Your newspapers are full of one “Seeker” on Covid-19 origin theory, an Indian-this-Indian-that entity. It’s such a fraud, such a big fraud. They are again trying to mislead you as they did for over a year on the “wet-market-origin” theory. Human beings is seems are no more than guinea pigs to these monsters.
All of a sudden, every media outlet is wondering if the Covid-19 was leaked out of a Wuhan lab and didn’t emerge from the wet market.
For over a year, it was considered a crackpot theory fit only for Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks looking to escalate tension with China. Now that Biden has announced an investigation, Liberals are jumping over each other to own it up.
Scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted these Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses for years. You modify naturally occurring infective agents—often found in animals such as bats—for the proclaimed purpose of ensuring humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic.
And this is a fact too that viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s. We also know now that several staff at Wuhan had got sick in late 2019. So, could Covid-19 too have escaped from Wuhan lab?
Who is in a position to answer this query? And who has interest in finding out the truth? China? US policy-makers? World Health Organization? Corporate Media?
What can be said with certainty that the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months. We are being told what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
And that’s because when nobody could’ve known it, we were fed that lab-leak theory was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia. And now that the story has switched 180 degrees, we are still being misdirected.
And we could understand its implications. For this story has the potential to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites. And challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.
Like it was debunked before, and propagated now, is an attempt to control our understanding of it. Humanity is being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
WHY?
This May, Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, in an in-depth investigation, made a strong case for a lab-leak, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.
Wade, through proof, highlighted that before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was cooperating with the US scientific establishment, and WHO officials on its virus experiments—known in scientific parlance as “gain-of-function” research.
China, with its iron hand, could bury this news. But in the United States, when you provide the grant, you would have to declare its reason. And that’s how we know that US was involved with the Wuhan lab. (Again, catch up on Wade article if you haven’t).
Gain-of-function experiments were paused during the second Obama administration for fear of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci—yes, the same US president’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. Yet if the lab leak theory is correct, the pandemic’s saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators. And so would be officials from the WHO, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.
That’s why lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by Western political, medical and media establishments. It was done out of naked interest.
Consider this complicity: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.
(Peter Daszak and Dr Anthony Fauci)
This is the same Daszak who has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak all along and continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.
The extent to which major media is continuing to collude, and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet—is illustrated by this article published by the BBC.
Now in this BBC piece, the media giant weighs both narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Interestingly, Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have most to lose from a serious investigation into Wuhan lab.
Why the West has now turned 180 Degree
So why after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly gone public with the possibility of a China lab leak?
Because not just Nicholas Wade’s article has blown open the doors on lab leak but also because number of scientists are now speaking up. The cat is out of bag.
The Journal Science published a letter recently from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-original theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both—a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.
And so the Biden administration’s Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred.
Biden’s investigation makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it’s nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media: The narrow focus on the lab-leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact – just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.
The Illusion of Truth
The Wuhan story tells us how elites wield their narrative power over us—to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking.
Here the illusion of truth, and not truth itself, is of utmost importance. That our leaders have our best interests, that the Western system is the best possible for our political and economic lives, and that we are on a steady path towards progress.
This job is done by corporate media. They would now indulge in lengthy, certainly lively—but carefully ring fenced and ultimately inconclusive—debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
This is corporate media’s task: A smooth transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty that the pandemic had an animal origin to a more hesitant, confusion picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. This is the possibility they are harping now even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
The questions we must ask though are:
- How did a sceptical, often raucous media sounded same for over a year on the origin of the Covid-19 theory;
- Why just one report by a former science writer penning in an obscure science magazine changed the media tack;
- Why did so many scientists who were silent on the lab-leak theory last year are now speaking up;
- Why should we believe that the same political establishment, scientists and corporate media are now telling the truth. That they have our welfare on mind; having lied to us or stayed silent for over a year.
Very few believe that our rulers are competent and moral. Scientists defer to a system which oversees research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. Journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures: They have no interesting in encouraging the public to question if it hurts the benefit of a tiny wealthy-elite.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
(This is an abridged version of an excellent piece by Jonathan Cook for UNZ Review).
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