By Michael Shellenberger June 15, 2023
Source: The NY Post
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash, It is no longer a question that the COVID-19 virus leaked from China’s notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory.
What’s more, this week my colleagues Matt Taibbi, Alex Gutentag, and I broke the explosive story that the first three people sickened by the virus were the scientists experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses.
Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab.
When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the virus spread around the world, we were told, “100%.”
Now, it’s up to Congress to demand answers from the intelligence community and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
How long did they know? And why did they keep it a secret?
The first 3 people sickened by COVID-19 were scientists experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses.
In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Why, then, didn’t he say something sooner?
The cover-up was vast and insidious.
Our sources were terrified to tell us what many had long suspected.
They only did so because they are as outraged as the American people should be and felt a moral obligation to speak out.
The pandemic is over. Who cares how it started? The answer is, in part, that the cover-up is indicative of the rot at the heart of many
American institutions.
The abuse of power by partisan and ideological officials at the highest levels of American government threatens our democracy and civilization, as the pandemic proved dramatically.
Not only did the highly infectious respiratory virus kill millions, but the response to it also shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.
Governments threw out their pandemic playbooks, which until COVID-19 had centered around voluntary measures and protecting high-risk groups — not long-term school and business lockdowns and mask mandates.
And, in the name of public safety and preventing “vaccine hesitancy,” governments declared war on free speech.
And the White House menacingly threatened Facebook and Twitter with extinction, in the form of revoking their license to operate, if they didn’t censor “often-true content,” including stories of vaccine side effects.
Now we know that many people within the federal bureaucracy have strongly suspected that COVID came from a lab and were too terrified to say anything publicly. The people we interviewed for our story weren’t the only federal employees who felt compelled to share what they knew.
For the last six months, we have seen whistleblower after whistleblower come forward bravely, as the law allows, only to be punished.
FBI officials punished whistleblowers for exposing the agency’s targeting of innocent Americans for “domestic terrorism” and “violent extremism.” China deserves plenty of blame for what happened.
The Wuhan lab had repeatedly failed to maintain proper safety levels.
And totalitarian societies, by punishing dissent, can’t self-correct in the way democracies can.
Fauci and his collaborators violated the spirit if not the letter of the law by sending that research to China, and spinning it as something other than gain of function.
The abuse of power is pervasive in the federal government.
Congress must act now to create an independent and bipartisan commission on the origins of the COVID pandemic, and why US government officials participated in its cover-up.
Congress also must take immediate action to defund and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex, whereby contractors of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation demand that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms censor disfavored speech, including “often-true” speech, or worthwhile hypotheses, like the lab leak theory was, which has since been proven.
And Congress must establish stronger oversight of its biomedical establishment.
The worshipful news media coverage of Fauci is particularly appalling in retrospect, now that we know that he personally sought to squelch the lab leak hypothesis for self-interested reasons.
The greatest change of all must be in the way Americans view their leaders and institutions. We must be much more suspicious of the official narrative.
Have you taken the COVID-19 vaccine? Why? Why not?
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