by Leo Hohmann
Probable cause, preponderance of evidence, and beyond reasonable doubt
Jan 28, 2024
Read original here:
If you are not interested in statistics and such evidence, then please scroll down to the section titled “The Strengthening Case for a Lab Origin” for the natural-science-based argument.
This article is eArchived here as originally posted just in case the original blog is deleted. You are encouraged to read the original at the link above.
Original post
The Strength of Evidence for a Lab Origin: Probable cause, preponderance of evidence, and beyond reasonable doubt
By Alex Washburne, January 28, 2024
I had previously made the case that the totality of circumstances surrounding SARS-CoV-2 origins is sufficient for probable cause to believe the virus originated in a lab. In addition to the circumstances surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence we lack for a zoonotic origin makes our case even stronger.
Outside the narrow lens of mainstream media outlets unable to cover this globally pertinent forensic case, the biggest scientific murder-mystery of the century is being solved.
New evidence has emerged to strengthen the lab origin case. The flawed papers claiming a zoonotic origin have been revealed as even more hopelessly flawed – while those of us independent subject matter experts could see this from the beginning, now it is becoming more obvious even to the lay public. Additionally, the lab origin theory has made remarkable predictions about the contents of recently FOIA’d drafts of the DEFUSE grant. The case for a lab origin is now clear enough that not only can we see the lab origin beyond reasonable doubt, but we are starting to accumulate evidence consistent with a cover-up, that this research-related accident was known to some who knew they funded the work, who knew they subcontracted the work, and who knew they did the work.
Let’s recap what we already knew, what’s new, and what we can reasonably deduce about who knew what & when.
The Fall of the Zoonotic Origin Papers
SARS-CoV-2 is a bat sarbecovirus that emerged in Wuhan far from the hotspots of wildlife bat sarbecoviruses, in a city without bats, at the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the largest repository of bat sarbecoviruses in the world.
The outbreak started sometime in October-November 2019, well before the Huanan Seafood Market outbreak. While Worobey et al. claimed “early” cases were centered around the wet market, they failed to account for earlier cases preceding the wet market outbreak, the Chinese government’s order to destroy early cases or the ascertainment protocol that required a connection to the wet market, and a study of social media data indicated the earliest surge in care-seeking terms was not near the Huanan Seafood Market, but across the river at hospitals nearest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
New: Michael Weissman, a quantitatively sharp physicist who has been estimating the likelihood of lab vs. zoonotic origin theories, made a simple observation that shows Worobey et al.’s own analysis disproves their own assumptions & conclusions. Worobey et al. report that the average distance to the wet market from “unlinked” cases was lower than the average distance to the wet market from cases linked to the wet market. This is a statistically significant indication of sampling bias – if there were no sampling bias, no preferential ascertainment of cases based on proximity to the wet market, then these distances should be the same, or unlinked cases perhaps farther.
Worobey et al. made conclusions based on the assumption that unlinked cases were ascertained at random, but their own analysis disproves that assumption and thereby reveals what we’ve said all along: these early cases are a biased view of the early outbreak provided by the Chinese government. Cases preceding the wet market, surges of care-seeking terms near the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the statistically proven biases of the wet market dataset all but disprove the wet market hypothesis, leaving us with no evidence supporting a natural explanation for why a bat sarbecovirus arose in a city without bats, but with a lab specializing in bat sarbecoviruses.
Pekar et al. also tried to claim the early evolutionary tree of SARS-CoV-2 is highly unlikely to have occurred by chance under one introduction, and they estimated a Bayes Factor of 60 for the two large branches at the base of the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny (i.e. they estimated the evolutionary tree we observe is 60-times more likely under a zoonotic origin than lab origin). Colleagues and I showed this paper did not justify its conclusions in many ways: (I) their model of evolution was inaccurate (they used a model for HIV evolution instead of SARS-CoV superspreading) and this model made big-branches less-likely (II) their model of case ascertainment, like Worobey et al (written by the same group), was wrong and biased case-ascertainment through contact or location tracing would make two-big-branches more likely, and (III) there are SARS-CoV-2 sequences that meet the authors’ inclusion criteria but which were excluded without cause, and these sequences suggest there aren’t two big-branches but instead intermediate lineages, completely undermining the empirical premise of Pekar et al.
New: An anonymous poster on X (formerly Twitter) examined the code in Pekar et al. and found they had a bug in their code. The authors fail to estimate the likelihood of two-big-branches under alternative scenarios and consequently their estimated Bayes Factors are not actually Bayes Factors. This bug in the code, alone, drops their not-a-Bayes-Factor of 60 to a Bayes Factor of 3, which is within the realm of noise, and that’s not accounting for the additional biases, model inaccuracies, and statistical challenges colleagues and I identified.
The end result is that the evolutionary tree of SARS-CoV-2 does not provide any evidence of multiple spillover events. This end result is important evidence in favor of a lab origin. We have seen a single SARS-CoV spillover in 2002 when an animal trade outbreak led to an infection of civet handlers across a vast geographic scale of Guangdong Province. The viruses circulating in civets were genetically diverse and consequently the evolutionary tree of viruses infecting civet handlers had many branches, one for each spillover event, and those branches differed by more than just 2 mutations that separated the two big branches at the base of the SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary tree (which could occur in a single human-human transmission event).
An animal trade network is the primary way a bat sarbecovirus with close relatives in faraway Yunnan Province could get to Wuhan, but animal trade outbreaks leave footprints. Animals are housed together and in close contact with animal handlers over many miles and across many cities. Like other outbreaks along food-distribution networks (think: salmonella on lettuce), the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak infected people across the entire distribution network of the food or animals. Civet handlers became ill in separate spillover events across all of Guangdong Province. SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, did not leave a trace between Yunnan and Wuhan, the Chinese government only locked down Wuhan yet there were not reported outbreaks outside of Wuhan or Hubei province.
The Chinese government limited PCR tests to travelers coming from Wuhan, and focusing testing on such a narrow area is a strange public health policy for any country trying to contain an animal trade outbreak with a geographically broad precedent. Another strange public health policy was the CCP ordering the destruction of early cases. If there was an animal trade outbreak, then we should test widely along the entire network and fear additional spillover events in geographically disparate locales getting animals (e.g. raccoon dogs) from the same trade network. In such a geographically broad outbreak across a trade network with the potential for multiple spillovers, earlier cases are exponentially more valuable for the information they contain about the cause of spillover, the animals infected, the particular lines of animal trade networks to monitor, and how we might bottle-up the leak from animals to people.
The Strengthening Case for a Lab Origin
All of these anomalies of SARS-CoV-2 emergence, SARS-CoV-2 evolution, and CCP outbreak policy, however, make perfect sense if the leak was not from animals to people, but from the world’s largest repository of bat sarbecoviruses in the same city, walking distance from both the wet market and the hospitals at the heart of earlier surges in care-seeking terms.
The lab origin theory examines the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from a lab, and to fully understand a lab-origin theory one must examine the research being conducted by the lab. It just so happens that there is a bat sarbecovirus lab in the same city where this bat sarbecovirus emerged; the specificity of the connection between the virus that emerged and the lab is so high it’s like finding a tiger roaming around the town walking distance from a big cat sanctuary in Germany, so knowing there is a sanctuary drawing in big cats from around the world provides critical context for the big cat roaming the streets nearby. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was a leading institute for studying wildlife coronaviruses. These researchers would catch all manners of animals and even sample animal trade networks in search of new viruses. They would take these wildlife viral samples back to Wuhan for further study, and in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance they would import wildlife viral samples obtained by external, US-based parties.
