Covid Inquiry Mystery 208


There is still no explanation as to why the judge chairman Lady Poole, the lead counsel Douglas Ross KC and three other lawyers have all quit the public inquiry into the handling of Covid in Scotland. This is an astonishing event. The inquiry currently is not happening. But nobody in the media seems particularly to care.

Word being put around the Edinburgh establishment is that there is nothing to report, it is nothing to do with remit or evidence, just about terms of service and the length of the inquiry. But that really does not wash. If the inquiry has collapsed over such issues, either the Scottish government has starved it of resources or the lawyers have behaved disgracefully and unprofessionally, abandoning an important public responsibility midway.

Either way, this cannot simply be shrugged off as nothing. And that is assuming it is true that there is no dispute over substance.

On that substance, obvious mistakes were made – such as the release of patients with covid back into care homes – but plainly they were not malicious. What was extremely malicious was the profiteering – for example over PPE, and Pfizer’s price maximisation on their vaccine. But these are outside the scope of this inquiry. I do not know why.

As regular readers know, I have avoided commenting much on covid on the grounds of lack of expertise. My instincts are libertarian – I would have concentrated more on enabling robust (but voluntary) shielding of the vulnerable rather than locking down healthy young people at low risk. Some things made no logical sense at all – like closing the universities when the schools were open. But I do not share the radical opinions many people genuinely hold, both for and against the lockdowns.

One major issue I have not resolved in my own mind is whether covid-19 was a natural development or an escape from a laboratory of a man made variant. The problem is that the experts best able to determine this are of course themselves in this research industry, which could be at fault in inflicting enormous human suffering.

If it were determined that covid-19 were human engineered, the backlash would result in massive closure of labs and defunding of the industry. I therefore don’t expect the scientists to tell us that any time soon.

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208 thoughts on “Covid Inquiry Mystery

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  • Stevie Boy

    Gosh ! CM discussing Covid, now I’ll have to dig out all my old blocked comments … popcorn ready.
    Initial comment.
    In the past, i believed that blaming Covid on China was a Trump inspired anomaly. However, I now think that China has a deeper understanding of the source of Covid, hence their approach in dealing with it as a biological weapon, albeit unintentionally released – or not.

  • David Steele

    The release of patients into care homes was malicious, as was the unprecedented use of Midazolam. The NHS, care homes, and other practitioners used end of life pathways, indistinguishable from the banned Liverpool Care Pathway, to murder thousands. It’s been going on since at least the nineties.

    That you appear unware of this is concerning.

    • mary-lou

      just in the past few days a joint US/German report came out claiming a.o. that through reversed engineering the researchers could only conclude that it is manipulated: “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 (Bruttel, Washburne, VanDongen)”. fairly simply explained here – https://thekylebecker.substack.com/p/heres-how-you-make-a-cov-in-the-lab
      original report: “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, Antonius VanDongen” – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1

    • uwontbegrinningsoon

      One of my family members was given large doses of morphine. It was the right palliative care decision. It enabled a peaceful and as comfortable as possible ending. Same with my granny. Others I know of die with uncontrolled nausea/ vomiting and other deeply distressing symptoms. I do not think that thousands were murdered.

      Ps. If anyone, particularly CM, is interested in the origins of ‘uwontbegrinningsoon’ then please let me know. It is truly astonishing !! and very difficult to believe/implausible !

  • Julian Bond

    Can we please stop with the conspiracy theories and the obsession with lockdown. And maybe focus on some real issues.

    – Profiteering on PPE, Furlough support, lockdown support?
    – Health Care workers, care homes, hospitals need help with disease mitigation. Where is it?
    – Why isn’t there adequate sick pay support for sensible self-isolation?
    – Covid is airborne. Why are we still denying this, and still not acting on it? We now know air hygiene is as important as water hygiene was discovered to be.
    – Kids may get less ill but they still get ill and they still spread the disease. Schools are strong vector for respiratory diseases. We should act on that. Why didn’t we?
    – Vax for kids is not an after thought. There’s really no reason to delay or put additional obstacles in place to stop it happening. Why did this happen?
    – There will be another pandemic. What lessons can we learn from this one to prepare for the next?

    And so on. These and many other questions like them are the kind of thing the inquiry should be focussing on.

    • Mr V

      “air hygiene is as important as water hygiene” – This is the most insane part of the whole debacle to me. Asian countries use masks on mass scale for years if not decades now because they WORK. This is shown not only by lower Covid transmission rates, but also that of the flu, cold, and other airborne diseases. Indeed, some poorer Asian countries like Vietnam managed to limit spread to very low levels despite having little resources purely because people there wore masks and observed social distancing.

      They did so not because government told them to (though it also played a role) but because protecting yourself (and others by extension) is basic common sense and human decency. The fact West had so many childish and entitled people frothing at the mouth at the thought of wearing a mask outside for a bit (do they skip underwear too?) shows such fundamental collapse of civilization and society that I am not sure it will ever recover. No wonder far right attracts so many votes if so many people are so selfish and show zero empathy for others.

      We were lucky Covid had “just” 1% mortality rate*. If that was something like MERS with its 10%, or 1918 flu with 35%, the insane crowd above would be responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths. The fact we completely screwed up this test run instead of rendering Covid extinct (and there was opportunity before it managed to spread) like we did with several diseases killed by vaccinations in 20th century is very bleak prognosis for the future…

      *although this is a lie – it was much higher in risk groups, not that conservatives cared. See all the calls by various far right politicians to “let the grandma die for the economy” (read – the benefit of my 1% paymasters). The fact anyone still votes for them after they de facto proposed genocide of the eldest is even more insane for me, but then again, their proposed fully private healthcare with obscenely high prices and starvation private retirement payments amounts to the same thing so at least they are consistent.

      • SteveR

        Here https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/ is a good place to start learning.

        Enjoy.

        PS The first place I looked was at a study published by the BDA (British Dental Association) in 2016 that concluded that dentists gained no benefit from treating patients while wearing any generally available masks. Strangely the BDA remove the publication just after the CDC WHO Uncle Tom cobbley and all changed their minds over the uselessness of masking and decided without evidence that they should be worn practically everywhere.

      • Tom

        Various research studies show that basic face coverings do not prevent transmission of respiratory viruses. You only have to look at the Japanese flu epidemic of January 2018 as evidence of this.

        • glenn_nl

          Compare the Japanese death rates from Covid-19 – despite their much older population – with that of the Brits and Yanks, so many of whom were too selfish and stupid to wear masks and take precautions.

        • Bayard

          WTF is wrong with wearing a face covering? People are going on as if it some fundamental infringement of their rights, instead of a minor inconvenience. The usefulness of covering your respiratory orifices has been known for centuries, “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch them in your handkerchief”.

          “Various research studies show that basic face coverings do not prevent transmission of respiratory viruses.”

          Quite possibly mask wearing does not stop transmission completely, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t slow it down. It is an undeniable fact that, if you cough, sneeze or shout, you expel particles of water from your mouth or nose. These particles of water can carry viruses and can, due to their much greater mass, travel far farther than viruses alone. They are also larger then a cloth mesh and so are stopped by cloth. All this is basic physics.”

          • Blue Dotterel

            Thank you. I tried throughout two years to explain this obvious fact to people: that the virus is expelled primarily through water droplets from coughs and sneezes, and thus, due to the size of the droplets the virus particles can be trapped on the surface of the masks and the virus’ spread reduced.

            In this way, masks were and are a necessary aid in preventing the spread of airborn viruses. Their ultimate effectiveness depends on the quality of the mask and its correct usage. No one ever claimed that the masks were perfect in preventing virus spread, but in significantly mitigating its spread.

      • andic

        “(and there was opportunity before it managed to spread)” Mr V October 24, 2022 at 12:42

        I don’t think this is true, certainly not in any practical sense.
        Wuhan is a densely populated city with a mobile population; workers come in from the outlying districts in the morning on crowded public transport and leave the same way at night. Housekeepers, builders, delivery drivers and office staff, people who have business in every corner of the city crammed together like sardines for an hour or so twice a day. Wuhan is also an industrial and transport hub, if you want to go to the south west you’ll be going there via Wuhan and thousands of transport drivers and business people move in and out of the city by road rail and air including international travelers every day.

