Welcome back to the podcast folks. I wasn’t going to do this, but I changed my mind. We’re doing it. I’ve been slapped pretty hard in the past for pandemic talk in the past, but if the government can call sh*t on Covid, then I’m going to call sh*t on Covid. Remember what happened to people who speculated that Covid came from a lab? Like the lab in Wuhan across the street from ground zero? Well, fast forward to December 2024 and the House of Representatives Oversight Committee just dropped a 500-page bombshell, concluding a two-year investigation into the origins of Covid. If you haven’t seen their conclusions plastered all over the walls of the Twittersphere, then grab a pair of headphones and let’s get into it.
The past almost – what – 5 years now have been like a fever dream. Lockdowns, masking, shops going out of business, kids getting dumber, free crackpipes to addicts, athletes dropping dead from heart attacks, families divided, turbo cancer, economy in shambles, and Jerome Powell with his magic money printing press at the Fed just whirring in the background. You know – just keeping their wealthy investor friends a float and the stock market looking good. Covid has been a ride on the crazy train.
Was this greatest disaster in world history an inevitable necessity? The result of a fateful encounter between a bat and a pangolin in a wet market in Wuhan gone sideways? Hashtag ‘cue the conspiracy theorists’ is getting old.
This web is so tangled with corruption and lies it will make your head spin. Today, I couldn’t help myself. I’m done being silent about this. Well, I’m only silent about it here, it’s all I talk about in my regular life. I have to talk Covid – let’s hope this time I do so without getting a strike. Congress said it – I think I can say it. Plus, my marketing manager says strikes are fake news – now, they just disappear you quietly in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping. Sweet – fewer attorney’s fees?
Let’s do it.
The House Oversight Committee has been working feverishly on their investigation into the real origins of Sars-CoV-2 for two years – let’s be honest I’m sure it’s been more than 4 but who’s counting. How long does it take to write 500 pages?? This baby is more than 500 pages. If you have a PhD, I’m betting you’d guess 10 years of unpaid labor. How close am I? Nevermind – probably not a great comparison.
You all will be thrilled to know we are going to read every single f*cking page of this masterpiece together. The intro, the outro, each and every chapter of this beautifulness – totally kidding we are doing no such thing. But I’ve perused this behemoth of a document, and it’s loaded with goodies. All the names are named. The NIH, NIAID, our good friend Tony, his co-conspirators in the EcoHealth Alliance, Kristian Andersen, Peter Daszak, the bat lady – everyone is included. Thankfully the committee took pity on us and started with the punchlines.
Scandal involving your dollars, sketchy research, even sketchier funding for said research, the face that came to represent the very essence of “Science” during the pandemic.
Let’s just say, the proximal origins of Covid-19 is the granddaddy of rabbit holes. Actually, that might be the hollow moon theory – we’ll save that for next time. Today we’re going to jump into the recently published findings from the House Oversight Committee:
“The Origins of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including but Not Limited to the Federal Government’s Funding of Gain-of-Function Research”.
The full, 520-page final report can be found here: https://oversight.house.gov/report/after-action-review-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-the-lessons-learned-and-a-path-forward/
Part 1: The Congressional Report and the Lab Leak Theory
Reading directly from the House Committee report:
COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
You think? There are more than a few suspicious behaviors of this virus. I think you’d agree.
You can’t smell the coffee
Your coffee smells like shit
There’s a clot in your brain
Your eight-year-old daughter is having her period
Your 80-year-old grandmother is having her period
Your toes have developed gangrene
Lots of strange encounters of the third kind going on with this novel pathogen.
Additionally, under the microscope, we saw some interesting fingerprints were noted early on – namely the now infamous ‘polybasic furin cleavage site’ never before seen in a coronavirus that appeared to have been magically inserted into the genetic sequence of Sars-CoV-2.
You might know this, you might not. For all you folks in the latter category, viral infection normally requires a few steps. Kind of like someone robbing your house. First, the virus has to break in the front door. You keep it locked, don’t you? Same thing here. Someone coughing or sneezing in your face will take care of step one. Virus particles are now on the front porch with a crowbar.
