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In the Telegraph today:
The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Sarah Newey has more details on the evidence that debunks President Trump’s latest theory.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relevant revenue body, and job done. Oddly, I rarely see such “Patriotic” rich folk saying “yes, of course, I will get that done immediately”. And I suspect a reason is that they want to sound good, and also like the idea of people being coerced. The coerced transfer in the name of “fairness” is the point. Voluntarily giving some of your money to the State is a bit, well, too voluntary.
Anyway, some paragraphs from Mr Russo:
I realised there’s a special kind of hypocrisy in preaching equality from the elevated comfort of elite media, elite networks, and elite platforms.
The idea of a wealth tax has been around for decades, but suddenly it’s being sold as the grand answer to Britain’s economic and social problems.
That’s the pitch. Simple. Catchy. Morally flattering. And, if you don’t look too closely, it’s vaguely heroic.
But the truth is less glamorous. A wealth tax isn’t a bold reform. It’s often a slogan in search of a serious policy, and a performance of fairness that doesn’t come close to fixing the machinery underneath.
Yes, Britain has inequality. Yes, too many people feel shut out while a narrow group sits on significant assets. But that does not make every proposal for taxing wealth a useful one. Britain isn’t America. We don’t have California-scale concentrations of extreme wealth, and we don’t have an economic structure that can pretend a wealth tax is some great fiscal breakthrough.
The sums being talked about sound large until you place them next to the scale of the state. Then they look less like transformation and more like loose change with a manifesto attached.
The hypocrisy is that some of the loudest advocates of wealth taxes talk as though they are speaking for the squeezed and the overlooked. In reality, they are often highly visible, highly connected, and very comfortable participants in the same media and political ecosystem they claim to be challenging. They denounce concentrated power while depending on the attention economy, elite networks and moral theatre to amplify their own status. It’s a neat trick. Condemn privilege from within a system that rewards you for sounding rebellious.
So let us name the principle actually in operation, because it is not sub judice. Sub judice is a rule, and rules apply evenly or they are not rules. The principle in operation is that speculation is dangerous when it is inconvenient and wholesome when it is useful. Ann’s case, where the early inferences pointed somewhere the official mind preferred not to look, attracted the full apparatus of hush. Suffolk, where the inference flattered the approved threat picture, was narrated by a Secretary of State before the evidence was in, and un-narrated by nobody when the evidence declined to appear. The Tates, indefensible in the court of public opinion, may be tried there nightly without a murmur. That is not the law of contempt. That is malinformation doctrine wearing the law of contempt as a disguise, truth and silence alike deployed by reference to harm as the managers define it.
– Gawain Towler, discussing a now debunked terrorism claim, the Tate brothers arrest, and Ann Widdicombe’s murder… and the very selective approach taken by the state in the pursuit of justice.
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech.
Germany’s experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann’s case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent.
– Max Thompson
Clive Crook, a columnist in Bloomberg, does not mince his words about the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who appears to be of the view that the pro-market reforms of Mrs Thatcher and some of her successors (not nearly pro-market enough, in my view), were all a terrible mistake. We should, according to Mr Burnham, look back with fondness with what came before. (The Institute of Economic Affairs has this rather nice takedown.)
Crook is having none of this blather. Here are a few paragraphs from the article, which is paywalled, so I won’t quote the whole piece.
If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.
To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.
The nadir was the “winter of discontent”: strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.
This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.
Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic center-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but “four decades of neoliberalism.”
Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organized labor. Nationalize a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal).
All things grow, bacteria, blue whales, businesses and bureaucracies. The difference for the latter is, that the first three must wrench a living from a cold, uncaring world, whereas the latter merely needs to increase taxes.
The bureaucracy grows like a cancer, stealing resources and threatening the viability of its host. Eventually the host, us, starts to ask whether it shouldn’t be reduced to something taxpayers can actually afford. The bureaucracy responds by doing everything in its power to prevent its dismemberment. Join the EU, there’s safety in numbers, import millions of voters to block the right, all while continuing to drain the lifeblood from the economy. It can’t win, of course, either it gets dismantled or the economy collapses. It’s just a matter of what is left afterwards.
– Roué le Jour
Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see.
Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good.
However, you will never convince me the casting was not epic trolling: a black actress as Helen of Troy, possessed of a face unlikely to have launched a thousand ships, at least not in her direction; an African-American rap singer; a transgender actress playing Sinon (a character actually from Virgil’s Aeneid); and the goddess Athena played by Zendaya Coleman, an actress known for practicing economy of expression.
I have not seen Nolan’s Odyssey and probably never will, not for any particularly ideological reason but because of what an old chum of mine with whom I did Classics observed after seeing it.
“They replaced the trickster polytropos Odysseus with some other chap, who strangely was also called Odysseus.”
Yes, my friend is a bit of a wag, but he does read Latin and Greek, and if I am going to watch something called The Odyssey, I want the protagonist to be Odysseus, not just called Odysseus.
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
– Gawain Towler
“Burnham to scrap Starmer’s digital ID scheme in ‘reset of priorities’”, the Guardian reports.
Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday.
The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday.
The Guardian understands the proposals are being outlined in an attempt to distance the incoming prime minister from unpopular choices made by his predecessor. A petition opposing the introduction of digital ID cards when it was announced last year attracted about 3m signatures.
Well done to all who signed it.
“One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives,” Burnham’s spokesperson said.
“That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living.
Although the cost of the scheme would have been great (projected to be 1.8 billion pounds and we all know it would have gone astronomically over budget), the foolish things Mr Burnham will do with the money saved, such as free bus travel for 11-16 year olds according to the Telegraph, will add to inflation, making the cost of living higher.
But the money scarcely matters. The important thing is that this series of Yookay ends with Starmer’s monster being chased away. It’ll come back, it always does. Some of those old Blair episodes were right scary before they announced “Giant ID computer plan scrapped”. But for now, let the credits roll and make yourself a cup of tea.
“Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years. He appears to be confessing to having been part of the neoliberalist regime which ruined Britain.
Burnham is a substitute prime minister in a party which two years ago won 34 per cent of the vote in a general election, yet you would think from the tone of his address today that he had just won a large personal mandate. He has none, and that is not a great basis on which to announce a grand plan to reverse 40 years of anything: neoliberalism, socialism of whatever else. Moreover, Burnham appeared to confirm that he will not be seeking a mandate. After paying a warm tribute to what he saw as the great achievements of Keir Starmer – the man he has just deposed – he said that the people of Makerfield had spoken on behalf of all forgotten communities. Really? I don’t recall the people of Scunthorpe, Teesside or Barrow in Furness asking Burnham to speak on their behalf. In reality, Burnham simply held onto an existing Labour seat, and our new PM is going to treat that as carte blanche to reverse 40 years of economic policy.”
– Ross Clark, Spectator.
“Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help.”
I consider my membership dues well spent.
“The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the patenting of James Watt’s double-acting steam engine. Each event marks a profound shift in how human beings understood and interacted with the physical world and with each other. Before this cluster of anniversaries, we’ve just passed another related semiquincentennial, of the birth of one of our most influential applied moral philosophers. I am speaking, of course, of Jane Austen.”
– Lynne Kiesling, at the Knowledge Problem substack. The article came out on New Year’s Eve, 2025. Definitely worth a read.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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