        Every city in China is like this. I don’t think this reality is compatible with your assertion.

    • pasha

      Just because there’s a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean there isn’t a conspiracy.
      You really need to educate yourself regarding the CIA and the origin of the term “conspiracy theory”.

    • Bramble

      Thank you. What have we learned? That people would prefer to waste energy concocting elaborate conspiracy theories based on paranoid levels of distrust than put into practice effective public health measures.

      Our species is headed for extinction.

      • glenn_nl

        No vaccinations, none, for anything?

        People – most particularly kids – used to die all the time from communicable diseases, literally dying all over the world. Do you think smallpox, polio etc etc all just went away by themselves?

      • Bayard

        The COVID jab is not a vaccine. Vaccines stop you getting the disease and stop you passing it on. The COVID jab does neither. It is simply a palliative.

        • ET

          This is a misconception and few vaccines actually give you sterilising immunity. Most don’t and none are 100% effective. A vaccine that reduces severity of disease also is considered a “vaccine” even if it doesn’t prevent infection or transmission.
          You may want to believe that your definition of a vaccine is correct but the immunologists and virologists will disagree with you.

          • Bayard

            “This is a misconception and few vaccines actually give you sterilising immunity. Most don’t and none are 100% effective.”

            There is a big difference between “not 100%” and “not 0%”. Most vaccines are the former, as you point out. The COVID “vaccine” is the latter.

  • Jimmeh

    > On that substance, obvious mistakes were made – such as the release of patients with covid back into care homes – but plainly they were not malicious.

    “Plainly”? As far as I can see, it was plainly malicious. Care-home managers were howling loudly that elderly patients were being decanted out of hospitals into care-homes *without any test*. The DoH pressed on for political reasons; we all know what the inside of a hospital is like, but few people under 50 are familiar with a care-home. The DoH wanted to avoid the NHS seizing up completely due to a lack of beds. Their cynical solution was to dump elderly hospital patients into oubliettes.

    I can’t think of a single action taken by Matt Hancock that wasn’t cynical and self-serving, from the care-homes shitshow, to the VIP contracts, to the not-fit-for-purpose PPE.

    • Politically Homeless

      The same people who for a decade have used rhetoric daily about the Tories killing the disabled with austerity think it’s a “conspiracy theory” (and worse a “right wing” one) that the Tories deliberately killed the elderly with COVID policies.

      These type of stark ironies in the political discourse around the pandemic were all a function of thinking through the lens of tribalism.

  • Michael Droy

    Wasn’t the head of the England inquiry pulled out of the Skripal inquiry – ie they needed a very safe pair of hands.

    A simple question from day One. QALY – Quality adjusted life years, is the basic unit of health accounting. It is used all the time to decide on which operations or drugs can be justified on cost, and which patients can be treated. The is a wealth of information on this, including the effects of withdrawing education (based on a lot of insights from a natural experiment in Brazil when teachers went on a long term strike).

    Civil servants are masters of 2 key skills, Economic analysis such as QALY, and Nudge theory.
    They obsessed over Nudge theory. I can’t believe they didn’t do the QALY analysis – they just didn’t publish it.

    Question 1 for any inquiry – Where was the Qaly analysis? – why was it hidden?

  • Kimpatsu

    Oh, good grief, Craig, now you’ve gone full-on conspircacy theory nutcase! Covid was definitely NOT bio-engineered. It is an example of zoonosis at Chinese wet markets. Please do get a grip!

      • joel

        As Jonathan Cook points out today: “Prof Jeffrey Sachs is the only establishment insider who keeps giving voice to the stuff we’re not supposed to think about.”

        • Goose

          Sachs is refreshingly open-minded and sometimes quite forthright. It’s as if he didn’t get the memo all other prominent people got. Elon Musk is another.

          Due to the wacky MAGA crowd and the QAnon conspiracy nonsense, it’s become almost impossible to conduct a serious debate in the US, with everyone taking ‘black or white’ highly polarised positions.

          Look at Anthony Fauci’s status, revered by liberals, after standing up to Trump. His record is quite sketchy. He admitted the US gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology.

          Notable how senior US figures went from openly accusing China to virtual silence, as if warned off due to some additional information coming to their attention. The US has extensive, controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research facilities spanning the entire globe. Ostensibly conducting research on pathogen evolution, wherein researchers alter or modify a disease to increase pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range. We are told this research has no military application, hence the ‘fake news’ claim over Ukraine military biolabs, although this researchis funded in part by the US DoD?

        • Brett Cameron

          And that doesn’t make you suspicious?
          Research Sachs role in the economic destruction of Palnd in the late 80s and Russia in the 90s.
          Many Russians believe Sachs is an emissary of Satan or the CIA.
          They are right.

          • Goose

            @Brett Cameron & @Adam Bentley

            You’ve probably both got a point about Sachs.

            Given the political cowardice on display everywhere, If someone prominent seems far too outspoken on controversial topics, and confidently so, then something is awry.

      • Adam Bentley

        The same Jeffrey Sachs, the man who helped the G7, the Harvard Hit Squad (led by Larry Summers) to rape Russia in the 90s.
        The same Jeffrey Sachs who appointed Peter Daszak to lead the Lancet’s inquiry. Literally the most conflicted man in the world (later recused). Sachs also helped write the Millennium Development goals , ie the 17 SDGs which will be impoverishing ALL of us before 2030.

        But Craig thinks he’s a good egg. Got an honest face.

    • Mr V

      Honestly, I used to think so too, but the level of vicious bloodthirstyness NATO shown in last year did a lot to convince me they would gladly release an engineered disease to maim China without a second thought. USA deliberately sunk Russian heavy cruiser, something that rightly should see Pentagon nuked, blown up Nord Stream, tells Ukrainian nazis to bomb Donbass with their banned cluster petal mines warheads, escalates by starting bombing Russian cities, arms and trains people who don’t even pretend they aren’t nazis, gives OK to constant bombardment of nuclear power plant in Energodar, sets up ground for both chemical and nuclear false flags – really, compared to this, what is one test run of a bioweapon?

      • Stevie Boy

        Interesting, you concede that COVID could be an, escaped, bioweapon but you also believe that masks and distancing provide protection !
        Alice in Wonderland comes to mind.

          • glenn_nl

            Nah, they just wear gas masks as part of the hoax, to fool the other side that harmless gasses are really deadly!

            That’s what they do these days with (so-called!) nerve gas, (supposed!) biological warfare agents and so on.

            Seriously – these denialist geniuses have seen right through it.

        • Bayard

          “but you also believe that masks and distancing provide protection !”

          So all those doctors who have been advising people to distance themselves from people with infectious diseases down the centuries have been wrong? The whole concept of quarantine is a con?

          • SteveR

            The common cold unit at Porton Down spent decades from the 1960s to 1990s looking at transmission of aerosol viruses and their rule of thumb based on empirical evidence was that subjects could take fresh air exercise if they kept a minimum of 60 feet apart and it would not destroy the experiments. So no, the advice given by the doctors you pray in aid was right in principle but insufficient and therefore effectively worthless. This is hardly surprising since they were working on the presumption that viral spread was by droplets that would fall out of the air within 6 feet of emission, it took them until early 2022 to finally admit that the spread was by aerosol and that infective aerosol viral particles can hang around for many hours provided they are not exposed to UVB/C.

          • Bayard

            “So no, the advice given by the doctors you pray in aid was right in principle but insufficient and therefore effectively worthless.”

            For all infectious diseases, ever? Wow, that’s some medical malpractice!

      • Pears Morgaine

        Interesting how the same conspiracy theorists who claim Covid to be a bioweapon also claim (erroneously) that it has a less than 1% mortality rate. Not much of a weapon then.

        • Goose

          Pears Morgaine

          Gain-of-function research has potential bioweapon application. Why do you think the US DoD are so heavily involved in funding?

          The people who scream ‘fake news’ rest that assertion on the US distinction stating they weren’t actually manufacturing bioweapons at these lab sites. That is technically correct, they weren’t, but they were doing risky research.

