Covid Origins Hearing Features Republicans Trying to Pin Fauci While Ignoring Wider Structure

The names Jeremy Farrar and Ron Fouchier were said in the hearings, but no one explained their significance.

Robert Garry and Kristian Andersen — two of the authors of the propagandistic Nature Medicine article “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Tuesday, see C-SPAN video.

The hearing was appropriately titled “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up” but didn’t live up to that.

I live-tweeted the affair. And I was interviewed on this subject on “Flashpoints” (at the top of the show) on Wednesday.

The focus on much of the coverage by people doing some serious work on lab origins was what the Republicans were going after — that Garry and Andersen were in late January 2020, according to FOIAed emails, stating that they thought there was a serious chance that Covid could have lab origins. But after Fauci and Jeremy Farrar communicated with them, Garry and Andersen changed their tune, wrote the pieces dismissing lab origins — and then got substantial grants. And they would go on to dismiss others who raised the possibility of lab origins.

See report by Ryan Grim of The Intercept — “House Republicans Accidentally Released a Trove of Damning Covid Documents” — and timeline by US Right to Know.

Professor Richard Ebright and others pointedly charged that Garry and Andersen had “compounded their fraud with perjury”.

Dr. Meryl Nass, who was one of the very first people to call out the article, adds a more radical perspective, noting among other things, how several of the “Proximal Origin” authors may be spooks. She bases some of her remarks on the work of Edward Hooper, who wrote the book The River about the origin of AIDS. See his piece from April of 2020 and his interactions with this same set of scientists.

As I noted in my last post, Garry and Andersen are also implicated in the Ebola 2014 outbreak, a subject I expect to be returning to in more depth in the coming weeks and months.

The hearing featured Republicans largely trying to pin blame on China and Fauci (see their report). And Democrats pretending there’s nothing really to see here (see their report).

This dynamic, which I’ve noted in the past, had a particularly deranged manifestation at Tuesday’s hearing.

In the course of undermining the Republican narrative trying to blame Fauci, Tuesday’s hearing saw Garry, Andersen and some Democrats noting the role of others in the formulation of “Proximal Origin”.

But these individuals actually highlight how insidious the process was.

The central figure was Jeremy Farrar. He played a crucial role in pulling together the group of people who would sign “Proximal Origin”.

As I noted early this year, Farrar not only played a role in the formation of “Proximal Origin” — he was also a signer of the Lancet letter, the other main pillar of propaganda from 2020 on Covid origins.

Farrar had been head of the highly influential Wellcome Trust in Britain and is now chief scientist for the WHO as it attempts a “power grab”.

This could hardly be more disturbing, but none of this was pointed out in the hearing. Time and again, Farrar’s name was invoked to let Fauci off the hook and never was it brought up to show how there was a deeper coverup going on.

Somewhat similarly, the name of Ron Fouchier came up as one of the people involved in the meetings which led to the publication of “Proximal Origin”.

But no one explained who Fouchier is.

He’s a notorious figure. In 2011, he used serial passage to make the avian flu, which is deadly but not easily transmissible, airborne. His work compelled even the New York Times to warn of “An Engineered Doomsday”.

But Fouchier didn’t sign any either the Lancet letter or “Proximal Origin” — quite likely because his doing so would have made alarm bells go off.

This shows how the propaganda put out at the beginning of the pandemic was highly orchestrated to hinder people from seeing the possibility of lab origins for Covid and the dire threats involved. This raises further questions as to the wider agendas at play.

See prior piece: