It’s Time for the Truth. Here’s the Covid Paper They Don’t Want You to Read
On his Rational Optimist Society Substack, Matt Ridley presents compelling evidence that a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology likely triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s an excerpt:
Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed including – unfortunately and worryingly – in science itself. I can think of few things worse for progress than for the public to lose faith in science, which is why I’ve made it something of a personal mission to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid-19. We need to rescue science’s mission of seeking the truth at all costs, even when it comes with an uncomfortable lesson about the dangers of irresponsible experiments.
As readers may know, I began by thinking a lab leak was unlikely, even impossible, as the source of the virus that emerged suddenly in Wuhan at the end of 2019. But during the late spring of 2020 I saw evidence that this hypothesis was in fact quite plausible and needed investigating at the very least. I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
Yet still the scientific establishment refused to take the hypothesis seriously, let alone investigate it. There are over 20 million people dead, and you don’t want to know why? Imagine if this were their reaction to a chemical spill that killed thousands of people, or a nuclear accident that killed tens of thousands. This killed millions. I tried to get the Royal Society and The Academy of Medical Sciences to debate it, but they refused: too controversial, they said!
Journals like Nature and Science barely touched the topic and even then only to dismiss the lab leak in condescending tones without bothering to engage with the evidence. Science journalists steered clear of the biggest story of their careers lest it annoy their sources. Yet the public, the world’s governments, and the intelligence community all soon came to the conclusion that a lab leak probably did cause the Wuhan outbreak. I found this institutional ostrich act by Big Science deeply disturbing.
In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The journal’s editor promptly rejected it: the reason, it was clear, was that he did not want to rock the scientific boat.
Now I am posting this paper online for all to read. It was composed several months ago so one or two small new items may be missing, but nothing in it has proved wrong. It is written not in my normal style but in dry, scientific prose, with each statement backed up by a source, in the shape of nearly 100 end-note references, so that readers can check for themselves that we have represented the sources faithfully. It deserves to be available to people to read.
To read Matt Ridley and Prof Anton van der Merwe’s rejected paper, click here.
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Yawn.
🤣 “You took the words right out of my mouth.”🎵🎸
I’m so over everything Covid. There’s only so many times you can regurgitate what’s now been said a gazillion times.🥱 I thought it was just me having a lower boredom threshold than most…😉
It’s all so what now Mogs. It was a scam, the greatest scam ever pulled on humanity. It was an exercise in compliance and kiddology and it will actually be exceeded by the Climate scam if they can get away with it.
Who cares – lab leak, accident, so what. The intention was to scare populations, enforce a compliance mentality and ultimately to inject as many millions as possible in order to injure, sterilise and kill. In other words a poorly executed attempt at mass murder which should they try again will fail miserably.
I couldn’t care less because the C1984 was never about re-branded ‘flu it was about all the above.
From our point of view it alerted us realists to the reality that governments were at war with their peoples and should no longer be trusted, in fact they should be fought against in every way possible.
My suspicion is that covid’s origins are repeatedly pasted into DS news simply to satisfy Toby’s continued adherence to cock-up theory in the vague hope somebody will write something to support him. Yawn. Again.
Yawn yes quite, but we can’t let the bastards get away with it surely you can see that whenever possible however tedious we need to give then both barrels.
We’re seeing a lot of these lab leak stories. It diverts attention from the real issue which is that whatever “Covid” was, what was done in the name of it was very wrong.
… And that there never was a “COVID pandemic”… Only a pandemic of lies, lies, damned lies and corruption.
Don’t forget that there are presumably readers new to all this who are only just starting to read the DS
Hardly a day passes when I do not recommend the DS to ‘normies’ as a good place to make a start.
By reading the BTL comments and the links to other sites, many much less temperate, one hopes that the penny will begin to drop
That’s a fair point, though a “normy” takeaway from this might be “the idiots should not be allowed to conduct dangerous experiments, and they lied to us” but also “just as well we locked down and had magic vaccines otherwise we’d all be dead from the Frankenvirus”.
My takeaway is “maybe all of this is true, which means they are wasting taxpayers money and lying to us” but also “there was no pandemic, and even if there were to have been a pandemic, the measures taken don’t work and can never be justified on moral or practical grounds”.
Hear, hear.
Fair point. I just struggle with the “origins” story. It was a bloody Con.
This “paper” Mat references says “caused 20 million deaths”. There is very little evidence that this is true, and anyway the overall death statistics from several countries show this was early on when old people were labelled as Covid whatever else was wrong with them. The evidence now shows about a 10% increase in excess deaths in the UK after the jabs were forced onto everyone, and is, if anything, still increasing. The method of measurement has been changed by the ONS to cover up these excess deaths on a year on year basis, which should be all the proof anyone needs to prove this is the real problem with covid, not the disease but the alleged “cure”. The jab has also been shown to damage the immune response, probably forever, of the jabbed and to increase the likelihood of more serious cancers. Oh dear, never mind where it came from, they are still trying to push the jabs!
Appreciated 👏
I guess the lesson for politicians is that if you want to get away with something, think big. Get a large crowd of fellow culprits that will keep you in the clear.
The bigger the lie…
The fact that nearly all countries stepped into line rapidly and locked down along with masking and then mass compulsory vaccination indicates that they may have been given information about a lab leak of a deliberately altered virus and panicked. One giant cock up followed by another giant cock up. However, there was a lot of consistency and alignment with global NGO like the UN and WHO which suddenly seemed to be telling citizens around the world what to do, or not do. Perhaps the political panic was genuine but that panic was manufactured by powerful interests such as the WEF and GAVI?