          Debate as to whether they should be bioengineering more lethal pathogen strains, with all the inherent risks, is being lost in this stupid raucous political polarisation that’s gripped the US. Liberals instinctively defend anything Trump supporters attack, and that’s made many close their minds. Trump derangement syndrome is real.

        • Stevie Boy

          Interesting how the same establishment shills who claimed Novichok to be one of the deadliest nerve agents was only able to kill a Cat and (apparently) an innocent woman months later, even though it was supposedly spread all over Salisbury. Not much of a weapon then.

        • TS

          In the early months of covid, it had a mortality rate of 5%. It has attenuated now to 1.2%. This is based on numbers I’ve been collecting since March 10, 2010.

          • Steve Hayes

            We have fairly reliable figures for deaths but figures for infections at the start of the pandemic are very uncertain because mass testing only came in later. The most likely explanation for that high initial mortality figure is that infections were much higher in reality than the figures being used. For most people symptoms were mild and easily assumed to be a cold or flu.

        • Bayard

          “Interesting how the same conspiracy theorists who claim Covid to be a bioweapon also claim (erroneously) that it has a less than 1% mortality rate. Not much of a weapon then.”

          So it didn’t work as intended. That makes it all right then? That’s like the report in the Portuguese newspaper of a train crash, “happily only third class passengers were killed”.

      • Goose

        Reckless hooray Henries are the British speciality. Senior American top brass tend to be more staid and sensible. Look how they restrained Trump’s ‘nuke ’em’ impulses. Despite the nickname “Mad Dog” fmr Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who eventually resigned, came across as one of the more level-headed, honest people in the Trump administration.

        It’s the crazy stuff SIS | MI6 and the CIA come up with, that’s truly ‘devil-may- care’. Did you read the Grayzone’s report on the blowing up the Kerch Strait Bridge and/or using microwave weapons to permanently disable Russia’s fleet of GLONASS navigational satellites? This is crazy town escalatory stuff. Does anyone in tghe UK actually have control over these people?

    • Robert Dyson

      Show us the intermediate hosts! There are conspiracies and of course those who want to hide it will call those who call it out nutcases.

    • Lapsed Agnostic

      Speaking as someone with a science PhD – though not a virologist with grants to obtain – it’s my firm view that SARS-CoV2 almost certainly WAS artificially modified, more than likely in the Wuhan Institute for Virology, Kimpatsu. Unfortunately, I haven’t got time to go into the details here (and people without a scientific background might struggle to follow them if I did), but I can recommend some bedtime reading for you:

      https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/viral-the-search-for-the-origin-of-covid-19-alina-chanmatt-ridley?variant=39647929139278

    • ET

      Before anyone completely dismisses or affirms either the lab leak or zoonotic hypothesis can I suggest you read through the thread:
      “https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/origins-of-sars-cov2/” where there are some good links to resources that give a good insight into the topic.
      I suspect most of us don’t have significant knowledge of genome fingerprinting techniques. Some of the linked articles discuss the “furin cleavage sites” upon which a lot of the discussion rests.
      For what it’s worth, I think the zoonotic hypothesis is the most likely but cannot exclude a lab leak on the basis of current evidence. I don’t think that we will ever find out for sure.

    • Coldish

      Craig: may I recommend the detailed investigation into the origin of Covid-19 by Chan and Ridley in their book ‘Viral’ (2nd edition, London, 2022, 432pp)?
      A problem with the theory that wild mammal zoonosis at the Huanan seafood market in Hubei was the source of the epidemic is that all 457 samples from 188 individual animals of 18 species (including stray cats) from the Huanan market collected by the Chinese authorities tested negative for SARS.CoV-2 genetic material. About 50 stalls at the market did test positive, but only one of these 50 had been selling wild mammal products. The other positive stalls had been selling frozen food, fish and seafood, poultry, domestic livestock and vegetables. Bats were not traded at the market.
      There is no doubt that gain-of-function research on viruses was and is carried out at laboratories in Wuhan, as at other sites throughout the world**. One lab working on viruses in bats, the most likely original natural hosts of the Covid-19 virus, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (this is not the better-known Wuhan Institute of Virology), is only about 300 metres from the Huanan market – close enough for workers to pop out for some shopping during lunch break.
      ** As an example of current gain-of function research, scientists at the Unversity of Boston in the USA have recently reported their creation of a Covid-19 variant which combines the highly transmissible nature of the Omicron variant with greatly enhanced lethality in mice. See ‘New Boston virus’ on John Campbell’s Youtube channel.

    • James Galt

      Zoonosis. How do you know this Kimpatsu?

      I’ll answer for you – in reality you don’t know for certain the facts behind this event – neither does Craig, and neither do I.

      His “theory”, if indeed he has one, is just as good as yours.

      I’m surprised he has put his head above the parapet on this one – I admire his courage, however I suspect he’ll get precious little thanks!

  • joel

    What the media considers officially *important* and *something we should care about* can sometimes seem completely random but virtually always public interest is determined purely by whether a story serves establishment interests or not. Remember how blatantly Theresa May was allowed to scrap the inquiry into the Westminster paedophile ring? The way Pompeo’s open threat to depose a British PM was treated as a non-story? Just this weekend “award-winning journalist” Matt Frei abruptly cut off a caller to LBC the instant they mentioned the LabourFiles documentary. Anything that embarrasses entrenched power and its narratives is simply disappeared without a peep of dissent from the Fourth Estate.

  • Martin Kernick

    One would think that the very fact that the experts say they are not sure that Covid 19 was not an escape from a lab should make governments think twice about such experimentation in the future. We have seen what a pandemic can do to the world….. and yet, the very fact that those at the very top have been able to use the pandemic for political distraction and financial gain, using it as an excuse to further subjugate people, makes me worried that further pandemics may be engineered.

    • Roger

      Right on! Read this. Short version: virologists recently developed a virus in Boston that (1) is as contagious as the omicron variant of Covid, (2) is unaffected by current vaccines, (3) is many times more deadly than any other Covid virus (killed 8 out of 10 mice in a test).

  • Fat Jon

    I thought Indian research scientists had proved that covid had to be man-made, but as soon as they went public the entire twitter sphere turned haywire from all the paid rapid rebuttal merchants. There was even one who appeared on a UK railway forum. No one had seen him/her as a member before. This alerted everyone to maybe the research from India was probably true. I think the scientists received all manner of threats and removed the final draft of the paper. Some rumours abounded at the time that they had ‘committed suicide’ (does this sound familiar?).

    These well paid (plus index linked pension) ‘bloggers’ can be recognised by their immediate use of ‘conspiracy’, ‘theory’, and ‘nutcase’ usually in the same sentence. They appear unable to mount a responsible argument, and go straight to personal insults. Perhaps that is what the official books order them to do? Who knows?

    Anyhow, this was one of the original reports from back in February 2020 which has not (yet) been removed from the internet…..
    https://greatgameindia.com/uncanny-similarity-of-unique-inserts-in-the-2019-ncov-spike-protein-to-hiv-1-gp120-and-gag/

  • Martin

    Craig, you don’t have to be an expert in genetics or virology to understand the questions which have to be answered by any theory of the origin of this virus. First, how did the virus travel from the bat caves of rural China to the centre of Wuhan and appear on the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the geographic journey)? Second, how did a bat virus make the species jump to humans (the biological journey)? The “Act-of-God” explanation cannot answer either question, or if it does, it is by supposition without any supporting evidence. However, we know that the WIV made regular trips to bat caves to collect samples for study – because they published their work in academic journals. So it is easy to explain the geographic journey by these sampling expeditions. Anyone who wants to explain it as a purely natural event with no human agency involved, has to believe in the most amazing coincidence. As for the biological journey, again, the WIV has a published history of gain-of-function virus research, so it’s not hard to explain it that way. Act-of-God theories and the “wet market” hypothesis, again lack evidence such as an intermediate host species, which were quickly and easily found in previous natural zoonotic events. The Chinese have been very secretive over evidence which might throw light on these questions, such as the full lab notes from the WIV and testimony of workers there, and the inventory and any samples or specimens taken when the wet market was closed. Based only on what we know, the most credible explanation is the “dangerous experiments in a leaky lab” theory. Deliberate release of an engineered bio-weapon is tinfoil hat stuff. I think the main reason for the longevity of the far-fetched Act-of-God theory is that it lets a lot of people off the hook – such as the Chinese government, and the virology profession. However it will clearly take many years for the truth to come out, if it ever does. This is a pity because it’s important. If the epidemic was the result of dangerous experiments, in one sense, that’s a good thing, because we can prevent the same thing happening again by stopping these experiments.

