either. Re-segregation is an escape from the old white supremacy and the new diversity as well.

That this apparent regression should be led by the very figures diversity policies were supposed to support must be a shock to college leaders. I’m sure they believe they’re doing all they can, that nobody has more sympathy for the historically disadvantaged than they do. They don’t know what they’ve done wrong, what more they could do to advance diversity and display racial awareness.

In this way, they only reveal the limits of the liberal-diversity outlook. For we should see the motives behind the protests and the calls for re-segregation in universal terms—not racial terms. These students want grounds and foundations, reassuring origins and forebears. They need a solid world and a momentous history and an enchanted reality. This is nothing new, but the need has become acute in the twenty-first century, in good part because liberalism has managed to expel conservatism so thoroughly from the lives of American adolescents. Put yourself in the psyche of the 19-year-old just arrived at college and ask, “What do I have to solidify my fledgling life?”

Chances are that you don’t have religion. You don’t have much patriotism, either, the kind of love that lets you say with pride, “I’m an American!” and gain strength from that loyalty. Moreover, you don’t have an assuring sense of neighborhood, not with the Internet having made so many of your social interactions virtual. Needless to say, the pop culture you enjoy doesn’t align you with any venerable traditions, and the consumerism flooding your iPhone turns you into just that, a consumer.

You have a rootless, floating existence, the only Big Picture being Achievement, Success, Health, Safety. No Gods, no glorious past, no community, no voices of the dead, no thirst for greatness, only a soulless pursuit of degrees and jobs—that’s all college offers.

But “the soul has needs that must be satisfied,” Tocqueville said, and diversity isn’t enough. Students of color in a separatist mindset are but the most overt example of the plight of Generation Z, young Americans entering the world without the support systems they need, urged to be free and independent and self-creating, but in truth, yearning for home and faith and belonging and an inheritance.

A segregated dormitory will give these youths a common experience, a tradition that surrounds them and heartens them. Or at least that’s what they assume. I don’t believe it will work out that way. The ensuing culture of the color-dorm will be just as historically shallow and artistically vulgar as most other youth communities, but it’s the thought that counts. Students of color are telling college leaders, “We don’t want your commiseration—we don’t want your liberalism—we want to be alone.” If this desire is not answered soon, and with something very different than diversity initiatives, the hostility is going to get worse. (read more)

The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement

Not long ago, the gay rights movement was a small group of people struggling to follow their dispositions within a larger heterosexual culture. Gays and lesbians were underdogs, vastly outnumbered and loosely organized, sometimes subject to discrimination and abuse. Their story was tragic, their suffering dramatized by AIDS and Rock Hudson, Brokeback Mountain and Matthew Shepard.

Today’s movement, however, looks nothing like that band of persecuted outcasts. The LGBT rights agenda—note the addition of “T”—has become a powerful, aggressive force in American society. Its advocates stand at the top of media, academia, the professions, and, most important, Big Business and Big Philanthropy. Consider the following case.

Jon Stryker is the grandson of Homer Stryker, an orthopedic surgeon who founded the Stryker Corporation. Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the Stryker Corporation sold $13.6 billion in surgical supplies and software in 2018. Jon, heir to the fortune, is gay. In 2000 he created the Arcus Foundation, a nonprofit serving the LGBT community, because of his own experience coming out as homosexual. Arcus has given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010 alone, making it one of the largest LGBT funders in the world. Stryker gave more than $30 million to Arcus himself in that three-year period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation. 

Stryker founded Arcus right when the AIDS epidemic was being brought under control in the U.S. Before he started Arcus, he was president of Depot Landmark LLC, a development company specializing in rehabilitating historical buildings. This would serve him well when he later renovated space for Arcus in Kalamazoo. He was also a founding board member of Greenleaf Trust, a privately held wealth management firm also in Kalamazoo.

Jon’s sister Ronda Stryker is married to William Johnston, chairman of Greenleaf Trust. She is also vice chair of Spelman College, where Arcus recently bestowed a $2 million grant in the name of lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. The money is earmarked for a queer studies program. Ronda and Johnston have gifted Spelman $30 million dollars overall, the largest gift from living donors in its 137-year history. She is also a trustee of Kalamazoo College (where Arcus bestowed a social justice leadership grant for $23 million in 2012), as well as a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows. 

Pat Stryker, another sister to Jon, has worked closely with gay male Tim Gill. Gill operates one of the largest LGBT nonprofits in America and has been close to the Stryker family since Jon created Arcus. In 1999, Tim Gill sold his stakes to Quark, his computer software company, and went to work running the Gill Foundation in Colorado. Working closely with Pat Stryker and two other wealthy philanthropists, who together became known as the four horsemen due to their ruthless political strategies, they set out to change Colorado, a red state, to blue. They proceeded to pour half a billion dollars into small groups advocating LGBT agendas. Gill noted in his opening introduction for Jon Stryker at the 2015 GLSEN Respect Awards that, since knowing each other, he and Jon have “plotted, schemed, hiked and skied together,” while also “punishing the wicked and rewarding the good.” 

Prior to 2015, Stryker had already built the political infrastructure to drive gender identity ideology and transgenderism across the globe, donating millions to small and large entities. These included hundreds of thousands of dollars to ILGA, an LGBT organization for equality in Europe and Central Asia with 54 countries participating, and Transgender Europe, a voice for the trans community in Europe and Asia with 43 countries participating (Transgender Europe has also funded smaller organizations like TENI, Transgender Equality Network Ireland).

In 2008 Arcus founded Arcus Operating Foundation, an arm of the foundation that organizes conferences, leadership programs, and research publications. At one 2008 meeting in Bellagio, Italy, 29 international leaders committed to expanding global philanthropy to support LGBT rights. At the meeting, along with Stryker and Ise Bosch, founder of Dreilinden Fund in Germany, was Michael O’Flaherty—one of the rapporteurs for the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (principles outlined in Indonesia in 2006). With the Yogyakarta Principles, the seeds were planted to bring in and attach gender-identity ideology to our legal structures. O’Flaherty has been an elected member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee since 2004.

Out of the Bellagio meeting, Arcus created MAP, the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that would promote gender identity/transgenderism in the culture. Simultaneously, the LGBTI Core Group was formed as an informal cross-regional group of United Nations member countries to represent LGBTI human rights issues to the U.N. Core Group members funded by Arcus include Outright Action International and Human Rights Commission. Core Group member countries include Albania, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, El Salvador, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Montenegro, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and the European Union, as well as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

These initiatives promote gender identity and transgenderism by training leaders in political activism, leadership, transgender law, religious liberty, education, and civil rights. The lineup of Arcus-supported organizations advancing the cause is daunting: Victory Institute, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, GATE, Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), The Council for Global Equality, the U.N., Amnesty International, and GLSEN. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), in partnership with Advocates for Youth, Answer, GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), has initiated a campaign using a rights-based framework to inform approaches in reshaping cultural narratives of sexuality and reproductive health. Sixty-one additional organizations have signed a letter supporting an overhaul of current curriculums.

In 2013 Adrian Coman, a veteran of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (a driver of transgender ideology that has begun initiatives to normalize transgender children), was named director of the international human rights program at the Arcus Foundation, to drive gender identity ideology globally. Previously, Coman served as program director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. And in 2015, Arcus worked closely with and funded NoVo Foundation programs for transgenderism. NoVo was founded by Peter Buffett, son of billionaire Warren Buffett. 

These programs and initiatives advance gender identity ideology by supporting various faith organizations, sports and cultural associations, police department training and educational programs in grade schools, high schools (GLSEN, whose founder was brought to Arcus in 2012 as board of directors, has influenced many K-12 school curricula), and universities and medical institutions—including the American Psychological Foundation (APF). Arcus funds help APF (the leading psychology organization in the United States) develop guidelines for establishing trans-affirmative psychological practices. Psychologists are “encouraged” by those monies to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of biological reality to include abstract, medical identities.

Concurrently, Arcus drives gender identity ideology and transgenderism in the marketplace by encouraging businesses to invest in LGBT causes. Lest we forget, Stryker is heir to a $13.6 billion medical corporation. One only has to look at the corporations supporting LGBT during pride month this year to ascertain the success Arcus has had in this arena.

As the example of the Arcus Foundation shows, the LGB civil rights movement of yore has morphed into a relentless behemoth, one that has strong ties to the medical industrial complex and global corporatists. The pharmaceutical lobby is the largest lobbying entity in Congress. Although activists present the LGBT movement as a weak, powerless group suffering oppression and discrimination, in truth it wields enormous power and influence—power it increasingly uses to remake our laws, schools, and society. (read more)

Anatomy of a Crime Wave

Baltimore’s experiment with de-policing has been disastrous—and deadly.

A decade ago, Baltimoreans became lab rats in a fateful experiment: their elected officials decided to treat the city’s long-running crime problem with many fewer cops. In effect, Baltimore began to defund its police and engage in de-policing long before those terms gained popular currency.

