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Liberty Quote
- Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
— Madeleine L’Engle -
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“These are very weird stars,” Hermes says. Stars like LP 40-365 are not only some of the fastest stars known to astronomers, but also the most metal-rich stars ever detected. Stars like our sun are composed of helium and hydrogen, but a star that has survived a supernova is primarily composed of metal material, because “what we’re seeing are the by-products of violent nuclear reactions that happen when a star blows itself up,” Hermes says, making star shrapnel like this especially fascinating to study.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210802160646.htm
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Chant keeps mentioning Whole Of Government.
W.O.G.
——————————————
/Fat Pizza!
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Test:
<a href"https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/b982e1c57054324b267ce29e5aa9766f?width=1024"Johannes Leak
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Free speech was not a load of crap.
It’s the basis of all the west’s wealth.
That’s why the country that enshrined it became a superpower.
———————————–
The more one’s direct dealings with sh1tholesrs at the same level of authority, the more “feudal society” dog-eat-dog applies.
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<a href=https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/b982e1c57054324b267ce29e5aa9766f?width=1024 Johannes Leak.
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“calli says:
August 15, 2021 at 2:07 pm
There is a place for a salon where everyone agrees respectfully with everyone else. Let’s face it, it’s comfortable. And civilised.
My preference is for the scarred, ciggie burned coffee table and bodies rolled into the corners for quiet disposal at a later date. Robust debate, real talk, disagreement. Maybe free speech comes with free fists. Could be if it’s worth fighting for.”
_____________
That.
The way the OLD old cat was, when good & bad ideas were thrashed about so soundly that only the most solid remained.
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Hawkey was a manufactured saviour in the Liar mould. I was at a stop work meeting in the Pilbara and kept out till they could get Hawkey in to save the day in the late 80s. The Liars tried the same thing with Peanut Head but he truly was unelectable.
His government was probably the best Liberal government Australia ever had.
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“Free speech was not a load of crap.
It’s the basis of all the west’s wealth.”
..
Garbage.
“The basis of all the West’s wealth”?
The height of western empire was the height of the British empire, from Victorian times on, exactly the times when you would be prosecuted for indecency.
i.e:
“abouchere’s Amendment, Clause 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885
“…any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour”.
Coinciding with the Height of Empire, that is, for example:
The British Rawas the rule by the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947.
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as long as you double-mask that should be fine
but no more than 1 hr per day
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Blue Origin SHUT DOWN By SpaceX After Losing NASA Contract
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPLyLzSKBLk
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At least someone’s giving the finger to the handsy hunchback. The Hun:
Partygoers were spotted drinking pints of beer and cocktails which they purchased from several vendors selling alcohol nearby.
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Tom – my pidgin HTML doesn’t seem to be working.
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“Farmer Gez says:
August 15, 2021 at 2:08 pm
Our political leaders are strange people.
Spoke to a bloke who has a mate that went through Mannix College with Dan Andrews for three years. He said none of his friends from those years can recall Andrews at all, yet here he is as Premier.
It’s the one common element with all the state leaders, they are seriously odd and perhaps friendless in ordinary society.
Bob Hawke was the last leader who was genuinely a people person.
It’s disturbing if you think about it.”
__________________________-
As demonstrated in real life, this movie shows how “The LOSERS”, are singled out to be given hold power over all & so do ‘what ever it takes’ to maintain that power –
The Wave – Based on a real Social experiment – basicaly how to create a Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cWxLNENgMc
The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, during one week in 1969. Ron Jones, unable to explain to his students why the German citizens (particularly non-Nazis) allowed the Nazi Party to exterminate millions of Jews and other so-called ‘undesirables’, decided to show them instead. Jones writes that he started with simple things like classroom discipline, and managed to meld his history class into a group with a supreme sense of purpose and no small amount of cliquishness. Jones named the movement “The Third Wave,” after the common wisdom that the third in a series of ocean waves is always the strongest, and claimed its members would revolutionize the world. The experiment allegedly took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in.
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“The Obscene Publications Act 1857 also known as Lord Campbell’s Act or Campbell’s Act, was a piece of legislation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland dealing with obscenity. For the first time, it made the sale of obscene material a statutory offence, giving the courts power to seize and destroy offending material. The Act superseded a 1787 Royal Proclamation by George III titled Proclamation for the Discouragement of Vice.
..
We actually used to WIN wars back then:
..
“The Crimean War was a military conflict fought from October 1853 to February 1856[in which Russia lost to an alliance made up of France, the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and Sardinia.
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“The British Rawas” should read “the British Raj”.
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“Free speech was not a load of crap.
It’s the basis of all the west’s wealth.”
——————————–
I’m sure Global OEMs would concur, with regard to local authorities’ OHS and Environmental legislation.
Life is cheap in some parts, Janet.
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Things must be slow over at m0nty’s.
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Lizzie, you mentioned a couple of other sites, montys(?) and nilk and another, where can I find links to them? Thanks.
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Rough as guts.
Rescue efforts underway as powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake strikes Haiti
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Johannes Leak.
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Reticulum II (or Reticulum 2) is an old dwarf galaxy in the Local Group. Reticulum II was discovered in 2015 by analysing images from the Dark Energy Survey. It is elongated, having an axis ratio of 0.6. The size is given by a half-light radius of 15 parsecs (pc). This is too large for it to be a globular cluster. Magnitude Mv of the galaxy is -2.7. The distance from Earth is 30 kpc. The galaxy contains some blue horizontal branch stars. Other features visible are a main sequence, and a main sequence turn off, and a red giant branch.[1][2] It has an unusual enhancement of r-process elements; meaning that gold and europium are extra common in the brightest stars in the galaxy.[3] The implication of the unusual enrichment in elements heavier than zinc, is that the r-process is very rare, and only happened once in this galaxy, possibly by the collision of two neutron stars.[4]
Gamma rays mostly with energies between 2 and 10 GeV have been detected by the Fermi satellite.[5] The radiation from Reticulum II is more significant than that of other dwarf galaxy emissions.[6] However this finding has been contested.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticulum_II
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We already have laws against promoting prostitution and drug use because of effects not related to free speech.
You seem to be seeing if people use speech when breaking the law, the speech being free is at fault.
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Confirms Barnes’s view completely. Conservacorp lawyer. Never trust the choices of McConnell or the Federalist Society. She dismissed the case without providing any reasons. Disgusting.
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Lizzie, I found them, thanks anyway.
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‘Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has blasted an inner-city takeaway-drink pub crawl as authorities warned young people were the focal point of concern in bringing the coronavirus outbreak under control…
Mr Andrews criticised a pub crawl across Richmond organised on social media, and pleaded with people not to breach social distancing rules.’
***
📢 Young people. HOW DARE YOU!
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Ahaha! I got it for you Tom, but you beat me to it!
Perfect.
Now, Johannes, do one for Gulag Glad.
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Cool. I am looking forward to seeing ‘Wogs Out of Work’.
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“Mother Lode says:
August 15, 2021 at 3:17 pm
If it exposes young people to less drugs and prostitution.
We already have laws against promoting prostitution and drug use because of effects not related to free speech.
..