    • ET

      ” again lack evidence such as an intermediate host species, which were quickly and easily found in previous natural zoonotic events.”

      From this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/#

      “Indeed, the animal origins of many well-known human pathogens, including Ebola virus, hepatitis C virus, poliovirus, and the coronaviruses HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-NL63, are yet to be identified, while it took over a decade to discover bat viruses with >95% similarity to SARS-CoV and able to use hACE-2 as a receptor”

      I don’t think the fact that the intermediate animal hosts have not yet been found is necessarily evidence that they don’t exist. The assumption that other zoonotic viral events were quickly and easily found doesn’t hold.

    • Cornudet

      You raise points that have merit. However, the issue fundamental to the argument that you develop, concerning the likelihood of the covid pandemic starting in close proximity to the Wuhan virology institute has parallels with a case commented on extensively on this site. This is the Skripal poisoning, which, among other putative “coincidences” involved a chemical agent being used on the doorstep of the UK’s chief chemical and biological warfare institute, Porton Down, on the very day that there was an exercise concerning the response to the use of such weapons and for the British army’s senior nurse trained to deal with such incidents being almost miraculously on hand to render assistance to the Skripal pair. If such coincidences is to be advanced as evidence of malign intent on the part of the authorities then, a fortiori, the UK government must be seen in a rather sinister light with regards to this incident.

    • Barry Meadows

      Great points. Also, do you remember Peter Daszak – the man Jeffrey Sachs originally asked to chair the inquiry into COVID19 origins?
      He made a startling admission in 2016 regarding the human hand that went into creating this virus. Here’s a quote for you……

      “In June 2021, a bombshell video was published by the National Pulse. This video is the smoking gun with which Daszak has shot himself in the foot.163
      The video was from a 2016 conference where ‘emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic’ was the topic of discussion. In the video, Peter Daszak helpfully explained a few things about the weaponisation of viruses. Pay careful attention to the following statement from Daszak, which looks an awful lot like a signed confession.
      “Then, when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells.
      Well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this, you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.
      You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”164
      Now, it is beyond obvious why Daszak was moving heaven and earth to persuade the world that the manmade virus story was a ‘conspiracy theory’.
      Just read those comments again:
      ‘Just like we did with SARS’, ‘we found other coronaviruses in bats’, ‘we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells’, ‘I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work’, ‘you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells’, ‘you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.’
      ‘You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.’(Emphasis added.)

      163 – https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/daszak-reveals-chinese-colleagues-manipulating-coronaviruses/
      164 – https://www.c-span.org/video/?404875-1/pandemics

  • DunGroanin

    It is certainly curious how quickly Modena and BioNTech threw up their Neotech mRNA vaccines.

    The Chinese and others came up with more traditional vectored vaccines. Afaik they haven’t yet tested and distributed widely any mRNA versions after almost THREE years. However it seems that until the natural mutations have progressed to be less harmful and more widespread it looks as the Chinese are still being extra careful. If the Chines were the culprits wouldn’t they have the antidote to their own poison as fast as the Western ones?

    I haven’t paid much attention this year. Having had it once in 2020 and again at the end of last year. Meanwhile my thrice vaxxed partner has just contracted it after a short holiday in Spain, and appears to be displaying most of the same symptoms as I had – though it appears to be milder due to her jabs, fingers crossed.

    Additionally I wonder why these many other vaccines developed outside of the Pharma Industrial Complex , given to BILLIONS now aren’t also recognised by our NICE people and we can’t choose which of the many versions available we want?

    Finally the amount of Bio Labs bordering EurAsia appears suspicious as shown by the early targeting in Ukraine and the large amounts of their secrets and scientists captured and quickly released back to where they came from.

    Being a mystery does not mean it will remain as such.
    Means, Motive, Opportunity.
    Honest science can track the genetics.
    Honest scientists though are as hard to come by as much as honest journalists as the article discerns.
    However given enough data even I could process it to determine the probability of manmade or natural.

    Show me the data! Is that what the Scottish Inquiry failure about?

  • mark golding

    Thanks Robert for an interesting and detailed post. Not to be perceived as a voice of doom I am robust although advanced in age and soon will require a hospital procedure. I have been advised NOT to have a Covid booster by the hospital.

    A report by the Lancet on COVID-19 mRNA vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation is interesting in that frail veterans could be at risk from mRNA type vaccines: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(22)00166-0/fulltext

    • Robert Dyson

      My post seems to have disappeared. I am a robust over 80 and had the Pfizer ‘jab’ early January 2021, and 2nd 12 weeks later, believing that though it may not be very effective it would not be seriously unsafe because mRNA lasts only a few minutes at most before being degraded. Also, because I understand the genetics I was rather taken by the tech (and I didn’t want to upset the NHS). However, then I learned that it is not really mRNA as we know it but a modified form that lasts for months making a part of the virus that is toxic in itself (because it attaches to ACE2 receptors, can get into the cell nucleus etc). Even the liposomes that contain this pseudo mRNA are toxic and they don’t stay at the injection site so endothelial ACE2 receptors are a target as well as heart muscle. My wife had the AZ and had a stroke some weeks later and I think that product was a causal factor from the information I got from the attending medic when I questioned him though the usual letter with details after treatment never came.

      • SteveR

        The various UK available ‘vaccines’ were, according to the manufacturers, explicitly to be delivered by intramuscular injection NOT intravenous injection.
        Dr. John Campbell (find him at his YouTube site) pointed out that the only way to ensure intramuscular and not intravenous delivery (he was a nurse trainer) is to aspirate the needle – this involves inserting the needle then pulling back slightly on the plunger, if blood appears in the vaccine you are in a vein or artery, remove the needle and bin the shot and try again. Experienced vaccinators (not the majority who were involved) have a ‘failure’ rate of around 1 in a thousand. Is that the sort of rate of vaccine injury being seen?
        I asked my local health board if ‘aspiration’ was being carried out as a matter of routine considering the manufacturers were specific on the issue, the reply I received was that is wasn’t required – the obvious question then was “by whom”, as by then it was accepted that microclotting was a thing with all the vaccines (though the AstraZeneca shot causes a different form of potentially fatal clotting than the Pfizer or Moderna). Apparently the decision to not aspirate was taken in 2004 for unknown reason, commercial perhaps, or so as not to question the safety of vaccines in General begging the question “why do manufacturers still specify how the vaccine is to be delivered?” NB The manufacturers said in their EUA applications that the vaccine would stay at the site of injection in the muscle – something the release of the animal testing the Japanese medical authorities received showed they knew to be untrue (a barefaced lie?) with every organ in the body receiving the lipid nano particles with the highest concentration in the ovaries, spleen, and testes.

        • Robert Dyson

          No vaccines should be intravenous injection. The idea is to put in muscle (and not fatty regions) where there is good blood supply so that antibodies can be created. It seems to me that if there are to be vaccines for respiratory viruses they should be sprayed in the nose where the cells specializing in combatting respiratory infections reside (as you might expect).

      • Fat Jon

        I’m so sorry to hear of your wife’s serious problems after the AZ vaccine. I am beginning to wonder how close I came, as I have had skin problems ever since. Not eczema-like, but large swollen patches about 2-3 inches in diameter over my hands, arms, legs and feet. The outbreaks declined 5 weeks after the first AZ, but returned within 36 hours of the second jab 12 weeks later. It still get itchy patches similar to Hives, 30 months later, but not as severe.

        I have never had any skin problems before, and will be 70 next year; but after a lot of thought I am having the booster this autumn (together with the flu vaccine – glutton for punishment?). I pray that my body can cope, but if not – goodbye everybody.

