Dr. Peter McCullough has been the world's most prominent and vocal advocate for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection in order to prevent hospitalization and death. On May 19, 2021, I interviewed him about his efforts as a treating physician and researcher. From his unique vantage point, he has observed and documented a PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING POLICY RESPONSE to the pandemic -- a policy response that may prove to be the greatest malpractice and malfeasance in the history of medicine and public health.

Dr. McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and Professor of Medicine at Texas A & M College of Medicine, Dallas, TX USA. Since the outset of the pandemic, Dr. McCullough has been a leader in the medical response to the COVID-19 disaster and has published “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection” the first synthesis of sequenced multidrug treatment of ambulatory patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the American Journal of Medicine and subsequently updated in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. He has 40 peer-reviewed publications on the infection and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 crisis in TheHill and on FOX NEWS Channel. On November 19, 2020, Dr. McCullough testified in the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and throughout 2021 in the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, Colorado General Assembly, and New Hampshire Senate concerning many aspects of the pandemic response.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, FACP, FACC, FAHA, FCRSA, FCCP, FNKF, FNLA
Professor of Medicine, Texas A & M College of Medicine
Board Certified Internist and Cardiologist
President Cardiorenal Society of America
Editor-in-Chief, Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine
Editor-in-Chief, Cardiorenal Medicine
Senior Associate Editor, American Journal of Cardiology
For more information about Dr. McCullough, please visit: https://heartplace.com/dr-peter-a-mccullough

Translated by Steven J. Willett

This is a black-figure terracotta pinax (plaque) from the 2nd half of the 6th-century BC. It has holes for hanging in a temple and depicts a prothesis scene, the lying-in-state of the deceased surrounded by the mourning families. Some of them are tearing their hair while others are gesticulating wildly in despair.

Infinite was, o man, the time before, until to light
you came, and infinite again to Hades.
What share of life is left remaining, either great as
a spot or even tinier than a spot?
A small harshly-straitened life is yours; for it never
is sweet, but sullen more than hated death.
Men carefully wrought from such a collection of bones
enframed, why fly to highest air and clouds?
O man, see how useless, when at the peak of thread
a worm is sitting on unwoven vesture:
it plucked so much, stripped so bare a skeleton leaf,
more hateful than a spider’s withered web.
From every dawn seek, O man, your breadth of strength,
and learn to slouch quite low in frugal life.
Always remember deep in thought so long as you dwell
among the living, you are framed from stubble.

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

The Long Road to ARPA-H

ARPA-H is not a new and exclusive Biden administration idea; there was a previous attempt to create a “health DARPA” during the Trump administration in late 2019. Biden began to promote the idea during his presidential campaign as early as June 2019, albeit using a very different justification for the agency than what had been pitched by its advocates to Trump. In 2019, the same foundation and individuals currently backing Biden’s ARPA-H had urged then president Trump to create “HARPA,” not for the main purpose of researching treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s, but to stop mass shootings before they happen through the monitoring of Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs.

Still from HARPA’s video “The Patients Are Waiting: How HARPA Will Change Lives Now”, Source: http://harpa.org

For the last few years, one man has been the driving force behind HARPA—former vice chair of General Electric and former president of NBCUniversal, Robert Wright. Through the Suzanne Wright Foundation (named for his late wife), Wright has spent years lobbying for an agency that “would develop biomedical capabilities—detection tools, treatments, medical devices, cures, etc.—for the millions of Americans who are not benefitting from the current system.” While he, like Biden, has cloaked the agency’s actual purpose by claiming it will be mainly focused on treating cancer, Wright’s 2019 proposal to his personal friend Donald Trump revealed its underlying ambitions.

As first proposed by Wright in 2019, the flagship program of HARPA would be SAFE HOME, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. SAFE HOME would suck up masses of private data from “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information from health-care providers to determine if an individual might be likely to commit a crime. The data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms “for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.”

The Department of Justice’s pre-crime approach known as DEEP was activated just months before Trump left office; it was also justified as a way to “stop mass shootings before they happen.” Soon after Biden’s inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to make pre-crime arrests as part of its approach toward combatting “domestic terror.” Given the history of Silicon Valley companies collaborating with the government on matters of warrantless surveillance, it appears that aspects of SAFE HOME may already be covertly active under Biden, only waiting for the formalization of ARPA-H/HARPA to be legitimized as public policy.

The national-security applications of Robert Wright’s HARPA are also illustrated by the man who was its lead scientific adviser—former head of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office Geoffrey Ling. Not only is Ling the main scientific adviser of HARPA, but the original proposal by Wright would have Ling both personally design HARPA and lead it once it was established. Ling’s work at DARPA can be summarized by BTO’s stated mission, which is to work toward merging “biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security.” BTO-favored technologies are also poised to be the mainstays of HARPA, which plans to specifically use “advancements in biotechnology, supercomputing, big data, and artificial intelligence” to accomplish its goals.

The direct DARPA connection to HARPA underscores that the agenda behind this coming agency dates back to the failed Bio-Surveillance project of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, which was launched after the events of September 11, 2001. TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project sought to develop the “necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches,” accomplishing this “by monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.”

While nominally focused on “bioterrorist attacks,” TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for “normal” disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.

That DARPA’s past total surveillance dragnet is coming back to life under a supposedly separate health-focused agency, and one that emulates its organizational model no less, confirms that many TIA-related programs were merely distanced from the Department of Defense when officially shut down. By separating the military from the public image of such technologies and programs, it made them more palatable to the masses, despite the military remaining heavily involved behind the scenes. As Unlimited Hangout has recently reported, major aspects of TIA were merely privatized, giving rise to companies such as Facebook and Palantir, which resulted in such DARPA projects being widely used and accepted. Now, under the guise of the proposed ARPA-H, DARPA’s original TIA would essentially be making a comeback for all intents and purposes as its own spin-off.

Silicon Valley, the Military and the Wearable “Revolution”

This most recent effort to create ARPA-H/HARPA combines well with the coordinated push of Silicon Valley companies into the field of health care, specifically Silicon Valley companies that double as contractors to US intelligence and/or the military (e.g., Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the like.

One interesting example is Amazon, which launched a wearable last year that purports to not only use biometrics to monitor people’s physical health and fitness but to track their emotional state as well. The previous year, Amazon acquired the online pharmacy PillPack, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which data from Amazon’s Halo wellness band is used to offer treatment recommendations that are then supplied by Amazon-owned PillPack.

Companies such as Amazon, Palantir, and Google are set to be intimately involved in ARPA-H’s activities. In particular, Google, which launched numerous health-tech initiatives in 2020, is set to have a major role in this new agency due to its long-standing ties to the Obama administration when Biden was vice president and to President Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander.

As mentioned, Lander is poised to play a major role in ARPA-H/HARPA if and when it materializes. Before becoming the top scientist in the country, Lander was president and founding director of the Broad Institute. While advertised as a partnership between MIT and Harvard, the Broad Institute is heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, with two former Google executives on its board, a partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners, and the former CEO of IBM, as well as some of its top endowments coming from prominent tech executives.

The Broad Institute, Source: https://www.broadinstitute.org

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was intimately involved with Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and who is close to the Democratic Party in general, chairs the Broad Institute as of this April. In March, Schmidt gave the institute $150 million to “connect biology and machine learning for understanding programs of life.” During his time on the Broad Institute board, Schmidt also chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a group of mostly Silicon Valley, intelligence, and military operatives who have now charted the direction of the US government’s policies on emerging tech and AI. Schmidt was also pitched as potential head of a tech-industry task force by the Biden administration.

Earlier, in January, the Broad Institute announced that its health-research platform, Terra, which was built with Google subsidiary Verily, would partner with Microsoft. As a result, Terra now allows Google and Microsoft to access a vast trove of genomic data that is poured into the platform by academics and research institutions from around the world.

In addition, last September, Google teamed up with the Department of Defense as part of a new AI-driven “predictive health” program that also has links to the US intelligence community. While initially focused on predicting cancer cases, this initiative clearly plans to expand to predicting the onset of other diseases before symptoms appear, including COVID-19. As noted by Unlimited Hangout at the time, one of the ulterior motives for the program, from Google’s perspective, was for Google to gain access to “the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,” which is held by the Defense Health Agency. Having exclusive access to this data is a huge boon for Google in its effort to develop and expand its growing suite of AI health-care products.

