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"We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans."

I'm reminded of a courtroom murder trial where the prosecution has laid out all the compelling evidence but the defense keeps shrieking "but no one saw him shoot so we can't be sure!" That's what all these "we do not know for sure" sounds like to me.

It's pretty apparent what happened. There was gain of function research, indirectly funded by the US with direct knowledge from Fauci, who kept alive a loophole allowing this research. Lackluster safety conditions (cited by US investigators pre-pandemic) meant a manipulated virus escaped and jumped to a human host, giving us the three lab researchers hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms as reported in the WSJ, which was shortly followed with the mysterious 17 days cell-phone blank out surrounding the lab (suggesting an intensive cleansing going on). The Chinese authorities thinking they'd controlled the escape sighed with relief and said nothing to the larger world, then two months later all hell broke loose. Beijing, knowing immediately what to look for, clamped down on Wuhan severely and all travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, which meant a rapid spreading virus was controlled and didn't emerge elsewhere in a country with one of the world's largest and heavily used train network, but still allowed international travel, which allowed COVID to spread to the rest of the world. The rest, we know.

There are two real questions here:

1. To what extent were US fed scientists/NIH involved in this gain of function research and to what extent they tried to cover it up in early 2020.

2. To what extent were the US intelligence and science communities deliberately refusing to openly discuss a lab escape and instead doubled down on the naturally occurring stance solely out of hatred of Donald Trump and an overwhelming desire to not do anything to bolster Trump's presidency or to provide him with any form of support or legitimacy. And this carried over to their allies in the mainstream media, who were desperate to defeat Donald Trump. Is all this "new" information coming out now only because Trump has been safely defeated?

The first is understandable. People screw up. A complicated, multi-layered byzantine bureaucracy makes mistakes. None are evil people.

The second is much more problematic. Deeply problematic for a liberal democracy.

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Where's all the investigating journalists now? This is outrageous and here I am reading this on Substack!!!!!! Not the NYT WAPO ETC ETC....Thank you AGAIN GLENN! you're truly an amazing journalist!

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I'm not a mathematician, and I realize coincidence and causation are not synonyms, but that this novel coronavirus broke out within a few mile radius of a lab that was creating novel coronaviruses, at the time it was creating novel coronaviruses, makes it quite outrageous that such certainty was deployed in denying a link -- let alone how outrageous it was that so many people bought that certainty without question.

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Just don't forget to wear your two masks, close your business, abuse your customers, give up your civil rights, dob in your friends n neighbours, and do any other batshit* crazy nonsense some talking head tell you to do because experts.

*if you'll pardon the pun

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Thank you for bringing back the Anthrax story. I really appreciate your work, you should be cloned.

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We 100% know that the FBI will lie to achieve their goals. From the WSJ 1/29/21: "Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.....admitted to falsifying evidence submitted to the court for a warrant to spy on onetime Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page."

In that article we see what price Clinesmith pays: "Federal Judge James Boasberg spared Mr. Clinesmith prison in favor of 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service. The judge said the evidence persuaded him that “Mr. Clinesmith likely believed that what he said about Mr. Page was true.”

This would be like me embezzling millions from Jeff Bezos, I get caught and plead guilty, and the judge (I sure hope it's a FISA judge) giving me no time because "Mr Bulger likely believed that he believed it true that he deserved the money more that Jeff Bezos".

It's over for me, and for many. These institutions are irredeemable, incapable of any self-policing. I used to believe the "it's only a few bad apples at the top" storyline but the rot is too pervasive, across too many separate institutions both here and abroad, for honorable employees to overcome. Sadly reminds me of the Catholic Church, and other organizations where the only people that would ever be allowed the power to clean it up will either be kneecapped by the resident gatekeepers, or else were complicit as well and were appointed to showtrial a few sacrificial lambs.

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“But what we do know for certain” is that the American people have been and are being constantly and needlessly lied to by their globally corporate owned government and their globally corporate owned media. And anytime anyone speaks out with a logical, natural assumption, like, “Gee, I wonder if Covid -19 is a man-made virus since the epidemic started in a place that has a Level 4 virology lab,” they are silenced (and they self-silence) with the label “conspiracy theorist.” Maybe if we weren’t constantly being lied to (and the government and the media often caught out in these glaring lies– like the way Americans bought into the lies leading up to the Iraq war – and then the media confessing years later that they were “duped,’ Oh, right…) then maybe we would have some level of trust. As it is currently only 25% of Americans trust their government and only about 40% of Americans trust the media.

As for me? My trust level is close to zero on both counts.