This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

Kelling had warned that “If you tell your cops, ‘We are going to go in and practice zero tolerance for all minor crimes,’ you are inviting a mess of trouble.” That’s exactly what Baltimore got: stratospheric arrest rates (over 110,000 in 2005, in a city of 600,000), no meaningful reduction in homicides, an ACLU lawsuit, and an erroneous but widely shared feeling that Broken Windows was bunk and policing was not the answer to the city’s crime problems.

Then came a respite. O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

But that’s when progress stopped and the de-policing experiment began.

Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

Criticized for her handling of the riots—somewhat unfairly—Rawlings-Blake decided not to run for reelection, but in her last two budgets she shaved another 345 personnel from BPD’s budget, nearly halving its investigative staff. (Real BPD expenditures, however, grew about 4.5 percent per year in her term because of mandated pension contributions and ballooning overtime outlays.)

Today, then, the BPD patrols the city’s 81 square miles with 18 percent fewer staff than a decade ago. Post-Ferguson, of course, it has become common to point to intuitively plausible but difficult-to-quantify reductions in the level of police effort to explain localized surges in crime; the evidence for this claim, though tentative, is supportive. In Baltimore, the “Ferguson Effect” has intensified an established pattern of diminished policing resources contributing to rising bloodshed.

And now Baltimore is among the national vanguard in a new trend: de-prosecution. While it was widely perceived that early in her tenure Mosby put the brakes on prosecution of many “low-level” crimes, once the pandemic began she made that policy explicit (nominally to ensure that overcrowded prisons not become Covid spreaders). She dismissed over 1,400 pending criminal cases and quashed as many warrants for possession or “attempted distribution” of controlled dangerous substances, prostitution, trespassing, public urination or defecation, minor traffic offenses, and more.

A year later, she revealed that this policy was not just a Covid palliative but an experiment with human subjects; declaring it a big success, she proclaimed that “the era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore.” She pointed to a 20 percent reduction in violent crime and a 35 percent decline in property crime in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year. With all the confounding variables at work during the pandemic, of course, no social scientist worth her salt would proclaim such a complex experiment complete—much less successful—with just a year’s worth of data (or a subsample thereof).

When you’ve got data you like, however, “the science” or logic can be overlooked. So Mosby claimed that a 33 percent decline in 911 calls mentioning drugs and a 50 percent decline in calls mentioning sex work during her experiment proves that “there is no public safety value in prosecuting these offenses.” To the contrary: with drug use and prostitution de facto legal in Baltimore, many residents still wasted their time calling the cops about the dealers, junkies, hookers, or johns on their block.

Then there is Mosby’s spin that focusing “the limited law enforcement resources we have” on murder, armed robbery, and carjacking will magically lead to a safer Baltimore. Yet it is Mosby who has been running the State’s Attorney’s office for over six years, during which time her staff has grown by 14 percent (with 50 added positions) and her real budget by 27 percent. A cynic might suggest that the resource limits she imagines are a byproduct of her active travel schedule or other distractions.

A simpler explanation is that Mosby is just not very good at her job. Pre-pandemic, violent crime surged on her watch; homicides (averaging 55 per 100,000 residents) have run one-fifth higher than in any prior administration. Conviction rates fell as soon as she took office. According to Sean Kennedy of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, in 2017 only 12 percent of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy-to-commit-murder cases resulted in a guilty plea or verdict for the murder charge. In 2018, only 18 percent of gun-crime defendants were found guilty.

It’s true, of course, that BPD resources—measured in actual boots on the ground—have been increasingly scarce in recent years. Mosby ignores the rather obvious implications of that trend while drawing dubious conclusions from her own too-brief, badly designed test. A dispassionate look at Baltimore’s decade-long experiment with de-policing seems fairly clear: people die.

De-prosecution is likely to amplify this tragic tendency. Now that sellers and buyers of drugs and sex face lower risk (or no risk) of prosecution in Baltimore, these markets will expand and become more profitable. The gangs that supply these products often compete for market share by violent means; their customers sometimes fund their habits with muggings and assaults.

As Kelling and Wilson taught and many cities’ histories have demonstrated, disorder and crime can be contagious, but policing these problems efficiently and with community involvement can yield major improvements in public safety and quality of life. Baltimore is simply ignoring these lessons. Other cities should not follow suit. (read more)

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Election Integrity: The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time | Robert Barnes
(watch video)

If There's Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?

If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and "concerned" NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.  An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona's Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland's Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.  Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount "ludicrous" because "the election is over."  And MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only "dangerous," but also the "end of democracy."
 
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.  If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don't know of it.  And if there is a reason to expose workers' identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it.

Compare the highly professional audit taking place in Arizona to the orchestrated chaos of the presidential election.  It took five days last November for vote-counters to find enough mail-in ballots for Joe Biden for the Democrat press corps to declare him the winner, and in the voting precincts where Trump leads disappeared over those days, transparency was nowhere to be seen.  Vote-counters covered windows with cardboard to block outside observation of any kind; counting paused and restarted in secret; and ad hoc procedures were established on the fly and without consistency from one precinct to the next when determining whether to include ballots lacking legally required voter identification metrics, including even the rudimentary safety protocol of a loosely matching voter signature.  If "free and fair" elections require basic security, verification of ballot authenticity, and consistently applied standards at least across the precincts and counties of any one state, then there was obviously nothing free or fair about the 2020 election. 

The remarkable thing is that most Americans have actually come to this correct conclusion.  After six months of some of the worst gaslighting in America's history, during which corporate news propagandists and tech behemoths have colluded with federal and state authorities to paint the presidential election as aboveboard and all those who question its legitimacy as kooks, "extremists," "violent insurrectionists," and "terrorists," the nearly universal narrative drumbeat from the press and the psychological warfare deployed against regular Americans have failed miserably in their desired effect.  Whether spray-painted on highway overpasses, discussed in uncensored online forums, or spoken aloud, more and more Americans have concluded that the election was stolen from President Trump.
 
State legislatures were useless in ensuring election integrity.  Election lawsuits in Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin failed to provide any timely mechanism for remedying violations of states' own election laws, let alone for redressing the likelihood of outright fraud.  The Supreme Court shirked its own constitutional duty to safeguard American enfranchisement by declining to hear on appeal the merits of lawsuits alleging electoral misconduct, consenting to review controversies only after Biden's inauguration and then largely booting them as moot, and outright refusing to exercise its original jurisdiction over Texas's suit against other states for their failure to ensure equal application of their own voting laws as required by the Constitution. 
 
At every step of the way, America's institutions utterly failed to safeguard the security of the 2020 election beforehand, to protect Americans' votes once the predictable catastrophe of mail-in balloting unfolded on November 3, or to provide any semblance of the rule of law afterward that could have remedied the election's obvious and multifaceted failures and halted America's downward decline toward a banana republic farce whose elections look less reliable than those in Venezuela.

Yet the common sense of the American people has largely prevailed over the "Big Lie," an astonishing accomplishment during a time when Americans have never been more controlled by government authorities micromanaging everything, from what they wear across their faces to which pronouns they use to refer to others.
 
I have always been of the opinion that whether the full scale of the 2020 election's fraud and manipulation ever comes to light, the historical record will never be able to account for three facts that betray most Americans' common sense: (1) no president for a century and a half has won more votes during re-election than he did for his first election yet lost re-election, and President Trump gained over ten million new votes over his 2016 victory; (2) Joe Biden, a man evincing obvious signs of mental decline and dementia who generated historically low levels of excitement among his own Democrat voters, somehow won over fifteen million more votes than Barack Obama, the political rock star who energized Democrats like no other politician in recent memory, managed in 2012; and (3) President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county in the country from coast to coast by double-digits. 

After a year when Facebook and Twitter did everything they could to minimize Trump's reach to his voters and his voters' reach to each other, and after years of outright Pravda corporate news that pushed the Deep State's "Russia collusion" and Ukraine "quid pro quo" lies to take down a sitting president, President Trump's vote totals in 2020 were still so remarkable that they would have normally indicated a resounding mandate from the American people. 

It is revealing that, unlike other past election losses, there was no great Republican "autopsy" done in order to pinpoint what went wrong, as there was after Mitt Romney's 2012 failure.  Other than an occasional assertion that Republicans "must do better with suburban women," there is no serious analysis about how Republicans should improve upon President Trump's 2016 totals.  The reason why is obvious: he did better with voters, in general, than any other sitting president in history, and with minority voters in particular than any Republican in sixty years.

When George Bush recently remarked that Republicans would lose future elections if they appealed only to a "white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant" base, his out-of-touch assessment of the 2020 election was apparent to anyone paying attention.  However WASP-y George Bush's Republican Party may have been, it is Donald Trump who expanded the party's reach to Americans of every background, and Trump's direct engagement with black voters has been so successful that even Obama was forced to minimize the accomplishment as merely due to Trump's "macho style."

Trump built that.  Most Americans seem to have figured that out.

