Is this the smoking gun for the Covid lab leak? Blueprint for creating a 'SARS-CoV' virus with an altered spike protein in Wuhan was published in 2018, bombshell new records show

By Alexa Lardieri U.S. Deputy Health Editor Dailymail.Com 08:27 AEDT 20 Dec 2023 , updated 08:29 AEDT 20 Dec 2023

• American and Chinese scientists proposed experimenting with spike proteins
• Ultimately, it was not selected for a grant and the project did not move forward
• READ MORE:  Sen Rand Paul goes nuclear over 'Covid cover-up'

A newly-uncovered trove of documents detailing plans to create a Covid-like virus in China months before the pandemic make the 'lab leak almost certain', experts say.

The records - obtained now by FOIA requests - lay out a plan to 'engineer spike proteins' to infect human cells that would then be 'inserted into SARS-Covid backbones' at the infamous Wuhan virology lab from December 2018.

Just a year later, in late 2019, the Covid-19 virus emerged with a uniquely adept ability to infect humans, going on to cause a global pandemic. 

The proposal was made by the now-notorious EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that channels US government grants abroad to fund these types of experiments.

Ultimately, the application was denied by the US Department of Defense, but critics say the plans laid out in the proposal serve as a 'blueprint' for how to create Covid, and inadvertently start a pandemic.

The documents also show how EcoHealth deliberately tried to mislead the Pentagon on how risky the experiments were to secure funding.

Sen Rand Paul - who has been a vocal supporter of the lab leak theory - added the documents further support of the 'deception' used by players tied to the Wuhan lab.

Matt Ridley, a biologist and science writer who has written extensively about the potential lab leak in the past, said: 'This latest [document] leak makes the case for a lab leak almost certain. 

'A reckless experiment, known at the time to be reckless, probably caused the death of millions of people. 

'Scientists and the media conspired to conceal the evidence. Let that sink in.'

The documents were obtained by nonprofit public health research group US Right to Know, which has previously been accused of fueling anti-vaccine sentiments.

The grant proposal was entitled Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses.

It proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as the original SARS to preempt a human spillover and develop vaccine technology and strategies. 

The team sought to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily. 

The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19's origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments.

The grant then proposed attaching the furin to coronavirus strains and infecting mice to see how ill it would make them.

The plan was then to use drugs and vaccines to treat the disease. 

Dr Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told DailyMail.com: 'These revelations are important because the experiments in the grant proposal likely - indeed highly likely - led to the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2.' 

The grant proposal has raised concerns and some say it serves as further support of the Covid lab leak theory - that the virus was borne out of gain-of-function research bankrolled by the US taxpayer through Dr Anthony Fauci's former department, a theory the FBI and other government agencies now subscribe to.

The principal investigator on the project is listed as Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, a now-notorious health agency that uses US government money to sponsor there's types of experiments abroad. 

Other team members listed on the proposal include researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School, University of North Carolina, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, Palo Alto Research Center and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab where Covid is believed to have originated from.

The proposal listed Professor Shi Zhengli - been dubbed the 'bat lady' for her extensive work on bat coronaviruses at the WIV - as the lead on the project in Wuhan.

Additionally, Dr Ralph Baric was listed as a subcontractor on the project. Dr Baric is a known expert in making recombinant coronaviruses.   

The documents show the experiments were proposed to take place at the WIV, which has fewer safety precautions for working with pandemic-potential specimens than the US, which was advertised to the DoD as cost-saving. 

The American scientists concealed the lack of safety precautions from DARP in order to avoid national security concerns about conducting high-level biosafety research in China. 

In initial proposals for DEFUSE, the lab work was to be done in a biosafety-level 2 lab, which researchers said would appeal to DARPA grant-makers as 'highly cost effective' despite the fewer safety precautions taken in lower-level labs

Dr Baric acknowledged in an edited version of the proposal US researchers would 'freak out' if they knew novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in a BSL-2 lab.