Link to a law that outlaws “promoting” prostitution or drug use.
Our culture is saturated with such. Do a google search of “fat woman” with safesearch off.
Then understand that the SAME company will relegate your vaccine reluctance to the 50th page if it allows it at all.
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For fucks sake Adam, put in a button for quotes.
This blog is all but unusable.
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Sfw, m0nty, nilk, Zipster and Dover all have alternative sites. I can’t give you the addresses, but I’m sure they’ll pop in to give you an invitation.
It would be good to have a Blogroll toolbar like the old Cat for linkies.
Plenty of choice for hungry felines!
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Oh, and Arky has his Rumble channel.
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Here is a Google search for the word “high”.
..
https://www.google.com/search?q=high&sxsrf=ALeKk02KYUBKCI-memcmlinxC5aoqQqdxg:1629005200524&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj8tcGipbLyAhWn7HMBHUyaDGEQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1280&bih=625
..
Note that the word “high” is not synonymous with getting off your face on drugs. In fact that isn’t in the first five listed definitions. But to Google, it’s about the only definition.
..
High: (dictionary definition)
of great vertical extent.
“the top of a high mountain”
Similar:
tall
lofty
towering
soaring
elevated
giant
big
multistorey
high-rise
sky-scraping
Opposite:
short
2.
great, or greater than normal, in quantity, size, or intensity.
“a high temperature”
Similar:
inflated
excessive
unreasonable
overpriced
sky-high
unduly expensive
dear
costly
top
exorbitant
extortionate
outrageous
prohibitive
over the odds
steep
stiff
pricey
over the top
OTT
criminal
strong
powerful
violent
intense
extreme
forceful
sharp
blustery
gusty
stormy
squally
tempestuous
turbulent
boisterous
Opposite:
reasonable
light
calm
noun
1.
a high point, level, or figure.
“commodity prices were at a rare high”
Similar:
high level
high point
record level
peak
record
high water mark
top
pinnacle
zenith
apex
acme
apogee
apotheosis
culmination
climax
height
summit
Opposite:
low
2.
a notably happy or successful moment.
“the highs and lows of life”
adverb
1.
at or to a considerable or specified height.
“the sculpture stood about five feet high”
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ikamatua says:
August 15, 2021 at 3:24 pm
Go here for short term fix.
How to Create Bold and Italic Headings in HTML
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Twiggy Forrest ,” if your an anti vaxxer your history, or you better know more than me cause I am the science. ”
” Some liberty on the quote but the message is the same”
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Mr Andrews criticised a pub crawl across Richmond organised on social media, and pleaded with people not to breach social distancing rules.’
————————————
Ring-of-Steel sounding p1ssweak.
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The same Google image search with “safesearch” on will return the exact same images of people getting off their faces on drugs, with the cartoon Lisa Simpson again in the first few results.
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“Franx says:
August 15, 2021 at 2:24 pm
The people who favour lockdowns are often working from home.
Yet more often than not they fail to realise that they are not working from home but are living at work, that their homes are the domain of their masters who can inspect and demand oh&s measures, can determine who enters and under what conditions, can determine when the worker can leave and for how long and how far. The idea and reality of ‘home’ has morphed from sanctuary into gulag. How easy was that. Not a shot fired.”
______________________
Yep, while people are watching for black clad armed police to freak out over, the same people merrily go on dobbing their neighbours in to those black clad armed police for letting their kids have a birthday sleep over with a couple of friends.
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Your preference is for taboos, mine is for morals Arky.
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This is why I don’t get anyone still trusting those flitting between all the cats, calling for the banning of anyone they don’t like or the banning of those platforms that don’t comply with the needs of their ever so sensitive minds.
THE TARGET is to have NO Free & Open Public Forums in Australia & they are going hell for leather to make it so.
Just because there are a great many people on tbe Cat (including Doomlords) who consistently found your content tedious and conduct objectionable, does not mean that there is a concerted campaign to ban everyone from speaking their piece, srr.
As the phrase goes, “It ain’t us- It’s YOU…
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Helicopter gunships were like fireflies in some areas and still the Mujahideen prevailed.
The Russians were giving the Mujahideen a pretty ferocious beating until the USA started to give them Stinger surface to air missiles, then suddenly all their Aviation became vulnerable to any man on a donkey.
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So any primary age school child inputting a Google search for the word “high”, a word for which the primary aged definition should be ‘elevated’ or “a distance above ground level” even with safesearch on, will return page after page of drug culture and paraphenallia, and none that illustrates the concept of height.
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I had in mind of promoting to minors – whose minds are still forming. I had no idea you mean to control what can be said to adults so you can manage what they think, and therefore do.
How very 1984 of you.
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“Your preference is for taboos, mine is for morals Arky.”
..
Incorrect.
I simply note, as do the Marxists, that you do not rid a society of taboos, but replace one set with another after a period of chaos. A taboo against public intercourse is useful. A taboo against debating immigration levels or the likihood of carbon dioxide affecting temperature are not useful.
Your preference is for chaos, which is never a permanent state.
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calli says:
August 15, 2021 at 3:24 pm
Sfw, m0nty, nilk, Zipster and Dover all have alternative sites. I can’t give you the addresses, but I’m sure they’ll pop in to give you an invitation.
It would be good to have a Blogroll toolbar like the old Cat for linkies.
Plenty of choice for hungry felines!
Been thinking the same thing, but of late I have visited few other sites.
I used to visit Jon J Ray’s sites (Dissecting Leftism, PC Watch, et al), but he posts little these days, apparently because of serious cancer. Also Quadrant On-Line, Spiked On-Line, Instapundit and Small Dead Animals.
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” I had no idea you mean to control what can be said to adults so you can manage what they think, and therefore do.”
..
This is garbage.
I said nothing of the sort.
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Twiggy Forrest ,” if your an anti vaxxer your history, or you better know more than me cause I am the science. ”
A steel cap boot to the head would not go astray.
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“Chant keeps mentioning Whole Of Government.
W.O.G.”
________________
I was told off for referring to myself as a first gen Aussie ‘wog’, in Canberra, when “WOGS OUT OF WORK”, banners where flying everywhere.
There was also that time the National Gallery held a Chinese Communist Party Exhibition that they were praising, not condemning for their mass slaughters of their own people.
Canberra, it’s broken and doesn’t recognise humans, only currant “talking points”.
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Lode.
I just linked to where the major tool for research by primary aged children in schools opens up with page after page of images promoting drug culture.
With “safesearch” on.
Again.
You claimed there were laws against promoting drug use to children.
Link to one.
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“I had in mind of promoting to minors ”
..
Link to a law that outlaws “promoting” drug use to minors.
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I’ll be forced into bicycling in circles around the Hills Hoist in the backyard
I went for my daily 40kms ride around Fairfield this morning .. not a plod in sight but then there NEVER is, all this waffle about rings of steel & presence in Fairfield since the beginning, has been just that .. waffle ..!
Coupla weeks ago the media made a big issue of plod & horses in Fairfield resplendent with pix .. what wasn’t mentioned was that it was a photo op on a residential street on the edge of the shopping precinct that very rarely has much pedestrian traffic at the best of times.