The wildlife virological work in Wuhan is important context, but the single most important thing to know about the lab origin theory is a grant written in 2018 – the DEFUSE proposal. The DEFUSE proposal was pried from the unwilling hands of EcoHealth Alliance by DRASTIC, the group of independent sleuths investigating a lab origin theory since 2020.
DEFUSE was submitted to the DARPA PREEMPT call. By pure happenstance, I have intimate knowledge of this call because I helped write a successful DARPA PREEMPT grant, I was working on a DARPA PREEMPT team for 2 years pre-COVID (and a DARPA YFA on bat viruses since 2017), and I attended the meeting in DC where we got to hear from other DARPA PREEMPT teams. Consequently, I can read DEFUSE and put it into context of the grant call & other contemporary work in the field, and I can quickly identify the characterizing features of DEFUSE revealing the unique research goals and intentions of the authors that differ from broader wildlife virological work.
The DARPA PREEMPT call aimed to preempt pathogen spillover. The call sought proposals to identify “jump-capable quasispecies”, a rather new term that referred to strains of pathogens with an increased ability to jump the species barrier, especially those with an increased ability for onward transmission in humans that could cause a pandemic. Then, to preempt spillover, the call sought proposals aiming to somehow prevent wildlife from acquiring these jump-capable quasispecies and/or interventions that reduced the risk of humans overlapping with wildlife at times & places when they had these jump-capable quasispecies.
To give you an example of a DARPA PREEMPT grant, let me share a bit about the grant I was on. I was part of a team studying bat henipaviruses like Hendra, Nipah, Cedar etc. We proposed to have a vast international team catch bats across Africa, SE Asia, and Australia, sample bats for henipaviruses, and characterize when & where we find infected bats as well as the genetic diversity of their henipaviruses. The most important barrier to entry for most wildlife viruses is a step in the virus life cycle called “receptor-binding”, or latching onto the receptors of new hosts, so we would focus our studies of quasispecies phenotypes by having labs make the receptor-binding proteins of henipaviruses in the lab (not the whole viruses) and test their ability to bind human receptors. For a small set of jump-capable quasispecies, we would try to culture the viruses in a BSL-4 lab (the highest possible biosafety level), and we would develop vaccines against these quasispecies identified from the wild.
DEFUSE proposed to sample bat sarbecoviruses in SE Asia, but they didn’t propose to examine the extant variation of sarbecoviruses in nature, instead they were searching for a highly specific genomic feature that has never been seen before in sarbecoviruses: a furin cleavage site (FCS). This, alone, is highly unusual – why would they bet an $15 million grant on searching for a feature that had never been observed in nature before? Furin cleavage sites had been documented in very distant coronaviruses such as MERS-CoV, feline alphacoronaviruses, or some endemic human coronaviruses, and across the board it was recognized that the FCS enhances the ability of a virus to bind receptors and enter the cells across a wider range of host receptors and cells. DEFUSE proposed to search for furin cleavage sites and if they found one, insert the FCS inside more-abundant strains to test their transmissibility. The viral assays and work with humanized mice (e.g. testing transmissibility of a virus with an FCS) would occur not in Buenos Aires, not it Atlanta, not in Cape Town or Sydney, not even in Beijing… it would occur in Wuhan. Finally, these researchers would construct a vaccine against such a sarbecovirus and vaccinate bats to preempt spillover.
Kudos to the grant’s focus on receptor-binding & cell entry, but their identification of a never-before-seen motif is highly unusual. None of the other PREEMPT teams proposed to make things not found in nature. The proposal to search for something never before documented and swap it around other viruses in hypothesized recombination events is not the direction evidence flows in wildlife virology. Wildlife virologists look at what we find in wildlife, and study what we find in wildlife, we don’t use our imaginations to make unnatural chimeric innovations not found in wildlife and then conjure these horrors into existence.
SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with a furin cleavage site never before seen in a sarbecovirus. It needs to be emphasized that, to the best of our global knowledge, “sarbecovirus with furin cleavage site” did not exist in nature before 2020, but it did exist in a grant proposal to make something not found in nature, and that biological novelty was proposed to be made in Wuhan. The exact furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 is found in another protein, a protein called alpha-ENaC found in humans and studied heavily at the same university (UNC) as one of the PI’s of DEFUSE.
New: Drafts of the DEFUSE grant recently obtained by Emily Kopp at US Right to Know found several pieces of evidence strengthening the connection between DEFUSE and the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2. First, the leader of DEFUSE, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, mentioned in a comment that, while they would propose to do some of their riskier work in the BSL-3 labs of UNC, after acceptance of the grant they could offload that work to the BSL-2 labs in Wuhan. These comments amount to a conspiracy to deceive and defraud the US DoD in their grant and cut corners in biosafety to cut costs, conducting more risky work not in Buenos Aires or Raleigh or Amsterdam, but in Wuhan. Second, the drafts contain more specific mentioning of “furin cleavage” than the final grant – the final grant hedged bets by emphasizing “proteolytic” cleavage sites, but the drafts fixate on furin, increasing the specificity of the connection between DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2. Finally, and most importantly, the authors propose a specific location in the genome where they will insert these furin cleavage sites: the S1/S2 boundary, a narrow window in a 3,600 nucleotide gene, and SARS-CoV-2 has its furin cleavage site at exactly the location proposed in these grants.
The furin cleavage site alone should be enough for probable cause given the lack of precedent of this feature in 2018 when DEFUSE was written and the specificity of their proposed insertion matching exactly that seen in SARS-CoV-2. Peter Daszak shows an awareness of the biosafety regulations and intentions of US government agencies, and he conspired to bypass these rules and regulations to cut costs once he received US taxpayer funding for his work.
However, there’s more.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2, researchers would need to have a DNA copy of the RNA virus. In order to make a DNA copy of an RNA virus, they would construct a “reverse genetics system”. Even the submitted version of DEFUSE mentions that they will use reverse genetics technology to rescue viruses from genome sequences on a computer, swap spike genes, and insert the furin cleavage sites inside these DNA clones to make modified viruses. Two of the three leaders in the field of coronavirus reverse genetic systems were on the DEFUSE grant: Ralph Baric and his former student, Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi ZhengLi.
In 2022, Valentin Bruttel and Tony Van Dongen noticed an unusual pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Two of the most popular bioengineering scissors used to make reverse genetics systems – BsaI and BsmBI – appear to cleave the SARS-CoV-2 genome into 6 segments, and this would make for a highly efficient reverse genetics system. SARS-CoV-2 appears to a bioengineer like an IKEA virus, as if someone had already put time into making sure it could be easily assembled with readily available tools.
We quantified the odds of this pattern appearing in nature and wrote a paper documenting the endonuclease fingerprint in the genome of SARS-CoV-2. Not only is the spatial arrangement of these cutting/pasting sites highly unusual, but the mutations that move them around are exclusively the mutations bioengineers used in prior work, and the concentration of these “silent” mutations is 8-9 times higher within these moved-around stitching sites compared to the rest of the genome. This analysis led us to our theory of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 by 6-segment assembly, using the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI. The IKEA virus can be ordered in 6 parts and using only the screwdriver of BsaI and allen wrench of BsmBI, you can put the parts together with ease.
