#We must hear from this man: Devine

On the 17th floor of a non-descript Manhattan office building, opposite Hudson Yards, part of the deadliest coverup in human history was hatched last year, alleges a devastating congressional report into the origins of Covid-19

There, on the corner of 34th street and 10th Avenue, is the headquarters of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit devoted to “Wildlife Conservation”, whose big-noting, British-born founder, Peter Daszak, somehow wound up at the center of a pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republican minority report, released this week, found “strong evidence that suggests Daszak is the public face of a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] disinformation campaign designed to suppress public discussion about a potential lab leak.

“Daszak attempted to hide his close association with [China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology] while he referred to anyone in the scientific community who said a lab leak should be investigated as promoting a ‘conspiracy theory’.”

What an irony, considering this is the very same Daszak whose word was treated as gospel by Facebook when it censored any mention that the virus leaked from the Chinese lab he part funded that was conducting Frankenstein “gain of function” research on bat viruses. Talk about a conflict of interest. Daszak, 55, has studiously avoided answering questions asked by Congress about what happened in Wuhan.

While EcoHealth didn’t do research, the government agencies which funded it — the NIH, the Department of Defense, USAID — relied on Daszak to procure disease samples in foreign countries, said a former colleague of Daszak.

“The process of collecting disease samples requires having all the necessary contacts in the foreign country, the politics aligned in that country, and the money,” according to the ex-colleague.

In other words, the money was for access to Chinese viruses, Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID director, and leaders of the NIH, always had final approval authority on grants and contracts.

Daszak was working hand in glove with Fauci, our top expert directing the nation’s response to the pandemic. Together, they wilfully misled us about the origin of the virus. They were willing to run the Chinese line and defend the Wuhan Institute this past year, even after the State Department confirmed that military research was being conducted there.

Daszak’s orchestration of the shameful Lancet letter in February 2020, “debunking” the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” is highlighted in the congressional report.

It quotes from emails which “show Daszak’s effort to organize a large group of scientists to sign onto a statement that he personally drafted,” taking care that EcoHealth alliance was not linked to the letter. “We’ll… put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration,” he wrote in one of the emails The Lancet declared at the time that the authors had “no competing interest,” despite the fact Daszak organized the letter on behalf of the Chinese researchers “who he funded and with whom he collaborated”, said the congressional report.

It is a scandal which the once prestigious medical journal has never properly acknowledged. It just quietly, four months later, added an update suggesting Daszak might have ”competing interests”

Daszak and his Chinese collaborators engaged in “bullying other scientists who questioned whether the virus could have leaked from a lab; misleading the world about how a virus can be modified without leaving a trace; and, in many, instances directly lying about the nature of the research they were conducting, as well as the low-level safety protocols they were using for that research,” said the congressional report.

He appeared to spend much of last year isolating in the affluent arcadia of Rockland County in his million-dollar two-storey gabled white clapboard, nestled between a country club and the forests of the Ramapo Mountains.

But someone disturbed his peace last August, when the FBI reportedly paid him a call after he reported receiving an envelope in the mail containing white powder. The following day Daszak got physical with a News 12 cameraman filming outside his house. The footage which aired that night showed a strenuous tussle for the camera and an angry Daszak can be heard saying “Go away”.

Ever since, Daszak has successfully evaded scrutiny.

At last, the finger of blame is pointing directly at him, from Congress. But this was a GOP-only report. Democrats refused to use their majority powers to issue subpoenas and compel Daszak to give evidence. There’s no excuse for that.

The origin of the pandemic should be a bipartisan issue. If we don’t know what happened in Wuhan in 2019, how can we avoid a repeat performance?

There must be one thing Americans agree on: Daszak needs to spill the beans.

Rights of Jan. Sixers are abused

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken disrespected his own country on the world stage recently when he invited the United Nations to come here and investigate human-rights abuses such as racism.

Well, if he wants to go down that track, the UN investigators won’t have to go past Washington to find one of the worst human-rights abuses around. 

Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland have turned a blind eye to the injustice of dozens of Jan. 6 detainees still locked up, without trial, often in solitary confinement. Even people charged with no violent offenses are being treated worse than murderers.

Now a group of valiant lawyers for the “January Sixers” have written a last-ditch letter to Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union asking them to “investigate the mistreatment and torture of pretrial detainees held in the District of Columbia jail over the last six months.”

They have catalogued shocking abuses.

“In addition to prolonged solitary confinement, January Sixers are being beaten, denied medical treatment, denied regular shower access, as well as reasonable access to personal hygiene item . . . It is clear that January Sixers constitutional rights are being violated at DC-GITMO, within five miles of the White House . . .

“This letter is an emergency request to help us put an end to the human-rights violations taking place at . . . ‘DC- GITMO’ — violations which without question meet the definition of torture,” write the lawyers, Joseph McBride Steven Metcalf and Martin Tankleff.

They point out that “none of the detainees or those released pending trial have been charged with insurrection, despite the media, leaders in Congress, and the President of the United States calling it an insurrection. “However . . . our call for help . . . would remain the same. This is because pretrial detainees are being tortured while in federal custody in violation of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the UN Standard Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, otherwise known as the Nelson Mandela Rules . . .

“The Supreme Court . . . has ruled that pretrial detainees, unlike convicted persons, cannot be punished at all, never mind maliciously and sadistically.”

You can condemn what the January Sixers did that day all you want, but turning a blind eye to injustice and sadism committed in our name only hurts us all in the end.