Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Afterward, Farrar speaks more with Fauci and Farrar writes an email to Tedros who heads the WHO to propose how to move forward. That’s one of the bullet points from that email. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/ gives you a lot of details about what happened in that week.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.