New: The same drafts of DEFUSE mentioned above detailing FCS insertion in the S1/S2 boundary also contain more details about their proposed methods to rescue & modify wild viruses from bat samples. Specifically, after EcoHealth shipped bat samples to Wuhan, they proposed to sequence the samples and rescue bat sarbecoviruses using reverse genetic systems assembled with “6 segments” and in this context they include cost-estimates for the enzyme BsmBI.
The highly precise methodological details contained in the drafts of DEFUSE are exactly the details predicted by the theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated as a research product of DEFUSE-like work.
DEFUSE-like work has been the dominant lab-origin theory, and it’s misleading for people to say that lab-origin theories would originate in any city with a lab because there was only one city with the lab that proposed this highly specific research – this was not proposed to take place in Lima or Mexico City or Alberta or Paris, but in Wuhan. We have evidence Peter Daszak was willing to cut biosafety corners to cut costs and conduct the riskiest work proposed in DEFUSE, exactly the kind of work that could generate SARS-CoV-2, in Wuhan’s BSL-2 labs.
The odds of the alignment between a grant in 2018 and the unnatural, unprecedented genome of a virus in 2019 are nearly zero under a natural origin. My work on the DARPA PREEMPT grant was to forecast the evolution of viruses, so I can state with the confidence of my expertise that the biogeography, epidemiology, public health policy, and genomic anomalies of SARS-CoV-2 are not what you would expect from the natural evolution of a zoonotic virus. The connection between DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2 is nearly impossible with our 2018 knowledge of wildlife virology and the evolution of wildlife viruses, unless DEFUSE was used as the blueprint, a letter of intent to make a highly specific biological novelty that we found later in the same city where these authors proposed to make it.
DEFUSE was wisely rejected by DARPA, and this has been a common counterargument. However, the DEFUSE PI Peter Daszak had many other sources of funding, including tens of millions of dollars from USAID’s PREDICT program, the Gates Foundation and WellcomeTrust’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, and even NIAID.
In fact, not only did NIAID fund Peter Daszak through the grant “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence”, but this NIAID grant also expanded to include all the PI’s of DEFUSE in 2019. The email below from October 2019 contains the primary players of DEFUSE who had never all collaborated and co-authored a document before DEFUSE nor collaborated since (ouihaagendazs is the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Ben Hu and gnyny0803 is Li Guo). The authors are jumping on an “NIAID SARs-CoV call” on Wednesday, October 30th, suggesting the DEFUSE PI’s whose only known research product is DEFUSE were actively collaborating through NIAID at the time of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence.
Evidence of a Cover-Up
The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a database of hundreds of sarbecovirus genomes and spike genes, but that dataset was deleted in September 2019. The Chinese government ordered the destruction of early cases and sequences, and deleted sequences from NCBI’s servers have been recovered by Jesse Bloom, shining more light on the early outbreak, complicating the evolutionary & epidemiological story of the Huanan Seafood market (what are the odds that sequences deleted corroborate the wet market story vs. complicate it?). The Chinese government only allocated PCR tests to patients in Wuhan with connections to the wet market or travelers coming from Wuhan with connection to known cases in Wuhan, and only Wuhan was locked down, a policy that makes little sense under the SARS-CoV-1 precedent of a geographically widespread animal trade outbreak in SARS-CoV-1. Of course, since SARS-CoV-1 there were 6 lab leaks of SARS-CoV-1 in China, and that could have been the precedent guiding Chinese public health policy.
Peter Daszak, the leader of DEFUSE, did not disclose DEFUSE as a conflict of interest when he was elected to be the US emissary to the WHO’s COVID origins investigation in Wuhan, nor did he disclose DEFUSE when chosen to lead The Lancet’s COVID-origins investigation.
Peter Daszak went even further. Daszak coordinated with DEFUSE colleagues Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang to write an article to The Lancet calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories”. Not only did Daszak not disclose DEFUSE as a COI, but the email also indicates Daszak’s intent to ghostwrite the article, hide conflicts of interest, all for the purpose of distracting The Lancet’s audience from DEFUSE PIs’ central role working with the lab at the heart of the lab origin theory to design a biological novelty matching the specs of SARS-CoV-2. If the organism described in DEFUSE were patented, SARS-CoV-2 would be an infringement of their patent.
The subject line of Daszak’s email reads:
“No need for you to sign the ‘Statement’ Ralph!!”
Daszak & Linfa Wang agreed that Daszak, Wang, and Baric should not sign the statement they wrote & are organizing “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way”. Baric replied “I also think this is a good decision. Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
Below, we also have an email in which Peter Daszak wrote his colleagues of USAID’s PREDICT program in April 2020 with subject line
RE: China Genbank Sequences
Importance: High
All – It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point.
As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH.
… Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.
Cheers, Peter
The terminated grant in question was the same NIAID grant which brought DEFUSE collaborators together in 2019. What were these China Genbank Sequences of high-importance? Why would these sequences connected to the DEFUSE PI’s NIAID grant bring unwelcome attention? Forgive my insatiable curiosity, but this email makes me want to pay more attention to USAID and their PREDICT project supporting Daszak’s work.
If these sequences were natural bat sarbecovirus sequences and if SARS-CoV-2 were a natural bat sarbecovirus, then China Genbank Sequences would reinforce the evolutionary history of sarbecoviruses, helping us see more clearly that SARS-CoV-2 were a natural virus. If that were the case, few would have a greater incentive than Daszak to disclose these sequences, but instead Daszak chose to withhold them.
If SARS-CoV-2 were a laboratory product of DEFUSE-related work, then it makes sense the NIAID grant connecting DEFUSE collaborators would be terminated and sequences associated with this grant would bring “very unwelcome attention” to those who published the sequences, because somebody like me would look at the sequences and realize they provide even stronger evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was a product of DEFUSE-related work, that the suspects had the genomes on their computers prior to the emergence of this virus. It would make sense Daszak would not disclose DEFUSE nor China Genbank Sequences because he would have a consciousness of guilt. It would make sense he would assert himself as the US emissary to the WHO’s investigation and the leader of The Lancet’s COVID origins investigations without compromising his position by disclosing his conflicts of interest because he has an existential need to ensure investigations come to believe this is a natural virus, even if it is not.
There has remained the possibility that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have proceeded with DEFUSE-related work without the consent of Peter Daszak. However, that seems unlikely when we examine the way the scientific community operates. Daszak was a ring-leader of a massive global alliance, EcoHealth Alliance, capable of acquiring tens of millions of dollars from USAID’s PREDICT project, the WellcomeTrust + Gates Foundation’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, NIAID’s grant “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence”, and more.
EcoHealth Alliance was such a powerhouse that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have been able to publish such work without including DEFUSE PI’s – any attempt to publish such work would be flagged as failing to credit DEFUSE PI’s and that peer review battle would be a research ethics scandal that alienates the WIV from their most powerful and well-connected colleagues, greatly limiting their ability to have an impact in wildlife virology for years afterwards. The WIV had published prior reverse genetics systems (Peng et al 2016) and chimeric CoVs (Hu et al. 2017) with Peter Daszak. Daszak was a close and valued collaborator of the bat sarbecovirus team at the WIV, he was closer in-network at the WIV than Ralph Baric, and the WIV had every incentive to conduct this research with Daszak to boost the reach of their work through Daszak’s vast global network of wildlife virologists.
