The dam has broken regarding COVID.  Suddenly, theories that this deadly virus originated in a Wuhan lab and that Fauci was deliberately misleading people about it have gone from being castigated as racist conspiracy theories to accepted doctrine.  On Thursday, Vanity Fair, a leftist, hysterically anti-Trump magazine, published an extraordinary article revealing that the American and British scientific communities deliberately hid China's role in the virus's creation.

Vanity Fair's article is entitled "The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins: Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits.  Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark."  It doesn't give credit where credit is due to people like Tom Cotton or many other conservatives and that's okay because it does something more important: it reveals how deeply corrupt, compromised, and politicized America's scientific community is.

You must read the article with some care.  The facts vindicate Trump and the "conspiracy-minded conservatives" who nailed the virus's origin.  However, because Vanity Fair is a left-wing swamp, this is how it explains its analysis:

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world's most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

In other words, now that we no longer have to destroy Trump (whose alleged "xenophobia" about China was correct), let's start telling the truth.

Vanity Fair explains that the cover-up was set in early with a February 19, 2020 statement in The Lancet, a once reputable British medical journal.  Twenty-seven scientists signed the statement, assuring the world that it was a conspiracy theory to claim that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had anything to do with COVID.  Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist from New Zealand, recognized that this was "totally nonscientific," because it had no data:

To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been "nailed to the church doors," establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. "Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone."

Demaneuf was right, but he underestimated how bad it really was:

[T]he Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself.

In addition to organizing the statement, Daszak was careful to hide his involvement with gain-of-function research, Fauci, the NIH, and the WIF:

It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.

Under the subject line, "No need for you to sign the "Statement" Ralph!!," he wrote to two scientists, including UNC's Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: "you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way." Daszak added, "We'll then put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice."

Baric agreed, writing back, "Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact."

Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other signers had either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: "We declare no competing interests."

(As an aside, to me, this sounds a lot like the way activists sold climate change, including signed statements from scientists.)

There are other shocking revelations in the article, such as the fact that, when former CDC director Robert Redfield posited in a CNN interview that he believed COVID originated in a lab, he "received death threats from fellow scientists.

"I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis," Redfield told Vanity Fair. "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science."

If you find wading through the leftism and unhinged Trump Derangement Syndrome too painful, Tucker Carlson has a superb summary:

Every American should demand that China face a massive reckoning.  We also should demand that Fauci face consequences more serious than losing his perpetual gig on television.  At the very least, he repeatedly committed perjury when testifying before Congress.  More seriously, Fauci played an active role in hampering America's ability to deal with COVID, so the blood of several hundred thousand people is on his hands, and he deserves an appropriate consequence.

Image: Peter Daszak.  YouTube screen grab.

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