What a difference a few years can make.
With key “conspiracy theories” about Covid-19’s origins now being validated by the same voices that once mocked them, the collapse of the entire web of lies surrounding the pandemic appears almost inevitable—a matter of time.
Both the left-wing NY Times and the Boston Globe have executed “a 180” on the subject of what sparked the pandemic, with a Times opinion piece declaring, “We Were Badly Misled about the Event that Changed Our Lives.”
The article accuses leading scientists of engaging in a deceitful cover-up regarding the virus’s true origins and misleading the American people during the pandemic.
High-ranking public health officials insisted that the virus entered the human population “naturally” from an infected animal. Prominent experts disagreed, asserting that the most likely source of the outbreak was a lab accident, as viral features examined under a microscope indicated human tampering.
These independent voices incurred the wrath of public health authorities who sought to silence and discredit the lab leak theory with all the tools at their disposal.
It persisted in slowly gaining traction, however, with a comprehensive Congressional probe in December 2024 confirming its validity. An important study carried out in Germany in 2000 but kept under wraps until this month, agreed with these findings, the Deutsche Welle (DW) reported.
The German report noted the Wuhan lab’s serious breaches of safety protocols and the high risk of a lab accident happening there.
Fake Bombshell
The NY Times piece is written as a breathless, self-righteous narrative whose author seemed to have just stumbled across the shocking saga of how scientists and public health leaders lied and bamboozled the American people.
There is nothing new about this scandal—the facts have been on display since 2000-2001, as will be seen below. But the Times, in the voice of Columbia University Professor Zeynep Tufekci, fosters the impression that this bombshell information just recently came to light, perhaps to cover its tracks when it chose to bury the story back in 2021.
“It has emerged that safety precautions at the Wuhan lab in question “might have been terrifyingly lax,” Tufekci wrote, adding darkly, “Perhaps we were misled on purpose.”
The NY Times op-ed triggered a backlash from readers who say the paper’s admission of having championed the wrong cause comes five years too late. “Remember when the NYT would call you a misinformation spreader, and social media platforms would ban you for believing COVID-19 originated in a lab?” one reader posted.
Another user wrote: “Any so-called Covid reckoning from the Times that fails to confront its own relentless lies isn’t a reckoning at all.”
Critics also note that that the op-ed revealed itself as “limited hangout,” a term used for a propaganda strategy in which a portion of a scandal is revealed to bolster the speaker’s credibility, but which omits crucial details or mixes in misinformation to keep the listener from learning the full truth.
The “limited hangout” in the article admits that a group of scientists who believed that the virus evolved naturally mounted a smear campaign against those who pushed the lab accident theory. But those who vilified the lab leak proponents had a reason, the writer hastens to explain. It was because many of them, in her words, “were acting in bad faith.”
“They were using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science; they were out to inflame public opinion and to get attention,” author Tufekci insists, laying bare her own prejudice while offering no evidence to support her slurs against reputable scientists.
Perhaps what is most significant about this article is what is missing from it. The op-ed betrays its bias by shielding from accountability the powerful heads of NIH and NIAID, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, who reportedly engineered the cover-up from behind the scenes.
The Times appears to be asking the reader to believe that a handful of scientists had the political clout and audacity to manipulate the powerful heads of NIH and NIAID into doing their bidding, instead of the other way around.
The article goes on to recount how the group of conspiratorial scientists allegedly scrubbed emails, bought burner phones, held secret conferences, and shared tricks about how to hide their communications and prevent public records exposure.
All in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.
Captured Emails Reveal the Conspiracy
This multi-faceted subterfuge took place even as the officials and scientists were warning each other in writing that the virus must have leaked from the lab, retrieved email messages show.
Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, for example, wrote in the conspirators’ secret Slack channel, “The lab escape version of this is so likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
David Morens, then senior advisor to Anthony Fauci himself, wrote to EcoHealth president Peter Daszak saying, “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails, and if we found them, we’d delete them.”
The NY Times article described how Daszak drafted and circulated a “natural origins” letter while scheming to hide his tracks. He assured his recruited team of signatories that the letter “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” Meaning, himself.
