OK, we started last week's huge piece with a mention of the spread of what may be yet another deadly strain of Covid in a University in Shanghai. Specifically, the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, escaping from the “State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering.” Not a small school (26,000 students plus a Scheißtopf-load of faculty and staff. The spread is severe enough that they have had to shut down the entire university, in the middle of the huge metro area of Shanghai. Just for perspective, that school has about the same number of students as the University of Colorado Campus in Boulder.
Asking inconvenient questions sometimes can get you in trouble. The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this was what was the nature of the research on Covid at said “State Key Laboratory?” Was it research to create a new strain of Covid (which if you are innocent of creating the current form we are fighting is not what you would likely be doing), or was it research to fight the Covid we are dealing with (which would not likely involve creating newer, possibly more deadly strains)? And if that question is ever answered by the Chinese government, should the answer be trusted? Keep in mind the history of the routine lies the government of the Peoples' Republic of China has been caught in not only about Covid but other matters.
The second thing that crossed my mind involved any possible involvement that the U.S. government may have had in events in Shanghai. We have known for more than half a year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the U.S. National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, actually has used U.S. taxpayer money and funded Coronavirus research for years at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for ways to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans. That kind of research is what the Centers for Disease Control specifically defines as “gain of function” research, which Fauci has repeatedly denied funding under oath. Yet, now documents have been forced out by the Freedom of Information Act that say that is exactly what Fauci (and U.S. taxpayers) were funding. According to an investigation by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists the Wuhan Institute of Virology IS the place Covid-19 escaped from. Covid, remember, means COrona VIrus Disease. The “19” refers to the year it was first formally described.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-fauci-and-the-origins-of-covid-11620419989
The links above are sources that even the regime considers reliable. The Wall Street Journal is not known for making things up out of whole cloth. And Newsweek can usually be depended upon to support anything a Democrat official or administration wants. For them to call out one of them in a lie means that it is so big that it cannot be denied.
My questions remain, although I really do not think that they will be answered in our lifetimes. After all, the matter of the Pfizer Covid vaccine approval documents argues otherwise. On September 9 of this year, the group Public Health Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FDA's “vaccine approval documents” for the Pfizer vaccine that has been both approved and administered nationwide. These documents are NOT classified and are supposed to be available to the public. Once the approval for use is granted, if anyone tries to use the information in the documents to steal Pfizer's proprietary information, Pfizer can sue them till H**l won't have it.
The FDA responded quickly (within a week), but in terms that more colloquially would end with the phrase, “and bay at the moon.” Now the PHMPT was specific in their request that they assumed that the vaccine was safe and effective, but they wanted to make sure in light of the unprecedented speed with which it was approved that ALL the legally required steps had been taken. I realize that the concept of holding the government to the laws and regulations that the government makes has been unorthodox for the last couple of generations, and smacks of the rarely held concept of the “rule of law, not men'” but this group was asking for what was supposedly available on request.
So on Sept. 16, the PHMPT filed a suit in Federal court demanding that the FDA actually follow the appropriate law. A week or so ago (today is November 23, 2021), the FDA responded, asking that the court delay the release of those public documents . . . until the year 2076. No, that is not a misprint. They want to delay the release of the documents for 55 years.
To reinforce their request for the delay, the FDA says it does not have the staff to review and release the documents sooner. I will make the refutable assumption that they do not have all of their stored documents mixed in a loose pile on a warehouse floor, and they have discovered what a file folder and filing cabinet are, or better yet the electronic equivalents. And yet they are saying that while it took 108 days from the first vaccine proposal by Pfizer until final official approval was made, that it will take 55 years to review what they did in 108 days.
Now, Moratus Lectores, Your Humble Servant is not a young man. I have been dealing with politicians, officials and bureaucrats for longer than I care to think about. And frequently, they are lying to me and others in order to preserve their own Gluteus Maximi, Minimi and Mediali from the consequences of what they themselves have done, usually for their own benefit.
So when government officials go out of their way to make it so that the law is dodged so that IF they are doing something illegal, immoral or harmful to those they consider to be the lower classes; it will not be found out with any certainty until after pretty much everyone concerned is dead . . . the feeling I get is neither warm nor fuzzy.
And just for clarity, the conduct in the previous two paragraphs can be attributed to both supposedly opposed political parties.
