Faulty reasoning signals

• Negativity Bias - 28.6%
• Appeal to Authority - 20.1%
• Confirmation Bias - 15%

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The Covid pandemic began over six years ago, killed millions, cost the world trillions of dollars and caused untold tragedy. Despite its world-historical significance, there are still many unanswered questions about the virus.

One of these questions is where the virus came from and how it spread. This is hardly a trivial issue – it has vital biosecurity implications in the event of future pandemics. Was the virus harboured in a cave of bats and transferred to a host animal before showing up in humans? This would be the most common source of this type of viral spread. Or did the virus leak from a lab in Wuhan, China? If the virus did come from a lab, was it naturally occurring or was it created in the lab through man-made genetic manipulation (known as gain-of-function research)? If the virus was man-made and leaked from the lab, was the release accidental? Or, more implausibly, was it a deliberate attempt at a bioweapon, perhaps created by Chinese military scientists?

Last month, Tulsi Gabbard, the departing director of National Intelligence, released previously unseen documents and communications that were sent among government officials during the pandemic. According to Gabbard, the documents show that Covid leaked from a lab in China – and that Anthony Fauci, the then head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked with the CIA to cover up this fact.

The documents are not as conclusive as Gabbard claims. Nevertheless, they do reveal the CIA’s extensive involvement with government scientists like Fauci. Up to this point, the only thing the public knew about the CIA and Covid was that the agency was tasked by President Biden in March 2021 with doing an analysis of the origin of the pandemic. It is now clear from the documents that the CIA and Fauci cooperated on this project.

That might be innocent – Fauci, a leading Covid expert, is the logical person for the CIA to approach for help with their investigation. But there are two factors that cast the documents’ revelations in a more disturbing light. First, a CIA whistleblower has accused Fauci of frequently visiting CIA headquarters more than a year before the agency was charged with investigating the virus. Second, the CIA demonstrated a very high level of interest in Covid long before the investigation into its origins began.

This is where the CIA’s history comes into the equation. It has always been more than an intelligence-gathering agency, with a long history of deception and covert operations. It would be naive simply to assume that before spring 2021 the CIA paid no attention to Covid, especially given its origins in Communist Party-ruled China.

Based on the Gabbard documents, there are several questions that need answering about the CIA’s involvement: Was the CIA monitoring the Wuhan laboratory and the Chinese military involvement with it before 2019? Does the CIA believe the three Wuhan researchers who fell ill in 2019 were the original Covid cases? Was the CIA aware that the National Institutes of Health was indirectly funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? Did the CIA have important contact with any public health officials other than Fauci?

And there are a few questions for Fauci, too: Did he visit CIA headquarters early in 2020 and, if so, how many times? Other than providing expert names for their investigation of the source of the virus, what was the nature of Fauci’s information-sharing, if any, with the CIA? Who were the experts Fauci referred to the CIA to help with its investigation, and why have their names never been released to the public? What did those experts believe about the source of Covid and what did they tell the agency?

These are questions that everyone from congressional committees to journalists to medical and public-health communities needs to be asking. The people who dismiss any CIA involvement with Covid out of hand should recall its involvement in the MKUltra programme, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Operation Mongoose – covert ops and disastrous episodes in which the agency strayed considerably from its assigned boundaries.

Christopher Fox, the Intelligence Community inspector general, has accused CIA director John Ratcliffe of withholding records necessary to determine whether the government was engaged in covering up the pandemic’s origins. This might even be enough to motivate the professional conspiracy theorists. They could finally give up on conjuring an imaginary CIA role in the JFK assassination, which turned out to be a busted flush. Perhaps if they focus their attention on Covid and the CIA, they might uncover more of a connection between the agency and Fauci than it ever had with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Cory Franklin ’s The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.

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