Following The Science

• "Fauci Admits Social Distancing Wasn't Scientific and the Wuhan Lab Leak Wasn't a Conspiracy Theory"--Red State. Some highlights from his second day of closed door testimony to Congress:

• Dr. Fauci claimed that the “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation promoted by federal health officials was likely not based on any data. He characterized the development of the guidance by stating, “It sort of just appeared.”

    Well, no, it didn't "sort of appear." In March 2021, I documented the genesis of the social distancing bullsh** and how no one believed it.

    TL:DR version. It was based on a high school science project by the daughter of a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory. Like the rest of the measures used during the COVID panic, the primary purpose was controlling people, not keeping them safe. 

• Dr. Fauci acknowledged that the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory. This comes nearly four years after prompting the publication of the now infamous “Proximal Origin” paper that attempted to vilify and disprove the lab leak hypothesis.

This marks a significant walk-back from his previous position and soliciting a paper to disprove the lab leak hypothesis.

• "COVID ‘6-feet’ social distancing ‘sort of just appeared,’ likely lacked scientific basis, Fauci admits"--New York Post.

    Dr. Anthony Fauci confessed to lawmakers Tuesday that guidelines to keep six feet of separation — ostensibly to limit the spread of COVID-19 — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input.

    Fauci, 83, revealed to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the “six feet apart” recommendation championed by him and other US public health officials was “likely not based on scientific data,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician.

    Schools nationwide remained closed well into the second year of the pandemic as a result of the social distancing guidelines, which were disputed by both research studies and other health officials.

    “It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health who served as President Biden’s COVID response coordinator for 15 months, told the New York Times in March 2021.

 So remind me again why Fauci isn't being charged with crimes against humanity?

    In related news, the Daily Mail reports that "US scientists held secret talks with Covid 'Batwoman' amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly... just before pandemic."

    The Chinese scientist who ran controversial experiments at the laboratory suspected of triggering Covid held a secret meeting with the US government to seek backing for a project that would go on to supercharge coronaviruses – shortly before the devastating outbreak started in her native Wuhan.

    The June 2017 meeting at America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) held by Shi Zhengli – known as 'Batwoman' because of her work on sampling and sequencing the animals' viruses – will bolster fears of Western collusion in a Chinese cover-up after Covid resulted from a reckless laboratory experiment.

    A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.

    They show that US researchers seeking funding for work to engineer 'spike proteins' – making it easier for the bat viruses to infect human cells – misled the authorities about the risks of the experiments in order to maximise the chance of receiving grants.

    The documents, obtained by US Right To Know, a non-profit public health research group, include an order made by Chinese intelligence on January 3, 2020 – two days after the world was first told about Covid – which decreed that its scientists should either share their samples with the government or destroy them 'on the spot'.

    Western intelligence agencies increasingly regard a lab leak in Wuhan as the most likely explanation for Covid, rather then the original theory that it was somehow spawned in a wildlife market in the city. The bombshell documents include emails sent by staff at EcoHealth Alliance – a now notorious health agency that has used US government money to sponsor bat virus experiments – ahead of the visit by Professor Zhengli.

    Using the subject heading: 'Potential visit ... by our Chinese co-investigator', Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of EcoHealth, writes: 'Zhengli and I will do a double act, and we'll cover the work we're doing ... as well as the broadscale surveillance of bats for novel viruses'. Professor Zhengli became known as 'Batwoman' because of her virus-hunting trips to the bat caves of southern China, hundreds of miles from Wuhan, where her team collected more than 10,000 animal samples.

    The sequencing of Covid-19 closely matched that found in those caves. Also invited to the meeting was Peng Zhou, an associate professor at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    After the meeting, Mr Daszak thanked the hosts by writing in an email that it was 'nice to have a chance to introduce our collaborators to you personally'.

    EcoHealth also lobbied the Pentagon for funding for Zhengli to engineer high-risk coronaviruses by synthesising spike proteins with furin cleavage sites, that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily, at the Wuhan Institute from December 2018, a year before the Covid-19 virus emerged. 

    In an email, Dr Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the centre of concerns over gain-of-function studies, acknowledged that US researchers would 'freak out' if they knew novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in low-security Chinese laboratories, but disguised it to make the US government more 'comfortable' with the plan, which was intended to help with pandemic prevention.

 Now move along, nothing to see here.