The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19–related biometric wearables for “returning to work safely.” Last December, it was announced that Hill Air Force Base in Utah would make biometric wearables a mandatory part of the uniform for some squadrons. For example, the airmen of the Air Force’s 649th Munitions Squadron must now wear a smart watch made by Garmin and a smart ring made by Oura as part of their uniform.

According to the Air Force, these devices detect biometric indicators that are then analyzed for 165 different biomarkers by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Philips Healthcare AI algorithm that “attempts to recognize an infection or virus around 48 hours before the onset of symptoms.” The development of that algorithm began well before the COVID-19 crisis and is a recent iteration of a series of military research projects that appear to have begun under the 2007 DARPA Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) project.

While of interest to the military, these wearables are primarily intended for mass use—a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a bio-surveillance program to be run by the national-security state. Starting first with the military makes sense from the national-security apparatus’s perspective, as the ability to monitor biometric data, including emotions, has obvious appeal for those managing the recently expanded “insider threat” programs in the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

One indicator of the push for mass use is that the same Oura smart ring being used by the Air Force was also recently utilized by the NBA to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks among basketball players. Prior to COVID-19, it was promoted for consumer use by members of the British Royal family and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for improving sleep. As recently as last Monday, Oura’s CEO, Harpeet Rai, said that the entire future of wearable health tech will soon be “proactive rather than reactive” because it will focus on predicting disease based on biometric data obtained from wearables in real time.

Another wearable tied to the military that is creeping into mass use is the BioButton and its predecessor the BioSticker. Produced by the company BioIntelliSense, the sleek new BioButton is advertised as a wearable system that is “a scalable and cost-effective solution for COVID-19 symptom monitoring at school, home and work.” BioIntelliSense received $2.8 million from the Pentagon last December to develop the BioButton and BioSticker wearables for COVID-19.

BioIntelliSense CEO James Mault poses with the company’s BioSticker wearable. Source: https://biointellisense.com

BioIntelliSense, cofounded and led by former Microsoft HealthVault developer James Mault, now has its wearable sensors being rolled out for widespread use on some college campuses and at some US hospitals. In some of those instances, the company’s wearables are being used to specifically monitor the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine as opposed to symptoms of COVID-19 itself. BioIntelliSense is currently running a study, partnered with Philips Healthcare and the University of Colorado, on the use of its wearables for early COVID-19 detection, which is entirely funded by the US military.

While the use of these wearables is currently “encouraged but optional” at these pilot locations, could there come a time when they are mandated in a workplace or by a government? It would not be unheard of, as several countries have already required foreign arrivals to be monitored through use of a wearable during a mandatory quarantine period. Saint Lucia is currently using BioButton for this purpose. Singapore, which seeks to be among the first “smart nations” in the world, has given every single one of its residents a wearable called a “TraceTogether token” for its contact-tracing program. Either the wearable token or the TraceTogether smartphone app is mandatory for all workplaces, shopping malls, hotels, schools, health-care facilities, grocery stores, and hair salons. Those without access to a smartphone are expected to use the “free” government-issued wearable token.

The Era of Digital Dictatorships Is Nearly Here

Making mandatory wearables the new normal not just for COVID-19 prevention but for monitoring health in general would institutionalize quarantining people who have no symptoms of an illness but only an opaque algorithm’s determination that vital signs indicate “abnormal” activity.

Given that no AI is 100 percent accurate and that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, such a system would be guaranteed to make regular errors: the question is how many. One AI algorithm being used to “predict COVID-19 outbreaks” in Israel and some US states is marketed by Diagnostic Robotics; the (likely inflated) accuracy rate the company provides for its product is only 73 percent. That means, by the company’s own admission, their AI is wrong 27 percent of the time. Probably, it is even less accurate, as the 73 percent figure has never been independently verified.

Adoption of these technologies has benefitted from the COVID-19 crisis, as supporters are seizing the opportunity to accelerate their introduction. As a result, their use will soon become ubiquitous if this advancing agenda continues unimpeded.

Though this push for wearables is obvious now, signs of this agenda were visible several years ago. In 2018, for instance, insurer John Hancock announced that it would replace its life insurance offerings with “interactive policies” that involve individuals having their health monitored by commercial health wearables. Prior to that announcement, John Hancock and other insurers such as Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare offered various rewards for policyholders who wore a fitness wearable and shared that data with their insurance company.

In another pre-COVID example, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article in August 2019 that claimed that wearables “encourage healthy behaviors and empower individuals to participate in their health.” The authors of the article, who are affiliated with Harvard, further claimed that “incentivizing use of these devices [wearables] by integrating them in insurance policies” may be an “attractive” policy approach. The use of wearables for policyholders has since been heavily promoted by the insurance industry, both prior to and after COVID-19, and some speculate that health insurers could soon mandate their use in certain cases or as a broader policy.

These biometric “fitness” devices—such as Amazon’s Halo—can monitor more than your physical vital signs, however, as they can also monitor your emotional state. ARPA-H/HARPA’s flagship SAFE HOME program reveals that the ability to monitor thoughts and feelings is an already existing goal of those seeking to establish this new agency.

According to World Economic Forum luminary and historian Yuval Noah Harari, the transition to “digital dictatorships” will have a “big watershed” moment once governments “start monitoring and surveying what is happening inside your body and inside your brain.” He says that the mass adoption of such technology would make human beings “hackable animals,” while those who abstain from having this technology on or in their bodies would become part of a new “useless” class. Harari has also asserted that biometric wearables will someday be used by governments to target individuals who have the “wrong” emotional reactions to government leaders.

Unsurprisingly, one of Harari’s biggest fans, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, has recently led his company into the development of a comprehensive biometric and “neural” wearable based on technology from a “neural interface” start-up that Facebook acquired in 2019. Per Facebook, the wearable “will integrate with AR [augmented reality], VR [virtual reality], and human neural signals” and is set to become commercially available soon. Facebook also notably owns the VR company Oculus Rift, whose founder, Palmer Luckey, now runs the US military AI contractor Anduril.

As recently reported, Facebook was shaped in its early days to be a private-sector replacement for DARPA’s controversial LifeLog program, which sought to both “humanize” AI and build profiles on domestic dissidents and terror suspects. LifeLog was also promoted by DARPA as “supporting medical research and the early detection of an emerging pandemic.”

It appears that current trends and events show that DARPA’s decades-long effort to merge “health security” and “national security” have now advanced further than ever before. This may partially be because Bill Gates, who has wielded significant influence over health policy globally in the last year, is a long-time advocate of fusing health security and national security to thwart both pandemics and “bioterrorists” before they can strike, as can be heard in his 2017 speech delivered at that year’s Munich Security Conference. That same year, Gates also publicly urged the US military to “focus more training on preparing to fight a global pandemic or bioterror attack.”

In the merging of “national security” and “health security,” any decision or mandate promulgated as a public health measure could be justified as necessary for “national security,” much in the same way that the mass abuses and war crimes that occurred during the post-9/11 “war on terror” were similarly justified by “national security” with little to no oversight. Yet, in this case, instead of only losing our civil liberties and control over our external lives, we stand to lose sovereignty over our individual bodies.

The NIH, which would house this new ARPA-H/HARPA, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars experimenting with the use of wearables since 2015, not only for detecting disease symptoms but also for monitoring individuals’ diets and illegal drug consumption. Biden played a key part in that project, known as the Precision Medicine initiative, and separately highlighted the use of wearables in cancer patients as part of the Obama administration’s related Cancer Moonshot program. The third Obama-era health-research project was the NIH’s BRAIN initiative, which was launched, among other things, to “develop tools to record, mark, and manipulate precisely defined neurons in the living brain” that are determined to be linked to an “abnormal” function or a neurological disease. These initiatives took place at a time when Eric Lander was the cochair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology while still leading the Broad Institute. It is hardly a coincidence that Eric Lander is now Biden’s top science adviser, elevated to a new cabinet-level position and set to guide the course of ARPA-H/HARPA.

