https://www.wired.com/story/revenge-of-the-covid-conspiracy-theorists/
"In a flurry of tweets last week, Elon Musk declared that the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) was “a viper’s nest of
radical-left marxists who hate America” and was pure “evil.” One of the prime
sins of the international development body, he said, was its alleged role in
starting the pandemic.
“Did you know,” he tweeted, “that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded
bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people?”
Several of Trump’s other senior appointees have also touted this theory that
Covid-19 is not just the result of a lab leak, but is a genetically engineered
virus—and perhaps even a bioweapon—created in part thanks to US funding. This
belief, which has been consistently refuted, has become a North Star for the
new administration.
The list of Trump appointees who have endorsed this or similar theories is
long. There is Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency
(DOGE); Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is likely to be confirmed as head of the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); Tulsi Gabbard, the newly
confirmed director of national intelligence; and Jay Bhattacharya, incoming
director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Others, like CIA director
John Ratcliffe, have bolstered the claim that Covid-19 was leaked from a
state-run lab in Wuhan, but have stopped short of calling it a bioweapon.
And then there are the Republicans in both houses of Congress who have spent
the past four years subpoenaing witnesses, demanding documents, and alleging
that the US government was responsible for the pandemic.
The new administration has explicitly said that it intends to curtail research
on infectious diseases, ban a wide swath of virological work, and perhaps even
prosecute those who, it believes, created the Covid-19 pandemic. As one former
CDC staffer describes it to
WIRED, “There is a vendetta.”"
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Covid: February 13, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-february-122173068
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