Similar experiments in the US are conducted in BSL-3 labs.  

A later version of the proposal changed BSL-2 to BSL-3. 

Biosafety levels range from one to four, with four being the strictest and experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens. 

Dr Baric wrote: 'In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells.'

BSL-2 labs feature ventilated safety cabinets and researchers must wear surgical masks and lab coats. Experts say pathogen with the possibility of being transmitted through the air should be, at a minimum, performed in a BSL-3 lab, which has researchers in more protective respirators. 

Dr Ebright told DailyMail.com: 'The new documents reveal that EcoHealth Alliance planned to use US Department of Defense funds to perform high-risk virus experiments at WIV at a biosafety level that was inadequate for research with a potential pandemic pathogen.'

He added: 'The new documents also reveal that EcoHealth Alliance deliberately concealed these plans - both the plan to perform high-risk experiments at WIV and the plan to perform them using inadequate biosafety protections - from the US Department of Defense in order to improve the chances of receiving funding.' 

Dr Ebright tweeted: 'At this point, there is sufficient evidence to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a lab accident.'

While people who believed and promoted the lab-leak origin were initially accused of being xenophobic and pushing a conspiracy theory, the FBI and several other governmental agencies ascribe to this theory. 

EXCLUSIVE: America's frightening new bat lab: $12m taxpayer-funded NIH research facility in Colorado will import bats from Asia and infect them with deadly diseases - in project with China-linked scientists

A new taxpayer-funded lab is being built in Colorado that will import bats from around the world and experiment on dangerous diseases, DailyMail.com can reveal. 

The formal DEFUSE grant proposal states the engineering of the coronavirus spike protein would be carried out by Dr Baric in North Carolina. 

However, in an earlier comment on the proposal, Daszak said WIV will actually be doing most of the work but this fact was left out of the proposal to make DARPA more 'comfortable' with the details. 

Dazsak said in an email: 'If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team.

'Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well.'

In another comment, however, Daszak reiterates his desire to stress the US-focus of the project. 

He wrote: 'I am planning to use my resume and Ralph's [Baric]. Linfa/Zhengli, I realize your resumes are also very impressive, but I’m trying to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.'

In a statement Tuesday, EHA called the documents ' incomplete' and said the 'allegations are false based on misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotations and a lack of understanding the process by which federal grants are awarded.' 

Justin Goodman, president of The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group fighting to stop sending American tax dollars overseas to fund dangerous virus research, told DailyMail.com the documents prove US tax dollars have 'footed the bill for the shady EcoHealth Alliance and their comrades at the reckless Wuhan lab to supercharge coronaviruses in dangerous gain-of-function experiments.'

At least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic have since been thrown away at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of €4 billion, an analysis by POLITICO reveals. And that's almost certainly an underestimate.

Since the first coronavirus vaccines were approved in late 2020, EU countries have collectively taken delivery of 1.5 billion doses (more than three for every person in Europe). Many of these now lie in landfills across the Continent.

Calculations based on available data show that EU countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population. Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs.

If this average waste rate is projected across the rest of the EU, it would equal more than 312 million destroyed vaccines.

It's not easy to discover how many vaccines have been thrown out. Governments, including the EU's second-most populous country France, are reluctant to reveal the scale of the waste.

POLITICO's calculations are based on numbers from 19 European countries — 15 that supplied us with direct figures, and four where volumes were reported in local media. Some figures date from as recently as this month; the oldest come from December 2022.

The passage of time means the figures we received are conservative, with the real number of discarded vaccines likely much higher.

Germany, for example, provided its waste figures to POLITICO in June; at the time it had another 120 million vaccines sitting in storage. Vaccine-makers have also since introduced newer versions that are adapted to the latest coronavirus variants, making older jabs obsolete and more likely to be discarded.

