Fauci and the Lab Leak and Pandemic Handling

This is difficult to write about and think about because the politics around it are completely warped.  But I will try.

Republicans hate Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted COVID-19 was a serious emergency that demanded serious measures including lockdowns and masking.  And sometimes Republicans believe that not only were mRNA vaccines ineffective against the the virus, they caused all the excess deaths from a virus that otherwise would merely have been a mild flu.  Republicans are wrong about these things.  

2) Some Republicans think Fauci was responsible for the creation of the very deadly COVID-19 pandemic (which contradicts the first part, so many Republicans don't get this far).  There may be some truth here because it is quite possible that Fauci helped set the ball in motion which ultimately led to COVID-19.

Democrats love Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted that COVID-19 was serious (it was, of course) and demanded serious measures like masking and lockdowns (it did).  Democrats are entirely correct about this but often fail to see the issues in points 2 and 3.

2) Fauci epitomizes "Science" (but "science" is also people with self-interests and blind spots, and science is sometimes wrong).  That Democrats often reflexively side with Science, Medicine, and Law arises from a bias towards the PMC.  All these things are best understood critically.  (But this does not mean falling in line with cranks and charlatans either, we must be even more critical of them.)

3) The belief that there is no "scientific" reason to believe the Lab Leak Hypothesis (but the Lab Leak Hypothesis has not been disproven either, despite great efforts to do so, and many serious people believe it.  Fauci himself initially believed that the Wuhan Meat Market was only an "amplifier" of the pandemic which originated elsewhere, and Fauci this day continues to admit that that it is not impossible that the pandemic originated from a "lab leak"...which meant that someone in a lab first caught the disease from GOF boosted specimens they were working on).

Given that we just had a Senate Hearing in which Fauci refused to answer 100 questions about COVID-19 it might be interesting to see what all of those questions were.  But instead, the media and every source I can find is more interested in the politics of Fauci invoking the Fifth Ammendment when he was pardoned by Biden for activities starting in 2014.  I have not even found (yet) the questions asked in official Senate documents released to the public.

COVID-19 ORIGINS

Gain of Function (GOF) research on several risky viruses was banned in 2014, but the ban was lifted in 2017 because of "stricter oversight."

But starting in 2014, the NIH funded the EcoHealth alliance to study viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).  This appears to have been to evade the ban on GOF.  The research in Wuhan continued despite the ban up to the origins of COVID-19 and possibly beyond.

Because this research was being done in China, it was not affected by the ban on doing this research in the US, and also the later "stricter oversight" applied to doing it in the US.

It is known that WIV was doing research on Coronaviruses that could be characterized as GOF research (though perhaps not by certain definitions of that) in a BSL-2 laboratory (inadequate for the task and outside US oversight) at the time COVID-19 was released.  Therefore, a lab leak from WIV remains a highly plausible origin of COVID-19, and several US intelligence agencies (FBI, DOE, and CIA) concluded as early as 2021 (with low to medium confidence) that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak and they maintain these conclusions to this day.  The Lab Leak Hypothesis is not a crazy "Conspiracy Theory" believed only by kooks no matter how much some media and scientists say that it is.

We don't actually have enough detail to prove the Lab Leak Hypothesis because China has never allowed anyone else to see critical information about what WIV was doing in 2019, which itself is suspicious, because if this information were not incriminating they would have no reason to hide anything.  It is also known that several people involved in this research at WIV got seriously ill around the time in question.

Some, typically MAGA, believe that COVID-19 was a Chinese plot, but US involvement in funding similar research in Wuhan somewhat weakens that idea, as well as the fact that China itself was the first to have to deal with COVID-19 and lost lives and considerable resources because of it.  There have been others suggesting it was a US plot, and COVID-19 was simply "planted" in Wuhan to disrupt China, but once again the US suffered even more from COVID-19 so if it was a plot it was surely very inept.  These ideas that COVID-19 was a plot are examples of crazy conspiracy theories, but they should not be confused with the Lab Leak Hypothesis.