The problem with using the organs of the State to advance outright lies is that the State becomes less and less credible as more lies are revealed for what they are.  The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona involves the votes of one county out of roughly 3,100 in the United States, but after six months when Americans' collective common sense has been at odds with the collective narrative of the powers that be, one county's truth could expose a whole nation's lies. 

No wonder Democrats find it so "dangerous." (read more)

New Census data raise serious questions about 2020 election fraud

According to a website called The Election Wizard, newly released Census data contains an "anomaly" when it comes to squaring it with the reported electoral results:


If the Census data are correct, then about 4 million votes mysteriously were added to the election totals.  Usually, the Census data and the reported vote totals correlate closely.


It is very suspicious, but far from conclusive.  Certainly, it does justify questioning the election results and auditing where possible.


Here is the hour-long conversation between Barnes and Bartis: (read more and watch video)

"You can actually buy an official Georgia presidential ballot on eBay. And, you can also buy a number of states. So when they tell you they were controlling the ballots, it’s just not true. This was a very open system. It was a system where people could cheat, and did. And without getting into an argument about how big the cheating was, it was large enough that every American should expect that they have the right to vote, that they have the right to have their vote counted, they have a right to have their vote held legally and accurately, and they shouldn’t have their vote canceled by someone who’s cheating. And that’s exactly what’s been going on… In every one of the states that was very close that Trump lost you had those kind of shenanigans and you had state law violated in every single one of those states. In my mind there was no question that those states were in fact stolen. That doesn’t make the national media happy but I think as a historian people will find it’s absolutely true."

— Newt Gingrich, today on Sunday Morning Futures.

Anyone who has been around children or simpletons knows how they dissimulate and obfuscate after something has been broken or lost. They use every feeble trick to keep you from learning what happened. Their ploys seldom work, yet they employ them as a first resort, even when the trail of cookie crumbs leads straight to their bedroom.

Democrats, the Deep State, the overseas operatives and the media and technology oligarchs are acting like guilty children; extremely guilty children. If they have nothing to hide, why are they acting so?

As part of the legitimate forensic audit mandated by the Arizona state Senate, the over 2 million Maricopa county ballots are being examined under ultraviolet light. That examination reveals whether mail-in ballots were sent out through the mail and mailed back. That technology also reveals whether the ballot was filled in by hand or filled in by a copy machine.

Oops.

We shall learn so much when the auditors file their report and the consequences will be swift.

Senator Mark Kelly will be unseated. Chuckles Schumer will be out as Majority Leader. The illegitimate Biden regime will grind to a halt. Donald Trump's Arizona landslide victory will be verified and other states with Republican legislatures will want rigorous forensic audits as well.

There won't be a Constitutional crisis. It will be a Constitutional cataclysm; a Constitutional catastrophe. (Thank you, John Roberts.)

It will eventually be a Constitutional vindication of the rule of law.

There will be many sore losers in America, Europe and the Far East.

The American people, however, will be the ultimate winners.

Pushing for Amnesty Through Budget Reconciliation

Chuck Schumer is considering using the budget reconciliation process to ram through amnesty legislation for up to 8 million illegal aliens as part of the infrastructure package.

Get ready—the next great legislative battle of the 117th Congress finally may be here. In yet another radical move, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) formally inquired whether Democrats could use something called budget reconciliation to pass Joe Biden’s $2 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

Using this process would allow Democrats to pass a radical, broad package by a simple majority, rather than needing to muster the 60 votes currently required for most pieces of legislation. The Senate parliamentarian indicated that Democrats can use budget reconciliation one final time, but on what and how is still up in the air.

Disturbingly, the New York Times reported that Schumer is considering using the budget reconciliation process to ram through amnesty legislation for up to 8 million illegal aliens as part of the infrastructure package. According to the Times:

Big business and open-borders lobbyists responded to Schumer’s comments almost immediately. FWD.us—the pro-amnesty organization bankrolled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—announced it would be blasting TV airwaves with a new ad imploring lawmakers to use budget reconciliation to give a pathway to citizenship for some 8 million illegal aliens. Politico reports that FWD.us and other open-borders coalition groups are launching a $50 million effort pushing for amnesty for so-called “Dreamers,” temporary protected status recipients, and farmworkers.

FWD.us also announced the hiring of Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the maneuver this year. The decision on whether or not amnesty can be included will be in the hands of the current parliamentarian.

The [illegitimate] Biden Administration clearly is susceptible to public pressure, particularly when it comes to immigration. Look no further than the administration’s about-face decision to raise the refugee cap after previously deciding to keep it at the level set by President Trump. The loudest components of his base can and have forced his hand on these issues. Could a seven-figure ad campaign push Biden and his administration to include mass amnesty as part of the infrastructure package? Let’s hope there’s more common sense than that.

These changes would be disastrous for American workers recovering from the economic crisis wrought by the [over-reaction to the] COVID-19 pandemic [of lies]. Unemployment rates for those who would directly compete with unskilled but newly legalized aliens—the bottom quartile of earners—remain disastrously high at 20 percent. Worse still, many large corporations found ways to adapt throughout the pandemic and are not rehiring former workers. Immediately legalizing millions of illegal aliens would be a slap in the face to newly arrived legal immigrants and Americans without high school or college degrees, who often compete against illegal aliens for jobs.

Instead of acquiescing to Big Tech lobbyists, cosmopolitan corporations, and industry-funded libertarians who prioritize profits over people, Biden can and should resist the urge to support the inclusion of amnesty in his infrastructure package. If he doesn’t and the parliamentarian allows it to be included, all eyes will be on Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Will they stand with the American people or cower in the face of pressure from radical open borders advocates on the far-left fringe of their party? We’ll see. (read more)

Oligarchy, and Remedies

Those who live under oligarchies are not citizens—because oligarchy validates itself, decides for itself, within itself. It is committed above all to negating a people’s capacity to rule itself.

What are hundreds of America’s biggest corporations doing as they browbeat the public to abolish the requirement of identification for voting? What are Twitter, Facebook, et al. doing when they prohibit people from sharing facts that are inconvenient to government policy or (and) the Democratic Party? What did banks do when they turned over to the FBI the records of persons who happened to have traveled to D.C. near January 6? And what about all those big retail stores—you know, the ones that the government designated “essential,” the ones that thrived under the lockdowns—what are they doing when they continue to demand that you wear masks on their property regardless of vaccination? What are colleges and universities, even K-12 schools doing when they deprive of opportunities young people who do not fit woke profiles? And what do all of them do when they dismiss complaints that they are violating your Constitutional rights by telling you that they are exercising their own private rights?

Are they simply fronting for the government or, specifically, for the Democratic Party?

What is the [illegitimate] Biden Administration doing when it swears disinterest in “vaccine passports” to regulate ordinary people’s access to travel, careers, etc. but works with airlines, theaters, big retailers, and universities to help them impose such passports? Is the government—in practice, the political party that controls the government—fronting for corporations, or do the corporations front for the Party? Do the drug companies influence what the Centers for Disease Control “recommends” regarding pandemic restrictions? Do they influence the Democratic Party, or is it the other way around? Who runs whom?

Understanding what is happening in America begins with dismissing such silly questions. Focus, instead, on the fact that those who rule us in all these matters are essentially the same people. They are interchangeable, with near-identical interests, loves, hates, and tastes. Often, they are friends and colleagues, and are united about coercing whomever is not on their own sociopolitical side. Whether the institutions they control are public or private under our Constitutional system has ceased to matter. These persons are responsible for the sharp diminution in all manner of freedoms we have experienced since at least 2016, and especially since 2020.


Aristotle noticed that governments are run either by one person, by a few, or by the many, and that regardless of how many people rule, they do so either for the general interest or for their own. The American republic was founded in 1776-89 by the people at large, to serve the general interest by mixing the power of sheer numbers with that of states, and with that of a unitary presidency. But over the last century, the increasingly homogeneous set of people who run the republic’s institutions took power out of the hands of the people’s elected representatives pretty much at all levels, and have governed in their own interest rather than in the general population’s. Nobody voted for this, on any level.

On the contrary: the exercise of coercive powers by and for self-selected elites who claim to know better and who validate one another is the very negation of the constitutional republic within which Americans have lived since 1776. It is oligarchy.

In 21st century America, this oligarchy erased the distinction between public and private powers, and replaced it with the distinction between those who are and are not part of the ruling class. The privatization of public power is oligarchy’s essence. Because government is by the ruling class few, and is for that class’s interest, the oligarchs can wield the coercive powers of government without legal limits, as if they were dealing with their own private affairs.

Those who live under oligarchies are not citizens—because oligarchy validates itself, decides for itself, within itself, and because it is committed above all to negating the people’s capacity to rule itself.


Americans struggle to understand what is happening because we still regard ourselves as citizens, and imagine that those who run our republican institutions still respect them to some extent. We see persons whom the ruling class favors committing crimes with impunity, and complain of “a two-tiered justice system.” But this is not mere corruption. We see corporations wielding government powers and complain that power is being franchised to favorites. But these are not mere favorites of the regime. This is the new regime being itself. Such things are not deviations from republican legality. They are the assertion of oligarchic reality. This is oligarchic justice, oligarchic normality. The republic was yesterday. The oligarchy is today.