The letter, published in the prestigious Lancet, stated that the signatories, all renowned scientists, stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet published Daszak’s fake letter shaming respected scientists for peddling “conspiracy theories” and has never retracted it.
“Big Tech was censoring posts about the Wuhan lab leak. The media was calling people who talked about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theorists,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La, noted at the time. “All while Fauci himself was emailing about Covid-19 possibly leaking from the Wuhan lab. Let that sink in.”
The motives for wanting to kill all speculation that the pandemic began with a lab leak are quite transparent. If the Covid-19 virus had indeed escaped from research they funded, Daszak, Fauci and Collins would almost certainly be held culpable.
For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s radar, Daszak and other virologists had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories, partially funded by NIH and NIAID, they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature.
They insisted they could do so safely, and that by staying a step ahead of nature, they could predict and prevent public outbreaks caused by the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people.
Experts say they were courting disaster.
Any minor lab accident could torpedo the entire mission and wreak utter havoc; a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, a poorly labeled bottle, an overtired researcher forgetting some aspect of safety protocol—the list of possibilities is endless.
But proponents insisted on pursuing this most dangerous game.
It’s possible, the NY Times article finally admits, that the scientists chose not to go public with their research because it was so “risky.” Like “test[ing] possible gas leaks by lighting a match.”
In other words, were the true facts revealed, the role these men played in lighting the spark that launched the pandemic might explode in their faces, sealing their doom.
They Did not Follow the Science, They Betrayed it
The Boston Globe article noted above promotes the views of a new book, In the Wake of Covid, that examines where American science and democracy in the hands of an incompetent leadership utterly failed the public.
Less than two years ago, the Globe castigated anyone who dared challenge the motives and expertise of “America’s leading doctor.” Today, the paper claims that former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, former NIH Francis Collins and their cohorts “did not follow the science, they betrayed it.”
The article slams Fauci for pressing for lockdowns even though experts had warned for years that there was little evidence to support such a drastic intervention.
The costs of the shutdowns, as is well-known, were enormous: massive learning loss, increase in domestic abuse, the agony of leaving loved ones to die alone in nursing homes and emergency rooms; the trillions of dollars to stave off economic ruin and other devastating consequences.
Fauci consistently denied the harmful fallout of his policies and even brazenly denied–despite a vast amount of video-recorded evidence—that he had ever urged lockdowns.
In addition, he threw all his weight behind the experimental vaccine mandates that were neither safe nor effective as promised, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties for himself and co-workers at NIAID and NIH.
[It has taken multiple FOIA lawsuits, but new newly disclosed NIH data, reported by the NY Post, shows the agency and its scientists collected a shocking $710 million in royalties, just during the pandemic, between late 2021 and the end of 2023.]
The people who should have held these officials to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job, the Boston Globe op-ed charged.
Shameful Legacy
In October 2021, records obtained by a FOIA request by a team of scientists investigating the origins of Covid-19, directly implicated NIH director Francis Collins, and NIAID director Anthony Fauci.
These documents included records of federal grants for gain of function research that were channeled to the Wuhan Lab by NIH and NIAID, as well as progress reports that outlined the exact experiments carried out with the help of the grants.
As these documents surfaced, NIH director Francis Collins who had denied to Congress under oath any role in funding gain of function experiments, abruptly announced his resignation. Fauci continued to hotly protest his innocence for another year, finally stepping down in Sept 2022.
Despite massive efforts to suppress the facts, a scathing comprehensive Congressional Report in December 2024 prompted the gradual shifting of the narrative surrounding the Covid-19’s origins.
The document, based on months of congressional hearings and relentless probing, found that Fauci and Collins had orchestrated a vast cover up to hide the virus’ true origins, and to shield themselves from accountability in funding high-risk gain of function experiments that may have sparked the pandemic.
In the wake of the Congressional Report and a growing consensus among federal agencies, authorities have established that the pandemic was almost certainly sparked by a lab leak. Media outlets that served almost as a propaganda arm of the Biden administration are now distancing themselves from the deceitful positions the directors of NIH and NIAID espoused on Covid-19’s origins.
Crimes he may have assumed he got away with are now coming back to haunt Dr. Fauci in the press, even though he received a pardon from former President Biden for all past and potential crimes he may have committed.