        I think there ought to be a public inquiry into the AZ vaccine, and its after effects; and why our government ordered it in preference to other offerings. I’m sure there has been a cover up of the widespread reactions it has caused. I filled in all the yellow NHS forms but no one ever contacted me about them for extra details. I mentioned the problems before my second jab but there was silence from the nurses there, and they just did it anyway.

        I don’t know enough about it to do my own research, but it would be nice to know the truth – even if it is a scandal.

        • SteveR

          I don’t know if you were fobbed off by your doctor over your condition, most people are, but this is largely because there has been very little effort – despite the vaccine manufacturers promises – to monitor adverse effects of the vaccines.
          Recently, in Israel, there was a very belated study to rectify this lack. Israel was one of the most highly vaccinated countries but despite being closely involved with Pfizer they had not conducted any studies. The Israeli ministry of health contracted a research group to collect data on side effects, but they turned up some new and embarrassing evidence. First among these came from the side effects, considered nothing to do with the first jab, reappearing after the second jab (technically ‘rechallenge’) which proved that the side effects were due to the vaccines (and are also dose dependent). Secondly the study added a whole raft of neurological damage side effects to what Pfizer had previously advised might occur. When the research group presented their evidence to the ministry of health and advised that they might need to avoid the ‘safe and effective’ message to avoid litigation from damaged vaccine recipients, they were ignored by the Minister.

    • Crispa

      “A report by the Lancet on COVID-19 mRNA vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation is interesting in that frail veterans could be at risk from mRNA type vaccines”
      That is not the conclusion I would reach from my (quick) reading of that study, which is not about particular vaccines – indeed it suggests that MRNA vaccines were the more effective in the sample. If anything I would say that it supports the idea of boosters in line with age and frailty, because people’s immune systems become less robust. Personally if I was going into a high risk environment like a hospital I would want to be protected to the hilt and would be questioning the reasons for not having a booster (which might be reasonable on other grounds of course) or asking if Paxlovid or equivalent ant- viral might be available in the event.
      Two balanced discussions about boosters can be found here
      Medcram. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTyNA5FzfQA
      Microbe TV TWIV https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-942/
      In the second Paul Offit is very cautious about boosters on the grounds of lack of data on effectiveness over and above basic vaccination but he does accept they should be offered for anyone who is immunocompromised because of age, illness or general frailty.

  • terence callachan

    Airborne diseases like covid have been around for a long long time , I think we already know there have been leaks from government scientific laboratories but covid 19 in my view was not such a leak , the first country to be severely affected by covid 19 was China , let’s face it if China wanted to release such a disease on the world they wouldn’t start with a release in China would they .
    In my opinion the much more likely source is farming , we have known for a long long time that intensive farming practices led to mers the Middle East camel flu caused by a ban on camels right to roam the countryside which resulted in camel owners moving their camels to paddocks causing overcrowded conditions and an easy spread of disease , countries like Qatar initially denied their right to roam had caused mers and actually ran adverts when mers arose that went along the lines of “ kiss your camel it’s safe “ .
    There was also chicken flu
    Swine flu
    Bovine flu
    And it’s believed that some airborne epidemics of the past may have come from horses
    All these airborne diseases cannot pass straight to humans they need an intermediary host , many scientists point to bats claiming that the bats feed on the detritus found in so called wet markets , pangolins were blamed
    because so many are traded for their meat.
    There was an expedition to Alaska a couple of decades ago to find frozen bodies from the influenza pandemic of 1918 ,it successfully found what was looked for and concluded that the damaged DNA was remarkably similar to that caused by covid 19 some experts are now saying that the influenza of 1918 May in fact have been a covid disease.
    The fear for the future is a virus like mers that killed a high proportion of those infected morphing into a virus like covid omicron which spread so easily , this would be disaster a very deadly airborne disease that spreads quickly and easily.
    The sooner we stop intensive meat farming the better but the chances of this are not looking promising the biggest populations still bump up their meat industry year on year.
    U.K. government has just put new legislation through parliament allowing what they call precision breeding
    https://www.foodstandards.gov.scot/news-and-alerts/uk-consumers-give-their-views-on-precision-bred-food

    Precision breeding allows genetic change switching genes from one living organism to another
    And they want to introduce it with zero labelling so you won’t know what you are eating if it’s GMO or not

    So much waste and damage caused by meat eating

    • ET

      ” let’s face it if China wanted to release such a disease on the world they wouldn’t start with a release in China would they .”

      In considering a lab leak possibility mostly the discussion is about an accidental leak not a deliberate leak.
      I read something recently that suggested that melting ice sheets may throw up some very old but not currently circulating viruses which, whilst admittedly low risk, have a potential to start a pandemic.
      https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-021-01106-w

      • Stevie Boy

        An interesting point, IMO, is that there is evidence that Covid was in circulation in the USA and Europe well before China went public. Studies into virus’s in sewage farms and blood supplies have identified early Covid infections in 2019 as have some GP reports from the USA.
        These are just brushed off as conspiracy theories without actual investigation, which might prove embarrassing if validated.

        • Lysias

          I and a friend with whom I share a house both had bad colds in late October 2019 that we suspect were covid. We live less than a mile from the Daniel Inouye Building in the Forest Glen Annex of Fort Derrick in Silver Spring MD. The building is the headquarters of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the Naval Medical Research Center. Those organizations supervise the many Defense Department-funded biolabs around the world in such countries as Ukraine. The building is in Silver Spring, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia and next to the Beltway.
          As a retired naval officer, I am a!lowed to shop in military stores in the US. Before the pandemic, I used to shop weekly at a commissary (military supermarket) across the street from the Inouye Building. So I had plenty of opportunity to observe the building. It is enormous, and there is a lot of activity observable by soldiers who work there. It is a big program.

          • Jen

            I understand that Fort Detrick in Maryland is about 70km upstream from the Greenspings nursing home in Virginia that experienced a strange pneumonia outbreak among its residents in mid-2019. Doctors conducting autopsies on some of the dead patients discovered that their lungs were filled with fluid.

            About the same time the Fort Detrick research lab was closed down due to apparent breaches in staff safety protocol.

            Residents around US Fort Detrick biolab keep silence about suspected COVID-19 outbreak

          • Lysias

            The facility that I live near is not Fort Detrick itself, but its Forest Glen Annex, which is under the command of Fort Detrick but is located some 30 miles away.

            (Sorry Autocorrect “corrected” “Detrick” to “Derrick” in my previous posting.)

        • Steve Hayes

          It’s an odd thing that some time in late 2019 I noticed my sense of smell had gone. I feared it was an age thing and that was that but it came back after a couple of weeks. No other symptoms that I remember but I had no reason then to take an interest in them.

  • Crispa

    Public Inquiries led by judges and lawyers are the best ways of avoiding getting at the truth. Judges and lawyers should be just part of them there to interpret the bits concerning the law.
    Inquiries are not really ever independent as their sponsor, in this case the Scottish government, can hamstring them by dictating and changing the terms of reference to get the outcome it is seeking, which could be an issue here.
    Inquiries mirror Hierarchy and Establishment. The real work of Inquiries is done by people behind the scenes who often produce quite illuminating information that that just gets chewed to bits by the formal machinery and loses whatever value it has as a result. I would n’t expect much from this or any other Inquiry.
    I doubt if there is much jiggery-pokery going on as regards these resignations. Now the Inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, which is very much being conducted in a shroud of secrecy is a different kettle of fish altogether as far as these things go.

  • SteveR

    So much evidence has accumulated on the origins of the SARS-CoV2 that it is very difficult to see where the ‘gun’ responsible for all the ‘smoke’ resides. This piece https://expose-news.com/2022/10/23/moderna-created-covid-virus/ shows who did it and how. As an aside, everyone assumes that Covid-19 is ‘19’ because that is when it appeared, but considering the track record of those involved, it is equally likely to be due to the critical insert of the 19 nucleotide sequence (patented in 2013 by Moderna) that enables the spike protein of the virus to enter human cells.
    As the author points out, the only commercial reason to make a highly infectious human virus and then make a vaccine for it (also in advanced development before the WHO called ‘pandemic’) is to release the pathogen is so you can monetise the treatment.

