Thread by @shellenberger

Many say it doesn't matter where COVID-19 came from, but it does. The cover-up of its origin typifies institutional rot. Our leaders have been lying and persecuting whistleblowers. Such rampant abuses of power threaten our democracy and civilization.

nypost.com/2023/06/15/we-…

Now, it’s up to Congress to demand answers from the intelligence community and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.

How long did they know?

And why did they keep it a secret?

In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

Why, then, didn’t he say something sooner?

The cover-up was vast and insidious.

Our sources were terrified to tell us what many had long suspected.

They only did so because they are as outraged as the American people should be and felt a moral obligation to speak out.

Not only did the highly infectious respiratory virus kill millions, but the response to it also shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

Governments threw out their pandemic playbooks, which until COVID-19 had centered around voluntary measures and protecting high-risk groups — not long-term school and business lockdowns and mask mandates.

Why?

And, in the name of public safety and preventing “vaccine hesitancy,” governments declared war on free speech.

Facebook censored The New York Post’s accurate February 2020 op-ed pointing to a lab leak as the cause.

Twitter kicked journalists off its platform.

And the White House menacingly threatened Facebook and Twitter with extinction, in the form of revoking their license to operate, if they didn’t censor “often-true content,” including stories of vaccine side effects.

Why?

For the last six months, we have seen whistleblower after whistleblower come forward bravely, as the law allows, only to be punished.

FBI officials punished whistleblowers for exposing the agency’s targeting of innocent Americans for “domestic terrorism” and “violent extremism.”

China deserves plenty of blame for what happened.

The Wuhan lab had repeatedly failed to maintain proper safety levels.

And totalitarian societies, by punishing dissent, can’t self-correct in the way democracies can.

But powerful US officials enabled the disaster.

In 2014, President Barack Obama had banned the “gain of function” research that likely caused the pandemic.

Fauci and his collaborators violated the spirit if not the letter of the law by sending that research to China, and spinning it as something other than gain of function.

The abuse of power is pervasive in the federal government.

Congress must act now to create an independent and bipartisan commission on the origins of the COVID pandemic, and why US government officials participated in its cover-up.

Congress also must take immediate action to defund and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex, whereby contractors of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation demand that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms censor disfavored… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

And Congress must establish stronger oversight of its biomedical establishment.

The worshipful news media coverage of Fauci is particularly appalling in retrospect, now that we know that he personally sought to squelch the lab leak hypothesis for self-interested reasons.

The greatest change of all must be in the way Americans view their leaders and institutions.

We must be much more suspicious of the official narrative.

The people who cry “disinformation” are, often, trying to censor accurate but inconvenient truths.

And the people who accuse others of “spreading conspiracy theories,” are, as we have just seen, often conspiring to spread disinformation.

/END