POLITICO estimates the value of the 215 million wasted vaccines at more than €4 billion, based on vaccine prices reported in the media (they have not been made public). For countries that only reported the total number of vaccines destroyed, without breaking it down by vaccine type, POLITICO used a weighted average price of €19.39 calculated from data given by countries that provided a breakdown.

Again, this figure is almost certainly a minimum. But even €4 billion is a considerable sum, equal to a large infrastructure project or to the annual health care spending of Croatia.

Many of the vaccines in question were purchased at the height of the pandemic in 2021 when the EU, the U.S. and the U.K. were all scrambling to secure a limited number of doses. It was during that frenzied time that the EU entered into its single biggest contract to purchase 1.1 billion doses from Pfizer and BioNTech.

It's easy to forget how uncertain things were in 2021, and the EU deal was lauded at the time. But both the size and the timing of the agreement turned out to be problematic. Countries were locked into buying doses even as the pandemic subsided, while efforts to donate excess jabs to third countries were thwarted by falling demand and logistics issues.

The repercussions are more than financial. Questions around how the big Pfizer contract was negotiated have dogged Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ever since the New York Times reported that the EU chief had exchanged messages with Pfizer's CEO in the run-up to the deal.

The contract has already been renegotiated by the European Commission under pressure from EU countries suffering from a vaccine glut. Both Poland and Hungary stopped accepting vaccines and are being sued by Pfizer for non-payment. In Romania, prosecutors want to lift immunity for its former prime minister and two former health ministers, claiming excessive vaccine purchases caused more than €1 billion in damages to the state.

In the meantime, the jabs will keep coming, with the revised contract with Pfizer locking European countries into buying vaccines until at least 2027.

Fearistan, having done very well economically and provided its citizens a long lifespan, noticed that people were still occasionally dying in road accidents. Fearistanis were wealthy and really liked the freedom to travel. While road deaths were uncommon, any unnecessary death surely seemed worth avoiding.

The road-building industry, working closely with government, came up with the idea of building 6-lane highways between cities. Soon the big cities were all connected, and experts from the University of Transport proved that the new highways had a 7 percent lower accident rate than normal roads. University modelers predicted that if 6-lane highways were built between every town in Fearistan, they would save thousands of lives. Experts predicted that they would even save more lives than were actually dying on the existing roads.

The country followed the experts (they were, after all, renowned for building roads) and invested in 6-lane highways everywhere. While the country exhausted itself and most people could not afford to drive their cars anymore, they were rightly grateful that the road-builders were saving them. The near empty roads were now almost completely accident-free, proving the experts right.

Eventually, the road-building industry faced a dilemma; they were running out of towns to which roads could be built. This was not what their investors needed. Then the road regulator and the road-builders met and identified an urgent need to build roads to towns that did not yet exist. Fearistan had vast areas of empty desert that were completely open to town-building. When such towns were eventually built, experts predicted an inevitable and devastating tsunami of road accidents. This would return Fearistan to the total carnage from which they had so narrowly escaped years before. The new Town-X roads (as they termed them) were brilliant examples of high-tech road construction. And everyone could see how important this work was, to keep the public safe. 

In public health, we follow a similarly important business model. We call it ‘Disease-X.’

Understanding pandemic risk from infectious disease

Humans suffered for millennia from pandemics or ‘plagues.’ These killed up to a third of some populations. While causes in some cases remain unclear, such as the Athenian plague of 430 BC, the major plagues since Medieval times were mostly bacterial; particularly bubonic plague, cholera, and typhus. 

Bacterial pandemics ceased in late 19^th century Europe with improved sanitation, and elsewhere after the addition of antibiotics. Most deaths from the pre-antibiotic Spanish flu outbreak in the early 20^th century are also thought to be untreated secondary bacterial pneumonia. Cholera remains an intermittent marker of extreme poverty and social disruption, whilst most deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS are associated with poverty, which restricts access to effective treatment.

When indigenous populations long separated from the bulk of humanity encountered carriers of smallpox and measles, the effects were also devastating. Having no inherited immunity, whole populations were decimated, particularly in the Americas, Pacific Islands, and Australia. 

