Matt Ridley goes in depth to explore the Covid 19 outbreak, scrutinizing the lack of criticism, the inherent red flags widely accepted as benign, the possible motive for a multi-government cover up, and ultimately the demise of the scientific enlightenment as it bends to a more fearsome pandemic: totalitarianism.
The last three years did not teach us much about how viruses work and spread.
They did however teach us a lot about how governments work, and how tyranny and authoritarianism spreads.
Covid was in the US the summer of 2019. What was thought to be the e-cigarette vaping illness (evali), which peaked in Sept 2019, was really the first covid wave in the world. E-cigarette users are 7 times more likely to contract covid-19 than non-e-cig users. They were the canaries in the coal mine.
The CDC was aware of it and covered it up (vitamin e thickener was the cover story) after discovering it was one of Ralph Baric's creations. They hoped to hide the numbers as a severe flu season and hoped it would be gone in a year.
When China detected it several months later, after it had worked its way to the other side of the globe infecting many countries along the way, the US decided to wash its hands of the now-pandemic and blame China.
To be clear, the virus had been silently circulating and spreading in the US since at least the middle of 2019, and since we didn't take any action until early 2020, that long lead time is the reason why the US struggles with such high levels of it.
With China, the virus didn't enter their country until late 2019. They detected it early and locked down early, allowing them to get it under control, which is why they had such low rates of it until Omicron showed up.
There were so many asymptomatic cases in early 2020, the supposed beginning of the pandemic in the US, because they were of people who had contracted covid months earlier and recovered on their own.
The US found every excuse in early 2020 to delay testing for this reason. It would have revealed the virus was already widespread in the US by the time China got their first cases.
The World Health Organization also monitored the virus as it spread in the US. Unlike the CDC, the WHO is an independent body, and when it refused to obey Trump's order to blame China after they detected it, he cut off their funding.
Whether or not GOF research was outsourced to WIV in cooperation with EcoHealth Alliance is irrelevant since there was never any leak from that lab.
It's why Trump held his covid meetings in high-security meeting rooms, the so-called "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility" usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. This is the big secret the US is hiding about covid.