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Can anyone put up the article in The Oz re China and the takeover of the WHO? thank you.
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Twiggy is going to be a PITA till he explodes again. It may take a while.
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No one in the conservative sphere wants to be the “bad guy” of telling people they need to give up their drugs and porn fixations for the good of a productive society.
To do so invites scorn and derision as a ‘Mary Whitehouse” type. A person who must want to regulate others because the have some personal flaw.
Better to be a “Republican Party Reptile” of the P.J. O’Rourke style “We’re all good with drugs, dildos and public nudity”. Cool. Cool in 1988. Not cool now after viewing the detritus spewed out after forty years of emptying out the nut houses and drenching the inmates in drugs and prostitution.
Gulf War 1 on CNN was kinda cool back then too. A novelty. The USA actually winning a war. Only now we see both CNN and the endless interfering in the Middle East for what they really were.
About a good for us as pretending that conservatives could come up with a cohesive worldview that incorporated sex toys, cocaine and beating the shit out of rental cars.
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As requested by BBS: London Sunday Times via the Paywallian (>7500 words):
Barely eight months after taking charge, the director-general of the World Health Organisation gave a speech that would prove extraordinarily prophetic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that all nations were facing the ever-present threat that a new respiratory illness such as the Spanish flu might emerge and spread across the globe in weeks or months, killing millions.
That was why, the Ethiopian told the audience at his keynote speech in Dubai in February 2018, he had made it his daily priority since becoming WHO chief to ensure he was up to date on the thousands of reports it received every month that might flag up signs of an outbreak.
The WHO, a Geneva-based United Nations agency with a pounds 5 billion budget from 194 member states, was on a war footing. Tedros said it would act fast and decisively, because ignoring the signs of an outbreak could “be the difference between global spread of a deadly disease and rapid interruption of transmission”. So far this “new tighter focus” was working, he added.
So when the first alert of a mysterious respiratory illness in China, exactly as Tedros had described, was reported by health monitors in Taiwan at the end of December 2019, the health agency should have been ready for action.
In fact the WHO would receive considerable criticism for failing to help stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the opening weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the organisation fail to act but it also promulgated misinformation about the virus originating from China and even discouraged other nations from taking steps that might have contained the spread. For all his foresight, Tedros would be accused of being ineffective when the big test came.
The world paid a heavy price for the WHO’s inaction. The virus has killed more than four million people, and there will be many more. The body that is charged with looking after the world’s health seriously malfunctioned in those opening weeks, when humanity most needed it to come to the rescue. Why?
Our investigation reveals today how a concerted campaign over many years by Beijing to grab power in the WHO appears to have fatally compromised its ability to respond to the crisis. It raises serious concerns about the extent of Beijing’s influence over the WHO and its director-general, and how this undermined the organisation’s capacity – and willingness – to take the steps necessary to avert a global pandemic. Its leadership put China’s economic interests before public health concerns. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
Beijing’s man
It is a story that stretches back many years before the Covid-19 crisis. After being strongly criticised by the health agency for attempting to cover up the 2003 SARS crisis, China set out to increase its influence over the WHO. By applying financial and diplomatic leverage on some of the world’s poorest nations, Beijing won a global power struggle to get its favoured candidates installed at the very top of the organisation.
As a result, years later, a body that was set up with the lofty goal of “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health” has been co-opted into aiding the Chinese state’s campaign for global economic dominance. Its leadership began to speak differently, espousing statements and pursuing policies that were markedly convenient to China – even praising Beijing’s questionable allies such as North Korea, despite its appalling health and human rights record.
Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.
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Tedros himself caused outrage by bestowing the role of WHO goodwill ambassador on Robert Mugabe, the former Zimbabwean dictator, an appointment said to have had strong backing from the Chinese government, a longstanding close ally of the despot.
As hospitals became flooded with patients in Wuhan in January 2020, the health agency repeatedly relayed to the world the Chinese government’s false claims that there was no evidence the virus could pass between humans. It made a specific point of cautioning countries not to impose bans on travel to and from the virus hot spots – which meant many weeks were lost before countries independently decided to seal their borders. The WHO’s approach ensured that China’s short-term economic prospects were protected. Meanwhile, the virus was allowed to spread round the globe like wildfire.
More recently, we can reveal, a backroom deal negotiated between the WHO and China has seriously damaged the chances of the world getting to the bottom of one of the most important questions facing mankind today: the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the world’s nations gave Tedros the job of discovering how the virus first came to infect humans, his team struck an agreement in secret with China that emasculated the inquiry. It meant that the WHO’s “independent” mission – its fact-finding team travelled to Wuhan early this year to carry out an investigation – was, in the words of one expert, little more than a “shameful charade”. There may well be no second chance.
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Take 2:
Legacy of SARS
The health agency’s reaction to SARS, the first pandemic crisis of the 21st century, had been very different. In many ways that lay at the root of the later difficulties that would come to a head with China.
When the SARS outbreak started in November 2002, the Chinese government had immediately enforced its strict laws, which classified all new infectious diseases as a state secret before they were officially announced by the ministry of health. As a result, the WHO was kept largely in the dark about the outbreak until the son of one of its former employees emailed the agency in February 2003 with some alarming news. The message described a mysterious virus in Guangdong province that had already killed 100 people but claimed the authorities were insisting “it was not allowed to be made known to the public”.
The cat was out of the bag, and after stern questions from the health agency China shared some limited information about the new virus the following day. However, the Chinese were still anxious to play down the extent of the outbreak. At one stage 30 patients with the virus were said to have been driven round Beijing in ambulances, and 40 others were moved out of a hospital into a hotel to hide their existence from a visiting team of WHO scientists.
China’s reluctance to disclose the duration, scale and evolution of the disease led Gro Harlem Brundtland, then the WHO director-general, to get tough. She was a former prime minister of Norway and not scared of ruffling feathers. “Brundtland was a very brave politician with a lot of legitimacy,” recalls Gian Luca Burci, a legal adviser to the WHO at the time. “She didn’t shy away from criticising China and basically saying, ‘We don’t believe you. You should come clean.’”
Brundtland put pressure on China and took the brave decision to issue strong advice against travelling to the affected areas, which included Hong Kong and Toronto as the virus spread.
“The WHO really stepped into a vacuum, and it really exerted its authority as an emergency manager,” Burci said. “I would say the unanimous perception is that the WHO played a central role and essential role in allowing SARS to be controlled in a matter of months.”
The virus was brought under control in the early summer with only 8,000 cases and just under 800 deaths. The public ticking-off had been humiliating for Beijing. There was also an economic price for China: the health agency’s travel advice had contributed to an estimated dollars 6 billion loss to the country’s GDP.
China began taking a keen interest in the WHO after the bruising it received over SARS. A senior source now working at the health agency has described how in 2005 Beijing was behind a group of countries that attempted to “limit” the authority of its director-general.
Their efforts led to new regulations for the WHO’s governance, which compel the director-general to consult an emergency committee – made up of international experts and often including a China representative – before he or she calls an international public health emergency or recommends travel restrictions.
A further opportunity for China to extend its influence in the agency presented itself a year later in 2006 with the election of a new director-general.