There have been panels of scientists (mostly virologists with vested interests at hand) who concluded the COVID-19 origin was not likely lab leak based on technical details about the virus and the Wuhan Meat Market, but those conclusions are not air tight, so a lab leak still remains plausible.  It should be noted that no "smoking gun" was ever found at the Meat Market or elsewhere.  No evidence of COVID-19 has ever been found in the wild, as has sometimes been done before with other pandemics.  All we know is that people in Wuhan were apparently the first to get it (though we can't be entirely sure of that either).  And, perhaps not coincidentally, Wuhan had the WIV which had been doing GOF research on coronaviruses.  That is a remarkable fact, actually.  Meanwhile, the animals alleged (but never found) to be part of a zoonotic transfer were a considerable distance away.  Why did COVID-19 not start there, among the people living near or capturing these animals?

Early on in the investigation of the origins of COVID-19, some scientists claimed that the structure of the virus could not have developed naturally, it clearly looked like a result of GOF genetic splicing.  Much of the research claiming zoonotic origin of COVID debunks that notion.  But it does not prove that COVID could not have been created by GOF research.

Fauci denies that this particular Coronavirus research being done at WIV in 2019 was funded by NIH, and he is correct.  However, previous research of that nature WAS funded by NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.  What WIV was likely doing in 2019 (and this is what Jeffrey Sachs, who led one task force investigating COVID origins said in 2021) was unfunded research in the anticipation of funding.  Like Dr Sachs, I have worked in science and I know this is how labs operate.  A cynic could even believe the real research is the "unfunded research," and when the funding finally arrives that research is now virtually complete, and the funding is then mainly used to start research seeking the next funding opportunity, in effect being the "unfunded research" for that.  Sachs himself, after leading a panel of scientists investigating COVID origins, came to believe in the Lab Leak hypothesis and has said so in papers and interviews.   He looks primarily to the fact that China has refused to give the details on the research being done at WIV in 2019 as evidence of a coverup.  Those who believe in Zoonotic Transfer have the sort of racist view that the Chinese are always this way.

Funded or not, the research which may have originated COVID-19 was done in a lab that had previously received NIH funding for doing very similar research, and they might have anticipated funding getting funding for that research too eventually.  If it hadn't been for the initial NIH funding, they might not have been doing that kind of research.

Because of the risks, and the ban on GOF research in the US, the NIH should not have been funding EcoHealth alliance to do the GOF research in China.  Fauci was head of the Infectious Diseases Institute of NIH, and he also reportedly had direct personal involvement in getting EcoHealth funded to do this research in contravention of the US ban.  Therefore Fauci himself helped initiate the research program which may have ultimately produced and leaked COVID-19.  Because Biden pardoned Fauci for all his activities going back to 2014 Fauci cannot be prosecuted for this.  He may have violated US laws, and, if the Lab Leak Hypothesis is true, he might bear considerable moral responsibility for COVID-19.

If I may, let me add one more personal observation.  People who are paranoid about germs do not go into research in Virology.  People who are paranoid about germs avoid going near Virology Departments.  Virologists tend to downplay the risks of the research they are sometimes doing, as they would almost have to do in order to do this research, and overplay the benefits.  It is not clear to this day that GOF research on viruses has done anything useful.  Vaccines, for example, are not devised using GOF research.  I first heard about GOF research in 2011 (in a Virology Department presentation btw) and I was immediately scared about it.  I've also toured a BSL-4 lab (very impressive) and a BSL-2 lab (not where I'd want to work on anything dangerous).

Pandemic Handling

Finally there is one small issue about pandemic handling that also involves Fauci, but has been so warped by the politics we can't get straight answers.  Many Republicans and especially MAGA are still convinced today that masks are useless (often along with the unfounded notion that COVID-19 was fake, and the mRNA Covid vaccines caused all the deaths).  This is bad, very bad.  But even Trump himself got the vaccine which his Operation Warpspeed had helped create more effectively than otherwise.  Though Democrats often dispute that Operation Warpspeed made the vaccine available more quickly, it specifically helped fund development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, which proved to be among the most effective or even the most effective, and if the independently funded Pfizer vaccine work had failed to be useful it might have taken far longer to get a useful vaccine without the Moderna one.  As it turned out, both vaccines became available at about the same time, sometimes giving the public a choice, and most likely cranking out shots more quickly than if it had been left to Pfizer alone.