Once the virus has made its way to your nose or lungs, it then needs to get inside the cells in order to make you sick. This is more like picking a lock than a crowbar. Maybe that was a bad analogy. The virus shows up with a hair pin, a small screwdriver, and a little bit of patience.
But such was not the case with Sars-CoV-2. For the first time in history, we saw a beta coronavirus cat burglar that brought its own master key. How did it get a key to your front door? Did you leave one under the doormat? Drop one on the front lawn? No – You know where it came from? YOU! You left it right in the lock. Sars-CoV-2 hijacks an enzyme made by your cells to hack into your own body. No picking of the lock. No crowbar needed. Just turned the key and walked right in.
Pretty cool party trick.
This ‘polybasic furin cleavage’ situation made entry into human cells slick as fuck. One might even describe the easy front door entrance, the enhanced infectivity, and increased ability to spread from one person to another as a prime example of ‘function that has been gained’ when compared to every other known coronavirus on the planet.
But what do I know. I’m just a doctor.
That’s what Covid did. Biological characteristics not found in nature. Moving on.
https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12863-023-01169-8
- Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
This is another curious fact: According to the data, all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. One. Just one. A lone viral gunman that somehow managed to destroy the globe all by itself.
In past pandemics—like, swine flu or bird flu—there were multiple spillover events. This is the viral equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Some viruses infect a few people here, a few there, until one lucky strain finds its stride and takes off.
But not this time. SARS-CoV-2 nailed it on its very first try. No do-overs needed.
What are the odds? A single introduction, and boom—global pandemic. This is like hitting the lottery, but instead of money, you win endless Zoom calls, your kids all doing online school in the background, and a year’s supply of agony bathed in hand sanitizer. In the messy, chaotic world of nature, viruses don’t usually pull off a hole in one. They ‘spill over’, as we say, multiple times, testing the waters. Until one strain adapts well enough to really spread. It’s evolution by trial and error.
Viruses don’t just wake up one day knowing how to infect millions of people. Unless, of course, some secrets were swapped in a lab of insider trading. Allegedly.
I’m looking at you, Nancy.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
So, let’s state the obvious: Wuhan is home to the world’s foremost SARS research lab. And this isn’t just any lab—it’s one that’s been conducting gain-of-function research for years. You know, the kind of research where they take viruses, add some function, and make them more dangerous with these gains. Oh, and in Wuhan you can apparently do such things at biosafety levels that could generously be described as… casual.
A deadly SARS outbreak starts in Wuhan. Across the stress from the Wuhan Institute of Virology where they study deadly new SARS viruses. Where on earth could this novel virus have come from?
Do you remember the bit Jon Stewart did on Steven Colbert on this? The one where Steven Colbert almost had a stroke trying to derail him? I mean he did everything but pull open the trap door on the stage. He could NOT get Jon Stewart to shut up. He just hammered this.
“There’s a noel respiratory coronavius overtaking Wuhan China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8
But there we were, being told to believe that the outbreak in Wuhan—a city known for housing a lab specifically studying these kinds of viruses—had absolutely nothing to do with said lab. Because, apparently, science works like that.
Shut up, conspiracy theorists.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were reportedly sick with a COVID-like illness in the fall of 2019. Yes, months before the official story kicked off at the wet market. Probably just a coincidence, right? I mean, what are the odds that the very people studying bat coronaviruses at this lab happened to catch something that looks, smells, and acts exactly like COVID-19 right before the pandemic began? Totally normal. Nothing to see here.
The reports say these researchers were so sick, they had to be hospitalized. And yet, somehow, no one but the tin foil hat wearers thought, “Hey, maybe we should test these guys for whatever knocked them out?”
Nope. Instead, we were told to believe that these cases had nothing to do with the outbreak that would start just down the road a few months later.
Now, to be fair, lab workers getting sick isn’t proof of a lab leak. But let’s just say, it’s not exactly exonerating evidence either. This is called Occam’s razor.
The simplest explanation is usually the best explanation.
- By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
Spoiler alert—it hasn’t.
In past pandemics, the natural origin story has been pieced together pretty quickly. For the original SARS pandemic in 2002, we traced it back to those scary looking cats within months.
