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“Follow the science,” they said. If only they had. Instead, when it came to the Covid pandemic, politicians, bureaucrats, media, and too many scientists, put science a long, long second to politics. All along, the same people blithering about “the science” have, at best, been too often woefully, stubbornly wrong. At worst, they’ve blatantly, knowingly lied.
Especially when it cames to the origins of the virus.
From the very beginning, anyone who suggested that a novel coronavirus breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with the high-level laboratory doing work on coronaviruses was hosed down as a “conspiracy theorist” and “racist”. The official story — oddly enough, promoted by certain people who had a great deal they wanted to keep hidden about their involvement in the research at Wuhan — was “natural origin”.
It was a lie, of course. They knew it was a lie. We suspected it was a lie, but couldn’t prove it.
Well, the smoking gun just dropped.
Buried away inside one of the US intelligence agencies’ secret laboratories, a group of eminent scientists examined the structure of Covid-19 in order to determine its origin.
These scientists did not include Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak or Neil Ferguson, certainly not Siouxsie Wiles or Shaun Hendy. Instead, they were far better scientists, more committed to good science than chasing social media fame and political favours. Naturally, then, they’ve heretofore remained unknown, and their work largely unrecognised.
Because their work was quickly suppressed by the Biden administration.
There have even been attempts, at the highest levels of the US government to censor them and keep their discoveries secret.
Unlike the Proximal Origins paper, downloaded and cited millions of times, their papers – some top secret, others unclassified – remain tucked away behind the impenetrable walls of Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Today, for the first time, we hear their extraordinary story and reveal the lengths taken to hide from the public their categorical discovery and scientific conclusions.
So, what did they find about the origins of Covid?
Stripped of scientific complexity, these highly experienced researchers conclude that Covid-19 was almost certainly the result of experiments in a lab, and was not of natural origin as the world has been led to believe.
They made a discovery that was described internally as a smoking gun.
One of the scientists discovered that the size and location of a fragment of Covid-19 resembled a fragment in Wuhan Institute of Virology research from more than a decade earlier, in 2008. It involved the same technique the Wuhan institute used in grant applications to make chimeric viruses. “This paper is the smoking gun of everything. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct,” a source said.
The team included Robert Greg Cutlip, a senior research scientist who was a member of the coronavirus taskforce, providing intelligence to the president; Commander Jean-Paul Chretien who led the pandemic warning team at the NCMI; and John Hardham, a Navy Reserve captain and a coronavirus expert who specialises in chemical and biological defence programs. Hardham has licensed several coronavirus vaccines and worked directly with viral reverse genetics systems. He was on loan to the NCMI in late 2019.
Early in the pandemic they began analysing the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2. Very quickly, just as the authors of the Proximal Origins did, they saw unusual features in the virus that led them to question whether it might have been engineered.
Unlike the Proximal Origins authors, their first concern was not the effect on scientific collaboration or funding – they focused purely on what the science told them about the origins of the virus.
What the science told them was diametrically opposite to what the Promixal Origins team proclaimed, to media fanfare and political acclaim.
When Fauci and Francis Collins used it to insist the virus was natural, saying the matter had been settled, they were shocked.
These apolitical virologists could see beyond the inconclusive and biased commentary published by the esteemed medical journal.
They vehemently disagreed with the Proximal origin analysis.
They wrote an unclassified working paper, dated May 26, 2020, titled Critical Analysis of Anderson et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Their paper was circulated within the NCMI and among multiple scientists within the intelligence community. It was also intended for wider publication, so that the public could have a greater understanding of the new virus sweeping the globe. But it was never allowed to be disseminated more broadly, in yet another cover-up of scientists who questioned the natural origins narrative perpetuated by senior officials.
What the Biden government covered up was a paper that largely confirms what we’ve already reported at The BFD about the origins of COVID-19. In particular, that it was engineered from wild bat viruses collected at a mine in Mojiang, China. What’s been lacking to date, though, was a “smoking gun”.
Now we know that the investigating scientists in fact found it.
The majority of the SARS-COV-2 virus genome is similar to bat coronaviruses. However, a small region of the spike gene, encoding the spike protein’s receptor binding domain (RBD), is identical to that of the pangolin coronavirus MP789.
Hardham reported to NCMI that the size and location of the pangolin fragment in SARS-CoV-2 was similar to the same RBD fragment described in one of Wuhan institute’s previous research publications.
In a 2008 paper by Shi Zhengli and Ren Wuze, the Wuhan researchers identified the minimal cassette that would be necessary to change the binding to different host ACE2 receptors – this refers to how the virus crosses from species to species.
Shi also published papers describing working with furin cleavage sites in precisely the location they later appeared in SARS-CoV-2.
“This paper is the smoking gun of everything. Figure 7 is literally the description of the pangolin RBD insert.
So, what did the Biden administration do with this smoking gun? Quietly hid it away.
Joe Biden ordered a 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19 in May 2021. When the final document appeared, everything the team who had uncovered the smoking gun had written was gone.
“When the scientists saw the final document, they wondered were did all their edits go?”
They did manage to insert one paragraph into that document that related to the technique Ralph Baric had taught Shi Zhengli on how to engineer a virus without leaving a trace […]
The scientists who had actually done the work were not even permitted to speak directly with the National Intelligence Council; they were told to go through a lower-qualified intermediary.
There was a strong sense that this amounted to a silencing of the scientists. It was very unusual, according to sources close to the matter. The scientists viewed their experience examining the origins of Covid, and their findings being blocked from entering the public domain of the intelligence community reports, as a cover-up.
The Australian
Of course, it was.
You can trust science, perhaps, but you can’t ever trust politicians and bureaucrats.