Early in the pandemic, Fauci (and others) emphasized the importance of hand washing (which is relatively unimportant in the transmission of COVID-19 and many other infectious respiratory diseases) and did not tell the public that masking was a good idea.  This was not good.  (This attitude was and still is common among doctors--including my own PCP at the time--and even in hospitals.)  Later, when it was finally advised that masking was important, the public was prevented from getting highly effective N95 masks and instead told to use simple cloth masks, which are not highly effective and generally protect others more than oneself.  I see this as a grave error.  Instead, all measures possible should have been taken to ensure an adequate supply of N95 masks both for professionals and the general public.  There should have been an earlier Operation Warp Speed for making N95 masks as well as vaccines, and/or lifting sanctions to enable buying them from China.  I myself would never have appreciated N95 masks unless I had a friend touting them and giving some away.  Even today people wear lesser masks without much thought.  The government now recommends people use N95 masks in risky situations but has never made a big deal about it, as big as the deal to use cloth masks was during the peak days of COVID-19, so many people have never heard about it.

Jesus and "The Teacher of RIghteousness"

The story of Jesus recounted in the Christian Gospels could not have happened.  At the time of Jesus, the Romans were in full control of the region, through their prefects and the client king Herod they had elevated to the throne after defeating the Hasmoneans.  The Romans were meticulous record keepers, and they recorded none of the key stories in Gospel, including Massacre of the Innocents, the supposed crowds of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem, the judgement of Pontius Pilate, and the Crucifixion.  If these things had happened, the Romans would have recorded them, and they didn't.  So, these stories are all fiction, and they were likely invented by The Apostle Paul, and his followers, who founded a religion based on Jesus' resurrection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bWIY04BsAg

Paul's inventions came after the historically true assassination of James, the so called "brother of Jesus," who had a popular sect in Jerusalem that came to odds with the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus who ordered James's assassination.  Paul was a hanger in the court of King Herod Agrippa II who intended to marry someone there, and he claimed he witnessed the assassination of James, which is quite possible.  He certainly heard of it not long after.

But Paul's invention of Jesus didn't come from nothing.  He was aware of much that had been happening before the assassination of James.  He was surely aware of key ideas from James's sect, which had been becoming too popular for the likes of Ananus.  He may have talked with James, which is what the Gospels say, and even been a part of James's sect until James's death, after which Paul went his own way with these ideas.

Those ideas likely involved the teachings of a figure earlier than Jesus, The Teacher of Righteousness, the key figure in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Teacher was a much earlier figure, from either the first or second centuries BCE.  Millennialism was a primary feature of these teachings (also reflected in some of the Gospels) that the coming of God was at hand in about 40 years, and when that didn't happen many turned away his sect but others changed the story.  The Teacher was persecuted by "The Wicked Priest" in Jerusalem who is unnamed and historians can only speculate which one he is.  The Teacher was ultimately put to death by unnamed authorities.  This may or may not have been before the Romans defeated the Hasmoneans and replaced them with a client king, King Herod.

But along with the Millennialism, The Teacher taught some if not many of the virtues which would be familiar to Christians.  The followers of The Teacher, the Essenes, were a communal sect foreshadowing the later communal sects of Christianity.  This brings to mind The Sermon on the Mount, and in fact the Beatitudes have a striking resemblance to some of the teachings in the Dead Sea scrolls (eg, blessed are the poor in spirit), though the caves where they were found is some distance from the site traditionally believed to be where Jesus is said to have given the Sermon (near the Sea of Galilee).

One historian tried to advance the theory that The Teacher was Jesus, and this has never been very well accepted because the dates are so far apart.  But this is not what I am saying.   I am saying that The Teacher was likely part of the inspiration for the story of Jesus, which was an fictional invention of Paul and his followers.  The Teacher was probably also an inspiration for the sect of James, though James's teaching might have been quite different from Paul's and likely lacked key parts of Christianity like the Resurrection and the notion that Jesus was God.  Jewish Christianity which is said to have been the continuation of James's sect also lacks the idea that Jesus was God, merely an important human teacher, and Islam incorporates that view.