Thus, Biden’s newly announced agency, if approved by Congress, would integrate those past Obama-era initiatives with Orwellian applications under one roof, but with even less oversight than before. It would also seek to expand and mainstream the uses of these technologies and potentially move toward developing policies that would mandate their use.

If ARPA-H/HARPA is approved by Congress and ultimately established, it will be used to resurrect dangerous and long-standing agendas of the national-security state and its Silicon Valley contractors, creating a “digital dictatorship” that threatens human freedom, human society, and potentially the very definition of what it means to be human.

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.”

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance

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.

Kristian G. Andersen, Scripps Research

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.

The spike proteins on the coronavirus’s surface determine which animal it can infect. CDC.gov

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.

Dr. Zheng-li Shi in a high safety (level BSL4) lab. Her coronavirus research was done in the much lower safety levels of BSL2 and BSL3 labs.

How can we be so sure?

Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the 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 the 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.

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 Technology. 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 the 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 integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the 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.

Nicholas Wade

April 30,2021

Acknowledgements

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2 virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus’s origins. Deigin packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some intelligence agency must have authored it. But the essay is written with greater lightness and humor than I suspect are ever found in CIA or KGB reports, and I see no reason to doubt that Dr. Deigin is its very capable sole author.

In Deigin’s wake have followed several other skeptics of the virologists’ orthodoxy. Nikolai Petrovsky calculated how tightly the SARS2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptors of various species and found to his surprise that it seemed optimized for the human receptor, leading him to infer the virus might have been generated in a laboratory. Alina Chan published a paper showing that SARS2 from its first appearance was very well adapted to human cells.

One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.

Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe.

In June 2020 Milton Leitenberg published an early survey of the evidence favoring lab escape from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Many others have contributed significant pieces of the puzzle. “Truth is the daughter,” said Francis Bacon, “not of authority but time.” The efforts of people such as those named above are what makes it so.

By John Delmenico

Young people around the country have been seen telling Boomers to put down the avocado toast, stop being so entitled and go out and get a jab. This comes after research suggests nearly 30% of Australians are now hesitant to get the life saving vaccine over a blood-clotting risk potentially high as 0.0017%, which has led to the Boomer generation to be way too ‘choosy’ about which vaccine to have. Now young people have had enough and have told the lazy Boomers to ‘go out an get a vaccine, any of the vaccines are better than nothing.’

“Have you bothered to go get a vaccine yet?” said Mike a 26 year old after getting home from trying to find an entry level job that doesn’t require 5+ years of experience in the field and a degree. “All you do is sit around watching tv. Put down the avocado toast, be a grown up and get a vaccine! I don’t care if it isn’t your dream vaccine, it is at least a vaccine that works. Go now, it’s for your own good.”

“Classic old people they are just so entitled these days,” said Lauren a 20 year old full time-student who also has 2 jobs so she can pay her bills, “they just expect everything to be handed to them. They have been spoiled their entire lives and now they refuse to do anything for themselves. Growing up with these cheap houses meaning rent money is just handed to them, it’s made them so selfish and lazy. You know in my day, we have to go out and find a roommate to be able to afford rent in a run-down 1 bedroom apartment, but we do because we know what is important.”

“First the housing market and now vaccines, they just hoard everything for themselves even if they don’t actually want to use it. What a selfish and rude generation they are!”

In response to this issue, clickbait writers have begun writing predictable articles called “How this country’s old people managed to get a much lower death rate from Covid” with every article always having a part about how young people and their parents got vaccinated.

THE THREAD OF RATIONAL INTERPRETATION

According to Greek mythology, Theseus, having killed the Minotaur, found his way back from the heart of the Labyrinth by following a thread given to him by Ariadne.

There are two lessons – in an earlier idiom, morals – to be taken from this story. The obvious one is the wisdom of taking a thread into the maze and using it to find the way back out. The less obvious lesson is that the thread Theseus followed was reliable, a guide which, like real gold, would pass an ‘assay’ of veracity.

Our current economic and broader circumstances merit comparison with the Labyrinth – we’re in a maze which has many complex blind-alleys, routes to nowhere which tempt the unwary. If we’re to fashion a reliable thread that can be followed through it, we need to apply the assays of logic and observation.

The thread followed here starts with the purposes of saving and investment, purposes which pass the assay of logic, but fail the test of observation. This points to dysfunction based on anomaly, the anomaly being that the practice only conforms to the principle in the presence of growth.

Postulating that the economy is an energy system rather than a financial one also passes the assays of logic and observation, and confirms we have a thread that can be followed to meaningful explanations and expectations.

An assay of logic

Capital theory is as a good a place to start as any. This theory is that, in addition to meeting current needs and wants, a sensible person puts aside a part of his or her income for the purposes both of having a reserve (“for a rainy day”) and of accumulating wealth. The flip-side of this process is that saving – as ‘economic output not consumed’ – provides capital for investment. This theory would apply, incidentally, even if some form of barter were substituted for money.

For this to work, the saver or investor must receive a real return on investment that is positive (that is, it exceeds inflation), and this return must be calibrated in proportion to any risk to which his or her investment is exposed. The user of this capital must earn a return on invested capital which exceeds the return paid to the investor. Any business unable to do this must fail, freeing up capital and market share for more efficient competitors.

This thesis rings true when measured on the ‘assay of logic’ – indeed, it describes the only rational set of conditions which can govern productive and sustainable relationships between saving, investment, returns and enterprise.

But it’s equally obvious that this does not describe current financial conditions. Returns to investors are not positive. These returns are not calibrated in proportion to risk. Businesses do not need to earn returns which exceed appropriate returns being paid to investors. Businesses unable to meet this requirement do not fail.

When logic points so emphatically towards one set of conditions, whilst observation leaves us in no doubt that contrary conditions prevail, we don’t need to venture further into investment theory in order to confirm the definite existence of an anomaly.

To discover the nature of this anomaly, let’s look again at capital theory to discover the predicates shared by all participants.

The investor needs returns which increase the value of his or her capital.

The entrepreneur needs returns which are higher again than those required by the investor.

The shared predicate here is that the sum of money X must be turned into X+.

For the system to function, then, the shared predicate is growth.

Logic therefore tells us two things. The first is that a functioning capital system absolutely depends on growth. The second, inferred-by-logic conclusion is that, if the system has become dysfunctional, the absence of growth is likely to be the cause of the dysfunction.

Observed anomaly is thus defined as a property of dysfunction, whilst dysfunction itself is a property of the absence of growth.

You don’t need a doctorate in philosophy to reach this conclusion. All you need do is follow a logical sequence which (a) defines anomaly as intervening between theory and current practice, and (b) identifies this anomaly as the absence of growth.

We can confirm this finding by hypothesis. If we postulate the return of real, solid, indisputable growth into this situation, we can follow a sequential chain which goes on to eliminate the anomaly and restore the alignment of theory and practice.

Testing the thread

The deductions that (a) dysfunction exists, and (b) that this is a product of the lack of growth, take us on to familiar territory. If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know that the basic proposition is that the economy, far from being ‘a function of money, and unlimited’, is in fact a function of energy, and is limited by resource and environmental boundaries.

Using logic and observation, we can similarly apply the ‘assay of rationality’ to the propositions informing the surplus energy interpretation. There are three of these propositions or principles, previously described here as “the trilogy of the blindingly obvious”.

The first principle is that all of the goods and services which constitute economic output are products of the use of energy. If it were false, this proposition would be easy to disprove. All we’d have to do is to (a) name anything of economic utility that can be produced without the use of energy at any stage of the production process, and/or (b) explain how an economy could function in the absence of energy supply.

The second principle, applied here as ECoE (the Energy Cost of Energy), is that whenever energy is accessed for our use, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process. Again, if this proposition were false, its fallacy could be demonstrated, simply by citing any example where energy can be accessed without the use of any energy at any stage in the access process.

The third proposition – that money has no intrinsic worth, and commands value only as a ‘claim’ on the output of the energy economy – ought, if false, to be the easiest one to disprove. We would need to do no more, as a thought-exercise, than cast ourselves adrift in a lifeboat, equipped with very large quantities of any form of money, but with nothing for which this money could be exchanged. If this experiment succeeded, the ‘claim only’ hypothesis would be disproved.

