Last night at dinner, my younger brother told me about an old Army Ranger buddy of his who did several tours in Afghanistan & Iraq, and all of the terrible things he did and saw for the U.S. government and its corporate cronies. Dawning awareness of the true horror of it caused him to go through a dark odyssey of alcohol and violence from which he may never have emerged had it not been for his exceptional mental toughness and discipline.
The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (which now includes the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex) does not count the cost of its adventures, but moves from one to the next without any accounting or disclosure to the American people whom claims it is protecting from the big bad world. Most of the citizenry has no idea what kind of terrible things the Complex does “to keep us safe”—that is, to advance the interests of the powerful people it works for.
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Sadly, the American people and their captured representatives never demand a full accounting. Over time, reports invariably emerge that our government has lied to us about its adventures, but before disciplinary action is taken, the American people have grown weary of the mess and no longer want to hear about it. The final step in consigning the truth to oblivion occurs when the U.S. government embarks on its next adventure, thereby changing the subject.
For the last four years, Dr. McCullough and I have marveled at the extraordinary fiasco of EcoHealth Alliance and its NIH grant to conduct gain-of-function work on bat coronaviruses with its partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While there is a mountain of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created with American biotechnology supplied to the WIV by key players at EcoHealth, somehow Congress and the Department of Justice haven’t been able to muster the will to do anything about it.
We were reminded of this bizarre story this morning when we saw an August 19, 2020 e-mail from NIH Director Francis Collins to Harold E. Varmus—a former NIH director and currently a key advisor of the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the Department of Energy, and several other major institutions within the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.
As Collins expressed in his e-mail, he was upset with Dr. Varmus for the latter’s statements to a Wall Street Journal reporter who’d just published a report headlined NIH Presses U.S. Nonprofit for Information on Wuhan Virology Lab.
It’s important to note that any ordinary U.S. citizen (as distinct from a Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex racketeer) found the NIH demands perfectly reasonable. To quote the WSJ report:
The National Institutes of Health told a small New York-based nonprofit that it must hand over information and materials from a research partner in Wuhan, China, that is under scrutiny by the Trump administration to win back a multimillion-dollar research grant.
Among the items the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance must provide to resume funding is a sample of the new coronavirus that the Wuhan researchers used to determine its genetic sequence, according to a July 8 letter from the NIH viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
EcoHealth Alliance must also arrange for an inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology by an outside team that would examine the facility’s lab and records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019,” the U.S. health-research agency’s letter said.
“The NIH has received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology…has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns,” read the letter, which was signed by Michael Lauer, the NIH deputy director for extramural research.
And yet, in spite of these demands being perfectly reasonable, Dr. Varmus responded to them with the following statement, quoted in the report:
The NIH’s list of conditions “is outrageous, especially when a grant has already been carefully evaluated by peer review and addresses one of the most important problems in the world right now—how viruses from animals spill over to human beings,” Harold E. Varmus, a former NIH director, said in an interview. “What could be more important at the moment?”
Dr. Varmus is one of 77 Nobel laureates who asked NIH Director Francis Collins and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar in May to review the NIH’s termination of the grant the month before.
“This whole episode is just a woeful attack on the traditional way NIH has maintained its integrity,” he said.
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You may ask yourself: “What in hell is Varmus talking about?” Obviously he is part of the gang of eminent virologists who were doing everything in their power to conceal the true origin of SARS-CoV-2.
For his part, NIH Director Collins’s reproachful e-mail seems to contain a paradox. On the one hand, he seems to be telling Varmus to stop pushing back against NIH’s apparent effort to seek full transparency about what EcoHealth and WIV were doing.
On the other hand, it’s pretty clear from other FOIA released e-mails from Anthony Fauci and his virologist buddies that the NIH already knew precisely what EcoHealth and WIV were doing.
This raises my suspicion that a blunt iteration of what Collins was telling Varmus is something like the following:
It is imperative that we SEEM to give the impression that we are trying to get to the bottom of this. When you push back on me through the WSJ, you are just making my life harder. You know how this town works—that is, we conceal the reality of our terrible business from the American people while pretending to the American people be acting transparently and in good faith. While you are great at concealment, you are resisting (with your statements to the WSJ) our efforts to pretend to be transparent. We will ultimately conceal the truth, but we must first go through the motions of pretending that we are diligently trying to discover it.
This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.
