Groundhog Day for the Fraudulent Natural Origin Narrative
The same scientists who have been perpetrating the natural origin fraud for Covid for the past four and a half years have released yet another “study.” Who is orchestrating this seemingly endless PR?
For what feels like the umpteenth time, propagandists of the natural origin narrative for Covid have released a purported “study” to show that Covid came from nature. As is always the case when these “studies” comes out, the media has obediently parroted its assertions without a hint of skepticism.
The latest work of fiction from the natural origin gang has been published in the journal Cell, which claims to be a scientific journal in the field of biology.
Like previous incarnations of the natural origin narrative, the “study” in Cell merely rehashes old and thoroughly debunked narratives regarding the alleged origins of Covid at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market. There are far too many transparent falsehoods, inconsistencies, and erroneous conclusions in the article to enumerate them all here. We’ll try anyway.
In a nutshell, the Cell article argues that mammals were sold at the market and that traces of Covid were also detected at the market, albeit weeks after it was shut down and cleaned in January 2020. From this, we are supposed to infer that the virus originated from a mammal at the market. To be clear, the “study” does not say that there was an infected mammal—they never found one—just that there was a presence of mammals and virus traces at the market.
As if that wasn’t sufficiently ridiculous, we are also supposed to believe that this unknown mammal somehow contracted a virus and brought it to the Huanan Seafood Market without a single other animal or human being infected along the way. Then, miraculously, after silently traversing China, the coronavirus chose to erupt on the doorstep of the world’s leading coronavirus research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that happened to be engaged in creating a virus remarkably similar to the one that allegedly originated at the market. We are also expected to believe that the purported market virus somehow became perfectly pre-adapted for human transmission—something no virus has ever accomplished, at least not without human intervention in laboratories.
For the media to have initially embraced the fraudulent narrative regarding the origins of Covid may be forgivable, but this has now become a recurring pattern. The same group of purported scientists continues to publish fraudulent papers, and each time, the media eagerly disseminates their claims as if they were the definitive word on the origins of Covid.
This is no longer a case of the media being misled, but a case of the media doing the misleading. But who is behind this pernicious PR campaign?
Before we attempt to answer that question, let us take a quick walk down memory lane: The first time this playbook was used in earnest was in March 2020 when a group of scientists affiliated with, and funded by, Anthony Fauci published the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper. In fact, Fauci had commissioned the paper.
Unsurprisingly, given that its purpose was to absolve Fauci of complicity in creating Covid, the paper was a transparent fraud, as a very tiny group of honest scientists pointed out early on, albeit in far more polite words than we would have used.
In fact, one does not need to be a scientist to figure out the Proximal Origin fraud. The central argument of the Proximal Origin paper is that the Wuhan lab could not have created Covid because the backbone of the Covid virus did not match any known virus backbones. Now, leaving aside that neither Fauci nor his accomplice authors knew what viruses the Wuhan lab had, there is an even bigger problem. The footnote that accompanied that claim, the infamous footnote 20 (figure 1), pointed to a list of virus backbones from 2014, leaving a huge five-year gap to 2019 when the virus was made. In other words, anyone with a functioning brain would have known from reading footnote 20 that the Proximal Origin paper was a total fraud. It was as if someone claimed that the World Trade Center was still standing by pointing to a map from September 10, 2001.
Figure 1
Then there were two drafts of a seafood market paper in early 2022 for which the New York Times stopped the presses. Just like Proximal Origin, the two papers were completely destroyed by the online community of independent researchers. Regardless, those papers eventually made it into supposedly scientific journals but what had been termed “dispositive evidence” in one of the drafts had by that point become “insufficient evidence.” But once again, the media ignored the truth and cheerled publication of the fake papers. The public was never told about the humiliating change in conclusion.
Then, in March 2023, we saw the emergence of the ignominious raccoon dog paper which claimed that an unidentified and undiscovered raccoon dog had set off the pandemic at the Huanan Seafood Market. Unsurprisingly, the paper was celebrated by the media as definitive proof that Covid came from nature. And just as all the previous papers, it was immediately and thoroughly debunked.
There were also other fake and fraudulent papers that pushed the natural origin narrative. None of them contained any hint of a credible argument. In fact, to this day there is not a single piece of evidence that Covid came from nature. Not one.
And now there is the latest paper, which is simply a regurgitation of the previous papers. Yet, again, the media is parroting the lies.