Now the world is connected, and such mass death events don’t occur. Connectedness can be a strong defense against pandemics, contrary to what Disease X proponents claim, through its role in supporting early-age immunity and frequent boosting.

These realities reflect orthodox public health but are poorly compatible with current business models. They are, therefore, increasingly ignored.

A century of safety

The past hundred years have seen two significant natural influenza pandemic events (in 1957-8 and 1968-9) and one major coronavirus outbreak (Covid-19) that appears to have arisen from gain-of-function research in a lab. The influenza outbreaks each killed less than currently die annually from tuberculosis, while the coronavirus outbreak was associated with mortality at average age above 75 years, with roughly 1.5 people per thousand dying globally.

While the media fusses about other outbreaks, they have actually been relatively small events. SARS-1 in 2003 killed about 800 people worldwide, or less than half the number of children that die every single day from malaria. MERS killed about 850 people, and the West African Ebola outbreak killed about 11,300. Context here is important; tuberculosis kills over 1.5 million people every year while malaria kills over half a million children, and over 600,000 people die of cancer each year in the United States alone. SARS-1, MERS and Ebola may gain more media coverage than tuberculosis, but this is unrelated to actual risk.

Why are we living longer?

The reason behind increasing human lifespans is frequently forgotten, or ignored. As medical students were once taught, advancements came primarily through improved sanitation, better living conditions, better nutrition, and antibiotics; the same changes responsible for the reduction in pandemics. Vaccines came after most improvement had already occurred (with a few exceptions such as smallpox).

While vaccines do remain an important addition, they are also of particular importance to pharmaceutical companies. They can be mandated, and together with the constant birth of children this provides a continuing, predictable, and profitable market. This is not an anti-vaccine statement. It is just a statement of fact. Facts are what health policy should be based on.

So, we can be confident that, barring an intentional or accidental release of a pathogen engineered by humans, it is highly unlikely that a Medieval-style outbreak will affect anyone currently living. While poverty will reduce life expectancy, it will remain relatively high in wealthier countries. However, we can also be very confident that those half-million young children will die of malaria next year and that 1.5 million people, many of them children and young adults, will die of tuberculosis. 

Over 300,000 women in low-income countries will also die agonizing deaths from cervical cancer because they cannot access cheap screening. We know this, because it happens every year – it is what international public health, particularly the World Health Organization (WHO), was supposed to prioritize.

The ability to monetize an illusion

The Covid-19 response demonstrated how the sponsors of international public health institutions have found a way to monetize public health. This business model involves promoting abnormal responses to relatively normal viruses. It employs behavioral psychology and media campaigns to instill inappropriate fear into the public, then ‘locking them down’ – prison terminology before 2020. The public may then regain a degree of freedom (e.g., fly to visit a dying relative, or work) if they agree to take a vaccine, which in turn directly benefits the original sponsors of the scheme. The heavy public investment in Covid-19 mRNA vaccine development enabled pharmaceutical companies and their investors to reap unprecedented returns.

The major public-private partnership for vaccine development for pandemics, CEPI (inaugurated at the World Economic Forum in 2017), states that “The threat of Disease-X infecting the human population, and spreading quickly around the world, is greater than ever before.” 

Health practitioners are quite susceptible to this propaganda (they are only human). Many also seek income from investments and patents from technologies that may help lock others down or make vaccine production quicker and cheaper. Basing their salaries and careers on loyalty to this pandemic industry, they join in vilifying and scapegoating those who speak against it. Shielded by their sponsors’ ‘greater threat than ever before’ claims, they can blind themselves to the major causes of ill health and act as if only pandemic risk matters.

Why not rely on existing threats?

Despite current efforts with yet another variant, Covid-19 is losing its ability to scare. Sustained fear is necessary for politicians in penetrated governments (as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum notes) to provide this support. This business paradigm requires a continuing target. 

