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fauci: why no criminal investigation?

friday, may 28th, 2021

Fauci exploited a loophole that allowed him to fund research at the Wuhan Lab that likely became COVID-19.

[Full Title: "Tucker Carlson: Anthony Fauci let the coronavirus pandemic happen, why isn't there a criminal investigation?]

How do we assess the Biden administration’s response to COVID? Well, here’s one marker: it tells you pretty much everything that the White House that is supposedly so committed to science chose as its head COVID coordinator a man with no background at all in science or medicine. His name is Jeffrey Zients. Zients ran Joe Biden’s presidential transition team, that’s his qualification. He’s a former management consultant from Bain, who sat on the board of Facebook. Jeffrey Zients is a political operative. That’s who’s overseeing COVID response for Joe Biden. The good news is because Zients isn’t even close to being an actual scientist, he doesn’t talk like one. Occasionally he says things whose significance the rest of us can clearly understand. Read what Zients said on CNN yesterday, and it becomes very clear how the White House understands this pandemic.

JEFFREY ZIENTS: And the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter. Let's keep up our guard. Let's follow the CDC guidance. And the CDC guidance across time will allow vaccinated people more and more privileges to take off that mask.

There it is. "The CDC guidance across time will allow vaccinated people more and more privileges to take off that mask." A sentence like that raises so many questions, it’s hard to know where to start. How about here: If the vaccines work, why are any vaccinated people wearing masks anywhere, ever? Seriously. Jeffrey Zients should be required to explain that, slowly and with numbers, so the rest of us who didn’t serve on the board of Facebook can understand. No one’s asked him to explain that, of course, so he hasn’t. Nor has anyone asked Zients just how effective masks are at preventing the spread of COVID. Our public health authorities act as though masks are absolutely critical. But are they absolutely critical? Where are the serious studies that prove that? Do they exist? If they do exist, is there a reason they’re being hidden from us? And, finally, when did masklessness become a privilege? For thousands of years, until 12 months ago, masklessness was the global status quo. Virtually everyone on earth lived without masks. That wasn’t considered weird. Masks were weird. They were unhealthy and menacing. Yet Jeffrey Zients has just informed us that things have changed. Going forward, not wearing a mask, even after you’ve been vaccinated, is "a privilege" — a Scooby snack, a gold star, a pat on the head — that may or may not be granted to you exclusively by the Democratic Party, on the basis of no science, but purely because they’re in charge and you’re not. That’s called public health. It’s absolutely critical to the existence of our species that you comply with it reflexively, without asking questions or thinking about it. This will all continue, Zients explained, "across time."

What does that mean, exactly? How long will this terrifyingly irrational exercise continue? For the answer to that question, we go to a man even more partisan than Jeffrey Zients. The nation’s most highly credentialed political operative, Tony Fauci, let us know that, actually, this mask thing is never going to end.

CHUCK TODD, NBC: But is the mask going to be something we have with us in a seasonal aspect?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You know, that's quite possible. I think people have gotten used to the fact that wearing masks, clearly, if you look at the data, diminishes respiratory diseases…So it is conceivable that as we go on a year or two or more from now, that during certain seasonal periods when you have respiratory-borne viruses like the flu, people might actually elect to wear masks to diminish the likelihood that you’ll be spreading these respiratory-borne diseases.

"A year or two or more from now." In other words, never — you’re never taking off the mask. Get ready for a lifetime of filthy wet cotton covering your mouth, reduced oxygen flow to your brain, and a world where every stranger looks the same because no one has a face. When Kamala Harris and her husband kissed the other day while wearing masks, they were giving you a preview of your daughter’s wedding. In a masked world, human beings never really touch each other. Is that public health? No, it’s not public health. It’s a kind of punishment. Tony Fauci is punishing the country — you, us, everyone. The question is: why is he doing that? Maybe he liked it, that’s possible. But you’ve got to think that at least part of Fauci’s authoritarian germ hysterical is a cover for something else. Could it be that Tony Fauci is trying to divert attention from himself and his own role in the COVID-19 pandemic?

What do we mean by that? We can’t recommend more strongly a new piece by Nicholas Wade, who for more than 50 years has been one of the preeminent science writers in the world. For 30 years, Nicholas Wade worked for the New York Times, he edited the science section there. But this piece did not run in the New York Times, he edited the science section there. But this piece did not run in the New York Times. It ran on Medium. And the piece explains where the virus almost certainly came from. In it, Wade makes it clear that, more than any other single American, Tony Fauci is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wade lays out a nearly insurmountable amount of evidence that this virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Central China. We’ve raised this possibility from the early days of the pandemic. But this piece all but proves it. At the time the outbreak began last fall, the Wuhan lab was conducting experiments on how to make bat viruses infectious to human beings. Those experiments were funded by American tax dollars, the funding for those experiments was approved and directed by Tony Fauci in Washington. It’s hard to believe that, but it’s true, and the piece lays it out.

