Brownstone Institute
A World on Fire
Every day, news reporters, traders, and workers of all sorts the world over wake to do their work as they always have. Part of that requires that everyone pretend that life is normal, fixable, and more or less stable. All of this is temporary. It will come and go and really not be that bad.
Strange, isn’t it? Human beings have a hard time adjusting to disaster, in their decision-making and even in their mindset. Reporters have to do their jobs as they are trained. Traders too. Everyone does. They please their bosses. They don’t sound alarms. They don’t scream and yell as they probably should.
But there is a moment in the day when the work is done and perhaps a cocktail comes out or the dishes are washed and the kids are in bed and the room falls silent. At this moment, millions and billions of people the world over know it. Disaster is all around us. We are just pretending otherwise, simply because this is what we have to do.
It was this way during lockdowns. They must know what they are doing otherwise why would we be forced to do this. If we all do our part, maybe this will end sooner rather than later. The experts surely know better than we do what is what. What can we do but trust?
Let us adjust and find a way to normalize all of this in our minds. We are powerless to change it in any case.
And thus the peoples of the world adjusted and will continue to do so as the fundamentals decay and rot, long past the end of lockdowns and most vaccine mandates, even as all the old rituals and signals of life as we once knew it fade further into memory.
Enough with the dreary existentialism. Let’s talk about life in a one-bedroom apartment in London. The price of energy for heat has nearly doubled, seemingly overnight. Truly, it took months but it has felt like one day to the next. The energy bills will be approaching a substantial portion of the rent itself. And the forecast — which one has to do because that’s how energy markets work on the consumer end — is showing a doubling and doubling again.
Here is what Goldman Sachs is seeing.
Small businesses cannot function under these conditions. “Tom Kerridge, the celebrity chef, revealed that the annual energy bill at his pub has soared from £60,000 to £420,000 and warned that ‘ludicrous’ price rises left the hospitality sector facing a ‘terrifying landscape’,” reports Telegraph.
This is all running wildly ahead of consumer prices generally. This is only through June. We are already approaching 100% inflation in energy.
Many will need to close up shop. The new Prime Minister Liz Truss, who calls herself a conservative, has capped price increases for consumers while pushing the largest spending bill to bail out energy companies ever. It truly seems like she had no choice. Yes, that’s what they all say, but in this case, it might be true simply because otherwise, the entire nation would totally fall apart.
It could happen anyway.
“The U.K. may be facing a wave of business bankruptcies exceeding anything witnessed during the post-2008 panic and recession,” reports Joseph Sternberg. “Some 100,000 firms could be forced into insolvency in coming months, bankruptcy consultancy Red Flag Alert warned this week. These are otherwise healthy firms with at least £1 million in annual revenue. Business failures on this scale would dwarf the roughly 65,000 firms of any size that went under from 2008-10.”
Everyone wants to know why. As always, there are a number of factors. The sanctions on Russia for its struggle over the borders of Ukraine were ill-advised. That has never stopped the deployment of such tactics: sanctions against Cuba still in force began 60 years ago, all in an effort to make some foreign state behave in a way that the US demands.
They have driven up the price of energy all over Europe and the UK. But even then, Russian sources only about 3% of the UK’s energy needs.
Another culprit is the fanatical attempt on the part of the government to convert a fossil-fuel economy to one powered by the wind and sun. For reasons of climate change, we know how good politicians are at controlling the global climate by taking away your consumer conveniences.
But really even these two factors would not be enough to cause this level of carnage. The real root of the problem is monetary, which in turn traces (again!) to lockdown policies: the wild currency debasement starting March 2020 and continuing through lockdowns has wrecked the place. How could they not see this coming? It’s ridiculous.
And it happened the world over. The chart below that I put together looks messy but it tells the whole story of how one generation of central bankers wrecked the world. The key on the left tells you monetary inflation rates and the key on the right tells you price inflation rates. One lags the other by 16-18 months. I’ve color-coded it so that you can see the relationships.
This covers the U.S. (green), the EU (red), and the UK (blue). You can see the massive oceans of paper being pumped out to cover up for the egregious evil of lockdowns. Do you remember those days when governments the world over imagined that they could somehow shut things down while keeping the data looking pretty with the printing press?
How Quickly Things Fall Apart
My friends in the UK are truly panicked. They want to come to the U.S. just to get away. But many of my friends are rebels and did not accept the vaccine because they are healthy and under the age of 80. They rejected the jab. Now they cannot come to the U.S. because the U.S. is still imposing rules that forbid travelers from foreign countries who are not vaccinated from getting across the borders.
These policies again trace to the lockdown era: March 12, 2020, in particular, when the office of the president decided on its own to do the unthinkable and shut travel from Europe, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It caused family disruption, business loss, and tragedy all around. It is still not normalized, which makes the point: no one in Washington has any regrets.
This is the essence of policy in America today. Truly people are being locked out of our country for being insufficiently loyal to Pfizer, which seems to be the real government here at home, at least as it pertains to public health.
The most striking feature of that which afflicts the UK today is the sheer speed of it all. One day life was normal and then suddenly the bills were through the roof. No one could explain why. It was some kind of mystery, and extremely disorienting.
Why energy, for example? Well, inflation strikes in strange ways. It gravitates to the thing most vulnerable to price hikes. This could be dictated by fashion or policy or both. But when it happens, no power can stop it.
The story of going from normal to double and triple prices, forecasting to go much higher, reminds me of books I’ve read about Weimar, how things were fine until suddenly they were not and life itself took a shocking turn.
Until recently, Americans have looked at the chaos abroad and thought oh that’s what these weird foreign people do, just strange stuff with unstable governments and unsound financial systems. And yet right now it is happening to our mirror country across the pond, a place that Americans think of as cousins with a Royal family.
The remarkable thing is that the UK’s monetary policy was not as bad as the U.S.’s own. The only difference is that there is a larger international market for dollars than for pounds. This allows the Fed a bit of breaking room to do more damage.
But can it happen here? Yes, certainly, and it could happen before year’s end. The policies of the last three years have created an incredible powder keg. No one knows when it will go off, and no one knows what to do when it happens.
There are so many other data points: missing workers, food shortages, political instability, and the breathtaking entrenchment of Xi-backed lockdowns in China.
The world is on fire. Most people are not willing to think about it or talk about it. Yet.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
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