It’s possible the Chinese government could have proceeded with this work in a classified setting, but that wouldn’t explain Daszak’s own refusal to disclose DEFUSE, the “Statement” Baric did not have to sign, the China Genbank Sequences withheld.
Closing Remarks
Papers claiming a zoonotic origin have all been debunked.
The DEFUSE grant proposed a highly specific research program in 2018 that would create a virus like SARS-CoV-2, from the furin cleavage site never before documented in a sarbecovirus to the BsaI/BsmBI restriction map anomalous among wild CoVs and consistent with a reverse genetics system assembled with 6 segments. The only time BsaI and BsmBI had been used on a CoV before COVID was when Ben Hu, Peter Daszak, and Shi ZhengLi made chimeric bat sarbecoviruses in Wuhan.
Lab origin theory made several predictions about the specific research methods that would lead to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, and recently obtained drafts of DEFUSE contain precisely those methods to astonishing detail, from the S1/S2 insertion of a furin cleavage site to the 6-segment assembly with order forms for BsmBI. The drafts of DEFUSE also reveal Peter Daszak’s awareness of DoD’s biosafety concerns, and his willingness to defraud the DoD at great risk to humanity by claiming to conduct risky research in UNC’s BSL-3 labs but intending to actually conduct the work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s problematic BSL-2 labs.
The authors of DEFUSE are a unique collaboration. They had never all written a paper together before DEFUSE. They were all on a call with NIAID discussing SARs-CoVs in 2019. Included on the 2019 call was Ben Hu, the exact scientist who was unique in using BsaI + BsmBI on a coronavirus pre-COVID. After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, Daszak coordinated with Baric and Linfa Wang to author a “Statement” but not sign it to not look self-serving, and Daszak wrote a high-importance email ordering his UC Davis colleagues to not upload China Genbank Sequences that were part of the recently terminated NIH/NIAID grant connecting DEFUSE PI’s.
The evidence we have suggests not only beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, but that the unique collaboration leading us to believe a lab origin beyond reasonable doubt had NIAID support, had sequences they withheld with knowledge the sequences could bring unwelcome attention to whoever uploaded them, and proceeded to mount what can legitimately be called a disinformation campaign calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories” while conspiring to not sign their own statements to mislead readers into thinking such statements came from independent, unconflicted scientists.
Over 20 million people have died. Over 60 million people faced acute hunger. Over 100 million children were thrown into multidimensional poverty. Trillions of dollars were lost as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was an historic catastrophe that originated by researchers who had DEFUSE in hand and who willingly bypassed ruled and regulations to conduct risky work the authors knew would enhance a potentially pandemic pathogen, as the purpose of PREEMPT was to preempt pandemics by focusing on potentially pandemic pathogens. The authors who wrote DEFUSE behaved with a consciousness of guilt once the research product proposed in their grant began circulating around the world, and both our scientists and science-funding institutions have withheld critical information that reveals the nature of research proposed, and conducted, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the support of the US taxpayer.
Time, forensic analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and further evidence has only strengthened the case for a lab origin. We can further strengthen the case with more evidence, but with information in the public domain we already have enough evidence to justify probable cause to investigate DEFUSE PI’s, preponderance of evidence in civil suits of DEFUSE PI’s, and beyond-reasonable-doubt confidence that SAR-CoV-2 emerged from a lab even if we don’t know who held the pipette. I’ll let lawyers figure out if bypassing biosafety safeguards and accidentally killing 20 million people constitutes negligence, if causing a global pandemic is a crime.
The forensic scientific case of SARS-CoV-2 origins is like the case of a close network of friends who were all in a room together in which someone died, we have a proposal by these friends to kill that specific person with the specific bullet, in that specific room, at that general time when all of these researchers were in the room together. While the statement wasn’t funded, it should be read as a revelation of the intentions of the group. We may not know who pulled the trigger, but we know a murder occurred and every author of the letter is a suspect who knows more than they are currently sharing with the public.
It’s past time for impartial investigations that force the retention of documents by all parties found at the scene of the crime.
We can separate this research-related incident from our society and from all of science only once we separate the scientists & their funders and compel them to provide a full account of their activities in Wuhan in 2019. Only then can the world have truth, reconciliation, and hope for proper regulation of risky research and the scientific systems that made a lab-created pandemic possible.
There are zero benefits to these so-called “Net Zero” plans because CO2 cannot be sequestered from the atmosphere, except very temporarily. The environment will rapidly restore the CO2 equilibrium concentration at any temperature.
Removing CO2 from the environment (or preventing CO2 emission by humans) is a perturbance to the Henry’s Law equilibrium at the location and temperature where the perturbation occurred. Henry’s Law describes the physical phase-state equilibrium between the unreacted dissolved gas in a liquid, versus the same gas in air or space above the liquid surface and exposed to that surface. Henry’s Law applies to all gas and liquid combinations. Henry’s Law describes atmospheric CO2 gas in contact with the ocean surface, ocean being more than 70% of earth’s surface, but it also applies to water everywhere which is in contact with CO2 gas, for example in and on plants, on humans and all animals and in their lungs, inside bubbles in the ocean, on the surface of rain drops, soil, lakes, and rivers, collectively the environment.
An amount of CO2 gas will be removed from the atmosphere by the environment which is equal to any human-produced CO2 gas emitted to the atmosphere, and vice-versa; this is Henry’s Law simply said.
Thus human-produced CO2 cannot warm the earth. Any CO2 added by humans will be equally removed by the environment; any amount of CO2 removed by humans will be replaced by the environment. Thus there is no climate emergency based in human CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Climate-alarmists are the emergency.
Le Chatelier’s principle and the Law of Mass Action assure us that any perturbance to the Henry’s Law equilibrium will be followed by a rapid response from the environment to restore that equilibrium and the speed and size of that response will be proportionate to the speed and size of the perturbation. In other words, sequestration or removal of CO2 from the atmosphere or suppression of CO2 emissions, whether by humans, biological activity or inorganic chemical reactions will result in replacement of that CO2 by the environment and restoration of the Henry’s Law equilibrium partition ratio of CO2 gas in water and CO2 gas in air above the water surface based on local surface temperature.
Removing CO2 or preventing emissions of CO2 is a futile waste of money, time and resources. Humans can neither increase atmospheric CO2 nor decrease it by controlling emissions.
Ocean and water everywhere will emit an equal or temporarily higher amount of CO2 gas to replace any CO2 gas that has been removed from the environment until the Henry’s Law partition ratio is restored. The Henry’s Law constant for CO2 and water is a ratio of the molar concentration of CO2 gas in water versus the molar concentration of CO2 gas in air above the water. The Henry Law constant changes with temperature at the liquid/gas interface, which is dominantly the surface of the ocean.
Any increase in CO2 concentration in air (due to any CO2 source, natural and human) will be offset by a proportionate increase in solubility of CO2 in ocean and water everywhere that is in contact with the increase in CO2 partial pressure. This law applies for all gas and liquid combinations, but the ratio is different for each combination and temperature.
