NIH staffers storm out as Bhattacharya delivers reality bombshell about COVID origin
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya hosted his first staff town hall on Monday.
The event, held on the NIH's main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, was packed with nearly 500 attendees and even more individuals tuning in online to watch Bhattacharya answer some of the 1,200 submitted questions, Science reported.
'If it's true that we sponsored research that caused the pandemic, and if you look at polls of the American people, that's what most people believe.'
Yet when Bhattacharya attempted to answer a question about the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak, many staffers fled the room in apparent protest.
Ahead of his response, Bhattacharya noted that some of those attending the event would likely disagree with his perspective.
"It's possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings. And it's also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research," Bhattacharya told the crowd.
He appeared to pause as dozens of NIH staffers stood up and left the room.
"It's nice to have free speech. You're welcome, you guys," he said, apparently addressing the protesters.
Some attendees who remained responded with applause.
Bhattacharya continued, "If it's true that we sponsored research that caused the pandemic, and if you look at polls of the American people, that's what most people believe. And I've looked at the scientific evidence I believe in."
"What we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that's posing any risk to any human populations," he added.
Anything else?
A Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee's minority staff report drafted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) claimed that President Donald Trump's administration had "effectively" slashed the NIH's budget by $2.7 billion in the first three months of the year.
"Trump's war on science is an attack against anyone who has ever loved someone with cancer," Sanders said. "The American people do not want us to slash cancer research in order to give more tax breaks for billionaires."
The Department of Health and Human Services has labeled Sanders' claims as "unequivocally false."
"The report released by his office today is a politically motivated distortion that undermines the thousands of dedicated public health professionals across HHS, who remain steadfast in their commitment to delivering results for the American people," HHS stated.
RELATED: Trump's NIH closes Fauci's apparent puppy-torture lab after 40 years of sadistic experiments
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Trump bans dangerous gain-of-function research, but will Congress follow through?
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order banning federal funding for gain-of-function research abroad, particularly in countries like China and Iran, deemed to have insufficient research oversight. The order also pauses certain domestic research involving infectious pathogens and toxins until a safer, more transparent policy is developed. It aims to reduce the risk of lab-related incidents, like those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, but doesn’t hinder U.S. innovation in biotechnology.
“This could be one of the most consequential things that Donald Trump will do in his entire presidency,” “Blaze News Tonight” host Jill Savage says.
“This is something that’s just pure justice that needed to be done to save this country from all the crap that we’ve been through in the last few years,” adds Blaze News editor in chief and co-host Matthew Peterson.
He notes that even President Obama, in response to concerns about biosafety risks following lab incidents, paused federal funding for certain gain-of-function research. Fauci, however, “thwarted Obama” and took his research abroad.
“Fauci was able to weasel his way out and continue this dangerous research throughout the world,” Peterson says. “This has to end,” and Trump’s executive order “is a great beginning.”
While it is certainly a good start, Jill points out the obvious next step: “We need people in Congress to step up to the plate.”
“In order to implement the mandate, you need Congress,” Peterson agrees, adding that sadly, “there isn’t a sense of urgency with a lot of these people.”
“Congress isn’t used to getting the job done,” he says. They like to “wait out the executive” and “slow roll things.”
That’s why it’s “vital that everyone out there start calling them and putting pressure on your congressmen.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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How To Make Yourself Invincible To Media Info Ops
The most effective tactic for not getting duped by the media's information operations is to understand that they happen.Esteemed molecular biologist warns of 'smoking gun' evidence COVID-19 was engineered by researchers at Chinese lab
An esteemed molecular biologist has come forward to warn of "smoking gun" evidence that COVID-19 not only originated from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it was engineered by researchers at the Chinese lab.
Richard H. Ebright, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and is on the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. The Harvard Junior Fellow earned the Searle Scholar Award, was named a Johnson & Johnson Discovery Research Fellow, was awarded the Walter J. Johnson Prize, was named Infectious Diseases Society of America Fellow, and took home the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award.
Ebright has also served on the National Institutes of Health Molecular Biology Study Section and National Institutes of Health special emphasis panels.
He has more than 175 publications and more than 40 issued and pending patents.
Ebright is also an outspoken critic of the unchallenged narrative of the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Ebright notes that a document from 2018 points to "smoking gun" evidence that COVID-19 was engineered by researchers at a Chinese lab.
Ebright spotlights a March 2018 grant proposal for experiments called "Project DEFUSE."
American and Chinese virologists lobbied to receive a $14 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, for funding to engineer bat viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 to examine how they could jump to human transmission.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site."
The proposal involved Chinese bat researcher Zhengli Shi, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric – a University of North Carolina professor, who reportedly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on "risky bat-virus research" in 2015.
Commentary noted, "The proposal outlines a joint project between Baric’s UNC lab and a team headed by WIV senior scientist Zhengli Shi, the famous 'Bat Lady' of the Wuhan lab. The proposal was drafted under the supervision of Peter Daszak — whose EcoHealth Alliance would funnel the hoped-for grant money to the researchers — and was addressed to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)."
The proposal was ultimately denied by DARPA.
However, Project DEFUSE may have been funded by the Chinese government and executed by researchers at the Wuhan Lab of Virology.
