PA Counties locked down

[bogey1]

Do you lose smell and taste from a cold or flu? A friend was sick a couple weeks ago for for days and still can't smell or taste.

[eatmydust]

Do you lose smell and taste from a cold or flu? A friend was sick a couple weeks ago for for days and still can't smell or taste.

Colds and flus have rarely been associated with loss of smell and taste, however, over use of zinc gluconate products like Zicam can cause those side effects.

[RockIsland]

Do you lose smell and taste from a cold or flu? A friend was sick a couple weeks ago for for days and still can't smell or taste.

Colds and flus have rarely been associated with loss of smell and taste, however, over use of zinc gluconate products like Zicam can cause those side effects.

I always have since I was little. Almost every time my nose gets stuffed up, I can't taste or smell.

I assumed that was normal.

[ImminentDanger]

FBI: Fauci Funded 'Alarming' COVID Research in Wuhan
By Nick Koutsobinas - 20 April 2024
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/co...20/id/1161804/

A new COVID-19 revelation has come about via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request released Friday.

In the FOIA, internal FBI communications show the Bureau was tipped off in April 2020 that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had funded coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The "alarming" nature of the FOIA draws on a paragraph in the NIAID grant's "description," which, in its original form, appears to be erased from the internet. Nonetheless, the paragraph in the FOIA mentions how a "novel" coronavirus would be engineered "to infect human cells" while leaving no trace of its lab origins - thereby misleading future researchers - in the case of a future outbreak - that the novel virus had sprung out of nature.

Judicial Watch released the five FOIA pages of internal FBI communications on Friday.

"These smoking gun documents showed the FBI quickly understood that Fauci's agency funded the gain-of-function research that could disguise the resulting coronavirus as 'natural,'" Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch President, said, according to the New York Post.

"These new documents further demonstrate the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation into Fauci's gain-of-function scandal."

On April 23, 2020, the FBI email exchange took place under the subject line "Follow up call." A person, whose name has been redacted, shared information and analysis with several officials from the FBI Newark Field Office regarding the $661,980 grant awarded by the NIAID to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.

"The reason I am writing," the unnamed individual wrote to the FBI, "is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 ('infectious clone technology'), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***."

"Hey are you going to be in office tomorrow?" one agent wrote in a forward of the email. "We just interviewed our person from [redacted] and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me call if you can."

"This interesting," an unnamed agent wrote to Newark Field Office Special Agent in Charge Gregory Ehrie. "I'm following up with the squad tomorrow morning."

"Details when you can," Ehrie replied.

Emails obtained by Judicial Watch show FBI inquired into the grant for bat coronavirus at the Wuhan lab in May of 2020.

Last year, the FBI concluded that the most likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic was an accidental lab leak.

"The FBI has, for quite some time now, assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," FBI Director Christopher Wray stated on March 2023.

...

[bogey1]

We knew this already, judicial watch posted it last year. The fed works real slow huh

[ImminentDanger]

Ex-intel Officer: U.S. Had Proof of China COVID Cover-Up
By Eric Mack | Sunday, 05 May 2024 02:31 PM EDT
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/co...05/id/1163548/

The politicization of COVID-19 in America during the 2020 presidential election cycle ultimately led to worldwide skepticism that the intelligence was a "radioactive American political issue," according to a report.

Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly shared evidence of a Chinese cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic with the U.K. before former President Donald Trump left office in January 2021, but American politicization made recipients of the Five Eyes' intelligence sharing skeptical of it, The Telegraph reported Sunday.

"We saw several pieces of information and thought that they were, frankly, gobsmacking," a former intelligence official who worked on the report shared by Pompeo with the U.K. told the Telegraph. "They obviously pointed to the high likelihood that this was indeed a lab leak."

Five Eyes intelligence-sharing nations convened to discuss the evidence presented that China covered up coronavirus research, including gain of function, and military activity at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

U.K.'s then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was on the previously unreported call with Pompeo and with representatives from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, according to The Telegraph.

Two Trump officials said Raab and the U.K. government ignored the intelligence from the outgoing Trump administration, instead accepting government scientist resistance to the lab leak evidence.

Among the evidence of a Chinese lab leak, the State Department warned of "consistent stonewalling" by China, which accused local officials of "gross corruption and ineptitude."

Also, the intelligence included:

The first evidence that Chinese military officials worked at the WIV in the years leading up to the pandemic.
Lab staffers had fallen ill before the first cases of COVID-19 developed nearby.
Chinese scientists had been working on gain of function research.

The dismissal of the U.S. intelligence report from Pompeo led former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to publicly argue months later in June 2021 that "the advice that we have had is that it doesn't look as though this particular disease of zoonotic origin came from a lab," The Telegraph reported.

"Once the thing became fundamentally political, the ability to pursue it internationally really just collapsed because no one else was interested in touching it," one Trump official told The Telegraph. "I think [Five Eyes] were kind of annoyed by the way the issue had become treated in U.S. politics."

The sources told The Telegraph that the U.K. government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies' Sir Jeremy Farrar was one of the leading people to reject the lab leak intelligence report.

With the 2020 U.S. presidential election long in the rear view, the U.K. is now sharing the belief COVID-19 originated in the WIV, according to the Telegraph.

That January 2021 call was held on an "open line" in an effort to allow Chinese intelligence to pick up the fact the Five Eyes intelligence community had the goods on a China cover-up, the sources told The Telegraph.

"We did that deliberately," a State Department source said. "We wanted to put pressure on the bad guys."

