welcome to the hotez gain of function

you can check out any time you like, but you still leave a paper trail

i love good investigative journalism, especially when it involves looking into the sanctimonious and revealing them as frauds. and wow does this one have it all because

baylor college school of tropical medicine president peter hotez has been a one man misinformation machine.

he’s been on the wrong side of every issue from lockdowns to masks and vacations to vaccines. but his real signature issue of late has been “this virus could not be a lab escape and anyone claiming it is is a conspiracy theorist.”

he sits on the covid 19 commission at the prestigious journal “the lancet.” this is allegedly a “a panel of experts working to scrutinize the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “

there might be some eensy little problems there though, because this panel looks to have a cuckoo in its nest. well, really more than one. well, OK, frankly the whole thing was a sham from the start and included, of all people, peter daszak, the guy who ran the ecohealth alliance that so famously funded the wuhan institute of virology gain of function work on bat coronaviruses. but at least peter D did (eventually) disclose his conflicts of interest.

and his reputation as a virus hotwirer who colored well outside the lines right at ground zero is well established. (not that it seems to have done him any harm)

but petey H, well, he didn’t disclose anything save his endless scorn for those like commission chair jeffrey sachs who was raising the possibility that covid 19 was a lab escape. hotez was adamant that the commission report should not incorporate such implausible rubbish.

but the truth, she has a funny way of finding a way in…

and the folks at US RTK have done some great work here

let’s look:

Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, has been a fierce critic of potential hearings next year into a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and whether the National Institutes of Health prematurely discredited the hypothesis.

Hotez decried the hearings as nothing less than “a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America” in a viral tweet thread last week. Hotez also dismissed as an “outlandish conspiracy” the possibility that a lab accident sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

it really was quite the rant. positively fauciesque. these people really, truly beleive that they are “the science™”

worth reading.

Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD @PeterHotez

1/3 We already know that Sen Paul has no interest in covering the origins of Covid, it’s all about using his power in the Senate to target 🎯 prominent US scientists, while inviting fringe elements to testify and promote outlandish conspiracies foxnews.com/politics/rand-…

foxnews.comRand Paul vows to get answers on COVID-19 origins in gain-of-function hearingSen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will lead the first hearings on gain-of-function research in hopes of bringing more transparency to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

but as is so often the case, behind the bluster lie shady truths. methinks the hobbit doth protest too much.

it turns out that peter is lying his little face off.

However, Hotez’s own 2012 to 2017 NIH grant for the development of a SARS vaccine had the stated aim of responding to any “accidental release from a laboratory,” in addition to a possible zoonotic spillover of the virus. 

The $6.1 million NIH grant also raises the possibility of “deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack.” 

“SARS outbreaks remain a serious concern mainly due to possible zoonotic reintroduction of SARS-CoV into humans, accidental release from a laboratory or deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack,” the grant’s description reads. 

It’s not clear why Hotez has dismissed a possible lab release of SARS-CoV-2 as preposterous, after having conducted research for years to prepare for a possible accidental or deliberate release of SARS-CoV.

LOLZ. “not clear.”

well, let’s see about that.

perhaps it had something to do with the fact that hotez was, quite literally, collaborating with zhengli shi, wuhan institute of virology’s infamous “bat lady” who has been dead center of the whole covid mess on, wait for it…

“laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus”

ahem.

this is not a smoking gun. this is an entire field of freshly fired musketry:

“Hotez helped fund research on controversial chimeric coronavirus

While casting concerns about Wuhan’s labs as “fringe,” Hotez has not mentioned his own connection to a project involving a laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that has come under Congress’ microscope. 

The project was helmed by Zhengli Shi, a senior scientist and “virus hunter” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nicknamed the “Bat Lady.” 

As part of his NIH grant, Hotez subcontracted funding for research on combined or “chimeric” coronaviruses, a scientific paper shows. Hotez’s grant underwrote two of Shi’s collaborators on the project.

In the 2017 paper co-funded by Hotez, Shi and her colleagues generated a recombinant virus from two SARS-related coronaviruses: “rWIV1-SHC014S.” 

and contrary to popular claims, these are EXACTLY the droids we’re looking for.

A prior study of one of the coronaviruses that comprised the chimera, WIV1, found it to be “poised for human emergence.” Another prior paper on the other coronavirus, SHC014, stated that its future study in lab-generated viruses may be “too risky to pursue.” 

“The work here should have been at the very least, heavily scrutinized,” said David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert. “This work should have been heavily reviewed for [gain-of-function], and probably should have been subject to the pause prior to December 2017.” 

this is, of course, all of a piece.

peter daszak: well, yes, this is exactly what we did...

these guys were all at the same institute doing the same work and funding the same people with grant money that flowed straight from NIH.

and hotez’s grant was a specific part of the funding.

ideas that

“In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with WIV1 bat coronavirus,” the letter read. “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result rather than something the scientists set out to do.”

appear to be pure whitewash.

it was done 100% deliberately and with malice aforethought.

these are daszak’s own words:

all this money and effort from through bat-lady shi and the WIV which sits at the epicenter of the emergence. they were all peas in the same rotten pod.

Specifically, an EcoHealth Alliance grant report obtained by congressional investigators demonstrated that a WIV1-SHC014 chimera generated thousands of times the viral load and enhanced lethality in mice with human airway cells. This prompted concerns among some biosecurity experts, scientists and members of Congress. 

how hotez has managed to keep his own name out of the spotlight for so long is quite an interesting question. and i’m pretty sure we can all guess where this trail is going to lead.

it’s time to look past the howling invective, gaslighting, and invocation of “hate crimes against the science™” and get to the bottom of this. hotez and daszak and baric and who knows how many others have their fingerprints all over this.

they were all there, thick as thieves, serially passaging bat coronaviruses through mice to amplify their virulence a thousand fold or more, making them infective in humans, and working on the same sort of inoculation vectors that suddenly emerged from the NIH and got licensed to pharma as a basis for covid vaccines.

it’s all the same people who howled from the beginning that it could not be a lab leak despite having done this exact work in the exact lab in question.

it’s the same people who took over the investigations into origins to find themselves faultless.

it’s the same people who are howling still about needing protection from “hate crimes” against their reputations.

what it appears they did was past hateful. it was reckless to the point of “batman supervillain origin story crazy.”

and this moralizing and manipulation as they demand protection to investigate themselves and find no crimes must end.

if these people had the morals of cane snakes it would be an upgrade.

and no one should be protecting them.

we should be protecting the world from them instead.

it’s time to end this charade and put a stop to this. the people who did it must be held to account and taken out of the positions of power they continue to occupy at universities, journals, and federal agencies as the bonnie and clydes of bioethics. permitting them to investigate themselves is absurd.

serious, in depth, and rigorous investigation into just what happened here is one of the most important undertakings in the world right now and rand paul has stood very tall in relentlessly refusing to be put off.

this appears to be a real, no joke conspiracy. and it’s time we rooted out the rot and tore entire edifices of power down.

the government has no place funding science like this.

and the place for those who did likely features orange jumpsuits.