Note — This article details current historical* research into COVID-19’s origins, as part of the D.R.A.S.T.I.C. team of scientists, journalists & researchers. Recent news: D.R.A.S.T.I.C.’s research forms a large portion of the basis for investigations begun by the US Senate, House & National Institutes of Health. Recent appearances and/or discussion on 60 Minutes, The Joe Rogan Exp., Fox News, JRE [again], Bill Maher, CNN, Zero Hedge & most recently front page on The Blaze Media network.

All references for this and other articles are compiled under my research project The Arc of Inquiry Bends Towards Enlightenment. The files include my statistical analysis of the impact of censorship on the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

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Ignoble Lies

Last week, the natural-origin narrative for COVID-19 suffered two huge blows in two days; first, when US Right-to-Know published their newest findings from their ongoing FOIA efforts; and second, when Peter Embarek [the head of the World Health Organization’s [WHO] investigation into the origins of the pandemic] admitted in a documentary that China had forced a ‘compromise’ for putting the lab-leak hypothesis in their final report at all.

For those at home who aren’t following this aspect of the COVID-19 crisis as closely, Embarek’s admission might be very surprising - but only because he admitted it at all. We’ve seen a stunning pattern emerging ever since US RTK’s publishing of the Ralph Baric emails last winter, which showed clear and direct collusion amongst a high-profile collection of scientists to frame the case for a natural origin. It was that same collection of scientists that produced more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and letters in the 2 months following a 2/4/20 email exchange that explicitly documented their efforts at collusion.

Given these latest developments, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s actually any true believers among scientists in the natural-origin camp. After all, every scientist whose emails have been released has been shown to have concerns about COVID-19 coming from a lab, even though they were writing peer-reviewed articles that claimed the opposite.

I’m thinking of offering a bounty to any natural-origin proponent who can provide evidence of NOT holding a different position in private. If you’re keeping score, that’s 100% of natural-origin proponents [in emails released thus far] who’ve lied repeatedly to the world about what they believe is the provenance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here in the US, that includes Dr. Fauci - the public face of vaccines, masks, lock-downs and mandates - which doesn’t bode well for the future of “Trust the Science” once everyone understands that he was the conductor of the scientific censorship train. Fauci even literally stated that attacks on him were attacks on science; if that’s the case, it looks like the forecast for science has taken a turn for the worst.

On the bright side, the momentum towards the lab-origin hypothesis has continued unabated, as Ian Birrell pointed out in an excellent commentary yesterday [and also two days earlier]. Among the most recent disclosures, FOIA emails show that a scientist in Beijing contracted COVID-19 while working on it in a lab, that the existence of the Furin Cleavage Site [FCS] was "very chilling" and that Zheng-Li Shi & Ralph Baric, the scientists at the center of the lab controversy, were were involved in the editing of an article that rejected the lab hypothesis. Paul Thacker at The Disinformation Chronicle previously pointed out the disturbing links between the UK journal Nature and its funders in China. Other articles along similar lines include Beijing's Useful Idiots and China, the WHO and the power grab that fueled a pandemic.

However, I don’t want to cover too much territory that’s already been explored very well elsewhere; instead, I’d like to highlight the problem from a macro perspective, as I think much can be clarified by observing the full scale of the ignoble lie.

This screenshot from my list of 703 COVID-19 origin sources shows a sampling of journals and their entire contents found on that list. The green highlights indicate authors connected to the Wuhan institute of Virology and/or those involved in the 2/1 & 2/3 meetings that formed the cover-up - discussed below

Inconvenient Truths

When I say scale, I’m referring to a scale larger than a few scientists or science writers - I mean entire institutions. 1 pillar of the scientific establishment is publicly-funded research, and that partly fuels one of the other pillars - peer-reviewed publications in journals.

If one goes to the Scientific Journal Rankings website, they can see the rankings of the world’s most esteemed scientific journals. As of yesterday, the top 6 looked like this:

I’ve sorted the journals by H-Index score, rather than the proprietary score used by SJR, because it is more widely known and accepted. Any scientist in the life sciences is already familiar with what this chart shows, because Nature, Science, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have been at the top of all academic journal rankings for a long time [in the case of Nature and Science, forever].

As I wrote in Who Watches the Watchers? Fauci's Noble Lie, Exposed, Dr. Fauci and Kelvin Droegemeier [President Trump’s Presidential Science Advisor and director of the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy, or OSTP] held a meeting with these scientists below:

That meeting took place on 2/3/20, two days after the conference call exposed in Fauci's emails, and less than 24 hours before that same group of scientists was found conspiring to write a letter rejecting the lab-origin hypothesis - despite finding the origin suspect in private. Moreover, Fauci & Droegemeier were the ones who pushed for the letter to be written, as Alexander Pope of NASEM informed those scientists on the morning of 2/4.

