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Scientists, MPs Ask ‘Where Is Evidence Of 70% More Contagious Mutant COVID?’

Oxford University Professor: “I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and I can tell you can’t establish a quantifiable number in such a short time frame.”

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2 years ago

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As London and the entire South East of the UK was plunged into a fresh lockdown over the weekend, scores of countries have banned all travel to and from the UK, but scientists there are demanding to see any evidence that there is a 70% more contagious mutant strain of COVID, having not been shown anything by the government.

The Daily Mail reports that Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care, has expressed scepticism over the 70 per cent figure. 

“I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and I can tell you can’t establish a quantifiable number in such a short time frame,” Heneghan said.

“Every expert is saying it’s too early to draw such an inference,” the professor added.

“I would want to have very clear evidence rather than ‘we think it’s more transmissible’ so we can see if it is or not,” Heneghan continued.

“It has massive implications, it’s causing fear and panic, but we should not be in this situation when the Government is putting out data that is unquantifiable,” the professor further urged.

“They are fitting the data to the evidence. They see cases rising and they are looking for evidence to explain it,” Heneghan declared.

The ‘mutant strain’ has been circulating since September, according to the government, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson using it to justify literally cancelling Christmas.

However, Professor Heneghan emphasised that if this strain really is that much more contagious “we should be locking down the whole country”.

Within minutes of Johnson making the announcement that London and the South East would be locked down at midnight on Saturday, thousands of people crammed into train stations in an attempt to escape to other parts of the country.

While people in London are unable to travel, hundreds of flights from everywhere continued to land at and take off from the city’s airports over the weekend.

The data the government has on the ‘new strain’ off COVID comes from analysis by advisory body The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).

No one has seen the data, with the Prim Minster noting it is “early data, “subject to review” but “It’s the best we have at the moment.”

Announcing the previously non-existent ‘Tier four’ restriction level, Johnson added it was happening because of a “change in the science”:

Some conservative MPs, who were already rebelling against the tier 3 lockdown, have called for all the scientific evidence the government has to be made public.

The government was accused of being ‘bounced by the science’, with former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith noting that Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance are ‘stepping back into the shadows when it suits them’.

“‘Why did they not alert ministers to the dangers earlier? Especially when, as we now know, scientists learnt about this mutation back in September,” Duncan-Smith asked.

Former minister Sir Desmond Swayne said “it does have all the characteristics of the Government being bounced by the science, as it was right at the beginning of the arrangements when we first went into lockdown last March.”

“The arrangements for Christmas were explicitly voted on by Parliament. If they’re to be changed then in my view, Parliament should vote again,” Swayne added.

“Parliament voted explicitly for a certain set of arrangements, it seems to be perfectly proper therefore that Parliament should be consulted when those are changed, irrespective of the Government acting in an emergency, nevertheless it’s perfectly proper to recall Parliament at the beginning of this week to at least ratify those changes,” the MP continued.

Swayne noted that MPs haven’t even been given any evidence to justify the heightened restrictions, and that a third of the country was effectively imprisoned via a press conference.

“Explain to us – we are after all a democracy, explain to the elected representatives the evidence that they have and why they’ve reached this decision,” Swayned emphasised.

The MP charged that the government purposefully waited until parliament had started its break for Christmas before making the announcement, in order to avoid a rebellion.

“They’ve been looking at it since September and how convenient when Parliament went into recess on Thursday suddenly they were then able to produce this revelation,” Swayne noted.

“Let’s see the evidence then, let’s have Parliament back and show us and convince us, come clean,” he urged, adding “I want Parliament to be recalled so we can scrutinise properly in a democracy decisions that are being made which affect our economy radically and our liberty.”

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Entire US Congress Votes To Declassify COVID-19 Origins Intel

Published

2 weeks ago

on

12 March, 2023

Zero Hedge

HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images

100% of lawmakers in the House on Friday voted to pass a bill requiring the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and Covid-19.

The Covid Origins Act of 2023, sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN), passed by a vote of 410 to 0, after clearing the Senate by unanimous consent last week.

“Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the country with almost every household feeling its effects. The United States death toll from this virus has surpassed one million people. Although concrete data is hard to lock down, millions of people are suffering from the long-term effects directly attributed to this virus. It is becoming increasingly clear that school-aged children face hurdles because of long-term school closures. The American people need to know all the aspects, including how this virus was created and specifically, whether it was a natural occurrence of the result of a lab-related event,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) in a floor speech.

Next stop, President Biden’s desk.

And while Biden has officially said he hasn’t “made that decision yet” over whether to sign it into law and release the intelligence, we can’t imagine he won’t, lest he defy the entirety of Congress.

So, what will we get? Probably what’s already known; that the FBI and the Energy Department believe with ‘moderate’ and ‘low’ confidence respectively that Covid-19 likely arose from a laboratory leak – while four other agencies and a national intelligence panel continue to believe that the pandemic was likely the result of zoonotic spillover.