King Herod Agrippa II held that the assassination of James was illegal and Ananus was deposed.  Not long afterward, the Revolts were begun with Ananus as a key leader, and lasted for years until the Romans sacked Jerusalem (including destroying the Second Temple).  

The Romans seem to have sided with the followers of James in that even when Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem after the later Bar Kochba revolt, Jewish Christians were not.  Jewish Christians understood themselves to be fundamentally Jewish and followers of the Torah, as well as the teachings of Jesus, though they were excluded from both Judaism and Christianity centuries later, and many converted to Islam after that.

Passwords and other securanoia

 My security minded friend sent me another article today on how I should be securing my security cameras from unwanted watchers.  I replied thusly:

I keep inside cameras turned off when I'm not on vacation, and care little about the others.

I do not pay for monthly services and use my own local storage cards on my digital cameras.*

My analog cameras have a local hard drive for storage, and are all outside, but do have internet access except when the app sometimes mysteriously requires a password I can't remember.

My biggest problem is remembering passwords.  

Passwords and endless security measures I do not want cause me more grief than anything else and I hate being forced to change them or use passkeys or other additional security measures.  I can usually deal with two factor identification but sometimes it causes problems too.  I've always been ultimately able to access my credit accounts but always worry that at some critical moment I won't be able to.  I have never been subjected to identity theft and have never lost money to any kind of theft.  Once I lost my physical card and was able to cancel all the charges I didn't make, and another time I was billed for something I didn't order or receive but was able to get that cancelled too.  I have been ordering things online since 1996 and more than anyone else I know and sometimes directly from small companies.  I think more people are taken in by fishing scams that say you are being charged for something you didn't order, than are actually being charged for things they didn't order.

I worry more about losing access to things and quite often I've been unable to access my cameras remotely because the apps for the digital and analog cameras will unexpectedly require me to remember a password.  Keeping track of all my passwords has been very difficult even with a book dedicated to that.

I keep my computer hard drives unencrypted because my final plan is that all my creative works be accessible to my heirs and/or the general public rather than lost forever, but Apple keeps trying to force me, against my wishes, to encrypt them, which would mean they could be lost forever just for that reason.

No matter how many times I tell iCloud that Chrome on my Desktop Mac is a "trusted device" it never remembers that, and forces me to go through the Passkey/Password/2 factor identification dialogs every time I want to access my photos.  I then have to be very careful not to be sent down the Passkey rathole.  I presume this is a form of desktop warfare, and I think much securanoia is just that.  It's not really about keeping me secure, it's about forcing me to use some particular set of apps.

Passkey seems like the most dangerous thing of all because if I were to use Passkey for everything and I lost that, I'd lose access to everything.

*I did once enable monthly services.  That was on my November trip last year to California when I wanted to monitor my cats.  The AI on the monthly service plan never seemed to identify cat presence outside correctly and wasn't useful in finding what happened to my oldest cat a day after I left home that killed him.  I tried using my phone but quickly gave up.  By the time I got home and was prepared to more seriously use check it out from the comfort of my computer with a big screen, the data had 'expired' because it was older than the days allotted.  The only thing I was able to do was remove, save, and download all the data from my SD card on the outside camera which on which the raw video was still available.  But I found it's basically watch 24 hours of video and figure out what happened.  I can hardly do it for 10 minutes at a stretch.  So it was a waste of money to enable the monthly services for online AI, and it's not worth it to me to plug my existing 24 hours of video into a generic AI to figure it out.

Karim Khan

About the only thing we can be fairly certain of is that Karim Khan's replacement will drop the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.*  And that will be telling, since it was both Israel and US who have been pushing to get Khan removed ever since his warrant for Netanyahu, and Marco Rubio even said beforehand that the administration had was taking actions to get him removed.

(*And not Putin.)