The point of continuing to post these reports is to show that those who controlled the response to this created PANIC, acted according to their own interests, rather than presenting the facts as known. No actual, open discussion was conducted on the situation as it developed, nor were scientific approaches taken to evaluate the proper responses. These admissions, now coming to light, need to be widely broadcast as warnings against the future responses to such accidental or intentional assaults on humanity.

Even though many here were already of the opinion (perceived truth) that has now been admitted to by others, it is still necessary to document these facts to have them available for review in the future. It might be preaching to the choir, but we still need to create the songbook from which voices must be heard in future similar situations.

...

[ImminentDanger]

HHS halts grants for nonprofit EcoHealth that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan
By Social Links for Josh Christenson - Published May 15, 2024
https://nypost.com/2024/05/15/us-new...arch-in-wuhan/

The Department of Health and Human Services suspended all federal grants Tuesday to the controversial Manhattan nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which funded gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan, China in advance of the COVID-19 pandemic.

HHS deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions Katrina Brisbon informed EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak in a Wednesday letter released by a House subcommittee investigating the outbreak that there was "adequate evidence" to recommend the nonprofit be cut off from future government contracts, writing "immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest."

"Debarment is generally for a period not to exceed three years; however, regardless of whether EHA contests this action or responds to this Notice, I may impose debarment for a longer period or shorter period as the circumstances warrant," Brisbon added.

In an accompanying memo, Brisbon said that EcoHealth had been "more than two years late" with one of its reviews of a grant proposal for its Wuhan project, which had for a time operated around a government-wide moratorium on the practice.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which permitted the grant, gave EcoHealth several opportunities to disprove that its experiments constituted gain-of-function research - but the group "failed to do so," according to Brisbon.

That research also "likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety," she added, with experiments conducted at biosafety level 2 - which according to Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright is comparable to the standards of safety at a typical dentist's office.

Alarmingly, Brisbon revealed that NIH has yet to receive several materials from EcoHealth about its novel bat coronavirus research at the now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or from the Chinese lab itself.

Daszak, in sworn congressional testimony earlier this month, said he had not even asked Wuhan researchers - including longtime collaborator and WIV deputy director Shi Zhengli - for viral sequences since before the pandemic began.

Brisbon's memo also referenced an internal probe of "allegations that WIV released the coronavirus that was responsible for the COVID-19 global pandemic," though no EcoHealth or other US-funded grant has been tied yet to the outbreak.

"EcoHealth Alliance is disappointed by HHS' decision today and we will be contesting the proposed debarment," a spokesperson said in a statement. "We disagree strongly with the decision and will present evidence to refute each of these allegations and to show that NIH's continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest."

"EcoHealth Alliance provably defrauded the US government, provably breached contractual terns of US-government grants, and, through the reckless gain-of-function research it conducted in Wuhan, probably caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing 20 million and costing $25 trillion," Ebright told The Post.

"Nevertheless, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded more than $50 million in new US-government funding since the start of the pandemic with most of that funding earmarked for the same kinds of reckless virus discovery and virus enhancement research that likely caused pandemic."

The memo attached to the letter notes EcoHealth received a grant of more than $4 million from the NIH titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence."

More than half a million dollars of that funding flowed to the WIV between 2014 and 2021, a Government Accountability Office report found last year, to conduct "genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains."

The grant was initially suspended in April 2020, with NIH's then-principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak revealing in October 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant by performing the gain-of-function research.

The project had modified novel bat coronaviruses and made them 10,000 times more infectious for research on lab mice - but EcoHealth "failed to report" that to NIH.

Tabak stressed that the bat coronaviruses studied on the taxpayers' dime in Wuhan could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic because the "sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant."

But other EcoHealth grant proposals have since come under scrutiny from experts like Ebright, who said "the evidence provided by the genome sequence" from another 2018 grant proposal project submitted to US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was a "smoking gun."

Appearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on May 1, Daszak repeatedly denied that his group helped fund the gain-of-function experiments.

"EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak should never again receive a single penny from the US taxpayer," said COVID subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who had recommended a criminal investigation of Daszak before the hearing.

"Only two weeks after the Select Subcommittee released an extensive report detailing EcoHealth's wrongdoing and recommending the formal debarment of EcoHealth and its president, HHS has begun efforts to cut off all US funding to this corrupt organization," Wenstrup added.

"EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH," he went on.

"EcoHealth's immediate funding suspension and future debarment is not only a victory for the US taxpayer, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens worldwide."

The HHS letter to Daszak also drew attention to other NIH grants it received to study viruses in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations, all of which are "uniquely focused on either emerging infectious disease, highly transmissible pathogens, or novel viruses."

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was barred for 10 years from receiving any HHS grants in July 2023, months after both the FBI and US Energy Department determined a lab leak was the most likely cause of the COVID pandemic.

Wenstrup in his statement added that his subcommittee's "investigation into EcoHealth and the origins of COVID-19 is far from over," with high-profile public hearings planned in the coming weeks to question Tabak and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

"There must be full accountability, both civil and criminal, for EcoHealth and EcoHealth's officers - particularly its president, Peter Daszak," Ebright declared.

"And there must be full accountability for the US-government officials who enabled, abetted, and covered up EcoHealth's misdeeds and who obstructed investigation of EcoHealth's misdeeds."

Finally some consequences - If it is firmly applied. Hopefully there WILL be consequences for the government idiots that supported these grants and failed to exercise oversight when they went awry?

We'll see...

...

[bogey1]

Ahh yes, election season.

[Walleye Hunter]

Ahh yes, election season.

Does that mean that pot supplies will dry up too?

[bogey1]

Does that mean that pot supplies will dry up too?

I doubt it, it's highly taxed.