Perhaps most notably, it’s not just that the same fraudulent theory gets recycled but that it is the same authors who keep recycling it. This process of periodically publishing garbage papers pushing the natural origin narrative, which has now been going on for four-and-a-half years, started when Fauci’s gang of scientists, Kristian Anderson, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, and Eddie Holmes (Ian Lipkin was originally part of the group but has since disavowed the natural origin narrative), published the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper. What most people do not know is that this same gang also penned the latest fake paper, as well as the ones in between. That itself should be a huge clue as to the fraudulent provenance of the papers.
The simple truth is that all these papers come from a small, conflicted, and corrupt coterie of scientists who are circling the wagons for Fauci, for China, for the World Health Organization, and for themselves.
And this brings us to the most compelling reason why Fauci's team should never be trusted on any matter, ever. While some may argue that they authored misleading papers out of misguided intentions rather than outright malice, we have “dispositive evidence”—using one of their terms—that these individuals are indeed fraudulent.
Last year, the House Covid Select Committee managed to obtain Slack messages in which the Proximal Origin authors privately discussed that paper. The messages serve as a striking testament to the fact that the authors of Proximal Origin never believed their own fabrications. Anderson stated that it was “so friggin’ likely” the virus originated from a laboratory. Holmes argued that natural selection, meaning the virus mutating for human transmission, could not have occurred at the Huanan Seafood Market because the density of mammals was far too low. Garry noted that Covid’s furin cleavage site—the feature that makes the virus particularly virulent in humans and has never been observed in a natural beta coronavirus—was optimal from the get go, indicating that it was pre-adapted to humans in a lab.
In the same set of Slack messages, Andersen and his accomplices also discussed potential publication venues for Proximal Origin. They preferred to submit to Nature magazine; if that did not succeed, they considered Nature Medicine as their next option. If all else failed, they were aware that they had a reliable fallback in Cell, which is where their latest paper has now been published. (In the end, Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical trust, Wellcome, who, along with Fauci, had chaperoned the creation of the Proximal Origin paper, helped to get it into Nature Medicine.)
Holmes mentioned that Cell would publish their paper because Cell was “desperate to get in on the act.” Getting in on the act presumably meant participating in the cover-up of the origins of Covid. Kristian Andersen told the Slack group that he would reach out to “Sri at Cell”, further explaining, “that way we don’t deal with reviewers.” In other words, Andersen was aware that Cell would allow the authors to bypass the peer review process. Sri refers to Sri Devi Narasimhan, the Deputy Editor at Cell. Incidentally, Narasimhan was in regular contact with Fauci and his office during the early days of Covid. Most of the content of their exchanges remain fully redacted. Notably, Elsevier, which owns Cell, is very active in China.
What we are left with is a story that seems to be a permanent loop: A fraudulent “study” claims that Covid came from nature, this is followed by fawning media reports, the fraudulent “study” is then debunked and its authors shown to be frauds; yet, a few months later, the same authors somehow manage to publish another fraudulent “study,” which is again fawned over by the media and debunked by honest people, often random individuals on Twitter. This process has been going on for over four and a half years now.
Who is running the show? Is it China? Is it Fauci? Is it Farrar, who has now, astonishingly, and despite his documented involvement in the Proximal Origin fraud (or perhaps because of it), become the chief scientist of the World Health Organization? Is it a combination of individuals, or is it someone we’ve never heard of?
If we had to speculate, we would suggest Farrar. He co-authored the original paper that initiated the natural origin narrative, the infamous Lancet letter of February 2020. He shepherded the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper through its creation and into Nature Medicine. As the head of the Wellcome Trust, he wielded significant influence over billions in scientific funding. Now, as chief scientist of the World Health Organization, he occupies a pivotal position with extensive control over media narratives. Furthermore, he is a very close associate and long time personal friend of Gao Fu, who was head of China’s CDC during Covid.
However, this is merely our conjecture. The truth is that we do not know. What we can say is that once or twice a year we find ourselves reliving yet another Groundhog Day regarding the fraudulent natural origin narrative, and no amount of debunking seems capable of putting an end to it. It is inconceivable that this phenomenon continues to occur spontaneously. Instead, there appears to be an orchestrated public relations campaign promoting a transparently fraudulent theory, and it is high time we uncover who is behind it.