One of the leading candidates was Dr Margaret Chan, a Chinese national. She was a former Hong Kong health director who had been criticised during the SARS crisis for her supine attitude to mainland China. The Hong Kong legislative council found she had been too slow to respond to the SARS outbreak and too unquestioning of the misleading information from the Chinese authorities.
The Beijing government rallied behind her candidacy, ordering its embassies to lobby international friends to get behind her in the November 2006 election to choose a replacement.
Just five days before the vote, a summit was held in Beijing for leaders of the African nations. China pledged to cancel large amounts of debts and double aid donations to the continent in a move that was openly acknowledged by state-backed analysts in the country as designed to secure backing for Chan.
It was an “extraordinarily aggressive campaign”, according to Professor Lawrence Gostin, the director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre on Public Health Law and Human Rights. “[China] got burnt really badly during SARS,” he said, adding: “It wanted someone much more friendly and gentle if an outbreak came again.”
Chan won with two thirds of the votes in the final ballot. China had succeeded in getting its candidate to the top “precisely to avoid another humiliation”, according to a source at the WHO at the time.
The African link
During her 10-year reign in the agency’s top job, Chan certainly gave the appearance that she was very grateful to China for propelling her into the role. In April 2010 she made a trip to North Korea, one of China’s neighbours and allies, and made the extraordinary claim the country’s health system was the “envy” of most developing nations.
A few months later a report by Amnesty International described the shambolic state of North Korea’s “crumbling” health system where amputations were sometimes performed in candlelight without anaesthesia.
Chan made a number of key appointments that appeared carefully calculated to please the Chinese government, which included the soprano Peng Liyuan, wife of Xi Jinping, China’s president.
The biggest test for Chan was also the moment she drew the most criticism – and there was a Beijing link to this too. She took two months to declare an international emergency over the 2014 ebola outbreak despite repeated warnings from her own experts.
Leaked emails obtained by the Associated Press revealed that the delay was caused by WHO officials who did not want to upset the African countries hit by the outbreak and damage their economies. More than 1,000 people died during the delay.
One of the countries affected, Guinea, had struck a mining rights deal that allowed a state-backed Chinese firm to excavate one of the world’s biggest untapped iron ore reserves. Fearing that the foreign investors might be scared away, Alpha Conde, then the country’s president, claimed in a speech at the WHO’s Geneva headquarters that ebola was under control in Guinea.
His lie went unchallenged. “Margaret Chan’s WHO was accused of being too close to Alpha Conde,” the senior source from the WHO said. In the end the UN took the highly unusual step of appointing David Nabarro, a British doctor, to co-ordinate the international effort on ebola because it was so concerned about the WHO’s failure to get to grips with the outbreak.
In 2017 Chan crowned her final year in office by welcoming Xi to Geneva. While he was there, she signed an agreement that committed the WHO to working alongside China on health as part of the country’s Belt and Road initiative. It was the first time any UN agency had signed up to the initiative, which seeks to extend Chinese influence and trade in more than 70 developing countries by financing infrastructure projects.
The initiative is highly controversial because its critics argue that China uses it to shackle countries, particularly in Africa, to “unsustainable debt” as a way of gaining access to the continent’s raw materials and buying political favours.
“I think health is too special to get into the really seedy politics that Belt and Road is part of, and I wouldn’t want the WHO to be associated with it,” Gostin argues. “The cost in terms of human rights and debt, and other adverse events for Africa, was a bridge too far.”
turning on the money taps
Under bright skies in the rolling parkland on the banks of Lake Geneva a large group of protesters with placards gathered outside the Palace of Nations for the 70th meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the body with representatives from all UN member states that controls the WHO.
The protest that day – May 22, 2017 – was against Tedros standing to replace Chan, who had served her final term. The demonstrators were highlighting human rights abuses by the Ethiopian regime as, until the previous year, Tedros had been a minister in that Ethiopian government.
Tedros, a former epidemiologist then aged 52, had been the health and then foreign minister after joining the government in 2005. He denies wrongdoing.
As foreign minister Tedros had formed a close relationship with China. He would often praise the Chinese leadership, which invested more money in Ethiopia than any other country did. In 2014 he wrote a joint article with the Chinese foreign minister in the state-controlled China Daily newspaper that waxed lyrical about the bond between the countries.
The African Union countries had wanted their candidate to replace Chan as director-general. They had previously helped Chan get elected, and it was now their turn. As an African with close links to China, Tedros was the perfect candidate.
As the election approached, China had again turned on the money taps. A month before the vote, a multinational ministerial conference was held in Pretoria ostensibly with the aim of stepping up China-Africa co-operation in health. During the conference China agreed to offer a cataract surgery program for free to the African countries.
Then, nine days before polling, Xi hosted an event in Beijing at which he pledged more than dollars 100 billion in extra funding for its Belt and Road initiative – a large portion of which would be channelled into investment in developing countries. This included new investment in Kenya, Indonesia and Hungary.
Tedros’s main opponent was Nabarro, whose first-hand experience of the WHO leadership’s incompetence during the ebola crisis had convinced him of the need for reform. Nabarro was not alone in his concerns about the WHO, and he reportedly received support from the US, the UK and Canada. This appears to have been the first time the West had woken up to China’s creeping influence over the health agency.
The contest for the WHO director-generalship took place under new rules that had been introduced by Chan. Previously, the director-general had been chosen by the 34 members of the WHA executive board, but the new rules gave an equal vote to all the assembly’s 194 member states.
Critics of the rule change, such as J Michael Cole of the Canadian think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, have pointed out that the WHO was essentially copying the electoral system that propped up the famously corrupt regime of the former FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
As with football’s governing body, tiny countries that might be susceptible to financial aid were given an equal vote to countries many times their size. Cole said tiny island countries such as those in the Pacific were “easy targets” for Chinese influence.
In the end, Tedros beat Nabarro by 133 votes to 50 with China’s help.
‘Model’ China
Within a month of taking over in July 2017, Tedros was on his way to China to emphasise the health agency’s continued commitment to the partnership under the Belt and Road initiative.
“China’s long experience and expertise in health systems and policies will be invaluable to achieving the WHO’s global priorities, especially in health crisis management,” he wrote in the China Daily.
Months later Tedros made an extraordinary announcement, seemingly without consulting colleagues. He had appointed Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador for the WHO. Diplomatic sources affiliated to the health agency told us that the honouring of Mugabe was made at the behest of Beijing as a political pay-off for the dictator’s years as a staunch ally of the Chinese government.
Beijing’s connection to Mugabe stretches back to the 1970s, when it helped fund his guerrilla war in Zimbabwe before he took power. More recently it ploughed cash into his regime when it was struggling under western sanctions.
The appointment was an ill-judged move by Tedros. The UK prime minister’s office said it was “surprising and disappointing, particularly in light of the current US and EU sanctions against [Mugabe]”. There was particular bemusement because Zimbabwe’s healthcare system had deteriorated badly under Mugabe’s rule. A report by the group Physicians for Human Rights in 2009 gave examples of how Mugabe had damaged his own health system in his efforts to cling on to power.