CO2 gas is not increasing earth’s surface temperature. Additions of human-produced CO2 via fossil fuels etc cannot increase earth’s CO2 concentration, therefore human CO2 emissions cannot increase earth’s temperature. Instead, increases in earth’s surface temperature (dominantly ocean surface temperature) cause increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration. And vice versa. Solubility of CO2 gas in water is inversely proportional to temperature of the water. Colder water (thus denser water) holds relatively more CO2 than warmer (and less dense) water. Earth’s surface has been very slowly warming, and thereby ocean surface and water-containing surfaces everywhere have emitted relatively more CO2 than they absorb. Warming of earth’s surface is not due to humans or human-produced CO2, but instead, increases in total atmospheric CO2 are caused by earth’s surface warming. Warming which releases relatively more CO2 gas than is being absorbed. Both emission and absorption occur simultaneously and continuously; the ratio of absorption versus emission is the Henry’s Law constant at the given surface temperature.
“If we lose citizenship, there are going to be unelected bureaucrats, millions of them, that are going to be judge, jury, and executioner of our fates by the rules and regulations that they make that we have no say in. …If we lose citizenship, then we’re going to see a lot of experts, elites, professionals in and out of the university world that’ll start to dismantle the Constitution.” From Hillsdale College’s free online course, taught by historian Victor Davis Hanson, “American Citizenship and Its Decline”
Do not fantasize. This is happening now. As introduction, Neil Oliver of Scotland/Britain holds forth in this 11 minute video on, “all manner of atrocities committed in our name.” Don’t miss it.
Imprimis MAY/JUNE 2020 | VOLUME 49, ISSUE 5/6
Manhattan Institute
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on June 18, 2020, for a Hillsdale College online symposium, “The Coronavirus and Public Policy.” Please read the original here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-months-unprecedented-government-malfeasance/
Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.
Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.
This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.
On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.
Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.
Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.
If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.
The lockdown mandates employed mind-numbingly arbitrary distinctions. Wine stores and pot dispensaries were deemed “essential” and thus allowed to stay open; medical offices were required to close. Large grocery stores got the green light; small retail establishments with only a few customers each day were out of luck. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer notoriously used her red pen within megastores to bar the sale of seeds, gardening supplies, and paint.
It was already clear when these crushing mandates started pouring forth that shutting down every corner of the country was a reckless overreaction. By mid-March, two weeks before the Imperial College model was published, Italian health data showed that the coronavirus was terribly lethal to a very small subset of the population—the elderly infirm—and a minor health problem to nearly everyone else who was not already severely ill. The median age of coronavirus decedents in Italy was 80, and they died with a median of nearly three comorbidities, such as heart disease and diabetes. The lead author of the Imperial College model has admitted that up to two-thirds of all coronavirus fatalities would have died from their comorbidities by the end of 2020 anyway.
Three months later, this profile of coronavirus casualties still holds true. Public health interventions could have been targeted at that highly vulnerable population without forcing the American economy into a death spiral.
DISINFORMATION
By now it is impossible to attribute the media’s failure to publicize the facts about the coronavirus to mere oversight.
Every story that does not mention, preferably at the top, the vast overrepresentation of nursing home deaths in the coronavirus death count—above 50 percent in many countries and 80 percent in several of our states—is a story that is deliberately concealing the truth. Casual readers and viewers have been left with the false impression that everyone is equally at risk, and thus that draconian measures are justified.
The media have been equally uninterested in the scientific evidence regarding outdoor transmission. Coronavirus infections require what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact. The fleeting encounters on sidewalks and public parks that characterize much of city life simply do not result in transmission. And yet if you briskly approach someone on one of Manhattan’s broad and now empty sidewalks, the oncoming pedestrian may lunge into the street or press up against the closest wall in abject fear if you are not wearing a mask. You may be cursed at.
The public health establishment has been equally complicitous in creating this widespread ignorance. It has failed to stress at every opportunity that for the vast majority of the public, the coronavirus is at most an inconvenience. The public health experts did not disclose that outdoors was the safest place to be and that people should get out of their homes and into the fresh air.
Not coincidentally, the experts’ newfound power over nearly every aspect of American life was dependent on the maintenance of fear.
While the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus has been demographically circumscribed and lower than the previous flu pandemics of 1968, 1956, and 1918 when adjusted for population, the economic toll has cut across every sector of the country and every population group. Whole industries have seen their capital wiped out overnight.
Despite a better than expected employment report in early June, the long-term effects of the shutdowns and the continuing mandates to socially distance will prevent a full economic recovery for years to come. Forty-four million Americans are still out of work. Supply chains have been thrown into chaos. Fresh fruits and vegetables are being plowed under and livestock burned uneaten for lack of access to processing plants and markets. Small businessmen who have put their life savings into creating a service that customers want have seen their hard work go up in smoke. Without rent from their retail tenants, commercial landlords can’t pay their taxes. City budgets have been decimated. The additional $8 trillion in public debt taken on to try to substitute for the private economy will depress opportunity for generations.
And what has been the response to this economic carnage on the part of our ruling class? Branding strategies! Politicians have put cute names on what has been a taking of private property on an unprecedented scale. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo calls the state lockdowns “New York on Pause,” as if commerce can be indefinitely suspended and then magically resuscitated with the flick of a switch.
The politicians’ ignorance about the complexity of economic life was stunning, as was their hypocrisy. To a person, every elected official, every public health expert, and every media pundit who lectured Americans about the need to stay in indefinite lockdown had a secure (“essential”) job. Not one of them feared his employer would go bankrupt. Anyone who warned that the effects of the lockdowns would be more devastating than anything the coronavirus could inflict was accused of being a heartless capitalist who only cared about profits.
But to care about the economy is to care about human life, since the economy is how life is sustained. It is a source of meaning, as well as sustenance, binding humans to each other in a web of voluntary exchange. To its workers, every business is essential, and to many of its customers as well. Even judged by the narrowest possible definition of public health—lives lost—the toll from the lockdowns will exceed that of the virus, due to the cancellation of elective medical procedures, patients’ unnecessary fear of seeking medical treatment, and the psychological effects of unemployment.
In May, politicians started inviting a few scattered sectors of their state economies to reopen, with blue state governors and mayors being particularly parsimonious with their noblesse oblige. These blue state officials invoked “science” to justify yet another arbitrary set of guidelines to determine which businesses would be allowed to start up again and when. “Science,” we were told, dictated the timetable for reopening, based on rates of hospital bed vacancies and new infections.
In fact, the numerical benchmarks, enforced with draconian punctiliousness, seem to have been drawn out of a hat—they certainly had no evidence behind them. But even with official reopenings, many customers will be long reluctant to resume their normal habits of consumption and travel thanks to the uninterrupted fearmongering on the part of the media, the experts, and elected leaders.
Being fantastically risk averse is now a badge of honor, at least among the professional elites. A young tech columnist for The New York Times wrote an op-ed in May about cancelling a restaurant reservation in Missoula, Montana. Missoula County had been virus-free for weeks, and Montana’s case load had been negligible. Nevertheless, the columnist experienced a panic attack after booking a table, contemplating the allegedly lethal risk that awaited him in the reopened restaurant. Rather than being ashamed of his cowardice, the columnist was proud, he wrote, to have bailed out of his reservation in order to continue sheltering in place.