The overall aim is for the public to think that only a corporate authoritarian (fascist) nanny-state can save them from a continuing threat. Major natural outbreaks being rare, and lab escapes also infrequent, Disease-X fills this need. It provides the material for the media and politicians to work with between variant or monkeypox events.

Where to from here?

For the public, diversion of resources to fairyland diseases will increase mortality by diverting funding for real threats and productive areas of investment. Of course, if increasing lab leaks of engineered pathogens are expected from ongoing and future research, that would be different. But then this would have to be explained plainly and transparently, and prevention may be more effective than a very expensive cure.

Disease-X is a business strategy, dependent on a series of fallacies, dressed up as an altruistic concern for human welfare. Embraced by powerful people, the world they move in accepts amoral practice in public health as a legitimate path to their version of success. 

If our primary aim is to channel taxpayer funding to development of biotechnologies that the public can then be mandated to buy, to their own detriment but at great benefit to the developers, then Disease-X is the road forward. This market model ensures that a relative few can concentrate wealth gained from the many, at virtually no risk to themselves. The public must decide whether they want to keep their part of this highly abusive bargain.

By Professor Robert Dingwall Updated 08:06 AEST 04 Aug 2023

This may seem hard to believe, but for 48 hours in March 2020, as Covid-19 started to sweep the country, the United Kingdom authorities set out to manage the pandemic in much the same way as Sweden.

That, after all, had been the plan for at least two decades of preparing for such a crisis.

There would have been no 'lockdown', just an honest account of the facts from those in charge. The British public would have been trusted to behave sensibly, as the public was trusted in Sweden.

There would have been no compulsory masks, no mandates to keep us two metres apart from one another, even in our moments of greatest need. Schools would have remained open and the economy fully functioning.

In the event, our panicked politicians lost their nerve. Britain's carefully researched battle plan was binned in favour of more draconian and — as events have proved — more destructive measures to close down national life.

The Swedes were disappointed when we abandoned them in what had been an entirely sensible approach, although they won't be too concerned today. Sweden went on to have a far better outcome than us: fewer deaths and less collateral damage to society and the economy.

Not that you would know this from the first stage of the Covid-19 Inquiry, which has cost an eye-watering £40million after just 23 days of hearings. A further £1.6million will be spent on hiring high-end advertising agency M&C Saatchi to promote a scheme asking for people to share their experiences of the pandemic.

Through its lines of questioning, the Inquiry's legal team has been constructing a very different account of Britain's pandemic response.

This alternative story suggests that the government and civil service were negligent, that they failed to make adequate preparations for suppressing the pandemic.

That, in fact, we prepared for the wrong virus — influenza — rather than a novel coronavirus such as Covid-19. Yet this is to ignore the science, the history — and the truth.

I know something about Britain's pandemic planning as, from 2005-11, I was part of it.

As a senior sociologist I belonged to an official group, CEAPI — the Committee on Ethical Aspects of Pandemic Influenza, part of an initiative led by the Cabinet Office to prepare the Government for what was bound to be a major social challenge.

Our brief was wider than the name suggests. We looked at most social aspects of pandemic planning. We saw working papers from almost every government department detailing how a pandemic might affect their jurisdiction.

Our membership was broad, including philosophy, law and social science academics, journalists, patient advocates and people with clinical and operational duties in health and social care. Such voices were largely absent from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in 2020 — a group of scientists including Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.

We received papers from mathematical modellers and considered them. We did not have those modellers in the room — or on Zoom — shouting down the views of others. Medics were in a minority.

I can say, then, that the official United Kingdom plan for dealing with a novel respiratory virus, even one as dangerous as Covid-19, was quite the opposite of negligent.

Not only was it well thought through, it was admired across Europe. Throughout 2006-7 I spoke at international conferences, where leading public health officials told me as much.

A pandemic challenges a whole society not just its health system. Any British response would be led from the centre of government, and not its health ministry, as in other countries. Decisions would balance public health against wider social and economic issues.

