Memory-Holing the Apocalypse

Some crimes seem to be too big to talk about, let alone punish

Recently we learned thanks to a senior-level whistleblower that not only was disgraced bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci smuggled into CIA headquarters during the pandemic to influence the Agency’s supposedly apolitical analysis on the origins of Covid-19, but that CIA analysts were also bribed with “significant” cash bonuses to alter their conclusions on the matter. According to the whistleblower, six of the seven-member team set up to assess the question had concluded that the coronavirus most likely “originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China," but then changed their position to favor a natural-origin hypothesis after Fauci’s visit and the alleged assurance of “Exceptional Performance Awards,” which they then duly received.

Now, it wouldn’t normally be a matter of surprise or concern for the nation’s premier intelligence agency to consult the opinion of the nation’s then-top public health official on such an issue, though bribery to change analytic conclusions certainly would be (especially after the Agency’s infamous Iraqi weapons of mass destruction perfidy). But in this case we also happen to know that Fauci was at the time engaged in a sweeping behind-the-scenes effort to cover up the rather obvious origin of the virus and his own role in it. This included secretly directing the fabrication by his associates of the influential “Proximal Origins” paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature in March 2020, which deliberately and knowingly lied about the plausibility of a lab-origin scenario. Facui then used the paper as a weapon, falsely citing it as authoritative independent analysis and leveraging it not only to publicly attack dissenters as “conspiracy theorists” but also to pressure technology platforms to engage in mass censorship of any alternative scientific views on the subject.

This was of course only one part of a pattern of similar behavior by the good doctor and his colleagues, such as then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, who coordinated with Fauci a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the expert authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter that disputed the wisdom of using widespread lockdowns to combat the spread of the virus. (The Declaration and its authors were then duly hit-jobbed, hounded, censored, and suppressed.)

At this point it is clear that Fauci and co. by and large succeeded in mobilizing and weaponizing nearly the whole apparatus of the Western scientific establishment and managerial state toward their ends. Though evidence for the lab-leak scenario eventually piled up to such a degree that it became impossible to entirely deny its plausibility any longer, to this day government and mainstream media studiously avoid further discussion of the issue. And, most importantly, no one involved, least of all Fauci, has been or ever will be held accountable for their actions in any way.

But before the whole saga is completely stuffed down the memory-hole, I think it would be worthwhile for us to take a moment to step back and try to really think through the reality of what just occurred, and what it means if true. In my view the sheer scope of it can be hard to wrap one’s head around, raising as it does some pretty fundamental questions about some of the most cherished beliefs and institutions of our world today. This is, I suspect, the real reason why so many people (both elites and commoners alike) would much prefer to just continue to pretend, even to themselves, that none of it ever happened at all.

So let’s try to recap as straightforwardly as possible what the evidence suggests seems to have occurred:

• In 2014 the U.S. government temporarily banned “gain-of-function research” – i.e. the deliberate engineering of viruses by virologists to be more infectious or potent, allegedly so that they can study how to stop said viruses if they were somehow to become infectious and potent, but really because these alleged scientists need something to do in order to justify siphoning millions in grant money from taxpayers. At the time, some other, wiser virologists had at least partially succeeded in pointing out that this was a spectacularly stupid activity that would inevitably blow up in all our faces.

• Scientists who were fans of gain-of-function research and wanted to keep doing it, like Fauci and Collins, were angry about this (because how dare anyone try to limit The Science?). So to circumvent the ban they took the obvious course of action and, following the most hallowed traditions of the American way, simply offshored the production of their gain-of-functioned viruses to countries like China. Out of sight, out of mind, just like pollution and forced labor.

• As head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci used his bureaucratic position to dole out some of the around $6 billion in U.S. government money he controlled to various of his Science Buddies who were engaged in this offshoring enterprise. One of many such grifts was that of Peter Daszak, who runs the “global health” “non-profit” EcoHealth Alliance. Daszak then used a portion of this money to pay for Chinese researchers to go search every dank cave they could find for suitable bat coronaviruses that could be collected like Pokémon and leveled up to be more dangerous. The Wuhan Institute of Virology – which like every scientific organization in China is joined at the hip to the Chinese military – happily took the money and did so.

• One of the resulting enhanced bat coronaviruses escaped in an accident, because, shockingly, Chinese labs’ safety standards weren’t the greatest. It quickly began to spread, in part because it had been engineered to spread quickly. Decades of gain-of-function research then provided exactly zero help in stopping the virus.

• The virus soon became a pandemic, spreading around the planet and killing what is a much debated number of people, but potentially multiple millions. Governments around the world had a mental breakdown and/or enthusiastically went into managerial overdrive, and, led by bureaucrats like Fauci, engaged in all manner of ham-fisted policies, ranging from the simply stupid to the intentionally authoritarian, that caused untold further economic damage, suffering, and death.

• In the end, after all of this, the U.S. government… gave EcoHealth Alliance even more money to collect bat coronaviruses from around Asia.

Actually, that still wasn’t that straightforward. So let’s try one more time: The U.S. government paid for the scientists of its chief geopolitical rival, communist China, to deliberately make potentially dangerous viruses more dangerous. Completely predictably, one eventually escaped control and a whole lot of people died. Whoops. Mistakes were made.

Do we really need to wonder why both countries’ governments, their state media, and the global scientific establishment had quite an incentive to try to immediately cover up what happened, frustrate any real investigation, and gaslight anyone who could put the dots together?

Well, I think we should in fact go at a little bit deeper, because some of the cover-up protagonists’ own stated reasons are quite telling. Surveying their email and slack communications uncovered by Congressional investigators, it appears that by January 2020 Fauci’s circle of associates was in a state of near-panic. As the virologist Dr. Kristian Andersen put it in an email to Fauci, “Some of the features [of the virus] (potentially) look engineered,” which was a big red flag. Another virologist also noted that the virus seemed “to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go.” Andersen explained that “the lab escape version of this is just so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Fauci himself admitted that “scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments” involving bat viruses. Andresen pointed out that the Wuhan work was supported by money from the U.S. government’s $140 million PREDICT program, meant to predict viral outbreaks, and drolly noted that “if they’re not able to predict the pandemics they themselves cause” this wouldn’t exactly be a good look.

At least their humor seems to have been self-aware

Everyone involved seems to have therefore converged on the same conclusion: they had to lie for the greater good. Fauci convened a conference call with the group to discuss their writing a paper attacking the lab-leak hypothesis. It was decided that any “further debate” about a leak would only “do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular,” as one participant put it.  Yes, it would do “great potential harm to science and international harmony,” Collins echoed by email. “Given the shit 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 processes,” the evolutionary biologist Dr. Andrew Rambaut explained in writing. “Yup, I totally agree,” Andersen responded. “Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”

The only alternative, Andresen mused, was to “Destroy the world based on sequence data.” Andresen and the other scientists therefore agreed to secretly co-author the “Proximal Origins” paper on behalf of Fauci and Collins.[1] In it they concocted a scientific-sounding argument to disparage the idea “that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” executing the plan to shut down all discussion of what Collins described as “the very destructive conspiracy” of the lab-leak hypothesis.

But why were they so afraid that the truth would “destroy the world”? Because it very well could destroy the world – or at least their whole world.

Consider again the elements of this disaster. Instead of engaging in actual science (the pursuit of truth through empirical observation) our much-lauded Science Boys were found to be busy performing experiments in pure hubris, stitching together monsters they couldn’t control in pursuit of money and prestige, or just because they could. Rather than providing direction and funding to help promote scientific innovation and achieve real breakthroughs to benefit humanity, the scientific-bureaucratic complex (aka “Science” with a big S) revealed itself for what it is: a gigantic self-licking ice cream cone, a self-perpetuating system of grift (like so many of our systems) with no apparent purpose other than to siphon public money for projects that are often not only pointless but actively harmful to the public. Similarly, the guardians of public health and national security proved themselves to in fact be worse than useless, only making the nation less healthy and less secure. And our brilliant Expertocracy, who so disdain what they view as the small-minded parochialism of the public and the dim-witted constraints of democratic decision-making, demonstrated themselves not only immoral but dumb as rocks. In short, if the pandemic came out of a lab, it was a disaster produced by the very nature of our managerial regime.

But the lab leak would implicate more even than the regime. It would threaten many of the core beliefs of modernity itself. Total faith in rationalism and the existence of technological solutions to every problem; belief that more knowledge and application of technique is always beneficial; maybe even “Science in general,” as Collins put it; government as something best left to the most Enlightened and Reasonable people; globalization, “international harmony,” and limitless exchange; the ever-upward march of Progress toward a Star Trek-like utopian future…  All this, too, is challenged by the grotesque reality of a government-funded, scientifically engineered virus outsourced for manufacture in China and let loose on humanity through the eternally toxic mix of arrogance and stupidity. Here was a plague inflicted on the world not by the gods, but by would-be gods of our own N.I.C.E. Were this fact to be widely known and understood, how many people might begin to wonder whether the whole kingdom is really all it’s cracked up to be? And what other monsters, they might suspect, may be created and set loose upon us next?

In this sense the pandemic really was apocalyptic, in the true meaning of the word as “revelatory.” For the truth of a lab leak threatened to reveal the whole edifice running the modern world to be rotten to the core. This is what Fauci’s circle of courtiers, and the whole regime in which they are embedded, implicitly understood. Even aside from fact that their own actions would, in any sensible world, justifiably constitute the kind of crime against humanity for which international tribunals and scaffolds would be swiftly erected, they knew that the whole system of modern liberal-progressive managerialism of which they are a product could very well be condemned along with them. If any one event could truly shake the legitimacy of that system, the lab leak threatened to be it.

So down the memory hole the apocalypse had to go. And there they very much hope it will stay.

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[1] Andersen just happened to have an $8.9 million NIAID grant under review by Fauci at the time, which was approved only two months after the cover-up paper was published.