Here's the most definitive report I've been able to find on the actual acts Khan is accused of actually doing (you have to really dig to find this):

https://apnews.com/article/international-criminal-court-un-misconduct-accusations-a275e676e074c00d34c769c8bbdf69d7

A later report from 2026 reports Khan was cleared by a 3 judge panel of any relevant misconduct:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-investigation-united-nations-4f01c8ce5259dc726a565ce9a7f0a37b

This often gets referred to elsewhere as rape (I don't think it rises to that) or sexual harassment (it could qualify for that, but I generally question the concept and the standard ultimately applied by IOS which is the appearance of impropriety which is a terrible slippery slope, along with the concept imbalance of power which generally ignores the often superior powers that women have).

1.  He is alleged to have asked her to lie with her on a hotel bed (she did so) and ultimately he "touched her sexually" (elsewhere it is clarified: her breasts).

2.  He is alleged to have asked her to go on vacations with her (I'd dismiss this as completely unimportant).  She apparently did not, in this case she would have had to say yes for it to happen.  It was reported she was often reluctant to say no because of the imbalance of power.

3.  He is alleged to have put his hand in her pocket (I would say, this is no big deal, though perhaps not completely unimportant, and we don't know the precise context).

4.  He knocked on her door for 10 minutes at 3 am wanting to talk with her.  (It should be remembered that she was a very close aide who made many work related trips with him). I would call this completely unimportant to the charges.

Two items that are borderline seamy, and two that are completely unimportant.  Of which we know nothing about the antecedents--things she may have said or done.  We more or less know the context: she was his closest aide on important trips.  

And we are not at all talking about what would unequivocally be regarded as sexual acts.

IOW, it is not the Khan did not stop doing things when he was told not to (ie no means no).  It is rather that he did not first obtain affirmative permission for doing a couple of things that may have appeared improper and two others that were not unreasonable under plausible circumstances.  Or that he could not have obtained suitable permission by any means because of the alleged "imbalance of power."  (I feel that both of these latter qualifications may be regarded as anti-sex.  Why cannot any two adults come to have sexual relations by mutual consent?  And in many if not most cases, men are virtually required to be the initiator.  That is the way mammalian sex works.).  It is telling that many of Khans greatest detractors are Israeli defenders, and Israelis have a long history of documented violent and forcible rape against Palestinians, and in those cases no means nothing.  We see this kind of beyond hypocrisy frequently among those who are the most obsessed and uncritical about things like sexual harassment.

And for these alleged misdemeanors, the warrants against the greatest criminal of our era will be dropped.  And meanwhile, the vast documented rapes by Epstein clients go uninvestigated and the vast documented rapes in Israeli prisons are accepted, demanded and even celebrated by Israelis.  The Gaza genocide and pogroms in the West Bank continue.

Now Khan could NOT be described as any kind of leftist.  He was a Tory from the UK who only issued the warrant against Netanyahu (and failed to do so for many others who might have qualified for conducting genocide) under a lot of pressure, possibly even including the pressure from the initial secret inquiry into his alleged sexual harassment which had already started.  He had previously and more quickly issued a warrant for Putin (which in my mind is specious).

Also, FWIW, Khan is a married Muslim (married to a UN civil rights investigator) with two daughters.  And himself a judge of considerable stature.

The aide who was allegedly harassed did not make these things public (which was when they really took off).  She refrained from doing so possibly because she was in favor of the warrants against Netanyahu.  It was two of her "friends" who heard about the matter who made it public.

This raises many possible ideas as to the context and antecedents of the alleged sexual harassment.  

Nowhere in the public discussion are the things she may have done prior to the alleged acts in question.

Journalist Patrick Lawrence calls this affair (leading to the likely dropping of warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant) a "Descent into Lawlessness"

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/further-into-lawlessness

Ultimately Khan was sacked not by a judicial process but by a political one, by the Assembly of States Parties, which was no doubt (see Rubio's comment) heavily lobbied, bribed, and or coerced by the US (which has observer status) into making the vote against Khan.  After actual judges had investigated the affair and concluded there was no there there.

