Lockdowners Have No Shame or Remorse

WHO team member Peter Daszak leaves his hotel after the World Health Organization (WHO) team wrapped up its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan in China's central Hubei Province on Feb. 10, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

I’ve just woken up to the astonishing news that Anthony Fauci’s agency (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has doled out another $653,392 to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. The money began to flow last week. Alex Berenson seems to have broken the story.

I’m in a state of disorientation and amazement, as are many others. The grant makes a mockery of every attempt to bring some accountability to these people.

I would have thought that by now, at the very least, the major players in this calamity would be more surreptitious, cautious, or possibly even remorseful. It doesn’t appear to be the case. Not only have they not received the message. They are fearless, more brazen than ever.

How can we account for this? Is it hush money? Maybe. I suspect something even worse. None of these people believe there will ever be accountability. The elected representatives in a position to investigate and push for some justice are too few. The journalists and institutions covering the biggest scandal of our age are too few. If it weren’t for The Epoch Times, there would be no national newspaper focused on the pandemic response at all.

Everyone else just wants to forget, and this is because too many individuals and institutions are compromised from having participated in lockdown propaganda (and are now embarrassed) or are otherwise financially hemmed in by reliance on pharmaceutical advertising. In such an environment, the perpetrators of misdeeds feel free to continue their capers in the open.

You don’t need a “conspiracy theory” to discern what’s happening here. It’s out in the open.

Here’s the page from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) accounting for the grant.

EcoHealth is the sketchy nonprofit that the NIH has long used as a conduit to fund dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The whole Daszak–Fauci relationship began at a 2013 cocktail party at Washington’s Cosmo Club, where Fauci delivered a short talk while insiders sipped champagne and attempted to make a meal out of caviar and cheese.

By 2014, the meeting paid off. Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair explains:

“In 2014, Fauci’s agency had issued a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to predicting and helping to prevent the next pandemic by identifying viruses that could leap from wildlife to humans. The grant, titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, proposed to screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge the risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was a key collaborator to whom EcoHealth Alliance gave almost $600,000 in sub-awards. But the work there had been controversial enough that the NIH suspended the grant in July 2020.”

When news of the new virus from Wuhan started pouring in in late December 2019 and intensifying over January 2020, Daszak played a crucial role in pushing out the view that it was a nutty conspiracy to believe that COVID-19 might have originated from a lab leak. He wrote articles for the press and cosigned letters in The Lancet. Over time, of course, it became clear that the lab-leak theory wasn’t crazy at all.

Daszak has been central to the propaganda push from the beginning. On Feb. 27, 2020, The New York Times began its push for lockdowns and disease panic by interviewing their top virus reporter since fired (Donald G. McNeil) on the daily podcast. In this podcast, the newspaper broke a century of journalistic tradition and attempted to terrify the public about the virus. On that very day, Daszak wrote an op-ed for the newspaper. What are the chances?

“But as the world struggles to respond to Covid-19, we risk missing the really big picture,” he wrote, clearly preparing the way to assure his complete lack of culpability for anything going on, even though he had funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. “Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases.”

In this article, Daszak goes on to echo the views expressed by Fauci a few months later that it wasn’t a lab leak, but rather human interaction itself (meaning freedom) that’s the cause of infectious disease. He does a quick reconstruction of the history of infectious disease, blaming not bad sanitation or bad medicine but trade itself! His mantra: “Plagues are not only part of our culture; they are caused by it.”

In other words, we need experts to control the whole of society in order to stop the next pandemic. That’s what they believe. They have the money and the power to make it possible. None of the investigations or even the cancellation of Daszak’s previous grants from Fauci in July 2020 have deterred them. Not even a whistleblower’s book, scheduled to appear on Nov. 15, makes a difference.

What’s called the “administrative state”—the cash nexus between for-profits, nonprofits, and large agencies staffed by employees with permanent positions who are uncontrolled by any elected branch of government—just keeps barreling ahead. This is despite the extraordinary disgrace of the entire institution, having plunged the United States and world culture, economy, and legal restraints on states into total chaos.

Another major indication of how confident they feel came from Deborah Birx’s book on the subject of her tenure as coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under the Trump administration. She admits her lies on page after page. She lied about 15 days. She submitted false reports to the states. She used tax dollars to fly around the country and persuade governors to lock down longer and keep schools closed.

There are two features of this narrative I find shocking. First, the content of her story itself is shocking in its admission and even bragging about subterfuge. Second, that she would admit it at all and feel no compunction to cover it up reveals something of the culture of the deep state. It believes that it rules the world and no one has the power to change that.

This new grant for EcoHealth is a gross insult to every American, but it’s even more than that. It’s a poke in the eye to anyone who believes in accountability in government. The lockdowners—it’s a small group of insiders with enormous influence and power—are still riding high. They believe that they’re untouchable.

Are they right? Maybe, provided people lose interest in following this story. The only thing standing between us and the complete collapse of civilization are the writers, scholars, institutions, and leaders who have the tenacity to stand up to this kind of outrage.

The crucial battle of our time is only superficially between political parties and ideologies. The real battle is between the administrative state—Fauci is a totem for entire machinery—and the cause of freedom itself.

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