The CIA has released its view of the origins of the Covid pandemic. This work was done before Trump came to office. It seems that it is the decision to release the report that has changed under the new administration, not the work itself. The view is that Sars-Cov-2 was released as part of a research accident. They attach “low confidence” to the finding. The CIA now joins the FBI and the US Department of Energy in coming down on the side of lab leak.
Recall – that for months the liberal media was calling the lab leak theory a “conspiracy”. The Guardian was at the forefront of this. It wasn’t just giving airtime to one of the chief suspects, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, who funnelled the funds from NIH to Wuhan, to write that “scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab”. There were endless articles which referred to the “conspiracy theory” that Covid came from a lab. But, now the tendency is the other way and the liberal press are having a really hard job swallowing it. Even in this article where they admit the CIA’s finding, AP (in the Guardian) says: “While the origin of the virus remains unknown, scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats”. This contradicts what the authors have just said, namely, that the CIA work included work on the “scientific properties” of the virus. I think we can assume that the CIA did not use people whose expertise lies in counting tanks for that work, but used … scientists. The “racoon dogs” work has been entirely discredited [1], though it did obtain some very lurid anti-lab leak headlines before quietly being found to be scientifically weak. (One can speculate that the lurid headlines were the aim of the work). Nor does this recognise the main problem with the zoonotic theory; now 5 years after the pandemic and no still no transmission species and zoonotic reservoir located. It is also not true that “scientists think”. At best you could say “the majority of scientists”. One could say, “The Guardian falsely claimed that scientists said…”. This addiction to denying the lab leak is really interesting. It is striking to watch these journalists fighting back even as they are obliged to report on official press releases from government agencies – the main part of their job. I still don’t fully understand why the corporate media is so dead set against the most likely theory – lab leak. I imagine it can be explained by self-interest and the links between pharma, academia and the media. I don’t think it is about China particularly. I think that their plans for the future, (sorry, I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory), include a lot of pharmaceutical-medical disciplinary controls of the population and they are afraid of this whole project losing public confidence. For example, weight-loss drugs and psychedelic drugs and ultrasound brain implants to treat depression are all very rapidly becoming normalised and the media is doing the normalising; this is the focus, and “the dangerous virus which killed your Granny leaked from a US sponsored piece of virus research” is potentially extremely disruptive. So it has to be stifled. It is interesting to watch them at work. (The same thing happened with the AstraZeneca vaccine. There was a concrete risk of it causing blood clots. Small, but concrete enough for some state medical agencies to restrict its use. Again, though, we could see a concerted effort in the media to suppress this).
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