Many of the Wuhan experiments fell under the direction of a Chinese researcher Shi Zheng-li. Known as the "bat lady," she was China's leading expert on bat-born viruses. Her job was genetically engineering coronaviruses so that they infect human beings, and do so as easily as possible.

The work, Wade notes, involved, "doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells."

Why was this research going on? You’ll have to ask the scientist who did it.

But the facts remain, these were some of the most dangerous experiments ever conducted by mankind. And yet we know that China wasn't taking the necessary safety precautions. And we should not be surprised by that. Several years ago, U.S. diplomatic cables warned about lax standards at the Wuhan Lab. The Wuhan facility was classified as a "bio-safety-level two laboratory." What does that mean? According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, that's approximately the same level of safety that you would find in a dentist's office in America.

So that lab, conducting research on the coronavirus, and how to make it transmissible to human beings, resulted almost certainly infected a lab researcher and spread from there. The first coronavirus patients didn’t come from the so-called wet market as we heard. That was a lie. The first patients of the coronavirus were employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Once again, why would the Wuhan lab be conducting experiments like that in the first place? Well, we know that Tony Fauci had authorized payment for the research. For five years -- from 2014 to 2019 -- the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci runs, and has for decades, pumped money to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance.

The EcoHealth Alliance, run by a man called Dr. Peter Daszak, contracted with Dr. Shi to conduct gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Just before the pandemic became public knowledge -- on December 9, 2019 -- Peter Daszak sat for an interview that was streamed online. In that interview, he bragged about how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses in lab experiments.

PETER DASZAK: Coronavirus is a pretty good… You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. It’s spike protein, Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, build the protein. And we worked with Ralph Barrack at UNC to do this. Insert into a backbone of another virus and then do some work in the lab.

Just days after he said that, it became clear that this new version of coronavirus, this novel coronavirus, what we now call COVID-19, was running rampant through Wuhan then China then the world. Since the pandemic began, Peter Daszak, not surprisingly, has appeared on virtually every media platform available to him to deny, in the most strenuous and dismissive terms, that the Wuhan lab could be in any way linked to the outbreak, since he has very personal motives for claiming that. "The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney," he said last year. But that’s a lie. It’s not pure baloney.

A lot of smart people knew that right away. One of those people is Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT. She bravely wrote a paper about how the coronavirus's genome hadn't changed much over time, and that was odd because that genome had gone through trillions of replications. According to Chan, that fact implied that the virus was designed for human-to-human transmission from the outset.

The former director of the CDC also clearly understood this. He too argued the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

CDC DIR. REDFIELD: I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely ideology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped. Other people don’t believe that. It’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.

Millions of people have died of COVID-19, so it’s not a matter of score-settling or blame-assignment to figure out where it came from. If you want to prevent the next global pandemic, you have to figure out how this one started. And so, the World Health Organization, said it would get to the bottom of it. The World Health Organization, of course, is beholden to China. And so, it tried to hide the basic facts of the origins of this pandemic. And to hide those facts, WHO appointed none other than Peter Daszak as the only America-based representative on the investigative team looking into where the virus came from. In what turned out to be a sham report, that team concluded it's "extremely unlikely" the virus came from the Wuhan lab. That’s not true.

The WHO’s investigation into the origins of the virus was fraudulent, and that matters to public health globally. But one thing you’ll notice is that Tony Fauci did not say that. Why? Because once again, he’s implicated in it, personally. The gain-of-function research that Peter Daszak was bragging about in the video we just showed you had, in fact, been banned explicitly by the U.S. government. There was a federal moratorium on the funding of exactly the kind of gain-of-function experiments that went on in the Wuhan lab, to disastrous effects. So why didn't the feds halt its funding to the lab in Wuhan? That is a central question, and Nicholas Wade looked into it.

Here's what he found: "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.'"

And that’s exactly the loophole that was exploited. Who signed off on this? Tony Fauci — possibly along with Francis Collins, the director of the NIH -- invoked that special exception in order to keep funding the Wuhan lab, and the deadly experiments that were going on there. The experiments that clearly went so wrong.

According to Richard Ebright, "Unfortunately, the NIAID Director [Fauci] 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."

This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen. That is clear.

It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story. In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the COVID pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever. So why isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?

