Although the CDC acknowledged playing a role in the growing distrust in science, none of their professed forms of atonement, such as promising to share data faster and doing a better job of translating science into policy will restore trust without a process that includes honest debate.
We face the question of how to purity test our leaders—both official and unofficial—in light of all the devastation we’ve witnessed during the response to COVID-19. If you believe, as I do, that the importance of this issue presently eclipses that of any other, then every step should be taken to select for leaders who opposed lockdowns as early and as vocally as possible.
How Long Did It Take Them Realize that Human Rights Matter? Read More
The first known mention of the idea that the coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese lab appeared on January 9th 2020 in a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA). This was just days after the virus had first entered public consciousness, and at the time, no deaths had yet been reported and few people were worrying about the virus – including, it seems, the Chinese, who were claiming it wasn’t even clear whether it was spreading between humans.
This is the year when we will learn if Covid illiberalism will begin to be rolled back or has become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West. Although the head says to fear the worst, the eternally optimistic heart will still hope for the best.
With help from the media, social media and police, people were frightened, shamed and coerced into submission and compliance with arbitrary and increasingly authoritarian government edicts. The intense and unrelenting propaganda unleashed on the people by governments using sophisticated tactics of psychological manipulation and enthusiastically amplified by the media was astonishingly successful in a remarkably short time.
On this evidence it seems we can definitively rule out both an emergence before July 2019 (too many negatives and just one questionable positive) and after November 2019 (too many positives in a number of countries). The evidence is not currently consistent or robust enough to be able to pin it down more definitively than that.
The Evidence COVID-19 Was Spreading Around the World in Late 2019 Read More
We dare not relent lest the despotism we experienced only very recently be repeated and entrenched. We know now that it can happen, and that there is nothing inevitable about genuine progress. Our job now is to regroup and recommit to living free lives, never again believing that there are magical forces at work in the world that make our role as thinkers and doers unnecessary.
Though many in positions of power would prefer that we forgot, the strict lockdowns that consumed the world in 2020 are extremely well documented. Above all, these lockdowns were a chilling demonstration of just how quickly western officials, policymakers, scientists, journalists, and soon entire populations could be convinced to adopt a degree of totalitarianism in their everyday lives. Until we have real answers as to how exactly they happened, and why, there’s no reason for any thinking citizen to have confidence in the current crop of officials who claim to represent them.
In the end, the truths that De Las Casas preached did prevail but the human project is always at risk of going backwards in time. We know this now better than many previous generations, simply because we’ve been witness to such horrible abuses over these last three years. Human sacrifice is clearly not vanquished from the earth; it only takes a different form today that it did 500 years ago.
De Las Casas and the 500-Year Struggle for Liberty Read More
Based on this timeline and history, as well as my own direct personal communication with Dr. Callahan, I strongly suspect that both the gross clinical mismanagement of ventilatory support during the first phase of the outbreak (responsible for up to 30,000 deaths) as well as the stunningly poor management practices of Nursing Home and Extended Care facilities throughout the USA can be directly traced to the influence of Dr. Michael Callahan, DARPAs Man in Wuhan and arguably the top US Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research.
The 2019 tabletop exercise involved a huge number of public-sector agencies across all states plus many private-sector associations. It postulated a disease scenario in which a respiratory virus begins in China and spreads around the world by air travelers. It is first detected in Chicago. The World Health Organization declares a pandemic 47 days later.
When asked about the possibility of a lab leak in a November 2021 interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Drosten insisted that “I have no personal connection to the people in Wuhan and have never been at the [Wuhan] Institute [of Virology].” The above photo makes clear that he and Shi are not perfect strangers at any rate.