How do I know the orders came from the top? Because the 3 names I just mentioned were 3 of the 4 speakers at that 2/3 meeting. The 4th speaker was Chris Hassell, the man in charge of the Department of Health & Human Services’ P3CO, the US federal government’s oversight board for Potential Pandemic Pathogens [PPP or P3]. His presence makes it abundantly clear that this meeting was a follow-on to the 2/1 conference call - the purpose of which was to address the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus having been engineered. He would be privy to the advanced research projects that might have ties to the lab or to the development of techniques that might be implicated in the construction of the virus, including the work of Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Taken together, these scientists and officials were involved in a meeting whose stated purpose was to combat misinformation, and the next morning the attendees were tasked with writing a letter in support of that aim. There were two pillars of the resulting strategy:

1) Support the natural-origin narrative

2) Suppress any non natural-origin discussion as much as possible.

I recognize that accusing anyone of broad censorship at the highest levels of academia is a bold claim, but I’d argue that the evidence is overwhelming.

Let’s go through the Top 6 list I showed earlier and see if there’s a noticeable trend [I’d note that the color green indicates scientists involved in research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and/or the cover-up as orchestrated by Fauci et al. The shades of tan indicate lab-leak proponents]:

#1 on the global list of most influential/impactful academic journals is Nature; each list shows origin-related articles that appeared from 1/1/20 to 8/13/21:

For those keeping score, that’s 14 anti lab-origin articles, and 0 in support.

#2 is the collection of Science publications [Scientific American is published by Nature]:

#3 is the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM]:

#4 is Cell [shown earlier].

#5 is PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]:

#6 is The Lancet

[Note: this information, slightly updated, can be found on tab 1 of my Excel file on ResearchGate]

[Additional note: I can’t guarantee that these lists are all inclusive, but any missed articles would likely have little impact upon the overall distribution]

The final count from all of the top 6 journals is 35 articles in support of a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, and 1 article in opposition. In truth, the 1 article is an open letter that simply states that both possibilities deserve equal treatment, and it only appeared in May of this year in Science.

Digging deeper, we discover that nearly half of those 35 articles were written by authors involved in the collusion meetings during the first 4 days of February. And the kicker? Those 6 journals are the top 6 of 25,232 - across all academic disciplines.

How big is the advantage? My ‘Noble Lie’ article was read more than 250,000 times - which is only 1/22nd of the readership of Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. It’s a steep hill to climb.

This is a problem, but there’s still one more piece to this puzzle.

Doubling Down

By now, an intrepid reader might be asking themselves why a significant percentage of the world’s leading virologists & microbiologists would have been so flippant in rejecting an obvious possibility so early on in the pandemic [in fact, they began crafting the narrative six weeks before the WHO officially declared that COVID-19 had become a pandemic]. Or, perhaps others would ask the question the way I did: “Why did so few scientists speak out about the obvious possibility,” one that even my most junior Marines would’ve considered first?

The piece de resistance isn’t going to surprise anyone, because it’s money.

How much money? The answer may not sound that imposing: $3.1 billion a year in grants. However, in 2013/14 [the most recent year with solid global numbers-& only because someone published a paper about it] $3.1 billion represented 7.15% of All biomedical grants awarded by 41 of the largest public or non-profit organizations in the world. Fauci’s slice just at NIAID was just slightly below the entire European Union [27 countries at that time], good enough for a clear third place. 1st place belongs to the NIH as a whole, although the remaining $23 billion was split between 26 other Institutes:

After being in his position for 37 years, Fauci can advocate beyond his fiefdom, and that doesn’t take into account that the NIAID’s budget has been much closer to $4 billion in the last 3 years.

The picture certainly becomes clear when viewed through that telescope; from 2/1-2/4 of 2020, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci & Francis Collins [NIH Director] presided over an examination of evidence and then a discussion of how to respond. No one should be surprised that afterwards, most scientists stayed quiet about COVID-19’s origins - the attendees held sway over 61% of global public biomedical research funds, controlled the GOF oversight board that had been ignored for the WIV’s research [Hassell], a dozen of the world’s leading virologists who flooded the most prestigious journals with natural-origin propaganda, and direct links to Science [Pope] and NEJM [Farrar, an editor for the journal]. On March 1st, 28 days later, there’d already been 14 published and peer-reviewed papers/letters that rejected the possibility of a lab-origin for COVID-19 by connected scientists.

It’s amazing that we've even made it this far - but don’t worry, we have still have some time before the ivory tower falls. Just 3 weeks ago, Dr. Peter Hotez’s Mounting Anti-Science Aggression in the United States openly called for hate crime legislation from Congress to combat those who question scientists. He even ended with a comparison to 1930’s Nazi Germany, which seems odd for someone whose favored political party is in control and already suppressing free speech. What a perfect microcosm of pandemic-era science -

- a scientist whom already has Big Tech smothering the truth on his behalf, writing in a peer-reviewed journal, arguing that questioning the merits of vaccines or masks or natural origins should be punished with a felony. If Dr. Hotez can’t see which side is currently ‘burning books,’ then he’ll be really surprised when his fellow scientists are testifying under oath before Congress about their cover-up activities.

Talk about an inconvenient truth

C. H. Rixey

Prometheus Shrugged

Ignoble Lies & Inconvenient Truths…