© May 11, 2021 by Tucker Carlson, Fox News.

A Day In The Life.

Awake from the garbage truck's noise, at 7a, so I went back to sleep until 8:30. I did the first finger stick to check BSL (Blood Sugar Level), made coffee, had a smoke in the garage, breakfast and a daily shower. Then, I did my 21 Rx & OTC morning pill regimen. Almost no left side hip, thigh, knee and shin pain! The forecast called for near-90°, so Sherry and I switched our 1-2 mile walk to the York Galleria mezzanine instead of Cousler Park, just to be comfortable. I listened to the "Chris Plante Show" on WMAL-FM, from DC, from 9-12, had a light lunch and met her at 1p.

We had a delightful 1½hrs of walking and talking, went back to my condo to relax, and then Sherry drove us to her daughter's shop, in nearby Hellam. A very, very nice afternoon; I was sorry to see her leave. I made Crab-Filled Ravioli w/ Butter Sauce & Sweet Peas for dinner, watched Discovery's "Gold Rush: Dave Turin's Lost Mines", selected FNC shows until 11:30, and called it a day.

Up at 7:30a on Saturday, I did the usual morning routines, read thru some IRA RMD (Required Minimum Distribution) papers FedEx'd to me by my Financial Broker at Wells Fargo, signed them, put them into the return FedEx envelope and drove to Walgreen's Drug Store, here in East York, and sent them back. Then, down to DeVono's Cleaners to drop-off a pile of shirts, and back home by 12noon. After some PA Dutch Chicken Pot Pie for lunch, I opted to stay inside as temps hit 90°, but at least there was a breeze. We sure need some rain.

The Pink Rhododendron "Roseum Elegans" out back, in front of my office-sunroom, and the Yellow Peony "Bartzella Itoh", also out back at the irregular flagstone patio, are loving the heat. My front gardens are amazing, too.

The Biden administration says the border is closed. If you believe that, you probably think Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes.

I had a short 2hr snooze on the LR couch, watched the Indy 500 Qualifying Trails until dinner, and switched-on "American Pickers" until 10. The F-1 Monaco Gran Prix is on at 9-11a, tomorrow morning, so I will be getting-up early to get some things done before it starts, and I called it an early night.

Up at 6:15a on Sunday, I did the usual morning routines, and got ready to watch the F-1 Monaco (Monte Carlo) Gran Prix, at 9a. It was a boring race, thru winding, narrow streets in the principality of Monaco, at only an 98mph average; 175mph on one straight, very little passing only thru the mountain tunnel. Mercifully, it was over in 2hrs, and I moved on to other projects. By 1p, it was 94° and still climbing. I stayed inside during the afternoon, to avoid the heat and pollen, watched an IMSA (Int'l MotorSports Ass'n) endurance race at Circuit of The Americas, in Austin, TX. Good race. After dinner, I watched a new series on History, The Cars That Built The World, until 11p, and unplugged for the night.

Awake at 7:30a on Monday, I did the morning routines, and the rain came with temps in the 60s. I turned-off the AC in the condo, set at 73°, put on my wool Pendleton Shirt, and checked the myWellspan Portal, for this afternoon's 1:30p ECHO app't, and WellSpan's new massive complex, The Cardiology & Vascular Center. We sure needed the rain, and cooler temps were most welcomed. I listened to the "CP Show" until 12, had lunch and left for the 1:30p ECHO-Cardiogram app't and Apple Hill's new facility. Over in 30mins, I headed to a couple stops, and then home. Reading FR.com for a while, I chanced upon this article. "No, we're NOT alone We've never been alone".

By 3:30p, the ECHO results were read and posted, and IT WAS MAJOR GOOD NEWS and a 50-60% improvement over the previous test, just a year ago! More welcome rain and lower temps arrived. I grabbed a 2hr snooze on the couch, had dinner and watched TV until 11, and called it quits.

Up at 8:45a on Tuesday, I did the usual routines, ran a couple errands and was back before lunch. After a 2hr snooze on the couch, I had a smoke on the back patio saw a friend walking his dog, made my way up the 45° grass slope to talk with him, and slipped, turned my left ankle over, on the way back to the patio. Nothing broken; just some stretched-out tendons and ligaments, which were very painful and would be for days. Major t-storms and rain came thru the area around 3-4p, and it was again, most welcomed.

After dinner, I watched some TV until 10:30p, and hit the sack since the ankle was hurting.

Up at 7:30a on Wednesday, I spent the day inside, partly because of my hurting ankle, and partly because it was 92°, and I didn't want to deal with the heat and pollen. I slept for 5-6hrs on the LR couch, had a light dinner and called it a day, at 9p, since the cleaning ladies would be in at 8:30a.