What a crazy system. We vote middlemen into office in order to beg them for favors like telling us the truth. We don’t need middlemen.

Americans deserve the truth and they should demand it.

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I think we agree on the most important point: It doesn't really even MATTER if Fauci is responsible for Covid19. By funding dangerous research in a Chinese lab, he's essentially putting a gun to our heads and pulling the trigger. This is MORE than enough AT LEAST remove him from any position of authority, right? Even if (maybe) the gun was empty this time?

The coverup that came later from the entire "in" group is ALSO enough to get him removed from any position of authority. How does this guy still have a job? Why is he not asking questions in front of the senate about how he lied?

Does WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING not matter anymore? Does the media just get to create its own reality that we have to accept?

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The sudden about face by MSM and the Tech oligarchs might indicate they are using the Wuhan lab to camouflage something more insidious, illegal or pointing in a more politically harmful direction. Beware of thinking you know the answer. Something does not smell right. We knew the original story was BS- but this story is not definitive or proven. Remain thinking and stay alert.

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Is it too tin-foil-hattish to suspect the feds did the anthrax to help get the Patriot Act through congress?

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The most appalling part of this sordid affair is the complete failure of our media. Pretty clear they serve as propaganda agents for the modern administrative state.

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Why has the CIA's on-a-leash corporate media changed its course? Is the cat out of the bag or is this just another Orwellian fear tactic (maybe another create-a-boogieman and war-is-the-only-option maneuver)?

For over a year now our media has been conflating "created in a lab" with "released from a lab". They kept telling us that all their "experts" say that the virus wasn't "created in a lab" or "man-made", so, therefore, it could not have been "released from a lab". And not once did I ever hear them say something like "even though the virus wasn't created in a lab, it still could have been accidentally or intentionally released from the lab."

And now that Greenwald has shown us how the US Army was involved with the anthrax scares, should China's claim be considered? Last year, they claimed that the US Army released the virus at the 2019 Military World Games which were held in Wuhan. We need to get some real fictitious facts, so I think we should create something like the 9/11 Commission. (Is Building 7 still a conspiracy fact?)

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"February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab."

I vividly remember this censorship. The timeliness of the pandemic from the establishment's point of view seemed too good to be coincidental in the same way the jailhouse "suicide" of pandemicist Bill Gates' elite-blackmailing buddy did. The Romans asked the question, "cui bono?" for a reason. Asking that question proved reliable over time. Woke, censoring nannies argue not censoring what goes against their self-serving, "fact checked" narratives is "dangerous," but censoring what might be the truth is far worse. The public as a whole is fully qualified to figure out what's true and what's not when presented with the unfiltered facts, even when peppered with lies.

The public-opinion nannies arrogantly believe they're better than the plebs, that the ends justify the means. Repressive regimes through the ages used censorship to snow the public, to hide what might be or was in fact true, but the public tended to be smarter than the powers that were in the long run. In no case I can think of did this ever work out well for the repressors. The censor-monopolies believe they're smart censoring unapproved thoughts and opinions "for your own good," but they're playing with fire.

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The fine line between "offensive" and "defensive" bioweapon research had frankly never occurred to me before and it is pretty scary if you think about it.

For example, it is said that bioweapons are useless because they will just end up infecting the country that releases them. But what if the country (or some non-state actor) simultaneously engineers a new deadly virus *and* the protective vaccine? In that case, they could vaccinate their own population and then launch the virus on the rest of the world. They could also use access to the vaccine as leverage to extort compliance with their geopolitical demands.

Perhaps "gain of function" research is inherently dangerous. But maybe we still need to do it preemptively in order to pre-develop vaccines for the "gain of function" bugs that someone else might be secretly developing. If nothing else, there is definitely a good science fiction novel in this scenario.

Very intriguing article. Glenn connects dots in interesting ways that would never occur to our group thinking media establishment.

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Fauci’s is a liar, an incompetent, a sycophant and a tyrant. He was despised in the 80s and early 90s by all of us doing AIDS research in South Florida. Absolutely a despicable governmental parasite.

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For those interested, this is the most complete account of the lab leak hypothesis over at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

It was NIH funded research (meaning the Chinese government was probably not funding it), but they were not using sufficient biosafety protocols at the Wuhan lab. The aim of the research (the NIH grants are public knowledge) was not to "weaponize" the virus, it was to study "spillage" from animals to humans. If it were for bioweapon development, it would have been a secret DARPA or similar grant.

This is the best article I have seen on it so far. The human-preferred codon in the furin cleavage site between the two spike proteins is the most difficult to explain fact if the origins were natural.

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