  • john

    One of the points in the ToR was to investigate “the decisions to lockdown and to apply other restrictions and the impact of those restrictions”

    Dr Michael Yeadon fact-checked the Government justification for these restrictions, which was that lockdowns slow down the spread and reduce the number of cases and deaths.

    To summarize his findings:

    ‘These measures, though among the most repressive acts ever imposed on citizens in a democracy, was intuitively reasonable to many, and is is an example of how far off-course uninformed intuition can be.
    The core idea was simple. Respiratory viruses are transmitted from person to person. Reducing the average number of contacts surely reduces transmission. Actually, it doesn’t, because the transmission concept is wrong. Transmission is from a SYMPTOMATIC person to a susceptible person. Those with symptoms are UNWELL.They remain at home in most cases with no action from the government. Transmission occurred mostly in institutions where sick people and susceptible people were forced into contact: hospitals, care homes, and domestic settings.
    CONCLUSION AND VERDICT – FALSE
    A general lockdown had no detectable impact on epidemic spreading, cases, hospitalisations, or deaths. This is now widely accepted, after a meta-analysis by Johns Hopkins University.
    This is because those involved in the vast bulk of human-to-human contacts are fit and well and such contacts didn’t result in transmission. Essentially, if you’re fooled by the “asymptomatic transmission” lie, then lockdown might make sense. However, since it is epidemiologically irrelevant, lockdowns can never work. This concept is unequivocally known to multiple public health scientists and doctors, which is is why “lockdown” had never been tried before.
    Importantly, WHO scientists drafted a detailed review of all the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in 2019 and distributed copies of the report to all member states. This means that ALL member states already knew, late in 2019, that lockdowns, border restrictions, and business or school closures were futile. Only “stay home if you’re sick” works at all, and people don’t need to be told this, for they are too unwell to go out.’

    https://twoplustwoequalsfournews.wordpress.com/2022/05/26/dr-michael-yeadon-the-covid-lies-doctors-for-covid-ethics/

    • Jimmeh

      > Those with symptoms are UNWELL

      Correct; the symptoms are the unwellness. But the point is that people can carry and transmit the disease without ever becoming unwell (i.e. asymptomatic transmission). Because they aren’t unwell, they don’t stay at home. If you don’t believe in asymptomatic transmission, then you are well out-of-line with the scientific consensus.

  • Republicofscotland

    I agree totally there’s something not right in the lack of movement on the Scottish Covid Inquiry, the Salmond Inquiry springs to mind and the picture of Sturgeon’s fifty refusals, redacted documents, and SNP inquiry members on the board and chair going through the motions.

    As for Covid coming out of lab, information certainly points to biolabs as the culprit, and then there’s this.

    “I chaired the commission for the Lancet for 2 years on Covid. I’m pretty convinced it came out of a US lab of biotechnology […] We don’t know for sure but there is enough evidence. [However] it’s not being investigated, not in the US, not anywhere.”

    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1543259218995687424

    I doubt there will be the political will to look deeper into the REAL cause of Covid.

  • Ewan2

    In 1996 Pfizer illegally set up next to Doctors without Borders in a meningitis outbreak and started injecting them with the experimental drug Truvan. It killed 11 children and many others suffered liver damage. Pfizer went after state prosecutors, whistleblower and anyone else who stood in their way for over a decade, finally paying out to the families under a confidentaility agreement – and now we have an unguaranteed, one-size-fits all ‘vaccine’,
    That’s not a company I would trust due to the blase attitude towards human life.
    I’m surprised BLM didn’t pick up on that – perhaps they did and kept their mouths shut.

    • Pears Morgaine

      Pfizer gave 100 children the experimental oral antibiotic Trovan whilst another 100 received a tried and tested antibiotic Ceftriaxone. Five children given Trovan died whilst six of the Ceftriaxone group died.

      Pfizer maintain that both groups died of meningitis but have been made to pay compensation as the trial was unlicensed.

    • Stevie Boy

      Consider.
      All the big Pharma companies involved in the Covid geneVax were quick to ensure that they had legal indemnity from prosecution for their hastily prepared and untested ‘vaccine’. Doesn’t that tell you something or at least make you a bit uneasy ?
      Governments made three major assertions to justify their actions, all stated to be absolutely true and based on ‘the Science’:
      1. The geneVax would prevent you catching Covid – False[1]
      2. The geneVax would prevent you passing on Covid – False[2]
      3. The geneVax would minimise the impact if you caught Covid – totally unproven[3].
      Any inquiry worth its name would, at least, investigate these assertions and how they led to the chaos that, still, engulfs the country.
      .
      [1] Biden, Johnson, etc. virtually everyone jabbed has caught Covid again and again.
      [2] “A Pfizer executive said on Monday that neither she nor other Pfizer officials knew whether its COVID-19 vaccine would stop transmission before entering the market in late 2020.”
      https://dailysceptic.org/2022/10/12/covid-19-vaccine-was-not-tested-on-stopping-transmission-pfizer-exec-concedes/
      [3] To test this assertion you need two ‘large’ populations, one vaccinated, the other unvaccinated. You then infect both with Covid and measure the impacts and differences. Point One: because of contamination and lack of a ‘clean’ population this cannot be undertaken; Point Two: Because Covid is declared ‘deadly’ such a test would be deemed illegal and cannot be undertaken. Bottom line, this assertion cannot, and has not, been verified.
      The geneVaxes DO NOT do what we were told they do – we were lied to.

      • ET

        “All the big Pharma companies involved in the Covid geneVax were quick to ensure that they had legal indemnity from prosecution for their hastily prepared and untested ‘vaccine’. Doesn’t that tell you something or at least make you a bit uneasy ?”

        No. Say you were a pharma company developing a new treatment and fully intended to go down the usual testing route which ordinarily takes years. Government comes along and says we need it quicker than that. You, as the pharma company, will say well fine but we ain’t taking responsibility for any unforseen long term consequences that would otherwise have been uncovered by the usual long term clinical trials because it’s you that is asking us to forego the usual trials. If you want us to take this route you can damn well take responsibility for it if it happens.

        Your further points are also false, at least in the UK. See this post (and thread): https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/covid-19-in-2022/page/4/#post-89175

        • Bayard

          “Your further points are also false, at least in the UK.”
          Are you asserting that the COVID jab stopped you getting the disease and stopped you passing it on? Why then, was it officially admitted that it didn’t?

          • ET

            No Bayard. Kind of the complete opposite. I am asserting that the reasons given for the emergency use authorisation of the Pfizer vaccine were based on their trial showing fewer instances of covid illness in the vaccinated than the non-vaccinated. In the post I linked to is a link to the MHRA statement on their website (about their authorisation). There was never any mention of the vaccines preventing infection or transmission in the initial authorisation only that from the trial data the vaccine reduced symptomatic covid illness.

          • Bayard

            That’s not how I read the original comment and your reply: the original comment I read as the Government has asserted to us, the population (nothing to do with what was given in the authorisation) that:

            “1. The geneVax would prevent you catching Covid – False[1]
            2. The geneVax would prevent you passing on Covid – False[2]
            3. The geneVax would minimise the impact if you caught Covid – totally unproven[3].”

            so when you said that the further points were also false, it certainly looked like you were saying that the government didn’t make those assertions to the population.

        • Stevie Boy

          Maybe I should add point 4 ?
          4. A geneVax that is hurriedly developed and insufficiently tested can only be justified, if at all, iff there is no other viable treatments available. There are !
          The reality is that there are various Covid treatments available that work and that are cheap (Ivermectin anyone), also basic hygiene practices and daily doses of vitamin D act as a preventative measure. Of course these cheap and effective measures are silenced and literally declared illegal in some quarters because they are such a threat to the official agenda.

          • Lysias

            I have been taking megadoses of Vitamin D since the spring of 2020. For all that time, I have never had so much as a cold.

  • Will

    For more clinical information regarding recent peer reviewed papers on many things you raise I would point you towards the very considered work by medical professionals on YouTube. That of Dr Been and Dr John Campbell.