The appointment was withdrawn just four days after Tedros announced it. The following year he was in Beijing again praising China’s health reforms as a “model” which would be “a bulwark against health emergencies”.
The cover-up begins
The main “bulwark” at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic was a wall of secrecy in China over the possibility that the outbreak of pneumonia cases might be transmitted between humans.
On the last day of 2019 the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission publicly admitted for the first time that a number of people had been struck down with a similar illness, in a bland public announcement reporting 27 cases of pneumonia-like infection.
What the statement did not say was that the illness had already been identified by the Chinese authorities as a new coronavirus – not unlike SARS – that appeared to be passing between humans. This crucial information – as well as any indication of the alarm already secretly felt by scientific and health officials in China – was withheld from the world.
However, earlier that day Taiwan had been closely monitoring reports in the Chinese media that might indicate a new medical phenomenon and it noted that an internal hospital alert had been reported in an obscure business publication. The Taiwanese authorities sent the WHO an email raising concerns about a number of “atypical pneumonia cases” in Wuhan that had been “isolated for treatment”. The only reason patients would need to be isolated was that Chinese hospitals feared the virus could pass between humans.
The health agency did not heed the Taiwanese warning. The island’s relations with the WHO were strained because of China’s claims of sovereignty over its territory.
In the months before the pandemic Beijing had used its influence to block the island from attending meetings of the WHA for a third year in a row.
Taiwan’s vice-president, Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist by training, would later accuse the WHO of brushing aside this early evidence it had provided on suspected human-to-human transmission and of failing to pass the early warning on to the world.
In the first two weeks of January desperate scenes were unfolding at Wuhan hospitals as patients with flu-like symptoms began to flood in. The mayhem and death were described by Dr Peng Zhiyong, the director of the intensive care unit at Wuhan University’s Zhongnan Hospital, several weeks later in an interview he gave to the Chinese media outlet Caixin Global.
Within four days of the arrival of the first patient, Peng said, all 16 intensive care beds were full and the situation was “dire”. More than 40 members of his team contracted the disease from patients. Things were even worse at another hospital in the city, where two thirds of intensive care staff had reportedly been infected.
The doctors were in no doubt the virus was passing rapidly between humans. Few of Peng’s colleagues went home after their shifts, for fear they would infect their families.
Yet the Chinese authorities systematically tried to cover up the human spread by issuing diktats, suppressing whistleblowers and scrubbing social media. On January 3 a confidential notice was issued forbidding labs to publish details of the virus without authorisation. On January 6 the hashtag #WuhanSARS appeared online, but posts on Twitter were swiftly censored.
The authorities also withheld work that had been done to sequence the coronavirus’ genome, which had been completed by January 3 – a decision that delayed international scientists from developing tests for the virus.
The health agency simply took the Chinese explanations about the outbreak at face value. On January 10 the WHO issued a statement saying: “From the currently available information, preliminary investigation suggests that there is no significant human-to-human transmission, and no infections among healthcare workers have occurred.”
At the same time, the agency was mindful of the need to avoid taking measures that might damage the Chinese economy. “WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China,” its statement went on.
However, staff at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre laboratory were growing increasingly anxious about the need to develop tests for the virus in the hope they might be available before millions of people crisscrossed the country for the lunar new year celebrations later that month. So they took matters into their own hands and shared the genetic code they had sequenced on a US computer database called GenBank, which is available to scientists around the world. It was published on January 11. When the Chinese authorities learnt of the leak, the Shanghai lab was instantly closed for “rectification”.
By now some officials at the WHO were becoming frustrated that their repeated requests for data from China were being rebuffed. Leaked recordings of one of the health agency’s meetings in the second week of January show that Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s Irish chief of emergencies, wanted to apply more pressure on China because he could see that the crisis was becoming a repeat of the 2003 SARS disaster.
But such behind-the-scenes concerns did not alter the WHO’s public messaging. “WHO is reassured of the quality of the ongoing investigations and the response measures implemented in Wuhan, and the commitment to share information regularly,” it said in a statement on January 12. “At this stage there is no infection among healthcare workers, and no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” it added.
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Take 3:
Deadly delay
On the morning of January 13 the first case of an infection outside China was found in Thailand. That day Tedros announced that he was giving thought to whether he should call a meeting of the WHO emergency committee, which consists of about 20 international experts, including one from China.
The emergency body plays a key role in deciding whether the director-general should declare an infectious outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Meetings are held in confidence because PHEIC declarations can damage business, travel and tourism in an affected country, according to a source on the committee.
The growing outbreak in China could have been declared an emergency under the health agency’s criterion, which requires a crisis to be “an extraordinary event” that might cause “a public health risk to other states through the international spread of disease”.
But Tedros decided to wait, and nine more days passed before he even gathered the committee members for their advice. During this period he was talking directly on the phone about the outbreak to Ma Xiaowei, the Chinese minister of health, whom he had described warmly as his “brother” in a tweet on January 11.
Finally, on January 19, the health agency’s regional office in the western Pacific announced that the virus could pass between humans, albeit with the qualification that the transmission was “limited”.
By now the emergency situation in Wuhan was so desperate that the Chinese authorities were preparing to build the 1,000-bed Huoshenshan Hospital in just ten days.
Therefore, on January 20 – three weeks after Taiwan’s warning – China’s health ministry admitted that it did have evidence that medical staff had been infected. It meant the health agency could no longer delay. Tedros summoned a meeting of the emergency committee, which deliberated on January 22 and 23.
The number of known cases jumped from 314 to 581 during those two days and the virus had spread to 24 regions of China, killing 18 people. And the virus had now escaped the country’s borders: ten cases had been identified in four other countries.
The members of the emergency committee were split on what action to take after an update on the crisis was provided by the Chinese representative. The advice they gave Tedros was equivocal, and he decided to avoid taking the diplomatically fraught decision of imposing an international public health emergency on China.
In a press briefing on January 23 he reasoned that there was “an emergency in China … but it has not yet become a global health emergency”, adding that he wished to thank the country’s government for its “co-operation and transparency”.
The protection of Beijing’s interests continued the following day when the health agency issued a statement reiterating that countries should not impose travel restrictions on China, even though the situation in Wuhan had become so dire that the city had imposed a full lockdown, then unprecedented in modern times. Yet the inaction by the health body sent a clear signal to the world that this new coronavirus might not be as serious as was feared.
By Tuesday, January 28 four weeks had passed since Taiwan raised the initial alarm and there was still no evidence of the fast and decisive action that Tedros had said in his Dubai speech was necessary to combat an outbreak. That day he met Xi, the Chinese president, in Beijing and emerged from the encounter full of praise for his hosts.
He said Xi had shown “rare leadership” and deserved “gratitude and respect” for acting to contain the outbreak at its centre. These “extraordinary steps” had prevented further spread of the virus, and this was why, he said, there were only “a few cases of human-to-human transmission outside China, which we are monitoring very closely”.
Tedros even claimed that China was “completely committed to transparency”, pointing out that it had shared the genomic sequence of the virus “immediately” – when in fact the lab that leaked the sequence had been punished by the country’s authorities for defying the censors.