Dr. Fauci has “untold deaths on his head” for suppressing early treatment for the virus, Dr. Robert Redfield who led the CDC during President Trump’s first term, told Newsweek.
Fauci censored and demonized doctors who used early treatment to save millions of lives, Redfield said.
Under instructions from NIAID’s director, medical boards across the country threatened doctors who used early treatment medications such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine with the loss of their medical license.
In addition, Fauci forced on hospitals across the country a Covid-19 protocol that mandated the use of remdesivir—an exorbitant drug known to cause fatal kidney damage while showing no benefit for Covid sickness,” Redfield noted. The drug tragically claimed untold lives, he said.
Redfield stated his contention, as quoted in Newsweek, that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a U.S. biodefense program.” He said the research was funded by NIH, the State Department, USAID, and the Defense Department.
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Gain of Function Continues
Far from being halted in the wake of the Wuhan scandal, gain of function research continues unimpeded not only in Wuhan but Chapel Hill, North Carolina and in multiple laboratories and research centers in the United States, posing serious risks to human life.
“Neither the government nor the public can afford to look away,” Sen. Rand told a Washington DC campus in Nov. 2023. “We should treat this research as we do nuclear weapons—as the potential threat to human life is even greater.
“If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal,” writes Professor Tufekci in the NY Times op-ed.
“Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.”
What these programs essentially involve is digging exotic viruses out of caves and jungles where humans might never encounter them. The researchers then transport them to labs in key cities, tinker with them to make them more dangerous and transmissible, and publish the results to the world.
“To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris,” Sen. Paul emphasized.
“Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.”
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Censorship and Journalistic Integrity
As noted earlier, the New York Times opinion piece explores the cover-up of Covid-19’s origins as though this saga has only just come to light. In reality, the information is about five years old but was intentionally downplayed—or outright ignored—by most mainstream media outlets, including the NY Times and the Boston Globe, to conform to the culture of censorship.
Those challenging the mainstream narrative—that the virus had nothing to do with a lab leak, and certainly nothing to do with gain of function experiments—were trashed as misinformation spreaders, political opportunists and conspiracy theorists.
Yet, thanks to the dogged work and integrity of journalists at The New York Post, Fox News, Telegraph of London and a handful of other outlets who stood up to harassment and intimidation, this newspaper, too, was able to piece together some of the covert schemes that kept the truth about Covid-19 hidden.
Yated Ne’eman carried the story in two lengthy features; in October 2021 (NIH Director Steps Down Amid Growing Scandal About Covid-19 Origins), and in November 2021 (Revelations From the Great Covid Cover-up).
In addition to describing the draconian shutdown of scientific debate over the lab leak theory and the orchestrated cover-up, these articles exposed the deeper roots of the scandal.
They document the eye-opening assertion of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, that government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in cooperation with an American research firm, EcoHealth Alliance, was trying to create a coronavirus “shockingly similar to the Covid-19 virus.”
To quote from the November 2021 Yated article: “Rand had published an explosive op-ed that ripped aside the veil masking the role of these federal agencies, as well as some of the key actors involved in funding dangerous gain of function research.”
“Dozens of government officials, including Fauci and Collins, were privy to the proposal from Wuhan to create a virulent coronavirus, Sen. Paul elaborated in a 2021 Fox News appearance.”
Fauci was not only privy to the plan, the article explained, he reportedly found a way to channel funding for it. The head of NIAID used multiple strategies to conceal his role in the gain of function initiative, including denying that role under oath during Senate committee hearings, Sen. Paul alleged.
The controversial proposal, dubbed ‘Defuse,’ called for creating a virus “genetically very similar if not identical to Covid-19,” the senator said in the Fox News appearance.
The initiative came from the aforementioned British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a close Fauci ally. In seeking government funding for his gain of function research, Daszak sent his proposal to at least 15 federal agencies, including NIH, NIAID and many branches of the Defense Department.
“For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of Covid-19 and the Defuse project. Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that Defuse was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018,” Sen. Paul wrote.
“What does this mean? It means that at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Chinese lab were collaborating on gain of function research, and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public,” Sen. Paul charged.
Eventually, Daszak did get his funding. Thanks to the Deep State….