Conservatives’ congenital mistake is to try conserving something that no longer exists by supporting institutions that now belong to a regime so alien to republican life that it treats attempts at citizenship as crimes against the regime. And so they are. They call today’s American regime “our democracy.” It is “theirs,” all right, but not ours. It is a classic oligarchy.


First, stop pretending. Begin by rejecting—in heart and mind entirely, and publicly as prudence may dictate—the authority of the oligarchs who now control what used to be our republican institutions. Realize that you enjoy the rights God gave you only to the extent that your fellow ex-citizens recognize them, and that your only hope of continuing enjoyment lies in leaguing with them, on turning your back on the oligarchy and on effectively living republican lives with similarly minded people.

Citizenship is possible only when the many join together in the kind of mixed regime for the general good that our oligarchs rejected. Turning our backs to the oligarchy is possible for the twin purpose of rejecting un-republican rule and as the assertion of a new republican way of life. Citizenship happens when individuals join together under leaders of their choice to achieve common goals, both positive and negative.

Rejection of oligarchy is possible, even easy, if and when large numbers of persons do it together. This goes for ostensibly private corporations as well as for formerly republican institutions now in the oligarchs’ hands. The moment that millions of Americans, whether led by actual state governors in league with one another or by prospective presidents, recognize that Twitter and Facebook are enemy institutions, their power ends. The moment that millions are led to boycott Costco, or Pfizer, their officers are fired. The moment that these millions, so led, refuse the legitimacy of anything coming from Washington, its power ends.

Our oligarchs, having seen how easy it was to cower the majority of Americans to agree to the stupid, self-destructive practices of mask-wearing and lockdowns, having rejoiced in ruining the lives of small numbers of individual dissenters, believing that, under the media’s cover, their threats to crush opponents as white supremacists will forestall serious resistance, fantasize about applying the tools of the war on terror to America’s population.

But no. Their success was due to what remained of the American people’s confidence in them. That is now gone. The oligarchs have the FBI and CIA, and the Pentagon’s generals. But who will risk his pension, never mind his life, for them? Who will risk anything for Kamala Harris, never mind Joseph Biden?

Nor, in 2021, can anybody stop the governors and legislatures of any number of states from leading their peoples in settling what is and is not acceptable to them, how they shall and shall not live—that is, nobody can stop them as they decide to govern themselves.

The American people, divided as they are, cannot purge the oligarchs from what had been republican institutions. But those so minded have full power to defend themselves from them and to leave them to their own devices. (read more)

"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
— Samuel Adams

India’s “COVID outbreak” & the need for scientific integrity – not sensationalism. Reality versus hysteria in latest fear fest

Western media outlets are currently paying a great deal of attention to India and the apparent impact of COVID-19. The narrative is that the coronavirus is ripping through the country – people are dying, cases are spiralling out of control and hospitals are unable to cope.

There does indeed seem to be a major problem in parts of the country. However, we need to differentiate between the effects of COVID-19 and the impacts of other factors. We must also be very wary of sensationalist media reporting which misrepresents the situation.

For instance, in late April, the New York Post ran a story about the COVID ‘surge’ in India with the headline saying, “footage shows people dead in the streets”. Next to it was an image of a woman lying dead. But the image was actually of a woman lying on the floor from a May 2020 story about a gas leak in Andhra Pradesh.

To try to shed some light on the situation and move beyond panic and media sensationalism, I recently spoke with Yohan Tengra, a political analyst and healthcare specialist based in Mumbai.

Tengra has carried out a good deal of research into COVID-19 and the global response to it. He is the co-author of a new report: ‘How the Unscientific Interpretation of RT-PCR & Rapid Antigen Test Results is Causing Misleading Spikes in Cases & Deaths’.

For India, he says:


He adds that India is experiencing mainly asymptomatic cases:


In his report, Tengra offers scientific evidence that strongly indicates asymptomatic transmission is not significant. He asserts that as these cases comprise most of India’s case numbers, we should be questioning the data as well as the PCR tests and the cycles being used to detect the virus instead of accepting the figures at face value.

As in many countries across the globe, Tengra says people in India have been made to fear the virus endlessly. Moreover, they are generally under the impression that they need to intervene early in order to pass through the infection successfully.

He notes:

Faulty PCR testing and misdiagnosis, says Tengra, combined with people who want to intervene early with the mildest symptoms, have been filling up the beds, preventing access to those who really need them.

Addressing the much-publicised shortage of oxygen, Tengra implies this too is a result of inept policies, with exports of oxygen having increased in recent times, resulting in inadequate back-up supplies when faced with a surge in demand.

According to Tengra, the case fatality rate for COVID-19 in India was over three per cent last year but has now dropped to below 1.5 per cent. The infection fatality rate is even lower, with serosurvey results showing them to be between 0.05 per cent to 0.1 per cent.

The directors of the All India Institute of Medical Science and the India Council of Medical Research have both come out and said that there is not much difference between the first and second wave and that there are many more asymptomatic cases this time than in the so-called ‘first wave’.

Tengra argues that the principle is the same for all infectious agents: they infect people, most can fight it off without even developing symptoms, some develop mild symptoms, a smaller number develop serious symptoms and an even smaller number die.

Although lives can be saved with the right prevention plus treatment strategies, Tengra notes that most of the doctors in India are using ineffective and unsafe drugs. As a result, he claims that mortality rates could increase due to inappropriate treatments.

As has occurred in many other countries, Tengra notes the way that death certificate guidelines are structured in India makes it easy for someone to be labelled as a COVID death just based on a positive PCR test or general symptoms. It is therefore often difficult to say who has died from the virus and who has been misdiagnosed.

And the issue of misdiagnosis should not be brushed aside lightly. In a recent article by long-term resident of India Jo Nash, ‘India’s Current ‘COVID Crisis’ in Context’, it is noted that the focus of the media’s messaging and the source of many of the horrifying scenes of suffering – Delhi – is among the most toxic cities in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health.

Nash also argues that respiratory diseases like TB and respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises as happens at this time of the year.

As a result, it is reasonable to state that all is not what it might seem to be with regard to media reporting on the current situation.

It is interesting that this ‘second wave’ has correlated with the vaccine rollout (Nash provides official sources to support this claim). Tengra feels this might not be coincidental. He says that the ‘aefi’ (adverse events following immunisation) data vastly underestimates how many vaccine adverse reactions are taking place in the country.

Tengra says that, based on ground surveys and data collected by himself, there is a tremendous number of people who have fallen ill post vaccination, many of them then testing positive for COVID and becoming hospitalised.

The financial incentive for doctors to diagnose people with COVID could also mean many of the people who are ill with other conditions are being placed as COVID patients, while beds are under occupied for people for non-COVID health issues.

Two months ago, there was a lot of vaccine hesitancy in India and many people were not taking the jabs. Tengra notes that the government has had to up the ante in order to get people scared.

He argues:


Tengra is working with lawyers and other concerned citizens to file legal cases to challenge the idea of asymptomatic transmission and the testing of healthy people. The aim is to also improve the testing in line with evidence-based protocols.

But that is not all:


Tengra is not alone in challenging the mainstream narrative.

A recent article in India’s National Herald newspaper by clinical epidemiologist Professor Dr Amitav Banerjee argues that the current situation in India is not due to the lethality of the virus but by the numbers who are ending up in hospital, which are exposing cracks in India’s public health infrastructure and the inequitable distribution of health services. Even at the best of times, he argues, there is a mismatch of supply and demand. Little wonder, therefore, that we now see an emergency – not squarely due to COVID.

Like Yohan Tengra, Banerjee questions the scientific integrity of the responses to COVID and this includes the rollout of vaccines and the problems which this in itself could bring:


Referring to an editorial in the British Medical Journal by K. Abbasi (‘Covid-19, Politicisation, Corruption, and Suppression of Science’), Banerjee raises concerns about the suppression of science by politicians and governments and the conflicts of interest of academics, researchers and commercial lobbies.

He says:


None of what has been presented here is meant to deny the existence or impact of COVID-19. People in India are dying – some from the virus, others ‘with’ the virus but most likely mainly due to their pre-existing underlying conditions, and there are others who are being misdiagnosed.

Although excess mortality figures are currently unavailable, Yohan Tengra notes the average age of those who died in the first wave was 50. This time it is 49.

Professor Banerjee says that there is opacity and obfuscation instead of transparency. He calls for moral courage among scientists in advisory positions to the Indian government: scientific integrity is the need of the hour.

In finishing, let us place COVID and the global media reporting of the situation in India in context by returning to Jo Nash.

(read more)

The herd shot round the world

Every so often, a story published on the front page of the New York Times is so well written, meaningful, and appropriate to the Bulletin’s concerns that small snippets of it, properly chosen and arranged, produce something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry. That blessed coincidence occurred May 3, 2021.

