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Sci Tech    H1'ed 10/26/21

Covid: Open Questions That Disturb the Mind

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Jaws from James Bond movie
Jaws from James Bond movie
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Covid: Open Questions That Disturb the Mind

by John Kendall Hawkins

"Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems."

- Shakespeare, Hamlet, (1.2.77), Hamlet to his mother, Gertrude

It's all happening. We seem to be falling apart at the seems. Covid-19 may be a crypto-consciousness virus after all. Consciousness is how we're different from, and superior to, other animals, and it's our apparent Achilles' heel. Aliens in outer space probably laugh their asses off at the condition of our inner space.

So many questions keep popping up about the rise of Covid-19 and how we responded to it in America. What's 'shifty' Fauci been up to? Where'd the virus originate? How come DARPA was already preparing for it? Why did the Trump administration lift the money moratorium on gain-of-function (g-o-f) research after Obama had shut it down? How come Peter Thiel, CEO of PayPal, had the magical fortesight to invest in Abcellera, a Vancouver-based lab that was the first to receive antibodies from a Seattle patient in February 2020 (giving them a head start in the race for solutions), and what made Abcellera bring Thiel on as a director in October 2020? How come Nancy Pelosi isn't being impeached for her monetary gains related to insider knowledge of Covid-19-related stocks? How is it possible that vaccines began coming out the pharmaceutical yin yang as soon as Trump was told to take a powder by the voters (most of whom were actually counted this time around)?

Let's consider some of these worries one by one, soberly (put the fuckin bong down), and with rational relish. What do we actually know, and what just seems to be? Spoiler Alert: No conspiracy theories ahead.

A Faucian Bargain?

Recently, Dr. Anthony Fauci was said to be caught in a lie -- new information seemingly reveals that he knew that NIH funds he approved as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were being used to do gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Intercept was one of the first to report on it with "Ecohealth Alliance Conducted Risky Experiments On MERS Virus In China." A couple of days ago the standard in British journalism, The Daily Mail, amplified the same message with "NIH ADMITS to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China's Wuhan lab despite Dr. Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that it did not happen." Well, they mostly mean Rand Paul. Net conclusion: Fauci knew. Oh-oh.

Well, what do we know about this guy? His name means "jaws." This is scary, conjuring up images of Peter Benchley Cape Cod communities consumed by fear of being devoured by multiple iterations of machine-like killers of the wide sarcasto sea (note: viruses are said to be neither dead nor alive, but feast on their host); and also, one thinks of Jaws from James Bond, whose name had to be changed from the original anti-semitic insinuation implied by his "hoodlum" name, Sol "Horror" Horowitz. But still, you can picture him in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds going to work on Nazi brains. Anyway, let's just leave Italians out of this. You know where it's going to lead.

Now as far reputation goes, it's another story. Seemingly, sorta. If there ever was a poster boy for the Deep State that PBS's own Bill Moyers described a while back, Tony Fauci's your guy. Government service for 50 years. Wiki is kind enough to tell us that Fauci "has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan," including the present president, Joe Biden, and that "From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world's most frequently-cited scientists across all scientific journals." His service and peer respect translating eventually to a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Heady stuff, not to be trifled with by petty or false accusations. Whether Democrats or Republicans were in control, Fauci was there behind the scenes as director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

And as poster boy for the Deep State, he has been massively rewarded, as you'd (or he'd) expect. Fauci, the highest paid civil servant, currently earns approximately $450,000 annually. Forbes puts this in helpful perspective: "Fauci out-earned the U.S. president ($400,000); four-star generals in the military ($282,000); and roughly 4.3 million other federal employees." He makes roughly twice as much as Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi -- or, put differently, he earns what they make combined annually, and probably deserves it twice as much, as the two congressional leaders spend most of their time very much stoking what the Bard from Duluth calls the Disease of Conceit. Still, Fauci is one of the very few public servants ever made "fabulously wealthy" -- a one percenter -- by being a govo. It's difficult, without tax records, to know how many windfall leaves Fauci had raked in during his career, but It's nice, as Borat would say.