Whatever the enquiry concludes about our preparations, it is false to claim that Britain's planners failed to consider how we might suppress a pandemic virus.

Close attention was paid to whether we might shut borders, restrict internal travel and shut schools. But we decided these things were unworkable or, worse, counterproductive.

For example, it was obvious that border closures would soon cause food shortages. Internal travel restrictions — including checkpoints on motorways — would be unworkable in a country with a dense road network.

Closing schools provoked much discussion, but the consequences were clear. As soon as you shut these, the country's workforce is crippled by the need to stay at home and look after children.

Children are much safer in school — provided there are enough teachers and volunteers to supervise them. Children's interests came first in our considerations.

A study this week from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found the pandemic had a 'catastrophic' impact on children's emotional and social skills.

As far as I recall, masks were not even discussed. From my own reading, it was clear that cloth masks had not helped during any previous influenza pandemic.

Their widespread use in a few Asian countries had as much to do with urban pollution as infection control following the SARS (2002) and MERS (2012) outbreaks. An independent 2007 review by the Cochrane group — a global non-profit without commercial or conflicted funding — underlined the lack of evidence of any benefit.

Contact tracing was equally pointless beyond the first few hundred cases (to build a more specific picture of the virus).

There was no great benefit in closing bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres or other places where people mix. There was no evidence from previous pandemics to justify this.

In summary, the British planners decided it would be far more cost-effective just to ask people to stay at home if they had symptoms.

They had considered the evidence available, weighed the costs, harms and benefits and concluded that attempts at suppression were unlikely to be effective.

Government resources would have been better used to keep society and the economy going rather than shutting it down. Of course, all plans should be reviewed regularly in the light of new risks and evidence, and it is true that Britain's pandemic preparations were due to be revisited.

A review was begun in 2016 but was disrupted by factors, including Brexit preparations.

The basic plan, though, remained a good one — including the decision to base it on pandemic influenza. As Professor Dame Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, told the Inquiry, this was the sensible model.

Pandemic influenza is as novel a virus as Covid-19 (it is not simply a version of seasonal influenza or any of 200 or so other viruses that can cause similar symptoms).

And it is pandemic influenza that has returned time and time again, killing millions around the world in the preceding century or so.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel every time a new respiratory virus comes along. Since March 2020, I have often asked myself why a great deal of emergency planning work was so lightly discarded. I think there are three main factors.

First, we overestimated the courage of politicians and their willingness to tell the country the truth — that we were facing a crisis and little could be done to prevent significant loss of life.

This is obvious in the evidence given by former Health Secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock, the latter having been in charge for most of the pandemic.

Both assumed that something could be done — must be done — and looked for people to support that assumption, regardless of the expertise of those advisers.

Second, we did not allow for the fact that a large body of scientific and medical professionals would seize on the pandemic as an opportunity to attack a Conservative government that they disliked.

This was partly a consequence of mounting pressures on pay and working conditions but there was also a clash of values.

The pandemic released a streak of elitism and paternalism that has long been present in both biomedical science and among public health experts.

The crisis presented an opportunity to use the power of the state to remodel society, and the way individuals relate to it, without democratic consent or respect for the rule of law.

Third, we underestimated the opportunities for private gain, both in the commercial sense — think of the tax-payer-funded millions spent on testing, PPE, contact tracing and Perspex screens — and in the sense that Covid-19 led to greatly increased funding for biomedical research.

The scandals of PPE supply — the tens of millions wasted on inadequate products and fraudulent claims — are becoming increasingly apparent. But it is also the case that the pursuit of a technological fix for every problem funnelled resources into science without the usual scrutiny.

Policy analysts have been concerned for some considerable time about the excessive influence of biomedical interests on UK science funding and investment. The pandemic has overwritten those concerns in spades.

Looking back, you could say some of us were a little naive about what would happen when a pandemic finally took hold.

As rational planners, we expected the same level of rationality in others — a mistake, perhaps.