The absurd social distancing protocols make operating many businesses and much of city life virtually impossible. The six-foot rule is as arbitrary as the “metrics” for reopening. (The World Health Organization recommends three feet of social distance, and many countries have adopted that recommendation.) Keeping customers and employees six feet apart will render a city’s basic institutions unworkable, from restaurants to concert halls. The Metropolitan Opera has cancelled the first half of its 2020-2021 season while it figures out how to maintain social distancing among audience members and on the stage. Every other performing arts organization will face the same almost insuperable dilemma.
My 34-story apartment building in Manhattan, like many others, has imposed a one person per elevator ride rule, even though the elevator interiors are more than six feet across. I invite anyone who may also be waiting for an elevator to share my ride up; no one has ever accepted the offer, even though both I and my invitee are masked. Nor has anyone ever extended such an offer to me. Now translate this hysteria to Manhattan’s massive office towers. If New York City ever fully reopens, a similar social distancing rule for office elevators will lead to lines of workers around every midtown block each morning. As long as this fear lasts, city life is not possible.
FROM COLD WAR TO HOT
Then the cities started burning. What had been a cold war on the economy and civic life became a hot war.
Government officials, having shut down commerce due to unblemished ignorance of how markets work, now enabled the torching and looting of thousands of businesses due to the shirking of their most profound responsibility: protecting civil peace.
On Monday, May 25, a video of the horrific arrest and death of a black man suspected of passing a forged $20 bill in Minneapolis went viral. A police officer kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd begged for help breathing. Floyd was already handcuffed and thus posed a minimal risk. The officer ignored Floyd’s distress even as Floyd stopped talking or moving.
The officer’s behavior was grotesquely callous and contrary to sound tactics, and the officer will be prosecuted and punished under the law. His behavior was not, however, representative of the overwhelming majority of the ten million arrests that the police make each year. Indeed, there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police. Nevertheless, within 24 hours, the violence had begun.
On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of anarchy descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.
Soon cities across the country became scenes of feral savagery. The human lust for violence, the sheer joy of plunder and destruction, were unleashed without check. Police officers were shot at, run over, slashed with knives, and clubbed; two current and former law enforcement officers were killed in cold blood. Police cruisers and station houses were firebombed; courthouses were trashed. Looters drove trucks through storefronts and emptied the stores’ contents into the back of these newly repurposed vehicles of civil war. ATMs were ripped out of walls; pharmacies plundered for drugs.
Blue state governors and mayors ordered law enforcement to stand down or use at most (in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s words) a “light touch” with the rioters. By the time these progressive public leaders realized that something more forceful needed to be done, it was too late. The fire of sadism and hatred could not be contained, but would have to burn itself out. Belatedly imposed curfews were universally ignored: why should anyone obey an edict from a government that refused to protect human life and livelihoods?
Perversely, the rioting exhibited features of the coronavirus shutdowns in even more literal form. If before, businesses were boarded up due to bankruptcy, now they were boarded up to prevent further theft. Small businesses, lacking the resources to outlast the shutdowns, now saw the final depletion of their inventories. The fortress mentality in residential buildings from coronavirus hysteria was replaced by an actual fortress, as building managements hastily erected plywood barriers over lobby windows and doors. The hyped-up fear of going outside into allegedly virus-infected public spaces became a justified fear of leaving one’s fortress and being sacrificed to the mob. Shelter-in-place became a necessity, not a product of government overreach. The fall of night became a source of terror for ordinary citizens and business owners.
Previously, securely-employed public officials breezily dismissed their constituents’ anguish over unemployment and growing business failures. Now those same officials, safe behind their security details and publicly-owned mansions, foreswore the activation of the National Guard and military. None of those officials owned businesses, so they faced no loss either from economic quarantine or from physical rampage.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
One thing did change markedly between the coronavirus lockdowns and the riot lockdowns, however: elite wisdom regarding social distancing. The politicians, pundits, and health experts who had condescendingly rebuked business owners for reopening without official permission, who had banned funerals and church services of more than ten people, and who had heaped scorn on protesters who had gathered in state capitols to express their economic distress, suddenly became avid cheerleaders for screaming crowds numbering in the thousands.
Most remarkably, public officials overtly admitted to choosing the forms of assembly that would be allowed based on the content of the protesters’ speech. Mayor de Blasio explained that protests over “400 years of American racism” are not the same as a “store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.” While the store owner or worshipper may be “understandably aggrieved,” he conceded, their grievances must still be suppressed in the name of coronavirus safety. Not the grievances of the protesters and rioters, however. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy congratulated the Black Lives Matter activists and distinguished them from mere “nail salon” entrepreneurs protesting their ongoing business stasis. The two are in “different orbits,” Murphy said.
The politicians’ hypocrisy was a mere warm-up for that of the public health establishment. These were the people whose diktats had inspired the lockdowns and whose allegedly supreme knowledge of medical risk was allowed to cancel all other considerations in maintaining a functioning society. Nearly 1,200 of these same experts, including from the CDC, signed a public letter supporting the unsocially distanced protests on the grounds that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
One could just as easily argue that a global depression, induced by the gratuitous crushing of trade and the hollowing out of capital, is a lethal public health issue of at least equal magnitude. But it turns out that public health is as much about politics as it is about science.
This shameless reversal should have torpedoed the lockdowns once and for all. If it turns out that mass gatherings were now not just allowable but to be encouraged, no rationale remained for preventing restaurants and stores from reopening. But instead, once media attention became a little less monomaniacally focused on the anti-police agitation, the familiar chorus rose up again, directed at everyone else: Stay socially distanced! Wear your outdoor masks! No gatherings of more than a few dozen! No entering “non-essential” stores! The same arbitrary “metrics” for business reopenings were still in place and still being enforced.
By now, the collapse of government legitimacy is complete. For three months, public officials abdicated their responsibility to balance the costs and benefits of any given policy. They put the future of hundreds of millions of Americans in the hands of a narrow set of experts who lack all awareness of the workings of economic and social systems, and whose “science” was built on the ever-shifting sand of speculative models and on extreme risk aversion regarding only one kind of risk.
The public officials who ceded their authority to the so-called experts were deaf to the pleas of law-abiding business owners who saw their life’s efforts snuffed out. They engineered the destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth, through thoroughly arbitrary decision making. And then they stood by as billions more dollars of work burned down. Public order and safety, equal treatment under the law, stability of expectations—all the prerequisites for robust investment have been decimated. The failure to quell the riots means that more are inevitable. Any future business faces possible destruction by another lockdown or by looting—which it will be is anyone’s guess.
***
The coronavirus lockdowns demonstrated our leaders’ ignorance of economic interdependence. After the riots, that ignorance has been shown to run far deeper. It is an ignorance about government’s most fundamental obligation: to safeguard life, liberty, and property. It is an ignorance about human nature and human striving.
Property and capital are not soulless abstractions, easily replaced by an insurance payout, as the rioters and their apologists maintain. (The Massachusetts Attorney General noted that burning is “how forests grow.”) Capital is accumulated effort and innovation, the sum of human achievement and imagination. Its creation is the aim of civilization. But civilization is everywhere and at all times vulnerable to the darkest human impulses. Government exists to rein in those impulses so that individual initiative can flourish. America’s Founders, schooled in a profound philosophical and literary tradition dating back to classical antiquity, understood the fragility of civil peace and the danger of the lustful, vengeful mob.