The inability to disprove these propositions means that the theory of the economy as a surplus energy system passes the assay of rationality. Application is a much more complex matter, of course, but the next test is to see how theory fits observation.

The assay of observation

From the mid-1990s, and as the following charts show, global debt started to expand far more rapidly than continuing growth in reported GDP. Available data for twenty-three economies – accounting for three-quarters of GDP – shows a corresponding trend in the broader measure of ‘financial assets’, which are, of course, liabilities of the non-financial economy of governments, households and private non-financial corporations (PNFCs).

There is reliable data showing yet another correspondence, this time between the GDPs and the unfunded pension obligations (“gaps”) of a group of eight economies which include global giants such as the United States, China, Japan and India.

Let’s be clear about where this takes us. We’ve already identified the absence of growth as the source of financial dysfunction. We’ve now seen parallel anomalies in the relationships between GDP and liabilities.

These divergent patterns can be explained – indeed, can really only be explained – in terms of exploding financial commitments distorting reported GDP. Put another way, there are compounding trends whose effect is to ‘juice’ and to mispresent reported economic output.

This observation accords with the logical conclusion, discussed earlier, that the relationships between saving, investment, returns and enterprise have been distorted into a dysfunctional, anomalous condition by the absence of growth. The only complication is that we have to look behind reported “growth” numbers to make this connection.

What, though, explains the absence – in practice, the deceleration, ending and impending reversal – of growth itself? The right-hand chart indicates that what was happening at the start-point of observed economic distortion was a rise in ECoEs.

The assay that we’ve undertaken has shown the validity of the concepts of output as a function of energy, ECoE as a characteristic of the output equation, and money in the role of ‘claim’. This in turn validates the linkage identified here.

Fig. 1

Once again, let’s apply the test of hypothesis. Assume that a new source of low-cost (low ECoE) energy is discovered. Prosperity would increase, and real growth would return to the system. The observed anomalies in capital relationships would disappear.

This, remember, is purely hypothesis, because the discovery of a new source of low-cost energy is at the far end of the scale of improbability. We can thus conclude that dysfunction and anomaly will continue, to the climacteric at which the monetary system described by capital theory reaches a point of failure.

The clarity of defined anomaly

For anyone who isn’t a mythical hero, venturing into the Labyrinth, confronting the Minotaur and finding our way out again sounds like a terrifying experience. There are clear analogies to the present, in terms of the uncertainty of the maze, and the fear induced by the unknown. We may not have Ariadne’s thread, but we can fashion a good alternative by opting for rationality, applied through logic and observation.

The results of this process do seem to have the merit of clarity. Comparing capital theory with observed conditions identifies a dysfunction or anomaly that can be defined as the absence of growth. This in turn can be explained in terms of a faltering energy economy. Take away the predicate – growth – and the financial system becomes dysfunctional.

This interpretation helps to clarify the roles of the various players in the situation. Taking the ‘elites’, for example, we know that the defined aim of all elites is to maintain and, wherever possible, to enhance their wealth and influence. We can infer that, if we can identify the dysfunctionality of capital theory and observed conditions, so can they.

Likewise, we know that the defined aim of governments is the maintenance of the status quo, and we can again infer that they, like we, recognize the essential dysfunction as ‘the failure of the predicate’.

To this extent, we can demystify the behaviour of elites and governments. We can also make informed judgements on their probabilities of success. (These probabilities are low, for reasons which lie outside the scope of this discussion).

A similar application of logic and observation tells us that anomaly cannot continue in perpetuity. We can hypothesize the resolution of the energy-ECoE problem, but examination of the factors involved suggests that any such resolution, even if attainable, is unlikely to happen in time to restore equilibrium to the financial system. There are equations which relate the investment of legacy energy (from fossil fuels) into a new energy system (presumably renewables), and these equations give few grounds for optimism where current systems are concerned.

If rationality can take us this far, it surely makes sense to adhere to it. The probabilities are that global prosperity will contract, meaning that systems predicated on growth will cease to function. The logic of the situation seems to be that, when old predicates change, we need to fashion new systems based on their successors.

Transcript of video (45 min) at the website. The video has some specifics specific to Netherlands media and politics, but apart from the names, the exact same processes and relationships exist in all advanced western states. The last section corresponding to "The Danger We are in Now" section on the World Economic Forum is especially important to see in the light of the financial relationships tracing all corporate ownership up to Vanguard, shown in the first part.

If you’ve been wondering how the world economy has been hijacked and humanity has been kidnapped by a completely bogus narrative, look no further than this video by Dutch creator, Covid Lie.

What she uncovers is that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that “competing” brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments. This is the case, across all industries. As she says:

“The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen…They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.

A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.

Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO. Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company but Larry Fink does not pull the strings himself.

BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.

Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.

In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution. Why doesn’t everybody know this? Why aren’t there movies and documentaries about this? Why isn’t it in the news? Because 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates.

Covid Lie asks, “Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.”

Or, as George Carlin said, “It’s a small club and you ain’t in it.”

So when Lynn Forester de Rothschild wants the United States to be a one-party country (like China) and doesn’t want voter ID laws passed in the US, so that more election fraud can be perpetrated to achieve that end,what does she do?

She holds a conference call with the world’s top 100 CEOs and tells them to publicly decry as “Jim Crow” Georgia’s passing of an anti-corruption law and she orders her dutiful CEOs to boycott the State of Georgia, like we saw with Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball and even Hollywood star, Will Smith. In this conference call, we see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order.

The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth. To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government – namely the UN, itself.

And it is clear that the “pandemic” was orchestrated in order to bring this about. This video does an incredible job of explaining how it is all being done.

TRANSCRIPT

As you are watching millions fall into poverty because of the corona measures of the past year, even if the greatest economic crisis in history has not affected you yet, it will only be a matter of time until the rippling effects will hit you, as well

This is not fear-mongering but it’s a harsh reality. I also think we might mitigate the damage and may even do better, provided we are informed correctly about our situation. This is why I would like to show you a few facts you can easily check facts that are of crucial importance.

Less than a handful of big corporations dominate every aspect of our lives. That may seem exaggerated but from the breakfast we eat to the mattress we sleep on and everything we wear and consume in between is largely dependent on these corporations.

Those are huge investment companies that determine the course of money flow. They are the main characters of the play that we are witnessing. I know your time is valuable, so I summarize the most important data.

How does it work?

THE FOOD INDUSTRY

Let’s take Pepsico as an example. It is the parent company of many soda companies and snack companies. The so-called competitive brands are from factories from a few corporations who monopolize the entire industry. In the packaged food industry, there are a few big companies, like Unilever, the Coca-Cola Company, Mondelez and Nestlé.

In the picture, you see that most brands in the food industry belong to one of these corporations. The big companies are on the stock market and have the big shareholders in the board of directors.

On sources like Yahoo Finance, we can see detailed company info, such as who the biggest shareholders actually are. Let’s take Pepsico again, as an example. We see about 72% of stock is owned by no less than 3,155 institutional investors. These are investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.

Who are the biggest institutional investors of Pepsico? As you can see, only 10 of the investors own together nearly one third of the stock. The top 10 of investors together amount to a value of $59 billion dollars but out of those ten, only three own more stock than the other seven. Let’s remember them and look up who owns the most stocks of the Coca-Cola Company, the biggest competitor of Pepsi.

The biggest lump of stock is again owned by institutional investors. Let’s look at the top 10 and start at the bottom six of them. Four of these institutional investors we also saw at the bottom six of Pepsico. These are Northern Trust, JPMorgan-Chase, Geode Capital Management and Wellington Management. Now, let’s look at the four biggest stock owners. They are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These are the world’s biggest investment firms, so Pepsico and Coca-Cola are not competitors, at all.

The other big companies that own a myriad of brand names, like Unilever, Mondelez and Nestlé are from the same small group of investors. But it’s not only in the food industry that their names come up. Let’s find out on Wikipedia, which are the biggest tech companies.

BIG TECH

Facebook is the owner of Whatsapp and Instagram. Together with Twitter, they form the most popular social media platforms. Alphabet is the parent of all Google companies, like YouTube and Gmail but they are also the biggest investor in Android, one of the two operating systems for nearly all smartphones and tablets. The other operating system is Apple’s IOS. If we add Microsoft, we see four companies making the software for nearly all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world.