Will the disclosure point to door #1 – that Dr. Anthony Fauci offshored previously-banned Gain-of-Function bat covid research in a scientific collaboration on Chinese soil where it escaped (intentionally or otherwise)?

Or door #2 – that bats from a cave 450 miles away with a strain of Covid 96.8% similar to Covid-19 infected an intermediary species, of which either (or both) emerged with Covid-19 at a Wuhan wet market across town from the aforementioned Fauci-funded lab where they were infecting ‘humanized’ mice with Covid strains? A relatively rare occurrence according to the WIV in 2018.

Or Door #3, that China went rogue, stole Peter Daszak’s crazy plans (which DARPA turned down), and started going bat-covid crazy?

What we do know is that there were ‘humanized’ mice being bred in China in mid-2019, long before the outbreak in Wuhan. As Vanity Fair noted almost two years ago – a May 2020 Chinese research paper describing mice which had lung tissue that approximated a human’s (via National Review):

Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

And as journalist Josh Rogin wrote in Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century (again, via National Review):

After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe that this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak — research they hadn’t disclosed and continued to not admit to. That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it did make clear to U.S. officials that there was a lot of risky coronavirus experiments going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of. “This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we’re getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

And how much of that was done with knowledge, funding or collaboration from entities outside of China?

China contacted Hawley’s office on Wednesday to object to the bill, telling him that its only purpose is to “politicize and stigmatize China.”

“The move by the U.S. Congress just shows that the U.S. is going further and further down the wrong path of political manipulation. The so-called traceability report by the U.S. intelligence agency is an attempt to ‘presume guilt’ on China. It is an attempt to shift the blame from its own failure to fight the epidemic to China,” wrote government attorney Li Xiang.

Does Congress ever do things unanimously?

This post was originally published at Zero Hedge

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Video: Fauci DEFENDS Gain Of Function, Mocks Lab Leak Censorship

“The whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms”

Published

2 weeks ago

on

10 March, 2023

Steve Watson

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In a remarkable interview Thursday, Anthony Fauci had the gall to defend dangerous gain of function research, which in all likelihood was the direct cause of the COVID pandemic, and mocked the idea that a lab leak is being covered up.

Appearing on Fox News, Fauci told anchor Neil Cavuto “If you shut off all gain of function research. Did you get the flu shot this year, Neil? If you did, and you got it from an influenza vaccine, that was gain-of-function that made that influenza vaccine. That’s what people don’t understand.”

Fauci twice suggested that he should be “taken out of this,” reasoning that “I’m a charged person,” and went on to argue the case for gain of function research, which makes pathogens more deadly.

“The whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms,” Fauci claimed, adding “When you do it, you have to do it carefully and under very controlled conditions.”

All the while, Fauci was again careful not to define exactly what gain of function is, having previously changed the definition to cover his own culpability.

When asked if the research serves any value, Fauci stated “It depends on what your definition of gain of function is,” going on to say “Look at a whole array of virologists and scientists who do research that is absolutely critical for the health of the country. Some of that involves manipulating organisms. You want to call it gain of function. It really is not, in many respects, but it needs to be very well-regulated.”

Fauci also mocked the idea that discussion of a potential Wuhan coronavirus lab leak was dismissed and suppressed, after Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested that Fauci bribed scientists into silence on the matter with a $9 million grant.

Jordan was referring to testimony earlier this month by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who charged that two scientists who believed that COVID-19 leaked from a lab changed their minds after receiving the $9 million grant from Fauci.

“I almost have to laugh at that, Neil. That’s totally bizarre,” Fauci responded, going on to explain “First of all, I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other. I’ve always kept an open mind. As the data evolved and evolutionary virologists looked at the data, it looked more likely it was a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir.”

“I have always kept a completely open mind that it could be one or the other. Quite frankly, the evidence weighs more likely towards one, namely a natural occurrence,” Fauci claimed.

“The other absolutely preposterous thing that Jim Jordan said was that we gave the investigators $9 million bribe to change their mind. Is he kidding me?” Fauci further stated.

He continued, “They put in a grant about a year and a half before this all happened. The grant was reviewed by a peer review and put before an independent council and approved before the meeting even took place.”

“So to assume that they were getting a $9 million grant because of the fact that we tried to get them to change their mind is beyond ludicrous. Beyond ludicrous,” Fauci asserted.

Earlier this week, Senator Rand Paul accused Fauci, along with other scientists working with him at the National Institutes Of Health of engaging in an “elaborate cover-up” of the lab origin of the coronavirus pandemic in order to hide their own involvement.

Video: Rand Paul Accuses Fauci Of “Elaborate Cover-up” Of COVID Lab Leak

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    Govern Me Harder, Daddy!

    The most enthusiastic bootlickers.

    Published

    2 weeks ago

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    9 March, 2023

    The biggest age group to think the government wasn’t *authoritarian enough* during lockdown is young people aged 18-24.

    What the hell has happened to the ‘rebellious’ youth? They’re all bootlickers now.

    Please share this video! https://youtu.be/RTiGO9OqbPM

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