Our present leaders, the products of a politicized and failing education system, seem to know nothing of those truths. Pulling the country back from the abyss will require a recalling of our civilizational inheritance.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, and Public Interest, and is the author of four books, including The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
OCTOBER 2022 | VOLUME 51, ISSUE 10
Brownstone Institute
Read it in the original here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-economic-disaster-of-the-pandemic-response/
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 20, 2022, sponsored by the student group Praxis.
On April 15, 2020—a full month after President Trump’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve”—the President had a revealing White House conversation with Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I’m not going to preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world,” Trump wisely said, as reported in Jared Kushner’s book Breaking History. The promised Easter reopening of the economy had not happened, and Trump was angry. He also suspected that he had been misled and was no longer speaking to coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx.
“I understand,” Fauci responded meekly. “I just do medical advice. I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts. I’m just an infectious diseases doctor. Your job as president is to take everything else into consideration.”
That conversation reflected the tone of the debate, then and later, over the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. The economy—viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important—was pitted against public health and the preservation of life. The assumption seemed to be that you had to choose one or the other—that you could not have both.
It also seemed to be widely believed in 2020 that the best approach to pandemics was to institute massive human coercion—a belief based on the novel theory that if you make humans behave like non-player characters in computer models, you can keep them from infecting one another until a vaccine arrives to wipe out the pathogen.
The lockdown approach in 2020 stood in stark contrast to a century of public health experience in dealing with pandemics. During the great influenza crisis of 1918, only a few cities tried coercion and quarantine—mostly San Francisco, also the home at the time of the first Anti-Mask League—whereas most locations took a person-by-person therapeutic approach. Given the failure of quarantines in 1918, they were not employed again during the disease scares—some real, some exaggerated—of 1929, 1940-44, 1957-58, 1967-68, 2003, 2005, and 2009. In all of those years, even the national media acted responsibly in urging calm.
But not in 2020, when policymakers—whether due to intellectual error, political calculations, or some combination of the two—launched an experiment without precedent. The sick and well alike were quarantined through the use of stay-at-home orders, domestic capacity limits, and business, school, and church shutdowns. This occurred not only in the U.S., but worldwide—with the notable exception of perhaps five nations and the state of South Dakota.
Needless to say, the consequences were profound. Coercion can be used to turn off an economy. But given the resulting trauma, turning an economy back on is not so easy. That is why, 30 months later, we are experiencing the longest period of declining real income since the end of World War II, a health crisis, an education crisis, an exploding national debt, 40-year high inflation, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets, a breakdown of international trade, a dramatic collapse in consumer confidence, and a dangerous level of political division.
Meanwhile, what happened to COVID? It came anyway, just as the best epidemiologists predicted it would. It had a highly stratified impact, consistent with the information we had from the very early days: the at-risk population was largely the elderly and infirm. To be sure, almost everyone eventually came down with COVID with varying degrees of severity: some people shook it off in a couple of days, others suffered for weeks, and many died—although, even now, there is grave uncertainty about the true number of COVID deaths, due both to faulty PCR testing and to financial incentives given to hospitals to attribute non-COVID deaths to COVID.
Even if the lockdowns had saved lives over the long term—and the literature on this overwhelmingly suggests they did not—it would be proper to ask the question: at what cost? What are the tradeoffs?
Because economic considerations were shelved for the emergency, policymakers failed to consider tradeoffs. Thus did the White House on March 16, 2020, send out the most dreaded imaginable directive from an economic point of view: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.” And the results were legion.
For one thing, the lockdowns kicked off an epic bout of government spending. COVID-response spending amounted to at least $6 trillion above normal operations, running the national debt up to 121 percent of GDP. For comparison, our national debt in 1981 amounted to 35 percent of GDP—and Ronald Reagan correctly declared that a crisis.
The Federal Reserve purchased this new debt with newly created money nearly dollar for dollar. From February to May 2020, the total money supply (what economists call M2) increased by an average of $814.3 billion per month. The peak came early the following year: on February 22, 2021, the annual rate of increase of M2 reached a staggering 27.5 percent.
At the same time, as one would expect in a crisis of this sort, spending plummeted. Since a severe decrease in spending puts deflationary pressure on prices regardless of what happens with the money supply, the bad effects of printing all this new money were pushed off into the future.
That future is now. The explosion in M2 has resulted in the highest inflation in 40 years. And this inflation is accelerating, at least according to the October 12, 2022, Producer Price Index, which is more volatile than it has been in months and is running ahead of the Consumer Price Index—a reversal from earlier in the lockdown period. This new pressure on producers has heavily impacted the business environment and created recessionary conditions.
Moreover, this has not just been a U.S. problem. Most nations in the world followed the same lockdown strategy while attempting to substitute government spending and printing money for real economic activity. The Federal Reserve is being called on daily to step up its lending to foreign central banks through the discount window for emergency loans. It is now at the highest level since spring 2020. The Fed lent $6.5 billion to two foreign central banks in just one week this October. The numbers are scary and foreshadow a possible international financial crisis.
Back in the spring and summer of 2020, we seemed to be experiencing a miracle. State governments around the country had crushed social activity and free enterprise, and yet real income was soaring. Between February 2020 and March 2021, a time of low inflation, real personal income was up by $4.2 trillion. It felt like magic. But it was actually the result of government stimulus checks.
Initially, people used their new-found riches to pay off credit card debt and boost savings. In the month after the first stimulus, the personal savings rate went from 9.6 to 33 percent. Also, since people were being coerced into living an all-digital existence, there was lots of spare time and a need for new equipment. So companies like Netflix and Amazon benefited enormously.
After the summer of 2020, people started to get the hang of having “free money” dropped into their bank accounts. So by November, the savings rate had dropped back down to 13.3 percent. When the Biden administration unleashed another round of stimulus in 2021, the savings rate at first nearly doubled. But fast forward to the present and people are saving only 3.5 percent—half the historical norm dating back to 1960—and credit card debt is soaring, even though interest rates are 17 percent and higher.
In other words, all the curves inverted once inflation came along to eat out the value of the stimulus. In reality, all that “free money” turned out to be very expensive. The dollar of January 2020 is now worth only $0.87, which is to say that the stimulus spending covered by the Federal Reserve printing money stole $0.13 of every American dollar in the course of only 2.5 years.
This was one of the biggest head fakes in the history of modern economics. The pandemic planners created paper prosperity to cover up the grim reality they had brought about. But paper prosperity is false prosperity. It could not and did not last. Between January 2021 and September 2022, prices increased 13.5 percent across the board, costing the average American family $728 in September alone.
Even if inflation were to stop today, the inflation already in the bag will cost the average American family $8,739 over the next twelve months.
While Big Tech moguls and urban information workers thrived during the pandemic lockdowns, Main Street suffered. The look of most of America in those days was post-apocalyptic, with vast numbers of people huddled at home either alone or with immediate families, fully convinced that a universally deadly virus was lurking outdoors. Meanwhile, the CDC was recommending that “essential businesses” install countless Plexiglass barriers and place social distancing stickers everywhere people would walk.