We suspect it’ll occur again.

(read more)

What's Behind Vaccine Hysteria?

If you are reluctant to get the COVID vaccine and beginning to feel overrun by forces pressuring you to get vaccinated, you aren’t alone and you aren’t crazy.  There’s a reason you feel the way you do. You are being manipulated.
 
We are being bombarded with commercials pushing us to be socially responsible. Medical professionals, celebrities, and folks in our communities admonish us not to shirk our civic duty.  Suddenly, the vaccine is the only way to normalcy.

Friends and family openly brag about their vaccinations and gasp in astonishment when they find out you haven’t decided or, worse, that you will not get it. Doctors who inquire also give that disapproving look.

The [illegitimate] president routinely stokes fear, recently decrying the unvaccinated. Andrew Cuomo had the gall to suggest that the unvaccinated “could kill their own grandmother.”
 
Adding to the pile-on, we are now besieged with “incentive” programs offered by public-private partnerships that essentially divide us into the vaxxed and the unvaxxed… and it’s becoming downright creepy.
 
First, the simple “get jabbed, get a gift” incentives.  Following a similar program in Connecticut, New Jersey’s governor launched the “Shot and a Beer” program where those who get vaccinated in May get a free beer at participating breweries upon presentation of a “vaccination card.” He’s also promoting a “Grateful for the Shot” program that whisks churchgoers away from religious services to vaccination sites.

Jersey Shore nightclub D’Jais is hosting a vaccination clinic that will give patrons a Summer 2021 VIP Card.  Ooh.  The vaccinated are very important people who must be publicly acknowledged.
 
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice is probably using tax dollars to give $100 savings bonds to anyone between 16 and 35 who gets vaccinated.

The incentives then intensify with the lure of special treatment.  Cuomo teamed up with the Yankees to offer free tickets to fans who get vaccinated at the stadium.  Same for the Mets.  And, to protect the vaxxed from the unvaxxed, they will be seated separately -- even though the vaxxed can’t catch COVID from the unvaxxed.  If you don’t understand that, then the entire field of immunology is turned on its head and…the Sun revolves around the Earth.

This all has the odious markings of a two-tiered society where the vaxxed get special treatment.  Will they get preferred seating while the unvaxxed languish in the nosebleed section?  Don’t be surprised if the mollified masses -- vaxxed, privileged, and enamored by their own civic virtue boo pictures of the unvaxxed as they appear on the jumbotron.  Oblivious to how vile this sounds, Cuomo said, "if you're vaccinated that's one category, you're unvaccinated, that's another category."  You, to the right.  The rest, to the left.

The goal? To shame anyone who opts out into submission.

In New York City, De Blasio announced free admission to those who get vaccinated under the blue whale at the Museum of Natural History and added: "We're gonna be looking to do incentives just like that to give people great opportunities when they get vaccinated." Will discounts and freebies  give way to tax breaks, elevated status in society, preferences in college admissions, jobs, and government contracts? Will the unvaccinated have to sit at the back of the bus and drink from different water fountains?

New York already has the Excelsior Pass that provides digital proof of vaccination; Chicago has plans for a “vax pass” that provides access to concerts and other events.  Meanwhile, one individual has already been arrested for counterfeiting cards… but let the murderers, rapists, and violent left-wing rioters run free.  

Washington’s governor Jay Inslee just “released guidance on non-vaccinated-only sections, so [there will be] vaccination segregation, at outdoor stadiums, at graduation ceremonies for schools, even your church.”

From my vantage point, the “vaccine hesitant” are very analytical, very calm, and very patient.   They are not anti-vaxxers by any stretch but want to make an informed, data-driven decision, weigh the costs and benefits, and do what they deem best for themselves and their families.  They are willing to wait for more information about long-term effects before plunging the needle into their arms.

The hysteria is coming from individuals in positions of power who appear to be ignoring the science and are acting highly irrationally.  They don’t seem to grasp what the unvaccinated understand: the vaccines do not have FDA approval but only Emergency Use Authorization which allows unapproved vaccines to be used in public health emergencies. While manufacturers still had to conduct all three phases of clinical trials and present compelling evidence of safety and effectiveness before the FDA would issue the EUA, the normal approval process would take longer and yield more information about the long-term side effects of this radically new and potentially paradigm shifting mRNA technology.

Once those most at risk have been vaccinated and deaths and hospitalizations of our most vulnerable decline, and the virus is on the wane, should we be vaccinating the entire population without a thorough understanding of the long-term side effects?  Is the Biden Administration turning the entire country into a massive clinical phase trial?

The younger and healthier the individual, the more rational it is for that person to say: "The risk of dying or suffering grave consequences from a COVID infection are known and they are low.  Taking the vaccine presents many unknowns."

Hysterical people are scrambling to figure out how to get the hesitant to capitulate.  This heavy push is making people wary:  if it’s so obvious that this vaccine is the answer, why are you trying so hard to convince us with all of these incentives?

Perhaps University of Pennsylvania behavioral economics expert David Asch, MD, MBA, can explain.  He studies how people make health decisions.  As opposed to utilizing incentives (beer and tickets) or rules (mandated vaccines to attend school), people can be cajoled into getting the vaccine using,

Paternalism presumes the target is stupid and easily controlled.  Slavery is paternalistic.  Paternalism is very powerful, but not at all gentle and we should resist it with all of our might.

The messaging is designed to tug at our heartstrings and pique our desire to again run with the normal crowd; high-five fellow baseball fans; be a part of something good, something special, something almost religious… to save lives.  Everyone else is doing it.  I don’t want to be “that guy.”

Utilizing the key ingredients of propaganda -- psychology and marketing -- Asch explains, “Don’t try to use rules based on rational ideas.”  To compel the “vaccine hesitant” to abandon their faculties and reach for the needle, “we need to know how to hitch our [incentive] programs to those predictable psychological foibles [predictable ways we are irrational].”  Not with reason.  Or facts.  And certainly not with science. (read more)

The Incredible Vanishing Flu
(written by a physician)

Seasonal influenza, also known as “the flu,” visits America every year, similar to tornados, thunderstorms, heat waves, and snowstorms. As tracked by the CDC, over the past decade symptomatic flu cases ranged from 9 to 45 million cases per year in the US. Hospitalizations varied from 140 to 810 thousand, and deaths from 12 to 61 thousand, depending on the particular year, strain of influenza, and effectiveness of the vaccine.
 
This year, “flu activity is unusually low at this time” according to CDC surveillance. Since late September 2020, they recorded only about 2000 cases, a minute fraction of the tens of millions of cases in past years.

Hospitalizations this flu season are minimal with only 224 confirmed influenza hospitalizations from September 2020 to mid-April 2021, nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in past seasons.

Deaths are harder to measure since the CDC conveniently changed how deaths are characterized this past year. Instead of pneumonia, influenza, and COVID being in separate categories, now it’s called PIC, lumping the three entities together.
 
For children, the CDC doesn’t use PIC as COVID hospitalization or death in children is exceedingly rare, unless the child is immunocompromised. In each of the past three years, pediatric deaths ranged from 144 to 198 per year. This current flu season has seen only one single child die from the flu.

So what happened to the flu? From millions of cases to a few thousand. It would like having a winter with no snow, which despite predictions of NY Times climate experts, hasn’t come close to happening.

Perhaps the flu cases are mysteriously lost, like Hillary Clinton’s emails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or John Durham’s sealed indictments.

A virologist was perplexed and honest. According to the New York Times,


Other than an occasional news story like the one above, the media has been rather uninterested in this fluke of science, instead wringing their paws over an election audit in Arizona or Frank Luntz and Kevin McCarthy shacking up.

As big media is too busy looking for racism hiding behind every Republican, let’s explore why the flu might have mysteriously vanished.

One theory is that public health measures for COVID eradicated the flu. Did we just now discover hygiene? Was last year the first time that Americans washed their hands and used hand sanitizer? We have always done these things. And if they worked to stop the flu, why didn’t they stop COVID?

We didn’t need Dr Fauci scolding us into isolation when sick. Those ill with the flu stayed home until better. We naturally distanced when sick. Again, if these measures, far more draconian this year, stopped the flu, why didn’t they also stop COVID?

Perhaps the flu vaccine last season was a home run, unlike the 40-60 percent effectiveness of past seasons, one year as low as 19 percent effective. In a normal flu season, the vaccination rate is between 50-60 percent. It was likely much lower last year during COVID as a flu shot was not a priority and many avoided going to the doctor unless necessary.

Maybe it was the incessant mask use, going from none to one to two to one, according to Dr Fauci’s whims. If masks worked so well, why weren’t we told to wear them every flu season, preventing tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations? It is not like masks were just invented last year.

Does size matter? The influenza virus is 80-120 nanometers. COVID is similar in size, 50-140 nm. If, as we are incessantly told, masks work to save lives from COVID, then they should work similarly for influenza. Yet COVID cases are high and influenza cases are near zero. Why is that?

