“China eats weird animals disease”

The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former first lady of South Africa and Mozambique Graça Machel and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon are among nearly 200 signatories to a letter calling on governments to “never again” allow “profiteering and nationalism” to come before the needs of humanity, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a scathing open letter, published on 11 March, current and former presidents and ministers, Nobel laureates, faith leaders, heads of civil society organisations and health experts say Covid-19 vaccines and treatments had been developed with public funding but that pharmaceutical companies had exploited them to “fuel extraordinary profits”.

How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media

At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments. What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken. In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

For years, our officials—from Anthony Fauci on down—maintained that Covid-19 probably originated from a natural pathway in Wuhan, China. Bats in a wet market, some said.

But according to a new report, the U.S. Energy Department believes the virus likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology before going on to kill millions around the world. The FBI and a number of prominent scientists also think Covid may have leaked from the lab, where researchers were allegedly conducting “gain-of-function” experiments on coronaviruses, potentially making them deadlier. 

New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

A municipal councillor from West Nipissing in Ontario has issued an apology to community members who were affected by a mandatory vaccination policy that lasted a year.

At a council meeting on Jan. 3, immediately after the council rescinded the municipality’s mandatory vaccination policy, Councillor Anne Tessier said she wanted to apologize for the policy and proceeded to read a statement. An excerpt of her speech surfaced on social media on March 2, while the original full-length council meeting was posted on the council’s YouTube channel.

It remains remarkable that ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic was none other than the Chinese city of Wuhan — the world centre for the study and storage of exactly the type of coronavirus that caused the outbreak.

The city is a thousand miles from the areas in the southwestern province of Yunnan that have been identified by scientists as the likely bat virus breeding ground for Covid-19.

Yet of all the 662 cities in China, it was in Wuhan, more than a two-hour flight away, that the first cases emerged.

National Public Radio has always dismissed the “lab leak” hypothesis regarding the origin of the coronavirus as a debunked, possibly racist conspiracy theory. If Trump implied China was responsible, “science” had to be the opposite. Now NPR and the rest of the media look ridiculous after the Department of Energy concluded the virus did indeed most likely arise from a laboratory leak in China, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology biolab, and not from a nearby wildlife market (the “zoonotic origin” theory).

During the latest episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” liberal comedian Bill Maher praised all the COVID “dissenters” who’d refused to blindly accept the establishment’s narrative on both the virus itself and also the vaccine.

Bill Maher on the pandemic "I feel like the people who were the dissenters are looking pretty good."

Russell Brand: "I think dissent is a great duty around all topics." pic.twitter.com/NUQgGIQ1Yw

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 4, 2023

Denials from authorities seemed political all along, and public trust will take a long time to recover.

Government finagling and misdirecting, especially in crises, are destructive to the long-term public good. And in the end they’re always destructive to personal reputations.

The Journal last Sunday upended an old debate with a big exclusive: The Energy Department has told the White House it believes a lab leak was the most likely source of the Covid-19 pandemic. As reporters Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel noted, the department’s new stand is important because it results from new intelligence and because of the agency’s expertise—it oversees a network of labs. Two days later Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the FBI’s view that it was “most likely a potential lab incident . . . a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

We now know just how drunk on tyranny the political class was during the pandemic.

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph’s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: ‘Hilarious.’

During George Washington’s first term as president, an influential faction in Kentucky wanted to separate from the newly formed United States and join the United Kingdom. The group spread lies and deceived the public into accomplishing its goals. Washington denounced those “spreading mischief far and wide either from real ignorance of the measures pursuing by the government, or from a wish to bring it, as much as they are able, into discredit.” Frustrated and perplexed by the falsehoods, the president put his faith in honesty.