The Washington Times reported, "Nonetheless, speculation persists about whether the research may have proceeded with support from the Chinese government. Project DEFUSE also suggested modifications to bat coronavirus spike proteins, introducing 'human-specific cleavage sites.' Notably, these techniques are similar to those some biologists surmise could have played a role in crafting the coronavirus responsible for the global health crisis."
Nicholas Wade – a former science editor of the New York Times – wrote in the WSJ, "Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time COVID-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin."
Dr. Filippa Lentzos – an associate professor of science and international security at King’s College London – has also urged the world to acknowledge that the COVID pandemic may have originated from research by scientists.
"We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident," Lentzos said in a United Nations speech.
"Are we going to find that out? In my view, I think it’s very unlikely that we will," she stated. "We need to do better in future. We are going to see more ambiguous events."
“There will be an outbreak, and we won’t know if it’s natural, deliberate, or accidental, and as an international community we need to find ways in which we can investigate that," Lentzos warned. "For our purposes what is important we need to acknowledge that it could have been, and so what should your responses be."
As Blaze News reported on Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced new guidelines regarding COVID-19 that are in stark contrast to previous recommendations by the health agency.
The CDC now says people who test positive for COVID-19 no longer need to quarantine from others for at least five days, advised treating coronavirus in the same manner as the flu, and to gather outside to prevent sickness.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the left’s false prophet
One of the things the American public can never do is forget the constant gaslighting that’s taken place in the news cycle over the past few years.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was consistently saying — in a tone as smug as possible — that the “lab-leak theory was a theory with zero evidence,” as he looked down at the American public from atop his television throne.
News anchors suddenly became experts in “the science,” somehow privy to a knowledge that us plebeians born of the same educational system could never be.
Joy Reid was one of the worst offenders, repeating lines like, “Just weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected the conspiracy that coronavirus was man-made in a lab in Wuhan, China, and yet this week Donald Trump is still pushing the debunked bunkum [whatever that means] that the virus is not not not man-made.”
These news anchors worshiped Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Because apparently, only one man can know what the truth is. No one was allowed to listen to the scientists actively rejecting Fauci’s line that “everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [COVID] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
But now it’s been confirmed by the U.S. Department of Energy (why it’s now their job to confirm this is a mystery to all of us) that he’s likely wrong.
And it turns out that — as many of us lesser than earthly beings already knew — he was a false prophet all along.
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HHS inspector general issues damning report claiming NIH and EcoHealth failed to properly monitor dangerous virus research in China
The National Institutes of Health, directed by Francis Collins until December 2021, has long provided federal funds to the EcoHealth Alliance run by British zoologist Peter Daszak.
EcoHealth has, in turn, used grant money to fund dangerous gain-of-function research — executed in part by foreign entities — on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly the epicenter of the pandemic that has claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.
According to a damning new report from the HHS Office of Inspector General, the NIH knew about potential risks associated with the research being performed in China that had been executed using federal grant money funneled to and through EHA.
Despite this knowledge, it "did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements."
The Daily Mail reported that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helmed by Anthony Fauci until 2022, was the NIH branch responsible for monitoring this research.
The OIG report further suggested that while procedures were in place to monitor the dangerous work underway and to ensure adherence to requirements, they proved wanting, owing to deficiencies in compliance.
Both the NIH and EcoHealth are said to have flouted federal requirements, directly and/or by extension of their subawards.
For instance, the NIH asked EHA on Nov. 5, 2021, to provide scientific documentation pertaining to experiments performed in Wuhan. The OIG indicated that it did not encounter evidence that EHA ever obtained that information. EHA officials reportedly confirmed the Wuhan lab had proven unresponsive to its request for data.
The NIH also reportedly failed to refer the dangerous research to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for an outside review concerning enhanced potential pandemic pathogens because it determined the research did not involve and was unlikely to set off a pandemic.
Among the other deficiencies the OIG report noted were the NIH's improper termination of a grant and "EcoHealth's improper use of grant funds, resulting in $89,171 in unallowable costs."
These deficiencies "limited NIH and EcoHealth's ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action."
"With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research," the report concluded.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University, told the Daily Mail, "These conclusions demonstrate major failures in past NIH oversight of high-risk research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and underscore the need for both accountability for failures in past NIH oversight and strengthening of future NIH oversight."
The EHA issued a statement in response to the report, contending that the NIH, facing "significant political pressure ... retroactively alleged that our work was not in compliance," and that the nonprofit is "fully committed to responsible research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and follows all applicable U.S. policy frameworks and rules regarding such research."
Republicans lawmakers have repeatedly highlighted EHA's "lengthy history of reporting failures and collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)," noting that the WIV "is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) laboratory and the likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic."
Daszak previously called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV "heinous," and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV — to which his organization had directed a significant amount of taxpayer funds — as "conspiracy theories."
Despite questions about its compliance and its deficiencies, EcoHealth nevertheless secured funding to the tune of millions of dollars last month from the Department of Defense.
"Despite [EcoHealth] possibly having caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite definitely having repeatedly and gravely violated terms of a US-government grant, currently has 12 active US-government grants and contracts, totaling more than $34 million," Dr. Ebright said of EHA's continued funding at taxpayers' expense.
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thefederalist.com