Awake at 6:30a on Thursday, I did the usual morning routines, and the cleaning ladies arrived, as I went to sleep on the couch, with an icepak on my left ankle. They were finished in 90mins, and left. The weather forecast was for 9092°, with a Heat Index of 9892°, but that didn't happen. High for the day was only 8192°, mercifully. I stayed inside, put-off all errands, to rest my ankle, and the coldpaks helped. Not much on TV, but I watched FNC anyway. After my nightly insulin shot at 10, I called it a week. Tomorrow starts another one, here in the "Journal".

Highly Pathogenic Bird Flu Outbreak Already Reported in 46 Countries.

While the world was distracted with the rampant spread of a novel coronavirus, 2020 also witnessed an explosion in another deadly pathogen that could pose a threat to global public health.

H5N8, a subtype of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV), was identified decades ago, but during 2020 a series of emerging and ongoing H5N8 outbreaks in avian populations across dozens of countries have led to the death or slaughter of millions of birds worldwide.

"The affected geographic regions have been expanding continuously, and at least 46 countries have reported highly pathogenic H5N8 AIV outbreaks," virus researchers Weifeng Shi and George F. Gao write in a new perspective article in Science, warning of the dangers of H5N8 if we don't closely monitor and contain this worrisome trend.

While the most vulnerable animals to H5N8 are different kinds of birds (including farmed chicken and ducks, but also wild and migratory birds), human cases of the virus have also been discovered in recent times.

An outbreak of the avian flu in Russia in December 2020 jumped to poultry workers, with seven people on a farm in southern Russia showing signs of the infection – representing the first time H5N8 had ever been found in humans.

While that was a first for H5N8, it certainly wasn't a first for clades and subclades related to H5N8, nor for avian flu viruses in general.

"To date, there have been a total of 862 laboratory-confirmed human cases of infection with H5N1 reported to the World Health Organization (WHO), including 455 deaths," Shi and Gao explain. "These cases were from 17 countries, with ~76 percent from Egypt and Indonesia."

But zoonotic risks are only part of the problem with H5N8 and its ilk. In most of the recent outbreaks, a clade of H5N8 called 2.3.4 has become the dominant pathogen worldwide, first seen in a Chinese wet market in 2010.

"Clade 2.3.4 H5 AIVs, particularly the H5N8 subtype, have clearly displayed a propensity for rapid global spread in migratory birds," the researchers write, noting that these viruses also display evidence of constant evolution, genetically reassorting themselves with parts of other AIV subtypes.

Shi and Gao – respectively from China's Shandong First Medical University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – were among some of the first scientists to document the novel coronavirus in early 2020.

They note that the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic – and the prevention and control measures world populations enacted in response – saw a sharp reduction in the spread of seasonal human influenza A and B viruses in the last year.

Nonetheless, in the same timeframe, a number of highly pathogenic H5Ny AIVs, including H5N1, H5N2, H5N5, and H5N8 subtypes, spread across China, South Africa, Europe, Eurasia, and elsewhere.

At the same time, research has shown that clade 2.3.4 viruses show particular cell-binding adaptations that could pose greater risks for human transmission, including potentially human-to-human transmissibility.

In all, the researchers say we need to significantly step up our surveillance of HPAIVs in poultry farms now, before these pathogens fly the coop.

"Because of the long-distance migration of wild birds, the innate capacity for reassortment of AIVs, the increased human-type receptor binding capability, and the constant antigenic variation of HPAIVs, it is imperative that the global spread and potential risk of H5N8 AIVs to poultry farming, avian wildlife, and global public health are not ignored," Shi and Gao write.

George Floyd celebrates 1 year of sobriety.

George Floyd, patron saint of fentanyl, celebrated 365 consecutive drug-free days today.

Mr. Floyd famously quit taking drugs following his arrest for allegedly paying a convenience store with a counterfeit $20 bill. At the time, he was under the influence of multiple drugs, including a lethal level of 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.

He gave up drugs for good that fateful day. Activists responded to his newfound sobriety by rioting, looting and committing arson across the country.

His previous personal record for sobriety is believed to be in 2014, when Mr. Floyd finished his most recent stint in prison. Saint George served time for Aggravated Robbery when he pointed a pointed a gun at a pregnant woman’s stomach during a home invasion.

In addition to his newfound commitment to his health and well-being, Mr. Floyd is also approaching a personal record for longest time avoiding arrest.

Congratulations George, you are an inspiration to us all. May your sobriety streak continue!

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