Dr. Anthony Fauci year-over-year salary growth, 2004-2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci year-over-year salary growth, 2004-2020
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Last June I wrote about these very same allegations against Fauci, which, even then, were gathering dust: Dr. Fauci is currently under MSM siege, especially from the right, for his supposed knowledge of gain-of-function activity at the Wuhan lab. His voluminous email collection is now being combed for evidence that he encouraged the Chinese to continue with the dangerous research that Obama had closed down funding for in 2014. Any continued g-o-f research, which Fauci is on the record as supporting (seeing potential for vaccine development, not WW3), would have to be conducted overseas. Critics of Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), claim he snuck around Trump to get funding to Wuhan and DJ didn't know anything about it, according to the Weekend Australian.

The Forbes piece linked-to above suggests that Fauci always had "exemption" loopholes working for him, and that in December 2017, two years before the Covid-19 alarms were raised, NIH and Dr. Fauci's NIAID quietly restarted funding, with guidance, for what was then termed "enhanced potential pandemic pathogens." It appears he didn't tell Trump about the re-start. The Forbes piece goes on, "News of the funding restart surprised many in the scientific community." A reasonable question to ask, we'll see, is did the Department of Defense (DoD) pressure him to continue pursuing g-o-f research?

But Fauci's interest in g-o-f went beyond feel-good research to be ahead of the curve should a global virus outbreak occur, to actually aggressively championing research related to defense against bioweapons. In a 2002 report hosted at openthebooks.com, NIAID Strategic Plan for Biodefense Research, and authored by Fauci, we read:

The mission of NIAID is to carry out the research needed to understand the pathogenesis of these microbes and the host response to them, and to translate this knowledge into useful interventions and diagnostic tools for an effective response. Accordingly, NIAID is committed to an agenda of basic and translational research for bioterrorism defense, working with partners in academia, industry, and other private and public-sector agencies.

This mission statement helps explain why Fauci would want to work with WIV, in China, in the first place. They are willing to do what the US was loathe to do under Obama.

But there's more. As I wrote last year in a piece titled, "The Age of Synthetic Biology: Start the War Games!," 16 years after Fauci's Report, a more substantive framework for a massive development of new bio and chemical weapons, under the rubric of synthetic biology, was developed by "our" government. The framework is titled: Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology (2018). In the framework, the multiple scientific community authors state:

...synthetic biology makes it possible to synthesize genomes and use those to generate, or "boot," copies of naturally occurring organisms in the laboratory, opening new opportunities for the acquisition of existing, regulated pathogens... and synthetic biology tools could be used to synthesize and boot entirely new organisms, potentially incorporating genetic material from multiple existing organisms.

Note the similarities in missions and means between the Fauci report and the Framework.

Cover Image Synthetic Biology
Cover Image Synthetic Biology
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Here's the link.

Here's the Quick and Easy: The US government has begun intentionally developing syn bio WMD in the field of synthetic biology with fully expressed intention of uncovering the most lethal response from viruses, and other bio weapons, so that we beat the Russkies (and other foes, presumably not the Chinese, if we're willing to fund g-o-f research with them). Basically, "we" are beating the snot out of and waterboarding viruses and the like until they scream out their poetry of hatred for us; then we "cure" it. The lazy or hurried reader will find my highlighted areas in the framework so that you may quickly get the gist, although a fuller reading is recommended.

Further, the vaccine-development benefits that Fauci argued for seem to have come to fruition through the DARPA Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) government-private-academic coalition that made the miraculous (and under-reported) burgeoning vaccines possible. Yes (No!) Yes, the Department of Defense P3 program

aims specifically to develop a scalable, adaptable, rapid response platform capable of producing relevant numbers of doses against any known or previously unknown infectious threat within 60 days of identification of such a threat in order to keep the outbreak from escalating and decrease disruptions to the military and homeland.

The partners joined by P3 had been conducting 'war games' against a virus outbreak to make sure its infrastructure and response frameworks were up and running effectively. By coincidence, a real life pandemic emerged to test the engine for real. It passed. From the time syn biology lab in Vancouver received the antibody of the first American survivor to the identification and production of a monoclonal solution and partnership with Big Pharma (Eli Lilly) was within mission scope. Also, by coincidence, Jared Adams, chief of communications at DARPA, told me in an email: "The P3 program is two years into a four-year effort, so the goal of being able to identify and respond to a viral threat is not fully mature." Thus, P3 is scheduled to end next year some time.