The pore size in standard surgical masks is 300 nm to 10,000 nm, far larger than either virus, meaning masks cannot explain the discrepancy. Masks don’t stop either virus, which is why we never masked up during past flu pandemics. Unless the masks contain a pore bouncer, letting in only COVID but telling influenza to get lost.

In addition, if masks work, why the push for the vaccine? If the vaccine works, and it does far more effectively than the flu vaccine, why are we still masked up? It can’t be both ways. Except in Congress where the few Biden speech attendees, all vaccinated, were distanced and covering their faces. Do they consider the message they are sending? Apparently not.

The NY Times article suggests previous public exposure to influenza with no previous exposure to COVID might explain things. But every year there is “previous public exposure” to influenza and every year plenty of flu cases. Until this year. As influenza occurs every year, there is always natural immunity to influenza yet there are always many cases the following year. What changed?

Could “the mere presence of the corona virus” suppress flu cases? As in the big tough Chinese alpha male coronavirus scaring away the metrosexual beta male influenza virus? Has social justice and wokeness penetrated viral capsids? Perhaps that makes sense to CNN anchors.

I’ll throw out an idea, namely testing. Perhaps COVID numbers are artificially high due to PCR cycle thresholds, as I have written about. At cycle threshold of 35-40, “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus” according to the NY Times, meaning most positives are false positives. Deliberately attributing accidental deaths to COVID falsely inflates the death counts.

What if influenza cases were incorrectly labeled as COVID? After all, everything now is called PIC. Perhaps the influenza numbers are much higher and COVID numbers much lower based on misclassification.

The CDC wouldn’t play numbers games like that would they? Sure they would. The CDC changed its cycle threshold for “vaccine breakthrough cases,” those cases occurring post vaccination, to 28, far below that for normal cases of 40 or higher, to reduce COVID cases numbers after the vaccine. Imagine if they had done that last year. COVID cases numbers would resemble that of a bad flu season.

The CDC was happy to let high case numbers work against President Trump last year when he was campaigning for reelection but now want to lower case numbers to favor their heralded vaccines. This is the same CDC that allowed a national teachers union to help draft school opening guidance, just as Congress lets lobbyists write legislation. Can the CDC be trusted?

The CDC director said their data, “suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus” yet vaccinated people are still distanced and masked. Is the CDC about public health or just another political arm of the ruling class, like the FBI and DOJ?

Are the vanishing flu cases just a numbers game, the CDC playing three-card Monte, hiding flu cases while America bets her economy on this con game, the American people coming up short and the Democrats always winning? Was it every really about the virus? (read more)

Peer-reviewed study finds that ivermectin is effective as prophylaxis for COVID-19 and as a therapeutic remedy

I expect that the corporate media will ignore as much as possible the findings of a peer-reviewed study just published in the American Journal of Therapeutics that concludes that the readily available, inexpensive (off-patent) drug ivermectin is effective in treating existing cases of COVID-19 and in preventing coming down with the illness.  Unlike the experimental vaccines that we are being ceaselessly urged to take, ivermectin has been around for many years and is safe for all but a few people.  From the article:

The inventors of ivermectin received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.

The article is written in accessible language for laypeople to read.

Here is the abstract:


And here is the conclusion of the article:

(read more)

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

A Tale of Two Theories

After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the only other point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus”. But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). But since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.

The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.

Doubts about natural emergence

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Dr. Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady”, mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Dr. Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Dr. Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, “may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at “a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.

Inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Dr. Baric had developed, and taught Dr. Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by [Dr. Fauci's] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.

The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. “CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.

“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”

“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”

What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Dr. Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

“It is also clear,” Dr. Ebright said, “that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” “Genomic context” refers to the particular viral backbone used as the testbed for the spike protein.

The lab escape scenario for the origin of the SARS2 virus, as should by now be evident, is not mere hand-waving in the direction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is a detailed proposal, based on the specific project being funded there by [Dr. Fauci's] NIAID.

Even if the grant required the work plan described above, how can we be sure that the plan was in fact carried out? For that we can rely on the word of Dr. Daszak, who has been much protesting for the last 15 months that lab escape was a ludicrous conspiracy theory invented by China-bashers.

On 9 December 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.

“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new sars-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS,” Dr. Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger….

“Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?

“Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.” The insertions he referred to perhaps included an element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly increases viral infectivity for human cells.

In disjointed style, Dr. Daszak is referring to the fact that once you have generated a novel coronavirus that can attack human cells, you can take the spike protein and make it the basis for a vaccine.

One can only imagine Dr. Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” he declared in an April 2020 interview.

The Safety Arrangements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Dr. Daszak was possibly unaware of, or perhaps he knew all too well, the long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.

One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Dr. Daszak mentioned in his December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have been as defenseless against the SARS2 virus, if it were generated in their lab, as their Beijing colleagues were against SARS1.

A second reason for the severe danger of novel coronaviruses has to do with the required levels of lab safety. There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a new BSL4 lab, but its state of readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote in a cable of 19 January 2018.

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL4 lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL4 conditions. You have to wear a space suit, do operations in closed cabinets and accept that everything will take twice as long. So the rules assigning each kind of virus to a given safety level were laxer than some might think was prudent.

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” says Dr. Ebright.

“It also is clear,” he adds, “that this work never should have been funded and never should have been performed.”

This is a view he holds regardless of whether or not the SARS2 virus ever saw the inside of a lab.

Concern about safety conditions at the Wuhan lab was not, it seems, misplaced. According to a fact sheet issued by the State Department on January 21,2021, “ The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

David Asher, a fellow of the Hudson Institute and former consultant to the State Department, provided more detail about the incident at a seminar. Knowledge of the incident came from a mix of public information and “some high end information collected by our intelligence community,” he said. Three people working at a BSL3 lab at the institute fell sick within a week of each other with severe symptoms that required hospitalization. This was “the first known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be COVID-19.” Influenza could not completely be ruled out but seemed unlikely in the circumstances, he said.

Comparing the Rival Scenarios of SARS2 Origin

The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.

1) The place of origin.

Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the Covid-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.

It’s a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.

2) Natural history and evolution

The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further 4 the epidemic took off.

But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV,” they wrote.

Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Dr. Baric writes that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”

A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.

The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Dr. Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and that they have identified it — a humanized mouse from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

3) The furin cleavage site.

The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.

Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2’s furin cleavage site to be generated, even though it can’t completely be ruled out. The site’s four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”

So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

4) A Question of Codons

There’s another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path for a natural emergence origin even further.

As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus’s least popular codon for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.

Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its cousin viruses don’t, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The CCT codes for proline, the two CGG’s for two arginines, and the GC is the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5% of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2’s furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity.

“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”

Dr. Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

A Third Scenario of Origin

There’s a variation on the natural emergence scenario that’s worth considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Dr. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans — it didn’t need to because it could already attack human cells efficiently.

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn’t.

“Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection,” write a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.

Still, Dr. Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with Covid-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature of 8 similar viruses that Dr. Shi reports she collected at the same time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the ancestry of SARS2. But all that is a story for another time. The point here is that bat viruses can infect people directly, though only in special conditions.

So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus researchers do. Dr. Shi says she and her group collected more than 1,300 bat samples during some 8 visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012 and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan caves.

Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.

The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the bat-preferred codons.

Where We Are So Far

Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.

That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?

Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.

The records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly hold much relevant information. But Chinese authorities seem unlikely to release them given the substantial chance that they incriminate the regime in the creation of the pandemic. Absent the efforts of some courageous Chinese whistle-blower, we may already have at hand just about all of the relevant information we are likely to get for a while.

So it’s worth trying to assess responsibility for the pandemic, at least in a provisional way, because the paramount goal remains to prevent another one. Even those who aren’t persuaded that lab escape is the more likely origin of the SARS2 virus may see reason for concern about the present state of regulation governing gain-of-function research. There are two obvious levels of responsibility: the first, for allowing virologists to perform gain-of-function experiments, offering minimal gain and vast risk; the second, if indeed SARS2 was generated in a lab, for allowing the virus to escape and unleash a world-wide pandemic. Here are the players who seem most likely to deserve blame.

1. Chinese virologists

First and foremost, Chinese virologists are to blame for performing gain-of-function experiments in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions which were far too lax to contain a virus of unexpected infectiousness like SARS2. If the virus did indeed escape from their lab, they deserve the world’s censure for a foreseeable accident that has already caused the deaths of 3 million people.

True, Dr. Shi was trained by French virologists, worked closely with American virologists and was following international rules for the containment of coronaviruses. But she could and should have made her own assessment of the risks she was running. She and her colleagues bear the responsibility for their actions.

I have been using the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a shorthand for all virological activities in Wuhan. It’s possible that SARS2 was generated in some other Wuhan lab, perhaps in an attempt to make a vaccine that worked against all coronaviruses. But until the role of other Chinese virologists is clarified, Dr. Shi is the public face of Chinese work on coronaviruses, and provisionally she and her colleagues will stand first in line for opprobrium.