There was NO Pandemic. There was NO cock-up.
It certainly seems there was deliberate intent. Klaus Schwab’s dystopian book “COVID 19: The Great Reset” just confirmed my suspicions. All the various cold and flu viruses travel round the world all the time so in principle we are in a continuous pandemic of several viruses at once, and have been for perhaps 100s of years. And it’s not a problem. Hope Simpson studied all these types of viruses for about 50 years and we can see below that in the northern Hemisphere the Coronavirus is more widespread during the winter.
Seasonality of viruses was ignored, or rather denied, and lockdowns and vaccinations were administered at the point the coronavirus starts to naturally recede. How successful all the lockdowns and masks and vaccines must have appeared. How disastrous it all was.
Thank you, hux. We absolutely need to keep pointing to the elephant in the room.
Or, as they say in French, the elephant in the corridor.
Another French saying I learned just the other day, which is popular here in Pyrenees-Orientales, and which also translates nicely into English:
Si on n’a pas le droit, on prend la gauche.
If we don’t have the right, we go left.
Thanks M A k.
After a quick scan through the paper, I was surprised that there was no mention that several coronaviruses in the human field are, errr, common. After all, the term “coronavirus” was invented by the Common Cold unit many years ago.
Tucker Carlson broke the story in February 2020 his best moment being: “when they give you an answer to a question you didn’t ask you know they are lying.”
Why does no one mention the fact that the world military games were held in Wuhan, October 2019? Fit young soldiers from countries all around the world in one place. That is more than serendipity.
“Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed including – unfortunately and worryingly – in science itself. I can think of few things worse for progress than for the public to lose faith in science“
The world has “largely moved on” because lots of people were in on the scam and lots of others got scammed and neither side wants anyone to focus on that.
I have not “moved on”. I’m enjoying my life enormously but I have not forgotten or forgiven any of it.
I think it’s really rather excellent that people have lost faith in dishonest scientists, fake scientists, fake experts, fake politicians and a whole host of other grifters. People should have a lot less faith and a lot more critical thinking.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Exactly, tof. 👏
“Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed including – unfortunately and worryingly – in science itself.” None of this was anything remotely like science. Something vaguely resembling science, which we can call scientism, was used to stop any disagreement or scrutiny of what was going on. Those behind all this will be quite happy if everyone has moved on and will also be happy if people have lost faith in science. This opens the way for more of this tyranny. “We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” Richard Feynman A lab leak was the most likely cause right from the beginning as the Wuhan lab was implicated particularly as attempts were made to blame bats and the wet market next door. Humans haven’t just moved to Earth and discovered all these animals. It was the state of Wuhan that was locked down which is also where the lab is. Fauci was also funding Gain of Function testing at the Wuhan lab and… Read more »
Science has never really been open and honest. There is plenty of historical evidence that individuals have falsified data and results, denigrate rivals work. And there is the Kuhn paradigm that posits thag science only moves forward when a new generation comes along.
And we have a new problem in our age: the communication of scientific thought caused by wokification and left-mindedness. That is what causes rhe covid scandal, in my opinion.
Guys, let’s be honest. We did not have a pandemic. It was a plandemic to usher in some pretty dangerous experimental biologicals. And guess what, they did. Know anyone who has had a stroke, heart attack, atrial fib, vertigo, dementia. MND, Parkinson’s, autoimmune disease, cancers, lung disease, other heart ailments etc etc. the same people who,took the vaxxes, just keep getting ill, sepsis, pneumonia, etc etc.
I suppose it’s useful to have a record that the Scamdemic resulted from a lab leak of Gain of Function experiments carried out by the Chinese, but paid for by the American military.
But those of us with a few functioning brain cells worked most of that out a very long time ago. And we’ve also worked out that the real purpose of the Scamdemic was Population CONTROL and mass testing of the mRNA gene therapies they’d been (unsucessfully) trying to produce for decades and getting “the platform” in place to push them in future.
But heyho ….. Toby tells us it was all a cock up.
This long overdue paper is so welcome.
Over the years, as a biologist and businessman I read and wrote a lot about the risks of gain of function research particular in viruses and bacteria.
My gut feeling as soon as Wuhan was identified as the source of the Covid outbreak was to pinpoint the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the obvious source. Claims that the local (Wuhan) wet market was to blame seemed absurd especially knowing a nearby lab was heavily involved in research on viral genetics and had a history of problems with its biosecurity.
That Wuhan also plays a key part in the CCP’s biological weapon research work also seemed relevant.
To me, accidental release was the most likely but I still harbour a nasty lingering feeling that it wasn’t an accident.
When it comes to understanding how the sinister Covid saga evolved I’m always reminded of a quote from Carl Sagan.
“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it? …
“Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. A way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”
Thanks for this. I don’t know much about Carl Sagan beyond “famous scientist” but those are indeed wise and prescient words.
20 million died – of what? A scam. Even if you believe the Covid bit only about 5% actually had Covid only on their death certificate so they supposedly died of Covid, the rest, 95% died with Covid i.e. they died of something they already had NOT Covid. 5% of 20 million equals 1 million. Funnny how flu disappeared during the scamdemic and how many people each year die from flu? I believe about 650,000 not a million miles away from 1 million deaths calculated above. Sounds to me like a nothingburger. So yes yawn time!