He finally declared an international public health emergency on January 30. By then the virus had been detected in 18 countries and was almost certainly lurking undetected in many others. By this point a crucial four weeks had been lost because China had covered up the highly infectious nature of SARS-CoV-2 while the WHO had repeated its claims unquestioningly.
The virus was spreading fast across the globe and the health agency had failed in its single most important job – to swiftly sound the alarm.
The WHO’s failure to act had blown the world’s chance to contain the pandemic at source. Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology in New Jersey, a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America, believes China’s influence over the WHO played “a decisive role” in the agency’s failure to act decisively at the start of the pandemic.
“There was no scientific or medical or policy justification for the stance that the WHO took in January and February 2020. That was entirely premised on maintaining satisfactory ties to the Chinese government,” he said.
David Fidler, a former WHO legal adviser, is scathing about Tedros’s “obsequious” praise for Xi and suspects that “the WHO knew China was not being transparent, particularly about information related to human-to-human transmission”. He added: “The praise that he heaped on China gave them no incentive to change their behaviour.”
A year later a report by an independent panel set up at the request of the WHA was critical of the delay in calling the emergency. The panel, led by the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, said the health agency should have assumed human-to-human transmission and issued warnings as a precaution, given what was known about respiratory infections.
Gostin believes China’s cover-up in January was “the singular important event in the course of the pandemic” because it blew the world’s “only shot” of containing the crisis at source.
a flawed investigation
If the cordial relationship between Tedros and China had survived the opening months of the pandemic, the strength of their friendship would be tested once again in the early summer of 2020. The cause was the important, yet highly sensitive, issue of how and where the virus originated.
The SARS outbreak in 2003 is thought to have originated in bats in Yunnan province, southwest China, and to have been introduced into markets in the surrounding area through an intermediary host animal. SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have had similar beginnings because of its resemblance to other bat coronaviruses.
However, the caves in Yunnan province are more than a thousand miles from Wuhan, and no bats containing such viruses have been found near that city. If an intermediate animal, or indeed a human, had been infected by a bat in Yunnan, how could this very infectious virus be carried on such a long journey to Wuhan without causing a single noticeable outbreak along the way?
The Chinese had tested thousands of animals in Wuhan and the surrounding areas, but not one had come up positive for the virus. Chinese scientists had also rejected the suggestion that the virus entered through the Huanan seafood market in the city, which was connected to some of the cases in December 2019.
But there was an elephant in the room. Coronaviruses found in the Yunnan bat caves, including the world’s closest known match to SARS-CoV-2, were being kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time of the outbreak.
The subject had become politically charged. Donald Trump, then the US president, had weighed in and alleged China might be culpable. Right-wingers in American were calling for multibillion-dollar reparations from China if it was proved to have caused the pandemic.
So a demand for an investigation of the origins of the virus by the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, on April 22 was not welcomed in Beijing. Morrison called for the WHO to appoint independent investigators, akin to weapons inspectors, and urged the international community to back a plan to track down the virus’s origins in China. In the weeks that followed, China imposed trade sanctions on Australia’s beef and barley.
Morrison had started a hare running. It was important to find the origin of the virus but there was much resistance by China, leading to some tough negotiating behind the scenes at the WHA. Many countries wanted an investigation to start immediately, but Chinese diplomats managed to fight that off. In the end it was the EU countries that brokered a compromise. “There were negotiations over every word,” said a source in the WHO.
On May 19 the assembly agreed on a form of words for the inquiry. The resolution required the director-general of the WHO to work closely with member states to “identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population”. There was no mention of the word “investigation” or the timescale.
It was left to Tedros and his team to draw up the terms of the inquiry with the Chinese authorities between May and July, which they did without seeking the opinions of the member states. The two sides took the decision to jointly interpret the loose wording – referring to “scientific and collaborative field missions” – as a mandate for a “study” rather than a proper independent investigation.
“It was never an investigation. Investigations are something different,” said the WHO source with knowledge of the negotiations. “With a study it’s not that you go and look for some wrongdoing … You’re not looking backwards trying really to do a forensic audit of things and say, ‘Give me everything; show me everything.’”
WHO insiders say Beijing held the trump card in the negotiations because it could simply refuse to allow any of the scientific team to enter the country. That is why Tedros was averse to criticising the country’s leadership publicly, the insiders claim in his defence.
Behind closed doors the health agency ruled out any work on a matter that might make Beijing jumpy: the question of a possible laboratory leak. The study would concentrate on the zoonotic source of the virus, which the WHO argued was its narrow remit from the original WHA resolution.
But the resolution was clearly wider than the health agency’s interpretation. Even a virus that had leaked from the lab would have had a zoonotic origin before, for example, it was taken back to Wuhan by researchers. The crucial point was the second part of the resolution, which clearly states that the director-general was charged with finding out how such an animal virus would be then transmitted to humans.
The terms of reference were finalised between the WHO and China on August 2 last year. Yet, according to the US government, they were not shared with the other countries until the beginning of November.
That was when Garrett Grigsby, the US representative on the WHO executive board, immediately raised objections that the terms were “not negotiated in a transparent way with all WHO member states” and appeared to be “inconsistent” with the mandate. The complaints were ignored.
When asked why other nations had not been consulted about the terms, a WHO spokesman said: “In general, terms of reference for in-country scientific studies are not discussed by member states.”
By then the team of scientists had already been selected for the study. The health agency had deliberately chosen zoonotic experts rather than scientists who might be qualified to examine laboratory leaks. The team consisted of 34 scientists, and the agreement reached with Beijing was that it would include 17 members from China, who would mostly be employed by the Chinese state. The team turned out to contain a majority of Chinese nationals because the health agency chose Li Jian – one of its technical officers, who is from China – among its 17. Gostin says allowing so many Chinese scientists to be part of the team “undermined the credibility and objectivity” of the inquiry.
Furthermore, China was given a veto over the choice of the non-Chinese experts. When the US put forward three scientists, including a laboratory expert, they were rejected by the WHO without even a phone call. The only US representative chosen by the WHO was Peter Daszak, a New Yorker originally from Dukinfield, near Manchester.
Daszak was a controversial choice. He had been working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on hunting down coronaviruses for more than 15 years and he headed the EcoHealth Alliance charity, which had redirected large grants from the US government to the Wuhan lab to fund some of its coronavirus work.
The institute’s lead virologist, Shi Zhengli – nicknamed “Bat Woman” – described Daszak as her “collaborator” in an email to this newspaper that summer. He previously orchestrated a statement rejecting the “conspiracy” theory that the virus did not have a natural origin, which was signed by 27 scientists.
Ebright added: “Shameful terms of reference were negotiated between WHO and China. Terms of reference that in essence ended up being the Chinese position without any change. Again it is hard not to see this as a repayment, or as a return on investment on the support the Chinese government provided for [Tedros’s] election.”
The centrepiece of the first phase of the WHO study was the long-awaited field trip to Wuhan, which began on January 14. It had been delayed by the Chinese government for reasons that were opaque: a year had passed since the original outbreak by the time the international scientists set foot in the city where the first known Covid-19 cases were recorded.