2. Chinese authorities

China’s central authorities did not generate SARS2 but they sure did their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and China’s responsibility for it. They suppressed all records at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and closed down its virus databases. They released a trickle of information, much of which may have been outright false or designed to misdirect and mislead. They did their best to manipulate the WHO’s inquiry into the virus’s origins, and led the commission’s members on a fruitless run-around. So far they have proved far more interested in deflecting blame than in taking the steps necessary to prevent a second pandemic.

3. The worldwide community of virologists

Virologists around the world are a loose-knit professional community. They write articles in the same journals. They attend the same conferences. They have common interests in seeking funds from governments and in not being overburdened with safety regulations.

Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with gain-of-function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014 and it was raised in 2017.

The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2. Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world have been playing with fire.

Their behavior has long alarmed other biologists. In 2014 scientists calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged caution on creating new viruses. In prescient words, they specified the risk of creating a SARS2-like virus. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” they wrote. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control.”

When molecular biologists discovered a technique for moving genes from one organism to another, they held a public conference at Asilomar in 1975 to discuss the possible risks. Despite much internal opposition, they drew up a list of stringent safety measures that could be relaxed in future — and duly were — when the possible hazards had been better assessed.

When the CRISPR technique for editing genes was invented, biologists convened a joint report by the U.S., UK and Chinese national academies of science to urge restraint on making heritable changes to the human genome. Biologists who invented gene drives have also been open about the dangers of their work and have sought to involve the public.

You might think the SARS2 pandemic would spur virologists to re-evaluate the benefits of gain-of-function research, even to engage the public in their deliberations. But no. Many virologists deride lab escape as a conspiracy theory and others say nothing. They have barricaded themselves behind a Chinese wall of silence which so far is working well to allay, or at least postpone, journalists’ curiosity and the public’s wrath. Professions that cannot regulate themselves deserve to get regulated by others, and this would seem to be the future that virologists are choosing for themselves.

4. The US Role in Funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology

From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from [Dr. Fauci's] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to unsafe foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. Why didn’t the two agencies therefore halt the Federal funding as apparently required to do so by law? Because someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium.

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research.

“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.

When the moratorium was ended in 2017 it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.

According to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci “have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby nullifying the P3CO Framework.”

In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the ensuing reporting system, “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.”

Possibly the two officials had to take into account matters not evident in the public record, such as issues of national security. Perhaps funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed to have ties with Chinese military virologists, provided a window into Chinese biowarfare research. But whatever other considerations may have been involved, the bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions. The prudence of this decision can be questioned, whether or not SARS2 and the death of 3 million people was the result of it.

In Conclusion

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue. Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Dr. Andersen and Dr. Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the 2nd and 3rd names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020.

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Dr. Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”

Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with [duplicity] under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the [illegitimate] Biden Administration in handling the Covid epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such research would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?

The virologists’ omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss.

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump Administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of National Intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin. (read more)

“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

— Aldous Huxley

An investigation into the leaching of micro and nano particles and chemical pollutants from disposable face masks – linked to the COVID-19 pandemic

There is a concerning amount of evidence that suggests that DPFs waste can potentially have a substantial environmental impact by releasing pollutants simply by exposing them to water. DPFs release small physical pollutants such as micro and nano size particles; mainly consistent with plastic fibres and silicate grains, which are well documented to have adverse effects on the environment and public health. In addition to the physical particles, harmful chemicals such as heavy metals (lead, cadmium and antimony), and organic pollutants are also readily released from the DPFs when submerged in water. Many of these toxic pollutants have bio-accumulative properties when released into the environment and this research shows that DPFs could be one of the main sources of these environmental contaminants during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. It is, therefore, imperative that stricter regulations need to be enforced during manufacturing and disposal/recycling of DPFs to minimise the environmental impact of DPFs.

Secondary to environmental concerns, there is a need to understand the impact of such particle leaching on public health, as all DPFs released micro/nano particles and heavy metals to the water during our investigation. One of the main concerns with these particles is that they were easily detached from face masks and leached into the water with no agitation, which suggests that these particles are mechanically unstable and readily available to be detached. Therefore, a full investigation is necessary to determine the quantities and potential impacts of these particles leaching into the environment, and the levels being inhaled by users during normal breathing. This is a significant concern, especially for health care professionals, key workers, and children who are mandated to wear masks for large proportions of the working or school day (6–12 hours). (read more)

The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown

Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind.

Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.

The spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t. Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information. And in their eagerness to protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs. Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as on a hiking trail. But vigilance can have unintended consequences when it imposes on other people’s lives. Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.

“Those who are vaccinated on the left seem to think overcaution now is the way to go, which is making people on the right question the effectiveness of the vaccines,” Gandhi told me. Public figures and policy makers who try to dictate others’ behavior without any scientific justification for doing so erode trust in public health and make people less willing to take useful precautions. The marginal gains of staying shut down might not justify the potential backlash.

Even as the very effective COVID-19 vaccines have become widely accessible, many progressives continue to listen to voices preaching caution over relaxation. Anthony Fauci recently said he wouldn’t travel or eat at restaurants even though he’s fully vaccinated, despite CDC guidance that these activities can be safe for vaccinated people who take precautions. California Governor Gavin Newsom refused in April to guarantee that the state’s schools would fully reopen in the fall, even though studies have demonstrated for months that modified in-person instruction is safe. Leaders in Brookline, Massachusetts, decided this week to keep a local outdoor mask mandate in place, even though the CDC recently relaxed its guidance for outdoor mask use. And scolding is still a popular pastime. “At least in San Francisco, a lot of people are glaring at each other if they don’t wear masks outside,” Gandhi said, even though the risk of outdoor transmission is very low.

Scientists, academics, and writers who have argued that some very low-risk activities are worth doing as vaccination rates rise—even if the risk of exposure is not zero—have faced intense backlash. After Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, argued in The Atlantic in March that families should plan to take their kids on trips and see friends and relatives this summer, a reader sent an email to her supervisors at the university suggesting that Oster be promoted to a leadership role in the field of “genocide encouragement.” “Far too many people are not dying in our current global pandemic, and far too many children are not yet infected,” the reader wrote. “With the upcoming consequences of global warming about to be felt by a wholly unprepared worldwide community, I believe the time is right to get young scholars ready to follow in Dr. Oster’s footsteps and ensure the most comfortable place to be is white [and] upper-middle-class.” (“That email was something,” Oster told me.)

Sure, some mean people spend their time chiding others online. But for many, remaining guarded even as the country opens back up is an earnest expression of civic values. “I keep coming back to the same thing with the pandemic,” Alex Goldstein, a progressive PR consultant who was a senior adviser to Representative Ayanna Pressley’s 2018 campaign, told me. “Either you believe that you have a responsibility to take action to protect a person you don’t know or you believe you have no responsibility to anybody who isn’t in your immediate family.”

Goldstein and his wife decided early on in the pandemic that they were going to take restrictions extremely seriously and adopt the most cautious interpretation of when it was safe to do anything. He’s been shaving his own head since the summer (with “bad consequences,” he said). Although rugby teams have been back on the fields in Boston, where he lives, his team still won’t participate, for fear of spreading germs when players pile on top of one another in a scrum. He spends his mornings and evenings sifting through stories of people who have recently died from the coronavirus for Faces of COVID, a Twitter feed he started to memorialize deaths during the pandemic. “My fear is that we will not learn the lessons of the pandemic, because we will try to blow through the finish line as fast as we can and leave it in the rearview mirror,” he said.

Progressive politics focuses on fighting against everyday disasters, such as climate change and poverty, struggles that may shape how some people see the pandemic. “If you’re deeply concerned that the real disaster that’s happening here is that the social contract has been broken and the vulnerable in society are once again being kicked while they’re down, then you’re going to be hypersensitive to every detail, to every headline, to every infection rate,” Scott Knowles, a professor at the South Korean university KAIST who studies the history of disasters, told me. Some progressives believe that the pandemic has created an opening for ambitious policy proposals. “Among progressive political leaders around here, there’s a lot of talk around: We’re not going back to normal, because normal wasn’t good enough,” Goldstein said.

In practice, though, progressives don’t always agree on what prudent policy looks like. Consider the experience of Somerville, Massachusetts, the kind of community where residents proudly display rainbow yard signs declaring In this house … we believe science is real. In the 2016 Democratic primary, 57 percent of voters there supported Bernie Sanders, and this year the Democratic Socialists of America have a shot at taking over the city council. As towns around Somerville began going back to in-person school in the fall, Mayor Joseph Curtatone and other Somerville leaders delayed a return to in-person learning. A group of moms—including scientists, pediatricians, and doctors treating COVID-19 patients—began to feel frustrated that Somerville schools weren’t welcoming back students. They considered themselves progressive and believed that they understood teachers’ worries about getting sick. But they saw the city’s proposed safety measures as nonsensical and unscientific—a sort of hygiene theater that prioritized the appearance of protection over getting kids back to their classrooms.

