Wednesday, July 12, 2023


Text Messages of Top Scientists Shed Light on COVID Origin Response

A new report released by Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic includes new evidence that a group of scientists who received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), conspired to dismiss the origin of the pandemic in order to protect China.

The text messages were exchanged between authors of the Proximal Origin paper, initiated by then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, which had the explicit purpose of dismissing the lab leak theory for the pandemic’s origin. The Proximal Origin paper, which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” became one of the most cited science papers of all time and was prominently used by Dr. Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus came from nature.

While Dr. Fauci’s role in directing the paper’s creation as well as the paper’s many scientific and logical flaws have been widely documented, the exact circumstances of the paper’s origin have remained unclear. Text messages released by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic now reveal that it was fear of upsetting international relations, and the Chinese regime in particular, that drove the inception of Proximal Origin.

According to emails obtained by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, concerns regarding COVID-19’s engineered-looking features were first discussed by Proximal Origin author Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney and British pharmaceutical trust director Jeremy Farrar on Jan. 8, 2020. Mr. Farrar is now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as unnamed Chinese officials were also included in these early, behind-the-scenes discussions.

It remains unknown why Mr. Farrar—who later co-organized with Dr. Fauci a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that resulted in the drafting of Proximal Origin—was deeply entangled in the effort to suppress the lab leak theory and instead elevate the natural origin narrative. Notably, Mr. Farrar is a close personal friend of Gao Fu, who was at the time the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Mr. Farrar later admitted in his book “Spike” that he was concerned at the time about Sino–U.S. relations.

While Mr. Holmes, Mr. Farrar, Dr. Collins, and the unnamed Chinese officials were discussing the virus’s unusual features, NIAID-funded scientist Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute contacted Mr. Holmes to share his own concerns about the new virus, in particular its unusual receptor binding domain and furin cleavage site. Mr. Andersen had also uncovered that the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Shi Zhengli, had—together with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who is sometimes referred to as the godfather of gain-of-function experiments—inserted furin cleavage sites into SARS viruses. In other words, Mr. Andersen had detected a highly unusual furin cleavage site in COVID-19, a site that has to this day never been observed in naturally occurring viruses of this kind, and found direct evidence that the WIV had inserted such sites into coronaviruses. Mr. Holmes responded, “[expletive], this is bad” and “oh my god what worse words than that.”

On Jan. 31, 2020, Mr. Farrar talked to Dr. Fauci about the virus’s unusual features. At the same time, Mr. Andersen contacted Dr. Fauci by email, saying that the virus’s features looked potentially engineered and that its genetic makeup was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

It was at this point that Dr. Fauci and Mr. Farrar organized the teleconference, which was held the next day, on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to develop the Proximal Origin paper to counter the lab leak theory. Mr. Andersen became the paper’s lead author and was joined by fellow teleconference participants Mr. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, and Robert Garry of Tulane University as co-authors.

A fifth co-author, Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, was brought on board later in February 2020. Mr. Lipkin did not participate in the teleconference and has since distanced himself from the natural origin narrative. Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has stated that Mr. Lipkin is cooperating with congressional investigators.

The new text messages released by Mr. Wenstrup’s Committee reveal for the first time that the four Proximal Origin authors who attended Dr. Fauci’s teleconference started a Slack group to discuss the paper. In a message sent in the morning of Feb. 2, 2020, the day after the teleconference, Mr. Rambaut told co-authors Mr. Andersen, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Garry:

“Given the [expletive] show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”

Within three minutes, Mr. Andersen replied:

“Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”

These messages contradict the public claims by Mr. Andersen that he was not concerned with politics and that it was others who politicized the question of COVID-19’s origin.

The exchange between Mr. Rambaut and Mr. Andersen indicate that the efforts of Dr. Fauci’s group to elevate the natural origin theory had nothing to do with science and were driven from the start by a desire to protect China. Mr. Rambaut’s admission that it is not possible to distinguish between natural evolution and lab creation and that the Proximal Origin group should therefore simply blame natural processes is tantamount to a smoking gun. It suggests the authors never had the intention of writing a scientific paper—instead, they were focused on covering up the pandemic’s true origin.

Mr. Andersen went even further, telling his co-authors that given the political concerns, the preprint site bioRxiv should “start screening submissions – it’s a slippery slope, but it’s justified at this stage.” A preprint site is a site where scientists can upload their research prior to peer review. Mr. Andersen was essentially proposing to censor scientists who did not toe the political line on COVID-19’s origin.

The political motivations of the origins cover-up are further corroborated by a previously released message from Ron Fouchier, who also attended the teleconference. At the same time that the Proximal Origin authors were having their discussion on Slack on Feb. 2, Mr. Fouchier wrote an email to the teleconference group stating that “further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Mr. Fouchier is a Dutch virologist whose controversial gain-of-function experiments, whereby he created airborne viruses, led the Obama administration to impose its 2014 moratorium on such experiments. The moratorium was later lifted by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins during the Trump administration.