Surprisingly, Tedros decided to move the goalposts of their mission a few days before they arrived. According to WHO sources close to him, he agreed with China that the international team would be allowed to briefly visit the Wuhan institute – while fully aware that the scientists chosen were not qualified to assess the potential of a laboratory leak.
While the joint mission was in quarantine in a Wuhan hotel on January 15 this year, the US government released a bombshell allegation that Wuhan institute researchers had fallen ill with Covid-19 symptoms in November 2019 – on the eve of the outbreak. The US also raised concerns about the experiments at the laboratory on the closest known match to the Covid-19 virus and claimed that the institute had been engaged in secret projects with China’s military, including laboratory animal experiments, since 2017.
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I am on an iPhone so surfing the net and linking is rather arduous, but for the sake of argument I will concede they exist as you say.
It is no surprise to find organisations like schools, sports clubs, etc having speech codes and behavioural codes stricter than need be observed in general public. Education departments that promote (as opposed to depict without encouragement) things like drug use are obviously doing the wrong thing.
But to manage this by controlling speech for everyone everywhere is crazy. Adults should be able to discuss such matters.
Besides, if an education department was going to include it in a curriculum do you really think they would not get a special dispensation – the legislative bodies prohibiting the discussion would also be able to make exceptions. Then it would be only adults forbidden to talk about it.
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Take 4:
Playing politics
As it was, the team’s visit to the Wuhan institute lasted only a few hours. The scientists asked a string of questions and appeared to take the answers from senior figures from the institute at face value.
Professor Thea Fischer, a Danish virologist who was part of the delegation, said the team concluded that it was not obvious that anything untoward had been “going on” at the laboratory but admitted: “This was based on questioning and not us coming with swabs or testing, or serology follow-up, or looking into lab logs, because it was not a lab audit.”
Before the trip there had been widespread disquiet in scientific circles about why the institute had, on September 12, 2019, taken offline a database that itemised its collection of 22,000 virus samples and sequences. The institute claimed it had taken the database down because it had feared hacking attacks.
Yet the joint mission team did not even demand access to the database. Daszak later explained that he had told the team there was no need to request the information because his charity had done a lot of work with the institute. “We do basically know what’s in those databases,” he said. They appear to have accepted his word and moved on. Even WHO sources acknowledge that the lab visit was cursory. “They walk through the door, they talk to people and they walk out,” the source said. “And it was better than nothing, but it was close to nothing.”
When the team’s mission finished in early February this year, it conducted a straw poll of all the international and Chinese members on the relative likelihood of four theories on how the virus originated.
On the ground the Chinese were 17-strong as originally intended but the team were down to 14 because three of their experts were having to keep in contact remotely from outside China.
The ranking of possible theories took place in a Wuhan conference centre on February 8 and the results were announced at a press conference in Wuhan the following day. The favoured theory, which was backed as “likely” to “very likely”, was that the virus spread from a bat into another host animal, possibly through intensive farming, and was then passed on to humans.
The decision was perhaps unsurprising, given this was a team that had been specifically picked to concentrate solely on the natural animal causes of the pandemic. In addition, the joint mission’s Chinese contingent were under pressure from their government to dismiss any suggestion of culpability.
The joint mission found the idea that a virus could have leaked from an institution in Wuhan “extremely unlikely” and unworthy of further investigation. Even the theory that the virus might have entered China on frozen food was ranked higher and classed as “possible”. The Chinese scientists had been pushing this theory and claimed to have evidence of a small number of cases in which the virus had been reintroduced to China on frozen food packaging. The team’s acceptance of this possibility was welcomed in Beijing because it suggested the virus might have originated outside its borders.
Sources close to Tedros say he was taken by surprise when Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish scientist who was the mission’s joint leader, dismissed the lab leak theory at the press conference. “That was the first time when we realised back in Geneva that there was an agreement … among the totality to terminology that did not feel grounded in science, specifically this relative weighting of hypotheses,” said the source.
The WHO insiders admit that the team was not qualified to make that judgment. They point out that the health agency has a specialist “lab audit team”, which, for example, regularly checks Russian and American smallpox labs. “And that group had not fed into the choice of the team,” the source said. “Nor had any of those people gone [to Wuhan], because we weren’t able to negotiate something like that in the terms of reference.”
A second WHO source was even more damning. “These guys should have not gone into the labs at all. They had not been given proper access to these labs. They didn’t have expertise. They didn’t have a mandate,” they said.
Last week, Embarek gave an extraordinary interview for a Danish television documentary in which he disclosed that the joint mission had been forced to rule out a lab leak because of pressure from Beijing. He said the final report had been vetted by the Chinese government employees and the team were allowed to mention the theory only if they agreed that they would not pursue it further.
Embarek said it was possible that a laboratory employee might have been infected while collecting samples from bats in the wild. “We consider that hypothesis a likely one,” he added. This was not what the team had told the world.
It is still not clear why Tedros organised for the team to visit the laboratory in his last-minute negotiations. But the director-general was under pressure after the joint mission’s press conference in February. He was only too aware the new US president held more sway among America’s international allies than Trump had. While Joe Biden had reversed his predecessor’s decision to stop funding the health agency, he was not backing down on the confrontation with China over the origin investigation.
With the WHO’s credibility on the line, Tedros decided to take a diplomatic approach to the joint mission’s findings. He called a press conference to praise the team for its work while making clear that “all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies”.
When the mission produced its report in March, a joint statement was issued by the US and 13 allies, including Britain, Australia and Japan, which expressed concerns about its findings and alleged the scientists’ work had been hampered by significant delays and “lacked access to complete, original data and samples”.
The bigger picture was that the WHO study was in disarray. Whether by design or opportunism, China had triumphed. Beijing had never wanted an investigation of the origin of the virus and had used all its considerable influence at the WHO to make sure it was watered down.
“This outbreak was serious enough to potentially damage China’s image, its legitimacy, its interests, its ambitions and the image it was trying to project internationally,” said Fidler, the former lawyer for the health agency. “So that political dynamic led China to control and decide the way in which these investigations were going to happen. And that’s made nobody outside China happy.”
In late May Biden ordered the CIA to redouble its efforts to investigate how the outbreak started, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident”. When it reports in a few weeks’ time, more may be revealed about the reliability or otherwise of the intelligence on the Wuhan institute.
But China was ready to pull up the drawbridge. When, on July 22, the WHO proposed a new phase two of the investigation, which would include an audit of the Wuhan labs, it was quickly rejected by China. The country’s top health officials held a press conference in Beijing to say the results of the joint team’s work should be accepted and the next phase should look at whether the pandemic had begun in a country outside China.
It may mean that the world may never get to the bottom of what caused the great pandemic of the 21st century, which has killed four million people and counting.
Margaret Chan did not respond to a request for comment. A WHO spokesman said this article rehashes old events and contains “falsehoods and baseless claims”. The agency argues that the director general treats China like any other country as a matter of principle.
The agency added: “WHO’s top priority is ending the acute stage of the Covid-19 pandemic and we are supporting countries to implement comprehensive, evidence based responses, based on the consistent use of public health measures.”
Meanwhile, Tedros is likely to stand for re-election when his term ends next year and, if he does, will no doubt again seek backing from China.