Let’s see who are the biggest shareholders of these companies. Take Facebook: we see that 80% of the stock is owned by institutional investors. These are the same names that came up in the food industry; the same investors are in the top three. Next, is Twitter. It forms with Facebook and Instagram the top three. Surprisingly, this company is in the hands of the same investors, as well. We see them again, with Apple and even with their biggest competitor, Microsoft.

Also, if we look at other big companies in the tech industry that develop and make our computers, TVs, phones and home appliances, we see the same big investors, that together own the majority of the stock. It’s true for all industries. I’m not exaggerating.

THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY (AND ENERGY & MINING)

One last example, let’s book a holiday on a computer or smartphone. We search for a flight to a sunny country on Skyscanner or Expedia. Both are from the same small group of investors. We fly with one of the many airlines. Many of which are in the hands of the same investors and of governments, as is the case with Air France, KLM. The plane we board is, in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus, also owned by the same names. We book through Booking.com or AirBnB and when we arrive we go out for dinner and place a comment on Tripadvisor.

The same big investors show up in every aspect of our trip and their power is even bigger, because of the kerosene is from their oil companies or refineries. The steel from which the plane is made comes from their mining companies. This small group of investment firms and funds and banks are namely also the biggest investors in the industry that dig for raw materials.

Wikipedia shows that the biggest mining companies have the same big investors that we see everywhere. Also, the big agricultural businesses, on which the entire food industry depends; they own Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, the biggest seed producer in the world but they are also the shareholders of the big textile industry. And even many popular fashion brands who make the clothing out of the cotton are owned by the same investors.

Whether we look at the world’s biggest solar panel companies or oil refineries, the stocks are in the hands of the same companies. They own the tobacco companies that produce all the popular tobacco brands but they also own all big pharmaceutical companies and the scientific institutions that produce medicine. They own the companies that produce our metals and also the entire car, plane and weapons industry, where a great deal of the metals and raw materials are used. The own the companies that build our electronics, they own the big warehouses and online markets and even the means of payments we use to buy their products.

To make this video as short as possible, I only showed you the tip of the iceberg. If you decide to research this with the sources I just showed you, then you will see that most popular insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies restaurant chains and cosmetics are owned by the same institutional investors we have just seen.

BLACKROCK & VANGUARD

These institutional investors are mainly investment firms banks and insurance companies. In turn, they, themselves are owned by shareholders and the most surprising thing is that they own each other’s stocks

Together, they form an immense network comparable to a pyramid. The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen by now. They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.

A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost anything

Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO, Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company. But Larry Fink does not pull the strings, himself.

BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.

Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.

Forbes, the most famous business magazine says that in March 2020, there were 2,095 billionaires in the world. This means that Vanguard is owned by the richest families in the world. If we research their history, we see that they have always been the wealthiest. Some of them, even before the start of the Industrial Revolution, because their history is so interesting and extensive, I will make a sequel.

For now, I just want to say that these families of whom many are in royalty are the founders of our banking system and of every industry in the world, these families have never lost power but due to an increasing population, they had to hide behind firms, like Vanguard, which the stockholders are the private funds and non-profits of these families.

NGOs AND FOUNDATIONS AND THEIR OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA

To clarify the picture, I have to explain briefly what non-profits actually are. These appear to be the link between companies, politics and media. This conceals the conflicts of interests a bit. Non-profits, also called “foundations” are dependent on donations they do not have to disclose who their donors are they can invest the money in the way they see fit and do not pay taxes as long as the profits are invested again in new projects. In this way, non-profits keep hundreds of billions of dollars among themselves according to the Australian government, non-profits are an ideal way of financing terrorists and of massive money-laundering.

The foundations and funds of the families that are the richest stay in the background as much as possible. For issues that get much attention, the foundation of philanthropists are used that are lower in rank but very rich.

I want to keep it short, so I will show you the three most important ones that connect all industries in the world. They are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation of the controversial multi-billionaire, Soros and the Clinton Foundation. I will give you a very short introduction to show you their power.

According to the website of the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation is the biggest sponsor of the WHO. That was after Donald Trump quit USA financial support to the WHO in 2020. So the Gates Foundation is one of the most influential entities in everything that concerns our health. The Gates Foundation works closely with the biggest pharma companies, among which are Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Biontech and Bayer.

And we have just seen who their biggest shareholders are. Bill Gates was not a poor computer nerd who miraculously became very rich. He’s from a philanthropist’s family that works for the absolute elite. His Microsoft is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock and Berkshire Hathaway. But the Gates Foundation, after BlackRock and Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway. He was even the member of the board there.

We would need hours if we wanted to uncover everything in which Gates, the Open Society Foundation of Soros and the Clinton Foundation are involved. They form a bridge to the current situation, so I had to introduce them.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

We need to start the next topic with a question. Someone like me, who never makes videos can, with an old laptop objectively show that only two companies hold a monopoly in all industries in the world. My question is, why is this never talked about in the media?

We can choose daily between all sorts of documentaries and TV programs but none of them cover this subject. Is it not interesting enough or are there other interests at play? Wikipedia, again gives us the answer. They say that about 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates. Whether we take the monopolist Netflix and Amazon Prime or enormous concerns that own many daughter companies, like Time-Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, Fox Corporation, Bertelsmann and Viacom, CBS, we see that the same names own stocks.

These corporations not only make all the programs, movies and documentaries but also own the channels on which those are broadcast. So, not only the industries but also the information is owned by the elite.

I will show you briefly how this works in the Netherlands. To start with, all the Dutch mainstream media are owned by three companies. The first one is De PersGroep [DPG Media], the parent company of the following brands (. Apart from the many newspapers and magazines, they also own Sanoma, the parent company of some of the big commercial Dutch channels. Many media outlets from abroad, like VTM are also owned by the De PersGroep.

The second one is Mediahuis, one of Europe’s biggest media concerns. In the Netherlands, Mediahuis owns the following brands. Until 2017, also Sky Radio and Radio Veronica were owned by Mediahuis, as were Radio 538 and radio 10.

And then there is Bertelsmann, which is one of the 9 biggest media firms. This company owns RTL, that owns 45 television stations and 32 radio stations in 11 countries. But Bertelsmann is also co-owner of the world’s biggest book publisher, Penguin Random House.

The stocks of these companies are owned by private funds of three families. Those are the Belgian Van Thillo family, the Belgian Leysen family and the German Bertelsmann-Mohn family. All three families sided with the Nazis in the War.

According to Wikipedia, for this reason, the Telegraaf, the Leysen newspaper was temporarily forbidden in the Netherlands after the war.

THE FAKE NEWS

To complete this overview, look at where the news comes from. The daily news of all these media outlets the diverse news media do not produce news. They use information and footage from the press agencies, .ANP and Reuters. These agencies are not independent. .ANP is owned by Talpa, John de Mol. Thomson-Reuters is owned by the powerful Canadian Thomson family.

The most important journalists and editors working for these agencies are members of a journalism agency, like the European Journalism Centre. These are one of the biggest European sponsors of media-related projects. They educate journalists, publish study books, provide training spaces and press agencies and work closely together with the big corporations, Google and Facebook.

For journalistic analysis and views, the big media use Project Syndicate. This is the most powerful organization in the field. Project Syndicate and organizations like I mentioned are together with the press agencies. The link between all worldwide media outlets when news anchors reap from their autocues [teleprompters], chances are that the text stems from one of these organizations. That is the reason that worldwide media shows synchronicity in their reporting.

And look at the European journalism center, itself. Again, the Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. They are also heavily-sponsored by Facebook, Google, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.

In Belgium, there are protests regularly, since Mediahuis and De Persgroep receive millions of euros from the government, while many are abroad…

THE DANGER WE ARE IN NOW

Well, this was a lot to chew on and I tried to make it as short as I could. I only used examples that I thought were necessary to create a clear overview. This helps to better understand our current situation, that can shed new light on past events

There will be enough time to dive into the past, but now let’s talk about today but my goal is to inform you about the danger we are in now. The elite governs every aspect of our lives, also, the information we get and they depend on a coordination, cooperation to connect all industries in the world to serve their interests. This is done through the World Economic Forum, among others, a very important organization.

