Forget About Prosecute/Fauci. Prosecute/Drosten

Written by Robert Kogon on May 30, 2024. Posted in Current News

Elon Musk has again trotted out his famous bon mot “Prosecute/Fauci”, though it remains unclear what for exactly.

Since, however, Musk tweeted this iteration of “Prosecute/Fauci” in combination with a retweet of a New York Post headline accusing the former NIAID director of having lied before the U.S. Congress, one can suppose perjury to start with.

Prosecute/Fauci https://t.co/jx72bfhBJ5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2024

More generally, of course, the thrust of the accusations is that Fauci funded the gain-of-function research in Wuhan which may have – or, according to Elon Musk, quite simply did! – give rise to SARS-CoV-2 and that in early 2020 he attempted to cover-up this fact by orchestrating a campaign to discredit the “lab leak” hypothesis.

Never mind that the actual evidence cited by Congress shows, on the contrary, that Fauci was entirely open to the “lab leak” hypothesis, not only suggesting that the FBI get involved but even encouraging Kristian Andersen to write a paper demonstrating why he thought that the virus had been genetically engineered. (See here, p.9 and passim.) Spurred on by Fauci, Andersen and a group of like-minded Anglosphere scientists would set out to do just that.

The exact same evidence – though, curiously, this aspect appears to have been largely ignored by Congress – shows that if pressure was put on Andersen and his colleagues to recant, it came not from Fauci but rather from a trio of European virologists led by none other than the designer of the “gold standard” SARS-CoV-2 PCR protocol, Christian Drosten.

It was Germany’s “star virologist” Drosten and his Dutch colleagues Ron Fouchier and Marion Koopmans who would attempt to roughly talk some sense into Andersen and his Anglosphere colleagues on the famous February 1st, 2020 conference call organised by Jeremy Farrar. (Another German virologist, Stefan Pöhlmann, was also on the call, but he appears not to have said much.)

“[T]he arguments from Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten are presented with more forcefulness than necessary,” Fauci’s boss, then NIH director Francis Collins, daintily noted in an e-mail to Farrar the next day. (See below and for all the “Farrar-Fauci” e-mails here). Nonetheless, Collins allowed that he too was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely” – yet further proof that virtually the entire American or, more generally, Anglosphere side of the conversation had been leaning towards a lab origin.

Collins agreed with Farrar’s suggestion of turning the matter over to the WHO, in order, he said to preserve “international harmony” – another apparent nod to how adamant the Europeans were.

When, however, Andersen and his colleagues persisted in their pursuit of the “lab leak” hypothesis even after their upbraiding, this would provoke a remarkably pissy e-mail from none other than Christian Drosten (see below), who wondered, in effect, why the Anglosphere scientists were even giving the lab origin hypothesis the time of day. “Didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory [i.e. ‘lab leak’], and, if we could, drop it?” Drosten asked imperiously, “…Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

So, as I have asked repeatedly since Elon Musk first posted his bon mot, why not “Prosecute/Drosten”? Drosten clearly led the efforts to suppress the lab origin hypothesis. Fouchier appears to have been, so to say, the intellectual “muscle”: providing the bulk of the arguments against a lab origin both in the conference call and in a long e-mail which he sent to other participants two days later.

Drosten’s and Fouchier’s conduct in the matter is also described in the anonymous “whistleblower” e-mail to Jon Cohen of Science magazine, which is reproduced here. They are undoubtedly the two “world-class” coronavirus experts to whom the whistleblower refers, one of whom – namely, Drosten – told Andersen and his colleagues that their suspicions were “nonsense” and then got off the call.

Furthermore, why would Drosten have been so irate about “dropping” the lab origin hypothesis if he did not have something to hide or at least know there was something to hide? This is not a matter of molecular biology; it is simply a matter of human psychology.

As I have shown, Christian Drosten had far more and more substantial ties to virology research in Wuhan – and undoubtedly a greater understanding of what could have or was going on there – than Anthony Fauci. As both the e-mails and testimony to congressional investigators make clear, Fauci appears to have been clueless about the substance of the discussions and to have contributed very little. He “certainly didn’t add anything of substance to the scientific discussions”, Andersen told investigators (p.15).

As for perjury, while Fauci may have perjured himself, in light of the above e-mail – which, n.b., only came to light thanks to an American FOIA request – it appears certain that Christian Drosten did. Thus, having already been accused by the German physicist Roland Wiesendanger of having participated in efforts to cover up a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, in March 2022, Drosten submitted a sworn statement to a Berlin court in which, among other things, he affirmed:

I have no interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a certain direction. In particular, I had and I have no personal interest in ruling out the so-called laboratory thesis…

The full statement is available in German here.

No interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in a certain direction? No personal interest in ruling out the laboratory thesis? How is that compatible with “Didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and, if we could, drop it?”

See more here Daily Sceptic

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