Feb
25
A Conspiracy by Any Other Name
Some conspiracies are true.
We hear a lot about “conspiracy theories” and the “nuts” that espouse them. In many cases, the theories are indeed unbalanced and not supported by evidence and/or rational thinking. But, conspiracies happen all the time, especially in the halls of power.
The etymology of the word “conspire” means to “breathe together”. Simply put, a “conspiracy” is “an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act” (American Heritage Dictionary). The act in question sometimes involves covering up that or some other act and/or information. Due to the nature of the act/cover-up, the agreement often involves clandestine meetings and keeping the conspiracy very much a secret from anyone not directly involved, possibly the authorities and/or the general populace. Reasons for the act(s) in question may vary, but the most obvious reason for the secrecy is an attempt to escape blame/punishment.
Late last year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke of one such conspiracy (among other things) in a talk presented as part of a lecture series at Hillsdale College’s D.C. campus. I have excerpted the relevant portion of the article below, but Paul has produced a more comprehensive treatment of the topic in his book, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, if you’re interested.
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“In January 2020, [Anthony] Fauci was told that the Covid virus appeared “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He and his fellow scientists were worried that it may have originated in the Wuhan lab because they knew that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under Fauci’s direction, had been funding work at the lab for years. They also knew of a paper by Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli describing gain-of-function research — which involves taking two viruses and combining their genetics to create something more dangerous, more lethal, or more contagious — on various coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.
On February 1, just before 3:00 a.m., Fauci sent an email to Robert Kadlec, then-Secretary for Preparedness and Response at Health and Human Services. It read: “This just came out today. Gives a balanced view.” He attached an article published in Science arguing that Covid had jumped from bats to humans and seeking to discredit the lab-leak theory. When this email came to light, I was initially puzzled about its timing and urgency. But then I learned that one of Kadlec’s duties was to chair the committee responsible for screening gain-of-function proposals for safety purposes — and that the Wuhan coronavirus research proposal never came before his committee!
For a long time, even we in the U.S. Senate didn’t know that Kadlec headed the gain-of-function screening committee because of the pervasive secrecy throughout our government. The makeup of the committee is a secret, its deliberations are secret, and those on the committee do not like answering questions asked by the American people’s elected leaders in Congress. To this day, it is an open question how gain-of-function research was funded in Wuhan without committee review. It is not a stretch to think that someone with authority skirted the safety review process. If so, that person would have had a good reason to be very worried, even to the point of dishonesty, when the pandemic broke out.
Jeremy Farrar, the Anthony Fauci of the UK, told his brother that in the early stages of the pandemic, “a few scientists, including me, were beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident.” Farrar writes in his book Spike: “During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.” Indeed, many Western bureaucrats, especially in the U.S., began using various forms of communication to shield their messages from future records requests. We have an email from one of Fauci’s assistants instructing other government employees to avoid using government email addresses. Which, by the way, is a crime.
Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, headed up a group of virologists who, by his own account, were “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and [National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins” to research and publish a paper that would “provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypotheses around the origins of the virus.” Andersen had written to Farrar a week earlier, alarmed by the fact that the virus appeared to be manmade. But now, under pressure, he and others were circling the wagons and changing their tune.
By mid-February, British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a Fauci ally, organized a letter that was published in The Lancet stating that the authors stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” What the letter failed to mention is the fact that Daszak’s organization received many millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State Department — before and during the pandemic — and that millions were funneled through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab, some of which went to coronavirus research.
In March, the Andersen group’s paper, arguing that Covid didn’t come from a lab, was published in Nature Medicine. By that time, corporate media and Big Tech had taken to labeling anyone who supported the lab-leak theory as a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation. An ABC News article that cited the Andersen paper is a case in point: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’”
As we now know — thanks to the release of the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company — the mainstream media and Big Tech did not act alone. In fact, many of their efforts to censor speech about the lab-leak theory, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, school closures, and a host of pandemic-related topics were directed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies. In other words, the First Amendment was thrown out the window.”
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That, my friends, is a textbook example of an actual, verifiable conspiracy — carried out by officials and bureaucrats in the U.S. and UK governments and their co-conspirators in the media and the (supposedly unassailable) scientific community.
P.S. The full article adapting Paul’s talk can be found here.