Every year in Davos, the CEOs of big corporations meet national leaders, politicians and other influential parties, like UNICEF and Greenpeace. On the supervisory board of the WEF is former Vice President, Al Gore, our own minister, Sigrid Kaag, Feike Sijbesma, Chairman of the Royal Dutch State Mines and the Commissioner of the Dutch bank, Christine Lagarde, the Chairwoman of the European Central Bank. Also, politician, Ferdinand Grapperhaus’ son works for the WEF.

Wikipedia says that the annual fee for members is 35,000 euros “but over half of our budget comes from partners who pay the cost for politicians who otherwise could not afford membership.”

According to critics, the WEF is for rich businesses to do business with other businesses or with politicians. For most members, the WEF would support personal gain instead of being a means to solve the world’s problems. Why would there be many world problems if the industry leaders, bankers and politicians from 1971 onwards have gathered every year to solve the world’s problems?

Isn’t it illogical, that after 50 years of meetings between environmentalists and the CEOs of the most polluting companies, nature is gradually doing worse, not better; that those critics are right, it’s clear, when we look at the main partners that together make up more than half of the budget of the WEF. Because these are BlackRock, the Open Society foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many big companies, from which Vanguard and BlackRock own the stocks.

Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he writes about the plans of his organization. The coronavirus is, according to him a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. He calls it “Build Back Better”. The slogan is now on the lips of all Globalist politicians in the world.

Our old society must switch to a new one, says Schwab. The people own nothing but work for the state to have their primary needs met. The WEF says it’s necessary for the consumption society the elite forced upon us is not sustainable anymore. Schwab says in his book that we will never return to the old normal and the WEF published a video recently to make clear that by 2030, we will own nothing but we will be happy.

THE GREAT RESET = THE NEW WORLD ORDER

You probably heard of the New World Order. The media wants us to believe that this is a conspiracy theory, yet it has been talked about by leaders for decades. Not just George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela but also world-famous philanthropists, like Cecil Rhodes, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and even George Soros.

The UN presented in 2015 their controversial Agenda 2030. It is almost identical to the Great Reset of Klaus Schwab. The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth.

Sounds nice but wait till you read the small print. The plan is that Agenda 2030 will be paid by us, the citizens. Just like they ask of us now to give away our rights for public health, they will ask us to give away our wealth to battle poverty. These are no conspiracy theories. It is on their official website. It comes down to this: The UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. The new infrastructure, because fossil fuels are gone in 2030.

For this project, the UN says we need a world government, namely the UN, itself.

The UN agrees with Schwab that a pandemic is a golden chance to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030.

It is worrisome that the WEF and the UN openly admit that pandemics and other catastrophes can be used to reshape society. We must not think lightly about this and do thorough research.

– CIA Flashback: “We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False.” (Truthstream Media, Jan 13, 2015):

William Casey, CIA Director 1981-1987

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

(Truthstream Media) That creepy quote above has been widely attributed to Former CIA Director William Casey.

Casey was the 13th CIA Director from 1981 until he left in January 1987. He died not long after of a brain tumor in May 1987. Dead men tell no tales, as they say.

But did William Casey really say this quote?

The quote itself has been passed around extensively on the Internet, and some people claim Casey never really said it because the only main source it traces back to is late political researcher and radio show host Mae Brussell.

Brussell was the host of the radio show Dialogue: Conspiracy. She got her start when, as a radio show guest, she questioned the official JFK assassination story and the Warren Commission Hearings by suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only person involved in Kennedy’s murder. Perhaps the propagandized label of “conspiracy theorist” is the reason why people question the quote Brussell often repeated.

However, Brussell is not the only person that can be attributed to this sharing quote.

Someone posted this meme on Quora back in 2013 with the note, “A disclaimer: I just like Quorans debunking or showing the stupidity behind some of the worst FB memes.”

This is a new trend lately, people trying to debunk old (and most especially, establishment damaging) quotes.

This time, however, someone who claims to have been there when Casey said it showed up to validate the quote:

“I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the ‘intelligence’ that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines. As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.”
Barbara Honegger

Not only does Honegger claim he said it, but apparently he said it in response to what he saw as his goal as CIA Director!

This statement was further backed by an email posted by Quora user Greg Smith from Honegger regarding the quote which is consistent and apparently prompted her to tell the story above:

“Seriously — I personally was the Source for that William Casey quote. He said it at an early Feb. 1981 meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House which I attended, and I immediately told my close friend and political godmother Senior White House Correspondent Sarah McClendon, who then went public with it without naming the source… “

So there you go. Guess it boils down to he said she said, except when she says it, it’s because she was actually there…

The year 1981 was an interesting one for Director Casey. He just so happened to be under investigation and fighting to keep his new job over various seedy dealings that came to light; among them were claims he approved a plan to overthrow Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi to instill a shadow government. (Oh I know, our government would never do that, would they?)

The agency’s plan, according to an article in the July 27, 1981 Gettysburg Times, involved toppling Qaddafi via what else?

Disinfo:

“Newsweek Magazine reported the covert operation was designed to overthrow Khadafy through a ‘disinformation’ campaign to embarrass him, creation of a counter government to challenge his leadership and a paramilitary campaign.”

(Wow. A lot of that sounds eerily familiar… 2011, anyone?)

That same year, investigative journalist Jack Anderson published this piece in the September 22, 1981 Santa Cruz Sentinel discussing the troubling CIA disinformation campaign being waged against Americans:

Anderson points out the CIA’s “triple assault on the public’s right to know” included 1) trying to shut off channels of information to the electorate, 2) seeking criminal penalties against reporters whose stories might identify CIA operatives, and the third which Anderson called most troubling, 3) spreading “disinformation” to news agencies.

And who else does Anderson specifically call out in this disinfo campaign but new CIA Director William Casey:

“Now along comes Bill Casey, the dodering CIA director, with the argument that the government has the right to mislead the public by planting phony stories in the press.”

Oh really? So the good director not only talked about his disinformation campaign but actually argued for the government’srightto wage it against the American people?

The plan involved getting around the ban on CIA operations on domestic soil by planting disinfo stories in foreign news outlets that were routinely picked up by American mainstream media agencies. Anderson also points out the various rumors and false stories going around surrounding the goings on in Libya at the time…

The bottom line here is, if anyone in our government was going to make the above disinformation statement and specifically in 1981, all available evidence points to no better person who would have likely said it than Casey.

Finally on an aside, there seems to be this mission lately to memory hole quotes or muddy the water about who said what and change history.

In this particular instance, someone who was there when William Casey said the line in question and claims to have literally heard the words come out of the man’s mouth with her own ears as he said it is vouching that this quote is true.

Then again, this is the same agency on record behind the government’s MKUltra mind control program, an illegal project in which the CIA experimented on Americans for over two decades (that we know about) to manipulate mental states and brain function with everything from drugs to microwaves — the kind of stuff DARPA is openly working on today — all of which makes the piddly quote in question here seem like mere child’s play by comparison.

Even so, people still went into the Quora thread afterwards to claim — with absolutely no evidence whatsoever as they were not personally there — the quote is false.

So, in a bitter twist of the saddest irony possible, it would seem the contents of the quote itself are also true.

Friday 13th September 2019, Magdalen Berns, aged 36 died of brain cancer. After she died she wanted her videos to remain accessible.....to inspire others :-)

This next part is much more interesting, its Magdalen’s own words...

This channel is about, offering a counter narrative to media disinformation with blunt humour and honesty; lending a voice to other likeminded women, often misrepresented by self described feminists of the mainstream; giving ideological opponents an opportunity to reassess the assumptions of their arguments and simplifying complicated issues to make them accessible.

I am, a lesbian (not the political kind); a physics graduate (University of Edinburgh); a FLOSS accessibility hacker (the legal kind); an XX feminist (not the fun, kind); ex-amateur boxer (the competitive kind); a blogger; an activist; a cultural libertarian; a Londoner; a critic of religion, capitalism, identity politics, conservatism, neoliberalism and socially imposed gender norms.

