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State Department Memo In Early 2020 Assessed That Lab leak Was Most Likely Origin Of COVID-19

State Department Memo In Early 2020 Assessed That Lab leak Was Most Likely Origin Of COVID-19

Authored by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke via…

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State Department Memo In Early 2020 Assessed That Lab leak Was Most Likely Origin Of COVID-19

Authored by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke via The Epoch Times,

A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.

That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of information that wasn’t known publicly at the time it was written.

Although a lab leak is now widely accepted as a likely origin for the virus, when the memo was written, a concerted effort was underway to discredit that possibility. It also raises the question of what senior State Department leadership—including then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—knew and why the information was withheld from the public.

According to the newly released memo, the State Department knew as of April 2020 that the central issue surrounded an obsession with collecting and testing a massive amount of virus-carrying bats on the part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s Wuhan-located Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The State Department noted that lab testing of the earliest-known patient at the Wuhan Central Hospital in December 2019 determined that the virus was a “Bat SARS-like Coronavirus.” At the time this patient was tested, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hadn’t disclosed that there was any problem at all.

When they finally acknowledged an outbreak, they initially blamed it on pneumonia. It was only at the end of January that the CCP finally started admitting that COVID-19 was caused by a new virus that was transmitted between humans.

By that time, the virus had already been seeded across the globe and any chance at suppression had been lost. It was during this same period that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was made aware of the virus’s likely origin, having been told by a group of scientists whom he was funding that there was a high probability that the virus was engineered.

Although it’s been known since June 2021 that Fauci and the NIH covered up his knowledge of the virus’s origin, the State Department’s early insight into these matters wasn’t fully known until late March 2022, when the transparency group U.S. Right to Know obtained the April 2020 memo.

Two Labs

The memo, titled “An Analysis of Circumstantial Evidence for Wuhan Labs as the Source of the Coronavirus,” comprises five pages and is written in military BLUF style, meaning “bottom line up front.”

The memo begins by stating that one of two Wuhan labs is the likely source of the COVID outbreak. The two labs identified by the state department are the Wuhan CDC’s lab located in downtown Wuhan and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli was known to have conducted dangerous gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses.

The State Department’s focus on the Wuhan CDC lab as a possible source is particularly significant as that facility is located only a few hundred feet from the Huanan Seafood Market where an already infected customer may have caused a superspreader event in December 2019.

Notably, the World Health Organization’s lead investigator of the virus’s origin, Peter Ben Embarek, privately told a Danish TV crew that he suspected that the Wuhan CDC lab was the origin of the pandemic. Embarek, who promoted a natural origin for the virus in his public report, privately noted that the CDC lab had mysteriously moved to its new downtown location in early December and that such a move may have increased the chances of a lab leak or accidental spillage.

The other lab identified by the State Department as the likely source of the pandemic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been the main focus of attention over the past two years.

The State Department memo noted that the Wuhan Institute, by far the most logical place to investigate the virus origin, had been completely sealed off from outside inquiry by the CCP. The memo also noted that a gag order regarding both Wuhan labs had been issued on Jan 1, 2020, and a major general from the People’s Liberation Army had assumed control over the Wuhan Institute of Virology since early January of 2020.

The State Department memo emphatically stated that “All other proposed theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent inquiry to Wuhan CDC and Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

It bears repeating that the memo was written in April 2020.

That’s because the State Department’s decoy argument mirrors the actions taken by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) head Dr. Francis Collins who–at the same time this memo was written–were actively suppressing and censoring any public discussion of the lab leak scenario. When Fox News ran a story in April 2020 suggesting that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab, Collins immediately contacted Fauci to explore ways the two men could “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”

Collins had previously told Fauci and his group of scientists that “science and international harmony” could be harmed if the lab leak theory took hold. Collins’s directive led Fauci’s group to publish two papers that categorically dismissed the lab leak theory, one in the medical journal the Lancet and the other in the scientific journal Nature. Those two papers would become the cornerstone of combined efforts from Fauci’s scientists, the media, Big Tech, and the U.S. government to suppress any discussion of a lab leak, while simultaneously promoting the natural origin theory.

The State Department memo also lists many facts that the public has only come to know in piecemeal fashion over the course of the past two years. We’ve previously covered many of these details on our show, including that the Wuhan CDC had a resident “Batman”—Tian Junhua—who bragged about personally having collected more than 10,000 virus-carrying bats as lab samples from Chinese caves.

Tian also was widely known for his recklessness and carelessness during his collection process.

Regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the State Department memo noted that the director of the lab, Shi Zhengli, had conducted gain-of-function engineering of bat viruses to make them more easily transmittable to humans. As we now know, the defining feature of the COVID-19 virus, its furin cleavage site, is what makes the virus particularly transmissible in humans. While no furin cleavage site has ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS coronaviruses, Shi was part of a 2018 research proposal that aimed to insert exactly such a feature into coronaviruses.

The State Department’s memo also highlights the poor safety standards at the Wuhan Institute, a fact that could easily lead to an unintentional leak of the deadly virus to the outside population. Interestingly, the memo also questions the disappearance of lab worker Huang Yanling, whose bio, profile, and picture were scrubbed from the institute’s website shortly after the outbreak. To this day, Huang’s whereabouts and well-being remain unknown.

Lastly, the memo takes a detailed look at a Chinese medical professional whose online name is Wu Xiaohua. Wu claimed that Shi Zhengli was playing God by creating coronaviruses with the specific aim of making them more transmissible in humans. Wu also claimed that Shi used intermediate animals in her lab and that her lab’s management of deadly viruses was appallingly poor and negligent.

The State Department memo found Wu’s claims to be credible and that assessment holds up well, given the information that has been made public in the intervening two years. We now know Shi had an active plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat viruses, we know that she used humanized mice to test how her virus creations would affect humans, and we know that her lab was repeatedly cited for its poor safety record.

The most striking takeaway from the memo is that it focuses almost entirely on the lab leak scenario, reflecting that the State Department was almost certain in April 2020 that the virus had originated in a lab. What remains entirely unclear is why neither the State Department nor Secretary Pompeo released this information as soon as they had it.

Had the memo been made public nearly two years ago when it was written, the course of events would have been very different. Knowing that the virus came out of a lab would have refocused public attention and the search for remedies could have been more focused.

There also would have been more concerted efforts to prevent future leaks. Rather than misdirecting the public toward a natural origin, Fauci and the NIH would have been exposed for their role in funding the work at the Wuhan Institute.

Most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party would have been subjected to greater international pressure for its role in suppressing any advance information regarding the outbreak. The memo might also have had an impact on the 2020 presidential election, as voters tended to see Donald Trump as far more capable than Joe Biden in taking on the CCP.

While we don’t know with certainty why the memo was concealed, the only person who had a constitutional role in deciding if suppression of a lab leak should be the policy of the U.S. government was President Trump. Although it’s possible that Trump decided it would be better to conceal the facts, it’s far more likely that, like all of us, the president was kept in the dark.

Tyler Durden Thu, 04/07/2022 - 23:25

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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