With Somerville kids still at home, contractors conducted in-depth assessments of the city’s school buildings, leading to proposals that included extensive HVAC-system overhauls and the installation of UV-sterilization units and even automatic toilet flushers—renovations with a proposed budget of $7.5 million. The mayor told me that supply-chain delays and protracted negotiations with the local teachers’ union slowed the reopening process. “No one wanted to get kids back to school more than me … It’s people needing to feel safe,” he said. “We want to make sure that we’re eliminating any risk of transmission from person to person in schools and carrying that risk over to the community.”

Months slipped by, and evidence mounted that schools could reopen safely. In Somerville, a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor who works to promote equitable access to clean water and sanitation during disease outbreaks, told me. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.”

In March, Erika Uyterhoeven, the democratic-socialist state representative for Somerville, compared the plight of teachers to that of Amazon workers and meatpackers, and described the return to in-person classes as part of a “push in a neoliberal society to ensure, over and above the well-being of educators, that our kids are getting a competitive education compared to other suburban schools.” (She later asked the socialist blog that ran her comments to remove that quote, because so many parents found her statements offensive.) In Somerville, “everyone wants to be actively anti-racist. Everyone believes Black lives matter. Everyone wants the Green New Deal,” Elizabeth Pinsky, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. “No one wants to talk about … how to actually get kindergartners onto the carpet of their teachers.” Most elementary and middle schoolers in Somerville finally started back in person this spring, with some of the proposed building renovations in place. Somerville hasn’t yet announced when high schoolers will go back full-time, and Curtatone wouldn’t guarantee that schools will be open for in-person instruction in the fall.

Policy makers’ decisions about how to fight the pandemic are fraught because they have such an impact on people’s lives. But personal decisions during the coronavirus crisis are fraught because they seem symbolic of people’s broader value systems. When vaccinated adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re working through the trauma of the past year, in which the brokenness of America’s medical system was so evident. When they keep their kids out of playgrounds and urge friends to stay distanced at small outdoor picnics, they are continuing the spirit of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lonely asceticism. For many people, this kind of behavior is a form of good citizenship. That’s a hard idea to give up.

And so as the rest of vaccinated America begins its summer of bacchanalia, rescheduling long-awaited dinner parties and medium-size weddings, the most hard-core pandemic progressives are left, Cassandra-like, to preach their peers’ folly. Every weekday, Zachary Loeb publishes four “plague poems” on Twitter—little missives about the headlines and how it feels to live through a pandemic. He is personally progressive: He blogs about topics like Trump’s calamitous presidency and the future of climate change. He also studies disaster history. (“I jokingly tell my students that my reputation in the department is as Mr. Doom, but once I have earned my Ph.D., I will officially be Dr. Doom,” he told me.) His Twitter avatar is the plague doctor: a beaked, top-hat-wearing figure who traveled across European towns treating victims of the bubonic plague. Last February, Loeb started stocking up on cans of beans; last March, he left his office, and has not been back since. This April, as the country inched toward half of the population getting a first dose of a vaccine and daily deaths dipped below 1,000, his poems became melancholy. “When you were young, wise old Aesop tried to warn you about this moment,” he wrote, “wherein the plague is the steady tortoise, and we are the overconfident hare.” (read more)

Tucker Carlson Asks: How Many Americans Have Died After Taking the Covid Vaccines?

We are told a lot about the upsides of Covid vaccines but rarely discuss the risks. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken it upon himself to ask how many Americans have died after taking the vaccine.




Here is a transcript of part of the video.


Worth reading – or watching – in full.
(read more)

One in Five Electric Car Owners in California Switched Back to Gas-Powered

Meanwhile, governors of California and 11 other [leftist] states urge Biden to back phasing out gas-powered vehicle sales by 2035.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order banning the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035.

As with his dining habits, Newsom’s inclination to virtue signal may prove toxic to his continued political career. Unfortunately for him, it seems that the realities of “green energy” are not living up to the promises made by green justice advocates.


While ready access to the proper type of charging station was important, other economic factors also played a role.


[...]
There is an additional consideration about just how green electric vehicles are, which officials are starting to assess. In about ten years, the lithium batteries powering those cars will start failing. As a result, those in charge will soon need to address the disposal of these units containing a substantial amount of hazardous materials that are potentially reactive:


Of course, Newsom is trying to export this energy insanity throughout the country, perhaps to prevent even more citizens from fleeing to more liberty-embracing states. He has joined the governors of 11 other states pressuring Biden to issue a presidential executive order banning new, gasoline-fueled cars by 2035.


It is hoped, the rest of the nation won’t have to go through this executive inanity.

I suspect that we can add the practical problems surrounding this executive order to the list of significant issues that can and will be highlighted by Newsom’s recall challengers. (read more)

Federal Judge [Appointed by Trump] Throws Out CDC Eviction Moratorium

“The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”

U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich threw out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium. The CDC implemented the moratorium last year because of COVID-19 and extended it until June 2021.

The CDC used the moratorium as a way to contain COVID so cash-strapped people would have a chance to stay in their homes instead of moving around or end up in shelters. Officials applied the rules to public and private residences.

States and local governments enacted separate eviction moratoriums. Friedrich’s ruling will only affect the CDC moratorium.

Let me try to summarize. The Public Health Service Act grants the Secretary of Human Health and Services “broad authority to make and enforce regulations necessary to prevent the spread of disease.” Friedrich noted it does make the power “limitless.”

Basically, the act limits it to the residence:



The HHS Secretary “may provide for ‘other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.'” However, Friedrich went back to the act and found that the regulations “must be directed toward ‘specific targets “found” to be sources of infection.'”

She wrote:


Friedrich said the department interpretation of the act does not give a limit to the secretary’s authority just as long as the secretary “can make a determination that a given measure is ‘necessary’ to combat the interstate or international spread of disease.”

Friedrich also pointed out that the CDC has never used the act “in this manner.” HHS even confirmed the department never used it “‘to implement a temporary eviction moratorium,’ and ‘has rarely [been]utilized…for disease-control purposes.”

“It is the role of the political branches, and not the courts, to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease, even during a global pandemic,” Friedrich concluded. “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”

HHS asked Friedrich to limit her rulings. She decided “the court must set aside the CDC order” since the “plain language of the Public Service Act unambiguously forecloses the nationwide eviction moratorium.”

White House Press Secretary said the DOJ will talk about the ruling later today.

From The Wall Street Journal:

(read more)

Fake COVID-19 Testing Certificates Now Slamming Airlines

Fake CDC COVID vaccine cards are now the new, hot commodity on the dark web

Airlines around the world are encountering fake COVID-19 certificates as passengers attempt to avoid both the time and expense of a COVID test prior to their travel.

The airline industry anticipates more fraud if countries go forward with their plans to require vaccination certificates.

The documents are often the Covid-19 test results required by many countries on arrival. The International Air Transport Association industry body says it has tracked fake certificates in multiple countries, from France to Brazil, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Border control authorities and police forces have also reported arrests of people selling documents in the U.K., Spain, Indonesia and Zimbabwe, among others.

The problem is hitting international flights more than domestic ones, which typically don’t require certification at the moment. Airlines that are more dependent on cross-border travel, particularly those operating in Europe, are growing increasingly alarmed as they look to the summer, when they still hope demand will start to return.

The proliferation of fake health certificates is exposing a logistical blind spot, as airlines rush to navigate post-pandemic travel standards and retool their systems to ease compliance—and spur demand. Airlines say their staff aren’t equipped to handle and police all the new health certifications needed and worry the problem will be exacerbated when some countries also start to ask for vaccination certificates.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and those in 44 other states are investigating the online sale of fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards.


The problem is global. For example, Finnish authorities identified one company issuing fake certificates.


In Spain, authorities arrested a pharmacy worker who sold fake negative COVID-19 test certificates so that people could travel to Morocco.


As nations and businesses evaluate possible “vaccine certification” requirements, it is important to note that yellow fever vaccination certificates have been globally accepted for years. But there is significant fraud with those cards as well.


The problem will clearly not be confined to Africa or Brazil either, especially if it becomes a requirement to enter a large public venue (e.g., concert or sporting event, as has been proposed). (read more)

All it takes is an All-in-one color printer/scanner, cardstock, and printable white Mylar adhesive sheet. Scan a real one and save as png. Open paint Cut the vaccine labels and save to different PNG file. The vaccine labels are the only thing that needs color. Edit the original cut PNG restoring it to a Vaccine card that needs to completed and print it to the cardstock. Open Word and type you legal name and date of birth in Cambria font 10 pt. Copy and paste the png images of the vaccine and lot number in the word document and print. Cut out the stickers and place on card. Less than 15 minutes worth of work for the first one. Any follow up certs take less than a minute.

This is all hypothetical of course.
Tsquared | May 5, 2021 at 11:42 am