See Also:

• My Lady-Brain update #1 - Glioblastoma
• My Lady-Brain update #2 - Glioblastoma

Imagine a world where you can be jailed for attempting to protect your child from medical assault. A future where you can no longer object to your child being subjected to medicalized gay conversion ‘therapy.’ A country where the government can legally enforce a belief system and criminalize anyone who goes against that system of belief. No, I’m not talking about Iran… I’m talking about Canada.

On Friday, April 16, a father in Canada, Rob Hoogland, was sentenced to serve 6 months in jail for the crime of attempting to protect his child from medical assault, for speaking up, for refusing to abide by a legally enforced belief system — gender ideology. For parents in Canada, this is their new reality. And other countries, like the US, aren’t far behind.

The ordeal began several years ago, when Hoogland discovered that his 12-year-old daughter’s name had been changed in the 7th grade yearbook. From there, the truth unraveled — His child had been shown SOGI 123 ‘education’ videos (gender ideology indoctrination propaganda) at her school. She then decided she was a boy, the school ‘affirmed’ the child as a transexual and ‘socially transitioned’ her without informing her parents. The school kept this all a secret from the parents in accordance with the B.C. Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, which dictates that parents have no right to know what their child’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” is at school.

The school sent the child to see a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who treats “transgender” children as young as 2, and who, at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library, admitted that he advises kids to fake being suicidal. Wong sent the family to the endocrinology unit at the B.C. Children’s Hospital.

“So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need…” — Wallace Wong

On their first visit to the endocrinology unit, the doctor laid out a plan to medically ‘change’ Hoogland’s, then 13-year-old, child’s sex (to male), including injections of testosterone. Hoogland wouldn’t sign off. He noted his child said she was a lesbian, prior to deciding she was a boy, and thought she might be going through a phase. He also noted his child had obsessive tendencies and mental issues — His daughter had been infatuated with 2 male teachers, to the extent the school had to intervene, and in the 8th grade, while being ‘affirmed’ as a boy, his daughter had attempted suicide.

When his daughter was 14, the hospital informed Hoogland that they would be medicalizing his child in accordance with the B.C. Infants Act, and that according to the B.C. Infants Act, they didn’t need parental consent to do so.

Young people do not reach full cognitive brain development till around the age of 25, yet the B.C. Infants Act says a minor can consent to medical treatments. While this makes sense in the context of life-saving surgery (where, for example, a Jehovah’s Witness can otherwise prevent a hospital from saving their child’s life), when it comes to something as serious as chemical castration or the surgical removal of a minor’s sex organs, a young person can not possibly give “informed consent.” The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that determines our ability to understand repercussions, consequences, and develops our sense of identity, among other things, simply isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties.

Furthermore, most youth who are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” would otherwise grow up to be LGB, if they are allowed to grow up — Statistically speaking, 75% would grow up to be LGB, and 85% would grow up to be LGB or straight. What’s being legally enforced is a massive human rights violation of gay and lesbian youth, and a human rights violation of youth in general. Not to mention a violation of every single adult forced, legally, to lie and go along with it.

In 2019, Judge Francesca Marzari convicted Hoogland of “family violence” for using female pronouns when speaking about his daughter, and signed an order authorizing the police to arrest him if he was caught using language in a way that acknowledged his child as biologically female.

In March, Hoogland was arrested and held behind bars without bail. Hoogland’s lawyer, Carey Linde, commented, “He’s been sitting out in a government-supplied bed cot, in a small cement cubicle with iron bars, for speaking his mind, and he will stay there until the trial starts at 2 p.m. on the 12th of April.”

On Friday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen, said Hoogland had “blatantly, willfully and repeatedly” broken the rules, speaking out, and that a “strong denunciatory sentence” was necessary.

Hoogland has been ordered to serve six-months in jail. Additionally, the judge — noting the father’s crowdfunding website, which raised $56,000 to help him in this case — was ordered to donate $30,000 to Ronald McDonald House of B.C. and the Yukon, after he is released from jail.

Youtube: Rob Hoogland

On April 16, Chris Elston, a father and activist who sat in on the hearings, tweeted that Hoogland “pleaded guilty to violating the gag order by speaking out, naming the doctors involved, and publishing documents like this consent form that his daughter signed when she was only 13 years old,” commenting, “many young women get prophylactic hysterectomies after about 5 years on testosterone because the risk of cancer is so high. Prolonged testosterone use also causes abdominal pain, and vaginal and uterine atrophy, requiring hysterectomies. Can a 13-year-old girl consent to her own sterilization? The doctor at B.C. Children’s Hospital thought so after meeting with the child for just one hour.”

On April 14, Elton tweeted “Linde gets back to the Tavistock decision. The issue at the heart of this is whether a child can give informed consent. Seeing as we know very little about the long-term effects of these drugs, obviously they cannot.” However, it seems as though the judge wasn’t all too interested in whether or not a young person can give “informed consent.”

Landmark Case in the Fight to Protect Nonconforming Youth

Tavistock decision

While it may be clear, to anyone logical, that this father was speaking out in an attempt to protect his child from medical malpractice, the judge said he didn’t accept that the father’s “intention was otherwise than to attempt to undermine the authority of the courts and overall administration of justice.”

After the judge implied that he planned to inflict a longer jail term than the Crown recommended, the father took another turn on the stand and explained that during his time held in jail, he thought about his actions and realized he might’ve been used as a “pawn” and “played,” and influenced by new friends.

On Friday, the judge said he went with less jail time than he initially considered, due to the father’s last minute expression of remorse, his agreement to make efforts to remove information on his case from the internet, and the “eloquent” plea made on his behalf by Jenn Smith (a trans-identified advocate who publicly challenges gender ideology).

In recent years, a number of clinicians have come forward to say they left their jobs because their gender clinic was knowingly performing gay conversion therapy. A modest number of independent doctors have stepped up and spoken up as well.

In October, the Keira Bell (Tavistock) case demonstrated that young people have been subjected to medical malpractice. We have been seeing, and will be seeing a lot more, young people come out of this system feeling deeply violated. And rightly so… They’re being sexually and medically assaulted by the medical field.

Parents who send their kids to school, and let their kids access the internet, where gender ideologists run rampant, now run the risk of being forced to watch (or worse still, be jailed) as their children are ripped away, drugged, sterilized, and assaulted by the medical field — a field that’s forever been obsessed with pathologizing and medicalizing those who don’t conform.

Two recently published studies have led some to question whether masks are actually protective against COVID-19 and if they are even necessary. Let’s answer these questions by beginning with a review of the study findings. In one study from Denmark, the researchers found that masks did not offer additional protection to citizens who socially distance when outdoors ( Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers). In the second study, a group of military recruits who wore masks consistently over a two week period both indoors and outside did not appear to be protected against transmission ( SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine). Yet, as everyone is aware, mask wearing is still strongly recommended by the vast majority of health care agencies.

The goal of this review is to provide the physiologic insights that reconcile these three seemingly conflicting conclusions between the recent mask studies, and the prevailing mask recommendations which, although they are largely correct, often are a bit extreme. The following will hopefully provide guidance on when, where, and what kind of masks are needed to protect yourself from getting COVID-19.

The three observations to reconcile:

1. wearing standard masks doesn’t offer additional protection while social distancing outside (Danish Outdoor study)
2. wearing standard masks doesn’t offer much additional protection while in close quarters in quarantine for prolonged periods (Military Recruit study)
3. wearing masks are critical to reduce transmission (C.D.C., W.H.O. recommendations)

To understand how all three of the above can be simultaneously true, the predominant mode of spread of this virus must be agreed upon. The three possible modes of transmission are:

• direct contact/hands/surfaces (prevented with hand hygiene )
• large droplet spread from person to person in close proximity (prevented by social distancing)
• airborne spread by inhaling tiny floating droplets directly into the nose/lungs (prevented by either ubiquitous standard masking indoors or by any wearer of an N95)

The C.D.C. and W.H.O. have long claimed that there is little transmission via direct contact or surfaces, and that COVID-19 is instead predominantly spread via large droplets from person to person. However, many scientists, after astutely observing the near collapse of social and economic life across the world due to the massive global spread of COVID-19, instead concluded that the major mode of person-to-person transmission must be the “airborne” route. Although they were entirely correct, the relevant W.H.O. committee was reluctant to adopt this position without “sufficient evidence.” The discord on this issue erupted when a group of 273 scientists wrote to the W.H.O. with the evidence “proving” airborne spread: It Is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Oxford Academic). Well before that letter, I wrote an Op-Ed with my mentor and friend Professor Paul Mayo last May as we tried to warn the world that SARS-CoV-2 was being transmitted via airborne spread. Although the Op-Ed was accepted by The New York Times Opinion page, the editor who accepted it was fired before it could be published, and unfortunately for the world, the newly appointed editor dropped all the previously accepted Op-Eds. It was not until another two critical months passed before it was accepted and published in USA Today. In this Op-Ed, I provided overwhelming evidence that the predominant form of spread was via the airborne route, citing the work of many of the scientists that wrote the protest letter to the W.H.O. two months later: ICU doctors: Many more Americans need to wear N95 masks to slow COVID-19.

