The limited hangout Senate Minority Report on Covid Origins

I came down with COVID on October 26, and it has been for me (both times) like a bad flu. I pounded HCQ, zinc, vitamin D (though was already on the supplements), fluids, slept most of 2 days and today was able to load the dishwasher and do a load of laundry today. Very kind people brought me lots of food, flowers and a card.

Had to cancel my speaking engagement last night and an appearance at the TipToe to Tyranny movie premiere tonight.

So why am I blogging? Because of two “limited hangouts.” A limited hangout is where you get some of the truth, and it seems novel enough that you believe the rest of what is said, when the rest is propaganda or worse. I will address limited hangout #2 (Jeffrey Sachs again) later.

One was the Senate HELP Minority Report that asserts COVID was made in a lab, and furthermore tells the reader that it someone continues to assert it is of natural, zoonotic origin, they need to provide proof. Not the other way around. The lab origin is being claimed as the primary theory, and natural origin is being framed as the conspiracy.

I guess that is good, though the committee is a day late and a dollar short. Short because they do not acknowledge the possibility of its deliberate release, and assert it was made in the Wuhan lab based on circumstantial evidence. But why not consider Baric or his protegee Vineet Menachery as possible designers of the COVID virus? Check out Menachery’s publication list here. He and Baric certainly had the ability to do so.

Richard Burr, the Senator from Pharma/Biotech and the Biodefense industry wrote the foreword. Richard Burr, who was investigated for insider trader using information he gleaned in January and February 2020. Richard Burr, who employed Robert Kadlec as his staffer to actually design the national strategic stockpile (NSS) and the position of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Emergency Response (ASPR in beltway lingo) — and Kadlec was later appointed by President Trump to the position he had created. Kadlec then moved the NSS to his own agency and controlled its purchases, leaving the country bereft of PPE, masks, drugs etc. when COVID hit. See this, this and this.

But we had plenty of unneeded anthrax and smallpox vaccines, purchased from Kadlec’s former business partner, Fuad el-Hibrid, main founder of Emergent BioSolutions. Guess what? Kadlec is back working for Senator Burr right now, so you can be assured that this minority report has been sanitized by Kadlec and Kadlec’s other presumed boss, the CIA. Amazing isn’t it that he gets a plum federal position after being personally responsible for the lack of masks, gowns and gloves for healthcare workers early in the pandemic, many of whom died. Very little seems to have happened during most of Kadlec’s 27 years during which he was purportedly a flight surgeon for the Air Force.

Both Robert Malone and Alexis Baden-Mayer explore this backstory at greater length for additional insight on the history behind the report.

Daszak. Baric. Kadlec. It appears they are all of Ukrainian origin. Like Victoria Nuland, whose father changed his name. Just mentioning it, don’t know the significance.

The very useful information below, in italics, is from Alexis’ substack of yesterday:

“What would have been truly damning, destroying any possibility of the pandemic having a natural origin, is if SARS-CoV-2 had been most similar to SHC014-MA15, the SARS-like coronavirus engineered by Ralph Baric in his infamous gain-of-function experiments published in the 2015 paper, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” 

SHC014-MA15 was “a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” The House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff, under the leadership of Ranking Member Michael McCaul, summarized the experiment in their August 2021 report, “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology” (which Burrs analysis doesn’t even reference):

In other words, they removed the spike protein from SHC014 and inserted it into a SARS coronavirus that was genetically manipulated to better infect mice. This work was done under BSL-3 conditions. The newly created virus was then shown to bind to ACE2 in humans, replicate “efficiently” in primary human airways cells, and withstand antibodies and vaccines. Researchers concluded that the work “suggests a potential risk of SARS- CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”

We have to take Baric’s word for it that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t strikingly similar to SHC014-MA15, because he didn’t deposit the sequence of SHC014-MA15 in GenBank until May 22, 2020! (And, when he did, he misnamed it SHC015-MA15.)”

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The bottom line on the Senate Minority HELP report is that it tells us nothing we did not already know. It never crosses the line to suggest the outbreak may have been deliberate. It is a classic limited hangout, and what else would you expect from Kadlec and Burr, after all?