Commentator Craig Murray has concerns about the affair but keeps hedging that we don't know the facts.  The problem with this copout is that we do know the allegations and even they are pretty weak tea.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/07/narratives-of-moral-conflict-karim-khan-and-delcy-rodriguez/

Murray's article may be far more interesting in his defense of Delcy Rodriguez who is now often demonized on the left for selling out.  He also uniquely points out that Venezuela is actually getting the money from oil sales, less a relatively small US fee, and of course with no control over where the oil is going, which is a violation of sovereignty.  He has been to Venezuela and talked to top officials.  Ironically, according to Murray, Venezuela is getting the money from oil sales far more quickly than when China was handling the process.

Left to Right Peace and Freedom Coalition

I've been very skeptical of all these Left to Right Coalition proposals.  Sam Husseini's is the best I've seen.  As far as he goes, I'd support it.  He  stands for peace (not defined well here but elsewhere it's clear he would end support for Israel and other wars and imperialism), equal rights for all*, and freedom of speech, universal healthcare, tax the rich, restrain corporations, and protect the environment (also left undefined and I worry about it).

https://husseini.substack.com/p/the-need-for-a-radical-center-party?utm_source=publication-search

He dodges Immigration saying it would not be an issue if we stopped imperial wars and meddling AND the "War on Drugs" (war on poor people and democracy actually).

That being said, there are "far" left orgs I'd support too, the best of these currently is PSL (unmentioned by Husseini, and he laughs at Cornel West who I voted for last time...but wouldn't next time).  PSL even got their Presidential candidates onto the Texas ballot (which West did not).

*He leaves unmentioned sex change bathroom and sports rights and minor sex change rights.

MakePlaylist Version 1.100 now online

I have now uploaded MakePlaylist version 1.100 to SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeplaylist/

This is the version I have used to demonstrate that MakePlaylist is what I call a Lossless Information Procedure.  Even the smallest increase in data or data quality is reflected in the output data quality.  To do so it needs to generate millions of virtual playlists, which required considerable internal streamlining (what I've called Cyclotron mode) to be practical.  It also has an option to test what I call Paradoxical Information Procedures, for which some increases in data or data quality can cause less output data quality, ie, going backwards.  I discuss these types of information processing in an earlier post (which now needs a bit of updating to include the latest results obtained with 1.100 before it was finally uploaded, not to mention general editing, but the post is still basically correct):

https://verydeepleft.blogspot.com/2026/06/paradoxical-and-other-information.html

I need to get back to making other improvements to MakePlaylist for it's intended purpose of actually making playlists.  But eventually I also plan to add a mode to demonstrate Truncating Information Procedures which curiously requires adding more random numbers.  The Paradoxical type is achieved with simple data loss, which I think has far reaching implications.  And improve on the results and show they hold up for other conditions (which to some degree I have already done but not written up yet).

Sick People Should Stay Home

 I hate it when people go to concerts, movies, other social activities, and work when they are sick with respiratory ailments, carelessly spreading their germs to others.  It happens all too much, and I can trace every respiratory illness I've had (like the flu then pneumonia that almost killed me last month) to one or more such people.  I vowed never to remain near such a sick person, even at the cost of embarrassment.  Yesterday there was a person repetitively coughing and loudly sniffling with rattles right behind me at a concert.  It started just before the music director gave his intro.  I waited that out and as soon as he stopped I made my way out of the very tight row of people to a space in the corner of the hall where there were hardly any people (and nobody apparently sick).  I didn't quite get there before the music started.  I'm also going to remember to bring a mask to every concert etc in case I am delayed or trapped.  And generally not sit in the middle of front sections again because that really makes it hard to escape.  If there had been assigned seats, I'd have to go talk to an usher.  Many people give excuses like "it's just allergies" when they may have low grade infections caused by mycoplasma like walking pneumonia which are easily treated with antibiotics (which some doctors don't do).   I've been to places where nearly everyone was coughing with the chesty cough indicative of walking pneumonia, and sure enough I  caught it there, lasted a couple weeks until I got an antibiotic then went away quickly. Conditions like COPD lead people to easily pick up (and spread) other diseases, and are still disturbing to others.  It may be appropriate for people who cough a lot to wear masks in public as a precaution.  I pay attention to when I cough and rarely do so when I am healthy.  If it happens during social activities I turn away or cover my mouth.