DARPA P3 pamphlet explaining flow of gene data as it heads toward a 'cure.'
DARPA P3 pamphlet explaining flow of gene data as it heads toward a 'cure.'
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DARPA P3 pamphlet explaining flow of gene data as it heads toward a "cure."

This activity happened under Trump. (And, sure, maybe behind his back, too. You get the feeling that there was a lot of goofy backstabbing and nefarious deep-state hijinks going on.) Key here is that the vaccines are, essentially, a military miracle. That's where the story is. In a 60 Minutes episode last April titled, "Military programs aiming to end pandemics forever," the DoD crowed about a coming era when pandemics are wiped out. Speaking with P3 partner Vanderbilt infectious disease researcher Dr. James Crowe, 60 Minutes' Bill Whitaker elicits an eye-opening exchange, after a voice-over tells us that in 2005 scientists intentionally recreated the 1918 so-called Spanish Flu:


Bill Whitaker: So you find the antibodies in survivors who are almost 100 years old or more. Then what?

Dr. James Crowe: Well, once we have the genetic sequence, which is the DNA sequence, it's a string of letters that encodes the antibody, essentially, we have the recipe to make it again. And -- now we have a drug substance that we can use to prevent or treat that infection.

Voice Over: Dr. Crowe and CDC scientists infected lab animals with the deadly 1918 virus and cured them.

Bill Whitaker: And what happened?

Dr. James Crowe: Well, the antibody, like a heat-seeking missile, floats around in the animal, finds the virus, latches onto the virus and inactivates. Stops it -- in its tracks -- for us, after we had done that, we realized, "Wow, your body is a library of everything you've ever seen. Then we started thinking, as medical researchers, we could find the cure to virtually anything that had ever occurred -- on the planet. [The video of this episode is difficult to locate, but here's the transcript.]

Wow, DARPA claims that it has the technology to address any virus that comes along and develop a solution to it in 60 days. But can it do so without g-o-f? A contracting spokesperson for DARPA told me that the agency does not support g-o-f.

The most "recent" allegations aside, Fauci is eagerly on the record as affirming his support for gain-of-function research. And the reason for it is the promise of ending pandemics that such research holds out to humanity. Viruses bye-bye today, tomorrow cancer? Who knows? I don't know. Do you know, reader?

Fauci is innocent until proven guilty of some criminal complaint in a court of law -- and not before. If it turns out he lied to Congress about g-o-f research taking place at WIV, then he should be, at least, forced into retirement. If something nastier news develops -- Fauci is shown without a doubt to have contributed to the development of Covid-19 that then accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab -- then we deal with it then. Right now, investigators are still trying to determine the origin of the novel coronavirus.

A House Foreign Affairs Committee Report has drawn a conclusion about the Origins of the Covid-19 virus. In their summary statement they write:

It is the opinion of Committee Minority Staff, based on the preponderance of available information; the documented efforts to obfuscate, hide, and destroy evidence; and the lack of physical evidence to the contrary; that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019. The virus, which may be natural in origin or the result of genetic manipulation, was likely collected in the identified cave in Yunnan province, PRC, sometime between 2012 and 2015. Its release was due to poor lab safety standards and practices, exacerbated by dangerous gain-of-function research being conducted at inadequate biosafety levels, including BSL-2. The virus was then spread throughout central Wuhan, likely via the Wuhan Metro, in the weeks prior to the Military World Games. Those games became an international vector, spreading the virus to multiple continents around the world.

But a non-political, scientific quest continues nevertheless.

A very clear and thoughtful read on the continuing effort to find Covid-19's origin is found in a recent New Yorker piece, "The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory: Did the virus spring from nature or from human error?" by Carolyn Kormann. She ends her piece by pointing at humans as cause -- one way or the other:

...humans have changed the equation. Calling viruses zoonotic obscures the role we play in their evolution, whether in the wilderness, a wet market, or a lab. What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything? Nature's staggering diversity includes human nature. Somehow, sars-CoV-2 found its ecological niche in us.

It sure seems that way.


(Article changed on Oct 26, 2021 at 3:03 AM EDT)

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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