So, let us sum up a few things, some from this piece and some from previous pieces in the series.
1) There is a disease called Coronavirus 19. There are a lot of Coronaviruses, but only seven affect humans. Most of those which affect humans only have mild respiratory symptoms.
2) SARS-CoV causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and apparently “somehow” migrated from bats to humans. SARS-CoV-2 is the variant that causes the disease called COVID-19 that is what is referred to as a “pandemic.” This is an exaggeration as while it is a deadly and widespread disease, the term refers more to true mass infections that cause mass deaths. Examples are the various waves of the bubonic plague that moved through the world in recorded history, or the Spanish Flu (itself a misnomer) that moved through the Western world in the nineteen-teens and twenties killing millions in a few years.
3) Despite unsupported denials, it appears that the disease did escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread through China and the world. The first waves of any disease have the highest mortality and easiest spread. Between that, and the incompetent Chinese government reaction, China got and still is getting hammered with repeated new strains somehow turning up.
4) Despite denials under oath, documentation has emerged that indicate that the U.S. government (specifically Dr. Anthony Fauci) funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in what is called “gain of function” which involves making a virus spread easier and be more deadly.
5) There is an anomalous response to the appearance of Covid-19 in the world. Usually, when a new and dangerous disease appears, the first emphasis is on immediate treatment of the disease and its symptoms, and then on permanent cures and vaccines. Instead, in countries with government controlled health systems, they have been overwhelmed. Part of that is because government controlled health systems over time get cut down to be barely able to cope with an average patient load with no margin for emergencies. Another part is because for some reason there seems to be almost no effort to develop a treatment to ameliorate the effects of the disease and reduce mortality.
6) That effort to develop a treatment usually involves individual doctors and research teams trying literally anything to attack the disease. If something seems to help, the doctors follow up, refining as they are able. That approach seems to have been banned and instead there is very little between diagnosis and the ICU.
7) There are two drugs that have shown some promise. And mention of them, and investigation of them, has been deemed heresy in the Western world. They ARE being used elsewhere with positive effect. They are not a guaranteed cure, but when administered early enough in the disease cycle they seem to reduce mortality and shorten recovery times.
8) There are two (and there may be more) drugs that seem to have that effect on Covid-19. One is Hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil, which is a medication used to prevent and treat/prevent malaria since 1955 and is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. It is old enough to be generic. For a quarter century or more it was given to all U.S. troops in Southeast Asia. It is safe. The other is Ivermectin, which is a widely used anti-parasitic and anti-tropical disease drug whose discoverers got the Nobel Prize for finding it. It is interesting that in tropical Africa there is almost NO vaccination, but both of these drugs are widely taken. And there is almost no Covid-19. It may be a matter of the climate or other factors, but there is enough to warrant deeper investigation, which is not happening.
9) Instead we have an attempt to use what are, except for government paperwork saying otherwise, experimental vaccines. And to attempt to force them on everybody in more and more doses per person. It is admitted, separately, that getting the vaccine does not necessarily stop you from getting Covid. Nor does it stop you from spreading Covid. There are countries and regions in Europe with absurdly high rates of Covid vaccination (Gibraltar has 97+ percent vaccination and high Covid infection rates) and infections. If a vaccine does not stop the spread of a disease to the vaccinated, or stop the vaccinated from spreading the disease, then what is the purpose of the vaccine? It is noteworthy that in our own country Covid seems to come and go in waves, unrelated to vaccination rates. Toss in the illegal secrecy around at least one of the vaccines (I hope the other two, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson get similar FOIA requests) and it does not seem that we are doing anything right; reinforcing failed efforts and avoiding those that might work. Just in passing, if these vaccines are the solution, should not the number of deaths be falling as more and more people are vaccinated? In 2020, before widespread vaccination, there were 351,000 U.S. Covid deaths. To date this year after massive vaccinations, there have been 352,000 U.S. Covid deaths with about five weeks to go in the year.
All of this, both here and in China, and adding in what are apparently ongoing escapes of Covid from Chinese labs and a medical system that is less than optimal had brought trade between us and China to a functional halt. And the lack of parts and manufactured goods from China is slowing our economy to a crawl. Toss in a soon-to-be hungry China, because they are worse off than we are, and things may well be getting dangerous.
Which is where we will pick this up again next week in the last or next to last of the series.