  • Pears Morgaine

    Sachs is an economist with no medical or scientific background. Virologists have condemned his claims about Covid as ‘wild speculation’ and the Lancet’s publication ‘shameful’ and ‘disappointing to see such a potentially influential report contributing to further misinformation on such an important topic’.

    • SteveR

      Shame then that Dr David Martin has trawled through the US Patent Office files and found that Moderna patented the 19 nucleotide sequence that forms the spike protein’s unique in viruses ‘key’ to get the virus into human cells way back IN 2013.

  • Stevie Boy

    I believe it is the case that most, if not all, government instigated inquiries/reviews are just box ticking, white washing events. Lessons are never learned, the guilty are never identified, repercussions are never forthcoming.
    Look we had a review, everything is just hunky dory, onto the next disaster.
    Covid will be the same, we will have to wait a long time for the truth to trickle out.

    • G

      That is certainly my impression – whitewash results from all or most government inquiries. Before the predetermined verdict is typed up though lots of facts can come out. Its maybe better to have one that to have nothing as appears to be the case here.

  • Bob (not OG)

    This is an important subject but any critical analyses have long been derided by the MSM as ‘conspiracy’.
    Every year, people get the flu. That was always accepted and dealt with in the usual way, by staying in bed, having hot drinks etc. Suddenly, we were told a ‘deadly disease’ was on the way from China, be afraid.
    The nocebo effect is the opposite phenomenon to the well known placebo effect, i.e. if a doctor or authority figure tells a patient they will get sick in some way, very often they do – even when there’s nothing wrong with them. This has happened on a massive scale via the TV, papers, MSM and government conducting what is best described as a psyop on the population.

    Chris Whitty and his unelected ‘expert’ chums were on TV every day telling us about supposed ‘waves’ of ‘variants’. With hindsight, it all looks a lot like BS. A friend of mine felt ill during the first lockdown and went to A & E. To his amazement, despite television pictures showing overflowing wards of ill people, the hospital was virtually empty.
    Old people, in hospital for a reason, were shipped out to care homes to free up beds. Unsurprisingly, away from the medical care they needed, they died in the care homes – deaths that were then labelled as ‘covid’.
    When the message didn’t seem to getting across adequately to the government’s liking, their ‘nudge unit’ reported to them that people “aren’t scared enough”, so the PR campaign was ramped up with scarier images.

    It’s well known that the PCR test will show a positive result almost randomly. John Magufuli, president of Tanzania, famously tested some motor oil, a piece of fruit and a goat for covid with the PCR test. All three tested positive. He was a vocal critic of the WHO’s anti-covid measures and refused to implement them. He later died, somewhat suspiciously, of a heart attack. (Three other leaders who refused to comply also died, including the Haitian President Jovenel Moise, assassinated by mercenaries shortly before the US sent over jabs and agents.)

    The whole lab-leak theory is a distraction designed to hide the shocking reality – that there is no covid.
    It is most likely a (maybe harsh) strain of flu that’s been rebranded. Who benefitted from the whole covid bandwagon? The WHO, Big Pharma, corrupt ministers, corrupt officials, authoritarian governments… Who was harmed (by lockdowns, increased debt, mask enforcement)? The public, the economy (and also the environment, having to absorb billions of non-biodegradable plastic masks).

    The pharmaceutical industry, like the arms industry, is wholly run for profit, so their motives in selling a ‘disease’ and its ‘cure’ (or war and weapons) must surely be questioned. All the ‘experts’ who pop up to support the official line are part of the corporate-Big Pharma machine. They’re about as impartial as the BBC.
    After all that’s happened, and is happening, I now have no faith whatsoever in the government or their ‘experts’.

      • Stevie Boy

        Covid is a generic term for a family of virus’s that includes Flu and CV19.
        Flu mutates every season.
        Apparently, Flu disappeared between 2020 and 2021.
        Also:
        The Flu vax in the northern hemisphere is developed based on a best guess of what is happening in the southern hemisphere. Sometimes the guess is accurate, sometimes not.
        Excess deaths due to Flu averaged around 18,000 (high of ~27k) prior to 2019.
        If it looks like BS, and smells like BS, then maybe it is …

        • Fat Jon

          But surely, Stevie Boy, the incidences of flu in 2020 and 2021 were kept low because people were taking precautions to avoid transmitting/receiving Covid; wearing masks, lockdowns, cutting out large group gatherings, keeping 2 metres from other people, etc.

          In the past flu was spread by transmission through closeness, people going to work when they should have been at home in bed, lots of hugging and kissing on meeting people, etc. I don’t find the inability for influenza to spread through the population to be surprising, given the restrictions imposed at the time.

          And on the subject of initial lockdowns in spring 2020, surely the intention was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed by patients needing ICU treatment? Governments were panicking. They had no idea whether Covid would rip through all age groups at the time. They did everything they thought necessary to curb the spread at the time. I will admit to being afraid of going outside in case millions of Covid viruses were floating around my back garden. Remember the scare stories about catching Covid from postal deliveries, and to leave mail for 2-3 days before opening them?

          Yes, we can all appoint ourselves as ‘experts’ with the benefit of hindsight; but at the beginning of the pandemic most of us were heading blindly into the unknown.

          • glenn_nl

            FJ: “But surely, Stevie Boy, the incidences of flu in 2020 and 2021 were kept low because people were taking precautions to avoid transmitting/receiving Covid; wearing masks, lockdowns, cutting out large group gatherings, keeping 2 metres from other people, etc.”

            Nah, couldn’t be – because denialists insist that masks don’t work, remember! Indeed, these surgeons just operated with these unnecessary incumberences for years, for absolutely no reason. Aren’t surgeons just the stupidest people?

            I haven’t heard denialists explain how flu and cold infections went down so rapidly, though. They seem to want to ignore that awkward fact.

        • Jimmeh

          > Covid is a generic term for a family of virus’s that includes Flu and CV19.

          That simply isn’t true. Influenza virus is a quite different thing from Corona virus. Please don’t spread nonsense.

  • Hans Adler

    Since you encouraged comments…

    I share your concern both about the inquiry and about the uncertainty around the origins of the virus for the reason you stated.

    On the matter of closing universities and keeping schools open: Generally speaking, this can make a lot of sense.

    With a disease as infectious as COVID, it’s not enough to protect the particularly vulnerable; you also need to keep infections in the general population within reasonable bounds: 1) to keep the burden for hospitals manageable, 2) to keep other essential services running, and 3) because protection for the particularly vulnerable will fail occasionally, and this happens proportionally to the infection rate of the general population.

    Under a simplistic model, every individual measure has costs and benefits, and politicians need to decide on a combination of measures that, taken together, are sufficiently effective, don’t do too much damage, and have as good a ratio of benefits for costs as you can get. That could even mean taking one of two essentially identical measures, if just one of them is good enough to get the desired result. But in case of schools and universities, the cost/benefit ratio of closing schools is higher than that of closing universities because 1) universities and their students are likely to find it easier than schools and their pupils to change to a remote learning model, and 2) closing schools leads to a greater reduction of the effective workforce for critical services, including hospitals — unless you organise something specifically for them, which isn’t easy.

    Perhaps this model is too simplistic. People who meet at a university are more homogeneous than the children and parents connected by a school. On the other hand, there was reason to suspect that children have a far lower probability of spreading the virus than young adults. Therefore on balance, it’s not clear if schools were likely to contribute more or less per capita than universities to the spreading of the virus including effects from carrying it from one social circle to another. Therefore it was reasonable to just neglect this complication.

    Theoretically speaking, it could even have made sense to keep the schools open and close the universities; then as the epidemic got worse, to close the schools and re-open the universities, and when it peaked to close both the schools and the universities. But there are reasons why the second step (closing the schools while re-opening the universities) didn’t happen: A good reason is that while temporarily re-opening the universities would no doubt have had particularly high benefits, the costs in terms of re-opening connections between social circles would have been higher as well. A bad reason is that this would have endangered the kind of people politicians prefer to protect when they have a choice, and who have a voice when they don’t like something, whereas politicians don’t really care about the danger to sickly old teachers, or to vulnerable relatives of teachers who are forced to work. And then, of course, politicians would never close the schools early enough, so that when they do it, they must also close everything else that can reasonably be closed.

