As we all know, suggesting that anything contrary to whatever the media-political class have currently decided is The Science™ is crazy conspiracy-stuff. Of course The Science™ is apt to change to whatever the media-political class need it to be, faster than you can say “Hunter’s laptop”. Yesterday’s crazy conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s front-page news.

And when it comes to the murky world of Anthony Fauci, nothing, but nothing is beyond the bounds of possibility. The only thing we can say about what we’ll learn next about Fauci is that it will be darker and more compromising than anything we previously thought possible.

For instance, in early February 2020, just as Fauci was putting together America’s Covid response, he received a strange email from the dean of Harvard Medical School. The email requested “whatever information you are willing to share” on the developing response. But what was truly odd about the email was that the dean specifically requested the info on behalf of Chinese real estate company, Evergrande.

It was an odd question on its own: What business did Evergrande — then the most valuable real estate company on earth, but also widely known to be catastrophically indebted — have with the director of America’s pandemic response? But Daley’s next line was stranger still. “[Xia and Liu] stated thy [sic] were acting on behalf of Dr Zhong Nanshan, China’s key point person on the coronavirus outbreak (see below).” Below was an email from Evergrande’s Liu to Daley which, save for an opening line, is entirely redacted.

Zhong is China’s top epidemiologist, someone with whom Fauci would surely have needed no intermediary — least of all from a Harvard dean.

But two days after the email, something else happened.

The Chinese real estate firm on whose behalf George Daley had contacted Fauci pledged a $115 million donation to Harvard Medical School […]

On the day Evergrande approved the donation (according to its 2020 annual report), another unusual but highly significant event occurred: Fauci took what, according to a Chinese foreign ministry official timeline of early pandemic events details, was his first call during the pandemic with the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao, “to exchange information on the epidemic.”

In the meantime, Fauci and his apparatchiks had flown into action to quash suggestions that the new virus breaking out of China was engineered and possibly escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Fauci hastily arranged a conference call with researchers from Sydney to London, who had been publicly opining that it was “80% certain” that the virus was engineered.

None of the participants have divulged exactly what was said, and emails referring to its contents have been redacted in their entirety. But according to Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Judiciary Committee who viewed the original emails, many of the leading scientists on the call believed that a lab leak was at least as likely as the zoonotic spillover that had been widely suggested as the origin of the virus, if not more so.

Despite this, just three days after the conference call, a dramatic reversal took place regarding the scientists’ assessment of the possible origin of the virus.

And, just like that, the lab theory became a “fringe” “conspiracy” spread by “crackpots”.

No murky plot to obscure the virus’ true origins would be complete without Frankenstein Fauci’s own little Igor, Peter Daszak. Daszak was the head of EcoHealth Alliance, through whom Fauci funnelled millions that ultimately ended up facilitating Gain of Function research — then banned in the US — at none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The indefatigable Daszak was later appointed to the WHO “investigation” into the origins of COVID. Daszak has since admitted that he personally convinced the WHO team that they did not need to see the deleted Wuhan Institute of Virology databases of virus samples.

No more than two days after the Fauci-Gao call and the announcement of Evergrande’s donation, Daszak began asking prominent scientists to sign a letter condemning the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and affirming a scientific consensus on the pandemic’s origins. Published in the Lancet, the letter would be frequently cited by media outlets that sought to discredit the lab-leak theory for over a year. But many of the Lancet letter’s twenty-seven signatories had apparent conflicts of interest […]

For example, NEIDL, one of just two US National Biocontainment Laboratories, was run by Ronald Corley, co-author of the op-ed that announced the Harvard-Evergrande donation. NEIDL was in line to receive millions of dollars in Evergrande giving. Other signatories included Farrar, who had gone on record to praise the Evergrande-Harvard deal, Dennis Carroll, chair of the Global Virome Project, and, of course Daszak himself.

Harvard itself has long-standing ties with the Chinese Communist Party. In 1978, it established the still-extant Harvard China Health Partnership. In 1997, when Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese head of state to visit the US in over a decade, guess which institution he specially visited? Xi Xinping sent his only child to study under a pseudonym at Harvard, where she graduated in 2014.

Then there’s the estimated $200 million that Evergrande has pumped in Harvard’s coffers. Yet, even as Evergrande was financially collapsing, it donated $115 million to Harvard Medical School. According to senior US scientist:

“Harvard Medical School has lots of faculty. Lots of experts regularly consulted by the media. With millions from Evergrande on the table, those experts could be relied on to support, or at least not oppose, the false narrative concerning the origin of the pandemic.”

Spectator Australia

But I’m sure that’s all just another conspiracy theory.

Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...