In response, NIH head Dr. Collins chimed in, telling the group, “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

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Is CDC Manipulating ICD Codes Involving COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects on Death Certificates?

A review of Minnesota death certificates from an embedded source in that state reveals that of all the death certificates in Minnesota between 2015-Q1 2023, ten CoDs clearly identify a vaccine as a Cause of Death (CoD), including nine identifying a covid vaccine.

Surprisingly, our group discovered that on seven of these nine death certificates, the CDC had failed to apply an appropriate ICD-10 diagnostic code for vaccine side effects (either T88.1 or Y59.0).

I authored an article delineating the details that was republished in Brownstone. As a result of that investigation, multiple reporters contacted the CDC requesting a response to our allegations that the CDC had inappropriately omitted these ICD codes. The CDC issued the following statement to a reporter from Just The News:

“Thanks for reaching out to CDC. The claim in this post is incorrect. The ICD-10 codes in question pertain to adverse effects of vaccines, not vaccination. Vaccination is not a disease or cause of death, so simple mention of the vaccine or vaccination without mention of adverse effects will not get coded. The examples in the article for which the adverse effects codes are included are those that mention adverse or side effects of the vaccine. The examples for which the codes are not included do not contain such language.

COVID-19 vaccines are undergoing the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history. To date, CDC has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following immunization that would indicate that COVID vaccines are causing or contributing to deaths, outside of the nine confirmed TTS deaths following the Janssen vaccine.

When an adverse event, including death, is reported to CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, it is classified as serious or non-serious. The code of Federal Regulation defines “serious” as: death, life-threatening illness, hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization, permanent disability, congenital anomalies or birth defects. For reports classified as serious, CDC requests and reviews the available medical records, examines death certificates and autopsy reports. The determination of the cause of death is done by the certifying official who completes the death certificate or the pathologist who conducts the autopsy.”

The CDC’s response induces considerable concern. Far from resolving this important public health-related issue, the agency’s statement, in fact, raises critical questions about the intentions and integrity of at least some aspects of the large, sprawling public health agency.

The CDC claims that they only apply ICD codes for vaccine side effects where the death certificate documents a vaccine as a CoD using language materially similar to “side effects of vaccination”--semantics that explicitly attributes the CoD to side effects from the vaccine as opposed to the act or fact of vaccination itself.

So, the CDC stipulates that a coroner who writes language such as “vaccinated 10 hours before death” as a Cause of Death means to convey that the decedent did NOT experience any adverse effects from the vaccine and that the vaccine did NOT contribute to the demise of the decedent.

But it seems implausible that a coroner or medical professional filling out a death certificate would choose to convey clinically irrelevant and misleading information about the decedent’s vaccination by writing it as a Cause of Death on the death certificate. This is all the more so regarding the Covid vaccines, where there was and still is intense professional, social, and political pressure to avoid doing or saying anything that can promote “vaccine hesitancy”.

Additionally, the standard articulated by the CDC presumes that medical professionals would be aware that in order to document a vaccine as a CoD, they must use language that explicitly describes “side effects of” a vaccine. Considering the extreme rarity of vaccines being documented on a death certificate – there was only ONE such instance in Minnesota from 2015-2019, out of >230,000 death certificates – it is highly unlikely that medical professionals would be aware of such a requirement.

The conceptual basis of the distinction drawn by the CDC’s standard likewise seems deficient. It is axiomatic that vaccine side effects must be caused by the vaccine. Thus, any medical sequelae precipitated or initiated by vaccine side effects by definition, are attributable to the vaccine itself. Furthermore, the CDC does not draw any such distinctions regarding any other medical product or substance when listed as a CoD, even though a similar argument can be made that “the ICD-10 codes in question pertain to adverse effects of [the medical product or substance]”, “not the [medical product or substance itself]” which “is not a disease or cause of death.”

It is critical to note that the CDC does not dispute our characterization of the CDC’s role of assigning and adjudicating ICD codes for death certificates and admits the decision to omit ICD codes for vaccine side effects on the death certificates we identified was a conscious and deliberate choice.

Another troubling assertion from the CDC’s statement is their claim that “to date, CDC has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following immunization that would indicate that COVID vaccines are causing or contributing to deaths, outside of the nine confirmed TTS deaths following the Janssen vaccine.”

There are numerous case report studies documenting autopsies of deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination with one of the mRNA vaccines in the scientific literature, many of which have already passed peer review.

A recent meta-review of these studies found that “a total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.” The study concludes, “The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms, and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.”

It is inconceivable that anyone could still claim that there have been ZERO deaths linked to the mRNA vaccines. TrialSite has chronicled deaths recognized by government health agencies around the world, such as Taiwan, Vietnam and the UK. The CDC’s insistence to contradict in defiance of numerous published studies is puzzling and possibly indicative that the CDC, or at least some factions within, lacks honesty in its appraisal of overall mRNA vaccine safety.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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