But we have every right to expect rational scrutiny from this vast, time-consuming and expensive public inquiry.

Falsifying the past serves no one's interests in the long run.

AT FIRST I thought it might be a watershed moment. Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist treating Covid patients since the start of the pandemic, coolly challenged Sajid Javid last week over compulsory Covid jabs for NHS staff. 

‘I’m not happy about that’, James said in a widely viewed video of the encounter reported by TCW yesterday. ‘I had Covid at some point, I’ve got antibodies . . . the vaccines are reducing transmission only for about eight weeks for Delta, with Omicron it’s probably less. And for that, I would be dismissed if I don’t have a vaccine? The science isn’t strong enough . . . If you want to provide protection with a booster, you’d have to inject everybody every month. It’s not going to achieve a practical benefit.’

Sky News showed the video, but just in case we might get rebellious ideas, they offered a link to an earlier interview – first shown on December 22 – headlined ‘Doctor dismantles typical vaccine hesitancy arguments’.

And King’s College Hospital in south London, where the encounter took place, issued a pusillanimous statement distancing themselves from the consultant’s remarks.

Thus, the drive to inflict on everyone this experimental gene product, which persuades our bodies to produce millions of copies of a toxic blood-clotting protein, and which has broken all records for adverse event reports including thousands of deaths and injuries, continues.   

It is deeply depressing.

All the more so given that the latest UK data show the jab’s effectiveness to be plummeting across all age groups, and even to have become negative in most recipients in the month to January 2 this year. The only group in which it remained positive were those aged 18 and under, and even in them there was a sharp drop.

‘Negative effectiveness’, as the analyst Dr Will Jones explains, means the vaccinated are becoming infected at higher rates than the unvaccinated.  A vaccine effectiveness of minus 100 per cent means the vaccinated are twice as likely to be infected as the unjabbed.  

‘Booster’ doses brought temporary improvement in infection rates but those are now almost completely cancelled out by the arrival and rapid spread of the Omicron variant. 

The same phenomenon is being seen across several highly vaccinated countries, as this report by science writer Alex Berenson shows.

So, contrary to what ministers such as Javid are being told by their advisers, some of whom are compromised by their Big Pharma links, this is rapidly becoming an epidemic of the vaccinated.

Independent scientists have long predicted such an outcome, pointing out that as the vaccine is very specific in the antibodies it stimulates, it prepares the immune system to respond to just one feature of the genetically-engineered Covid virus.

Mass vaccination, as opposed to targeted protection of vulnerable people, drives the virus into producing variants which readily by-pass the immunity produced. This is why the vaccinated are so vulnerable to Omicron, a variant with very high transmissibility.

However, people exposed to the naturally circulating virus – especially chronically exposed NHS staff such as Steve James – are more likely to mount a full and lasting defence against all its key components, and therefore to be more resistant to variants such as Omicron. Javid seemed from his comments to be unaware of this fact.

Also, as described here when Omicron appeared, scientists were able to show from the start that it had mutated in ways that gave it less chance of causing serious illness in humans. That was why Dr Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who identified it, agreed that far from being a cause for renewed panic, exposure to the variant with its much milder symptoms could help build natural immunity across the population. Asked by Nigel Farage on GB News if the British were over-reacting, she said: ‘It doesn’t matter how many times we are saying it’s a mild disease, some people or some scientists don’t really want to believe us.’  

We can thank our lucky stars that the Prime Minister overruled his advisers on that one, saving Christmas.

Summarising, Alex Berenson says: ‘All we really know is that the vaccines don’t prevent infection for very long and for many healthy people have side effects that are significantly worse than coronavirus infection. Both those facts were true before Omicron. Both are doubly true now.’

I keep being reminded of a poem learned in my schooldays, which went:

‘Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs

For ‘Parson’, substitute ‘Sage and the mass media who so blindly and uncritically pass on their doctrines’, and you’ll get my meaning.