  • glenn_nl

    A thread like this was bound to bring out the usual lunatics.

    The inquiry is about the ineptitude of the government in its response to the pandemic, and the incredible corruption and cronyism and profiteering of them and their mates.

    The inquiry is not about entertaining every whacked out conspiracy theory from the nut-jobs who think it was all a grand hoax on an unprecedented scale, undertaken by literally millions of public health workers, scientists and officials (worldwide), but some crackpot on youtube has rumbled the whole thing, and – darn it – “They” just can’t seem to stop The Truth getting out now.

    Antivaxxers and their rag-bag of denialists must be hugely disappointed that people taking the vaccines aren’t dropping like flies. They probably thought they’d be the last survivors! ????

    • Bob (not OG)

      I’m not saying all those public health workers (including me), scientists and officials were part of a hoax. I’m sure the vast majority, including the scientists, believed everything they were told, and a kind of group-think acceptance developed.
      But what if they were mistaken?
      I’mk not an ‘anti-vaxer’. I don’t believe the jabs were designed to harm (I had one myself). However, it’s hard to deny that the main beneficiaries of the whole thing were the pharmaceutical corporations.
      If you believe otherwise, that’s your prerogative. Sometimes (quite often, actually), things which were once accepted as fact turn out not to be – not necessarily because of any plot (e.g. there was no plot to brainwash people that the Sun orbited the Earth), but because the benefit of some later analysis sheds more light on what happened. There’s no point getting too upset about it.

      • Twirlip

        From your post at 17:33:

        “The whole lab-leak theory is a distraction designed to hide the shocking reality – that there is no covid.”

        From your post at 19:20:

        “I don’t believe the jabs were designed to harm (I had one myself).”

        You must, then, have believed in the reality of COVID-19 at the time you were vaccinated against it. What changed your mind?

      • Mr V

        “the main beneficiaries of the whole thing were the pharmaceutical corporations”. Maybe. But even so, it’s an argument to nationalize them and leave the job of making new vaccines to universities and not-profit entities. Not for anti vaxxism nonsense. Vaccine deniers are as stupid as the anti-seat belt fringe groups, sure, someone profits from making them but no one sane will ever call for seat belt ban on all new cars. Something something baby and bathwater.

        Also, the main push from 1% who wanted to continue profiting during Covid was against vaccines and lockdowns, in fact they openly were saying we need to let grandma die to “save the economy” (read, their profits). Anti-vaxxer morons are repeating the propaganda of ultra-rich (and snake oil peddlers selling horse dewormers to gullible) and are too stupid to recognize it – just like the clowns repeating stuff from gigantic oil companies “because look, these scientists must profit SOMEHOW from all the climate change warnings”…

    • Bayard

      “Antivaxxers and their rag-bag of denialists must be hugely disappointed that people taking the vaccines aren’t dropping like flies. ”

      Most people who were against being “vaccinated” were simply sceptical of being injected with something that no-one even tried to pretend had been properly tested. That is a logical and sensible attitude to take, not the reaction of a nutcase. What if the authorities were wrong? They would be sorry, but you would still be dead. It’s not their life or health.

      • Mr V

        “no-one even tried to pretend had been properly tested” Vaccines had been extensively tested, retested, and triple tested for close to a century now. Moving goalposts and insisting every individual vaccine (or even better, strain of vaccine) being tested anew is not only utterly insane, it makes vaccines completely pointless because by the time all denier-insisted tests end, the pandemic will already be over. We might as well do nothing then.

        Do you test each bread you eat? If not, why? You know there are substances in improperly milled (or contaminated) grain vastly more dangerous than anything ever put in vaccines? From mold mycotoxins to stuff dumped by many really dangerous bacteria? The fact that deniers hyper-focus on stuff that is KNOWN to be mostly harmless and completely ignore every other, much bigger danger just proves they are entitled children inventing excuses to not eat peas – and no, the fact someone died after eating peas 56 years ago is not a good one. Your “liberty” ends where your insane actions might kill dozens if not hundreds of other people, it’s that simple.

        • Bayard

          “Vaccines had been extensively tested, retested, and triple tested for close to a century now.”
          Yes, but not this one. No-one even pretended that it had been. The ofiicial line was that it was an emergency so the normal rules didn’t apply.

          “Do you test each bread you eat?”
          I take my bread orally. Do you really take yours intravenously? The body has evolved over millions of years to combat poisons ingested with food, but not to combat things injected into the bloodstream.

          “The fact that deniers hyper-focus on stuff that is KNOWN to be mostly harmless and completely ignore every other, ”
          I don’t know who these nutcase “deniers” are, but they appear to be a figment of your imagination.

    • Stevie Boy

      Glenn. The reality is that significant numbers of people actually are dying – but you won’t read it in the MSM.
      A lot of rational people just want this to be investigated, that’s all, the causes may actually just turn out to be natural or bad stats. However, this is not permitted. Explain why someone is a nut job to just ask for an explanation.

      • glenn_nl

        I’m not calling anyone a nut job for asking questions. It’s the lunatics who have all the answers, which usually involve massive plots and hoaxes, that I’ve got little time for.

  • Wally Jumblatt

    Excellent topic Craig, I see not many of the posters have picked up on the fact that all the key players in the Scottish (narrow) Covid Inquiry have taken the first stagecoach outta Dodge City.
    That certainly looks more than a coincidence and is worthy of checking all your sources.

    The other points I think that even the most vehement of conspiracy-deniers might accept is that people can now be easily frightened, particularly if the mainstream media is not holding a searchlight onto government actions.
    I think there is are stories still to be told on the Vaccine and the Boosters, Wuhan, Fauci, Bill Gates, shutting down education, failing to protect old folks in nursing homes, Lockdown money and the PPE scandal -even Skripal (someone commented above).
    As far as I can see we can’t tell who and how many are still dying early or suffering new, debilitating conditions, either from Covid, Vaccine, Boosters, Ventilators, Remdesivir (and if you must, HCQ and Ivermectin -that would be nobody).
    Why aren’t these figures on the front page of every newspaper. I suspect a conspiracy …….

  • DiggerUK

    Craig, in the space of two sentences you go from claiming the resignations “cannot simply be shrugged off as nothing” and then claim that “obvious mistakes were made” about the issue seeing investigated.
    It is preposterous to ‘nudge’ a meme in to readers thinking whilst not knowing at this stage why the resignations have been made, or indeed what the eventual findings will be.

    I say hold your waters and wait for the reasons to be made known for now. I’d urge all other grown ups in the room to agree with me on that.

    I have major concerns over how Covid has been reacted to by both governments and the citizenry. Taking your lead, and going with my own libertarian instincts, I hope they support my argument that lockdown trashed many of our cherished freedoms…_

    • Bob (not OG)

      > lockdown trashed many of our cherished freedoms…_

      Indeed. Many of those involved (councils, NHS workers etc.) no doubt believed they were doing the Right Thing. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
      There was (is) a secondary effect – those who disagreed with the official narrative in any way were dehumanised as ‘ant-vaxers’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘nut jobs’ etc. etc. ad nauseam. Even if some people who questioned the government line are mad, that is not an argument against any facts they happen to believe which are true. A fact is a fact, irrespective of the believer.

      Take a few steps back, and try to apprehend the bigger picture. Look at what happened (lockdowns, enforced social distancing, isolation, not being allowed to visit loved ones) and what has been happening since: ‘fact checking’ propaganda outfits proliferate online while governments quietly introduce numerous bills (some now acts) curtailing free speech and the right to protest, while giving further powers to state actors to arrest people and even to commit crimes. All for ‘the greater good’.

      Freedom is more important than blind allegiance to authority. The worldwide, orchestrated response to covid was designed by unelected beaurocrat ‘leaders’ in the WEF and Davos. Bill Gates and other ‘philanthropists’ among them. Their reach extends to many influential UK universities, think tanks, discreet government bodies, the MSM…
      Those who think this is not happening are the ones in denial.

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