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My email to a mate OHMS on how the Pakis were going in the cricket was swallowed for racism. I expect i am under investigation somewhere. I am not losing much sleep.
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P.J. O’Rourke:
“I think our agenda is clear. We are opposed to: government spending, Kennedy kids, seat-belt laws, busing our children anywhere other than Yale, trailer courts near our vacation homes, all tiny Third World countries that don’t have banking secrecy laws, aerobics, the UN, taxation without tax loopholes, and jewelry on men. We are in favor of: guns, drugs, fast cars, free love (if our wives don’t find out), a sound dollar, and a strong military with spiffy uniforms. There are thousands of people in America who feel this way, especially after three or four drinks. If all of us would unite and work together, we could give this country. . . well, a real bad hangover.”
https://www.amazon.com/Republican-Party-Reptile-Confessions-Adventures/dp/0871136228
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For those that missed it.
Increased NSW Police powers: Threats, Intimidation, Harassment & Censorship.
He’ll be booted of Patreon soon. You watch.
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“Mother Lode says:
August 15, 2021 at 4:15 pm”.
..
I was talking about Google image search.
Not some thing used only in classrooms.
You do understand that everyone uses Google, including schools?
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Thanks for the 3-part posting, Tom.
The plot sickens…
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Raisins to live?
So long as you don’t upset the Sultana-ate…
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It’s amazing how the political class has actually leapt upon the dying of the old mainstream media and used it.
The commercial media is desperate for advertising and clickbait.
With government advertising the politician slimes have given them the one.
With the covid arseholery they’ve given them the other.
And in so doing scared the bejebus out of everyone.
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Thanks Tom.
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Struth:
“Such a shame Graeme.
In this world there is much truth in the saying ignorance is bliss.
Think too much like you do, and you find hobgoblins where there are none, and you live a life of misery.
So your weak character prefers you simplify things.”
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Well said, that man!
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Increased NSW Police powers: Threats, Intimidation, Harassment & Censorship.
———————————————-
It is devoutly to be wished that the NSW Liberal Party reaps an electoral disaster from the bitter crop they are sowing.
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Friends reporting that there are crowds standing outside coffee shops ,close together no masks and chatting around Melbourne’s leafy expensive suburbs .
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I came back in recently in some anger to correct some serious disinformation about a naive misreading of a peer reviewed medical study on Covid vaxination and pregnancy by people who think they have some competence in this field when clearly they have none and are just seeking to discredit testable vax findings.
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I’ll defer to Bret Weintein when it comes to mRNA & ovaries.
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I’ll defer to Bret Weintein when it comes to mRNA & ovaries.
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Indeed, I don’t think we need bother with Hyacinth when it comes to covid and vax information.
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Twiggy Forrest ,” if your an anti vaxxer your history
Is it me or is ant-vaxxer becoming the new racist. Another appropriated word devalued…
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Dover, Barnes said that the in the lower courts the college included case law that was part of what ended up being in the Buck v Bell case.
And ACB just endorsed that position.
I am without speech.
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Young Dot, spell “anti vaxxer”.
B – A – S – E – D
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Both JC and Lizzie , oh, and of course Notafan, have different ways of coping with the mistake they made.
So far, JC has been the most stoic, however all are using different methods to cope with their inevitable early demise.
I feel for them but we cannot tolerate them trying to muddy the waters to convince themselves , by trying to convince others, there is no problem with taking the poison jab.
You can expect their minds would be going at a million miles an hour.
Not a good place to be, but they can’t say they weren’t warned.
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Buck v. Bell (1927):
The Court declared in this terrible decision which still stands as good law. In an 8-1 decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court upheld the forced sterilization of those with intellectual disabilities “for the protection and health of the state.” Justice Holmes ruled that “society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” and ended the opinion by declaring that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
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REBELLION.
Civil Disobedience is second best.
It must happen.
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It’s 2021 & Buck v Bell is effectively upheld by SCOTUS.
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It is devoutly to be wished that the NSW Liberal Party reaps an electoral disaster from the bitter crop they are sowing.
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So after imprisoning the innocent in their millions, killing people in their thousands, you hope these criminals lose their jobs…..
They’re laughing at us.
In a just world they’d be executed publicly.
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Gaslighting, a Covid love story
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Ikamatua- great analysis. The loathsome legacy meja has demonstrated once and for all that it deserves to die.
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Australia should have zero presence in Afghanistan.
And why weren’t embassy staff etc out of there by now?
Did they expect to get an uber to the airport on Sept 11th ?
Seriously, with retards like that in DFAT, what could possibly go wrong.
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Even the once thought to be ‘ok’ germalists have shown where their loyalties really lie.
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These used to be fun.
Fleccas:
This Week In Culture#57
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Tom says:
August 15, 2021 at 4:12 pm
As requested by BBS: London Sunday Times via the Paywallian (>7500 words):
Excellent article. It says a lot about how the chunks work. When the WHO was a functioning organisation and nailed the chunks over the SARS the chunks then set to work to own the WHO and succeeded so they would not be put on the spot again. That’s why they’re beating the West; like all lefties they don’t care about rules or what is right, just winning and not having their power threatened.
The fucking nambie pambie conservatives in the West either haven’t learnt that lesson or if they have, have then sold out, like most of the GOP.
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Got to start somewhere. The Romanians did a good job with Ceausescu.
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You’re not the only one without speech, ftb.
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Dr. Ryan Cole #StoptheMandate
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But Arky, I agree, about the media, but what if the actual truth is even worse.
When the MSM were dying because of the internet, they got subsidised by government….actual subsidies to stay open?
That’s what I’m hearing.
Subsidies aren’t public.
Sort of like our tax dollars going to the Clinton foundation……………………
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Arky, email me.
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Try that again.
THIS WEEK IN CULTURE #57
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A week ago Malice was on Michael Knowles show.
Knowles is a chump who reminds me of Catholics who don’t even know about the Council of Nicaea, let alone able to discuss it.
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feelthebern says:
August 15, 2021 at 5:00 pm
Australia should have zero presence in Afghanistan.
And why weren’t embassy staff etc out of there by now?
Did they expect to get an uber to the airport on Sept 11th ?
Seriously, with retards like that in DFAT, what could possibly go wrong.
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Yes. This stinks. If they are removing Afghan “friendlies” just say so. If the Embassy is still there. then why? How stupid are these people? They have had months to form a strategy to get ‘the specials’ out.
Someone said upthread – why not utilise US presence to do the deed, FFS.
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Thank you to all those who provide links.
They go straight up on facebook and twitter when I’m not banned.
Last time on twitter it was only twelve hours!
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Third time is a charm.
THIS WEEK IN CULTURE #57
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How’s that beggin to Poland for vaxx’s going.
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they’re not interested in raisin the bar
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In a just world they’d be executed publicly.
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We don’t live in a just world.
So keep your hopes modest to avoid disappointment.
The worst thing that can happen to a career politician is to be turfed out of office.
I’ll settle for that.
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Everyone I happen to know who has stated they don’t want the covid jab are not anti-vaxxers. They, like me, simply don’t want this experimental juice injected into them.
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