So, if we accept that the predominant mode of spread is via the airborne route, what follows is that;

1. Masks are critical in protecting yourself from COVID-19, but only indoors. It is very difficult, if not nearly impossible, to give the virus to others outdoors via the airborne spread of tiny floating droplets because those droplets are, in most circumstances, quickly dispersed as a result of wind, air, or a person’s movement. Thus, the exhaled particle clouds get quickly diluted to the extent that there is not enough of a concentrated inoculum to infect others nearby. In fact, at the time I wrote the Op-Ed above, there was only one true contact-traced, confirmed, documented outdoor transmission – and that was between two Chinese friends who spoke at close range for over an hour.
2. So, those who argue against masks should simply amend their argument to say that masks don’t work or are likely and almost definitely unnecessary… OUTDOORS… in fresh air, sunshine, rain, while walking, in a field, on the sidewalk etc.. Except in congested crowds or perhaps stagnant air, it is unlikely to help. In fact, I found the Dutch study silly and their conclusions unsurprising given all the participants were socially distancing as well! I have long resented having to wear a mask while outdoors on the sidewalk, or anywhere outdoors minding my own business away from people or quickly passing them. But, people are scared and are being overly cautious, and I get that. The Danish study, however, supports this point: if outside and social distancing, masks aren’t necessary. I have long agreed with, and already argued, this in my Op-Ed (above) last May.
3. Then how do we explain the military recruit study? How come masks did not offer much protection there? Easy – because, in that study, “standard” masks (non-N95’s) will not protect you if you violate any of the four main risk factors that predict transmission within indoor spaces; Density, Duration, Dimensions, and Draft:

• Density – # of people in the room
• Duration – # of hours spent in the room
• Dimensions – # of square feet and ceiling height of the room
• Draft – amount of fresh air entry/speed of air flow

If you violate any of the four D’s above in a significant way, you will get sick, even with a “standard” mask. The military recruit study showed that, in the group wearing masks, nearly all transmission occurred between roommates or within platoons, and it should be noted that these situations violate all the four D’s above. They spent time indoors, among a high density of recruits, for prolonged durations, in small dimensioned rooms, with likely little draft. Standard cloth or surgical masks just won’t offer sufficient protection in these settings if an infected person is in their midst.

A recent article illustrated exactly what occurred in the recruit study using sophisticated, animated graphics: A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air (El País). These examples concur with what I have long maintained, in that, if you are in small, closely confined, poorly ventilated spaces with a large number of people for prolonged periods. you will get sick, even while wearing a mask.

What we all need to take from this is that masks are critical to decrease the likelihood of getting COVID-19, and/or prolong the duration that you can avoid getting COVID-19, when indoors for prolonged, but finite periods in not-too-close quarters with non-houshold members. Hence the large amounts of data showing crowded restaurants and bars as the main source of spread – people are eating/drinking and thus not wearing masks for prolonged periods in indoor, crowded environments. This is deadly; although, if you wear a standard mask in such situations it will protect you for a prolonged period, but not indefinitely. Spend six hours in such an environment, even with a standard mask, and you will run a high risk of getting COVID-19 if another (typically pre-symptomatic) person is there who has the disease. One case in point is that of a “super-spreader” event on a long plane flight from Ireland where everyone was wearing masks – 59 people still got sick in this situation. Researchers link 59 Irish COVID cases to inbound long-haul flight. This is why I wear N95’s when I fly – however, I would argue that N95’s are most likely needed for long flights rather than short ones, but who knows the time cutoff?

In the example from the El Pais article above, when a group of friends spends time together in an indoor space (i.e. a living room) for a prolonged period they will still contract the virus even though they socially distanced and wore masks. Transmission eventually occurs, likely due to violating the “D” for “duration” and possibly the “D” for draft if the windows were not open and there was no fresh air circulation. Recognize that this can happen even if everyone is wearing “standard masks” which, although highly protective when all cohabitants of a space are wearing them, the protection wanes over prolonged periods in close, confined settings.

To understand how standard masks protect in the short term, see the explanation in my Op-Ed ICU doctors: Many more Americans need to wear N95 masks to slow COVID-19 (USA Today), along with multiple examples of their efficacy on masks4all.co.

N95 masks, on the other hand, will protect against transmission/inhalation of droplets, even over prolonged periods indoors. Thus I would argue that it would and could be safe to do any activities in any crowd or confined indoor space, but only if everyone present wore an N95. The problem with N95s is that they are uncomfortable to wear for long periods. They are also in short supply due primarily to the total lack of an organized federal government N95 production initiative (ahem – we argued for this in our Op-Ed above), and also due to the persistently high national and global health care worker demand for them, for the purpose of providing safe care to the many patients filling hospitals. The discomfort of N95s is real, though – imagine a birthday party or wedding dance floor with everyone wearing N95s. it would be safe to do so, but not so much fun. We cannot have it both ways anymore it seems – i.e. participate in activities that are both safe and fun.

The original title of my Op-Ed above was “N-95s for All” given that it argued for the production of more N95s for the citizen population, to allow people the chance to avoid transmission in both high-risk indoor situations and also in indoor situations where others refuse to wear masks.

The safety of N95’s can be illustrated by the fact that I have been caring for critically ill patients with COVID for 11 straight months in ICU’s… and I haven’t gotten COVID That’s because I wear N95’s around infected patients and all the health care workers wear masks and try not to overcrowd communal workspaces. It works – many of my colleagues working in ICU’s and hospitals, have not gotten COVID since we all started wearing N95’s. But, in the time before widespread use of N95’s and mask wearing became standard in hospitals, many doctors and nurses and aides were getting COVID. I had a number of scary COVID illness episodes hit my network of colleagues, with several deaths among the wider New York City community of physicians.

So, my recommendation: wear masks indoors. Always. Avoid close quartered, crowded conditions among non-household members for prolonged periods unless the mask is an N95. In all other situations indoors, standard masks are sufficiently protective. Here is the most disturbing part of this story: the reality of airborne spread was known as early as the first thirty cases of this pandemic, at the end of December 2019, when a public health announcement fleetingly appeared on a Wuhan health ministry website (this notice was detected by a W.H.O. pandemic detection system that continually scours the internet for words suggesting illness outbreaks). That notice, although it was quickly taken down, was known by the W.H.O. to have read, “Avoid closed public places and crowded places with poor air circulation.” This fact was detailed in a Wall Street Journal article: How Coronavirus Overpowered the World Health Organization. Thus, it was known by at least one health official in Wuhan that the new virus was likely spread by airborne means – in December of 2019 – yet the W.H.O. still only considers airborne transmission “a possibility” at this time. Palm to forehead (once again) at the innumerable, perplexing actions and positions adopted by multiple national and international health care agencies throughout the pandemic. I just hope, once this is over, all can learn from the many frightening mistakes that have been made.

In conclusion, I agree that constant, ubiquitous mask wearing does not make sense in almost all outdoor settings, but they are absolutely critical in nearly all indoor spaces. This is unless the space is some large, cavernous, uncrowded space, and/or you are there for a brief period, and/or it is a very well-ventilated space. But making rules for each space would be far too complicated, and dangerous mistakes would inevitably be made. Thus, it is best to err on the side of safety and wear your masks indoors, people.

I hope this helps clear up some of the questions and confusion triggered by these recent trials suggesting that “masks don’t work”. They absolutely do, and are critical to protect yourself. You just need to understand which mask and in what situations.