This sounds ridiculous now, but for many it wasn’t then. I recall being yelled at for walking only a few feet into a grocery aisle that had been designated by stickers to be one-way in the other direction. There were reports of people using drones to identify and report neighbors who were holding prohibited parties, weddings, or funerals. Parents masked up their kids even though kids were at near-zero risk, and nearly all schools were closed. A friend of mine arrived home from a visit out of town and his mother demanded that he leave his “COVID-infested” bags on the porch for three days.
Those were the days when people believed the virus was outdoors and we should stay in. Oddly, this changed over time to where people believed that the virus was indoors and we should go out. It eventually became clear that we had moved from government-mandated mania to a popular delusion for the ages.
The resulting damage to small business has yet to be thoroughly documented. At least 100,000 restaurants and stores closed in Manhattan alone. Commercial real estate prices crashed, and big business moved in to scoop up bargains. Hotels, bars, restaurants, malls, theaters, and anyone without home delivery suffered terribly. The arts were devastated. During the deadly Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, we had Woodstock. This time around we had to settle for YouTube.
It may seem odd, but the health care industry suffered as well. The CDC strongly urged the closing of hospitals to anyone not facing a non-elective surgery or suffering with COVID. This turned out to exclude nearly everyone who would routinely show up for diagnostics or other normal treatments. As a result, health care sector employment fell 1.6 million in early 2020. Even stranger is the fact that total health care spending fell off a cliff. From March to May 2020, health care spending collapsed by $500 billion or 16.5 percent. This created an enormous financial problem for hospitals in general.
This is not to mention dentistry. I know from personal experience that in Massachusetts, you couldn’t get a much-needed root canal. Why? Because a root canal required a preliminary cleaning and examination, and those were prohibited as “nonessential.” I looked into traveling to Texas for a root canal, but the dentists there were required by law to force out-of-state patients to quarantine in the state for two weeks.
This virtual abolition of dentistry for a time was in keeping with the injunction of a headline in The New York Times on February 28, 2020: “To Take on the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.” What better way to describe the institution of a feudal system of dividing work and workers across the nation in terms of “essential” and “nonessential”?
The New York Times wasn’t affected by the lockdowns, of course, because media centers were deemed essential. Thus for two years, it was able to keep its presses running and instruct its Manhattan readers to stay home and have their groceries delivered. Delivered by whom, The New York Times neither said nor cared. It was apparently unimportant if the working classes were exposed to COVID in service to the elites. And then afterwards, when the working classes had natural immunity that was superior to the immunity offered by the so-called COVID vaccines, they were subjected to vaccine mandates.
Millions across the nation eventually quit or were fired due to those vaccine mandates. Highly qualified members of the U.S. military are still being discharged for noncompliance.
We are told that unemployment today is very low and that many new jobs are being filled, but most of those are existing workers getting second and third jobs. Because families are struggling to pay the bills, moonlighting and side-gigging are now a way of life. The full truth about labor markets requires that we look at the labor-participation and worker-population rates, both of which are low. Millions have gone missing. Most are working women who still cannot find child care because that industry has yet to recover from the lockdowns. Labor participation among women is back at 1988 levels. There are also large numbers of 20-somethings who moved home and went on unemployment benefits. Many more have simply lost the will to achieve and build a future.
The supply chain breakages we are seeing today are also a lingering result of the stoppage of economic activity in early 2020. By the time the lockdown regime was relaxed and manufacturers started reordering parts, they found that many factories overseas had already retooled for other kinds of demand. This particularly affected the semiconductor industry for automotive manufacturing. Overseas chip makers had turned their attention to personal computers, cellphones, and other devices. This was the beginning of the car shortage that sent prices through the roof. It also created a political demand for U.S.-based chip production, which has in turn resulted in another round of export and import controls.
These sorts of problems have affected every industry without exception. Why, for example, do we have a paper shortage? Because so many of the paper factories shifted to plywood and cardboard after prices sky-rocketed in response to the housing and mail delivery demand created by the lockdowns and stimulus checks.
We could write books listing all the economic calamities directly caused by the disastrous pandemic response. We will be suffering the results for years. Yet even today, too few people grasp the relationship between our current economic hardships—extending even to growing international tensions and the breakdown of trade and travel—and the brutality of the pandemic response.
Anthony Fauci said at the outset: “I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts.” Melinda Gates admitted in a December 4, 2020, interview with The New York Times: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.”
There is no wall of separation between economics and public health. A healthy economy is indispensable for healthy people. Shutting down economic life was a singularly bad idea for taking on a pandemic.
Economics is about people making choices and institutions enabling them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two, as happened in 2020, ranks among the most catastrophic public policy decisions of our lifetimes.
Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with the near abolition of freedom in the cause of mitigating disease.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and a daily columnist on economics for The Epoch Times. From 2017-2021, he served as editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research. He has written for several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Freeman, and Chronicles. He is the author of 20 books, including Liberty or Lockdown.
JANUARY 2024 | VOLUME 53, ISSUE 1
There are MANY closely related posts of my blog. This is not a recent crisis. Governments almost everywhere, not only the U.S.A. and the several hard core tyrannies, are out of control. Here is one:
#Malfeasance, #Misfeasance, #Constitution, #Technocracy, #Communism, #Socialism, #Citizenship, #Sovereignty, #BillofRights, #Swamp, #WEF, #Agenda2030, #Tyranny,
“They are weaponizing energy, weaponizing medicine and weaponizing the environment,” says Catherine Austin Fitts.
I add, weaponizing legal and political systems against humanity worldwide.
This is the history and development of “our common future” and the globalist one world project, beginning with John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and their families and foundations through League of Nations, United Nations, Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, UN IPCC, Club of Rome, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum, covid fraud and climate change fraud…and “global problems”.
“They want to control life,” says Dr. Jacob Nordangard in this full 4 part interview.
Reblog: Ivor Cummins interviews Dr. Jacob Nordangard. 4 parts total about 2 hours. https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/the-greatest-history-never-told-full:6
Or here in 3 parts: https://blog.jacobnordangard.se/the-greatest-history-never-told-why-the-world-makes-no-sense-anymore/
With Catherine Austin Fitz here, Don’t miss this short excerpt: https://home.solari.com/coming-thursday-engineering-the-global-coup-with-dr-jacob-nordangard/
Jacob Nordangård is a Swedish researcher, author, lecturer, and musician. Ph.D. in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University. Master of Social Science in Geography, and Master of Social Science in Culture and Media Production.
Founder and chairman of the Swedish foundation Stiftelsen Pharos and CEO of the independent publishing and media production company Pharos Media Productions.
Has previously worked as graphic designer, editor, media producer, press officer, politician, and Senior lecturer at the universities of Linköping, Jönköping, and Stockholm.
He is also the band leader, singer and songwriter of the doom metal band Wardenclyffe, with lyrics inspired by his research. His dissertation was issued with a soundtrack and his latest books (visit webshop) are available with optional CD singles as soundtrack.
More information is available at Jacob’s homepage. His blog is the home of Jacob’s articles in English, as well as some guest posts by his wife and associates.
Homepage: https://jacobnordangard.se/en/
https://blog.jacobnordangard.se
To save you a few clicks, here are comments about Jacob by the deep state and globalists.
U.S. Senator from Kentucky
Author, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up
Read the original here on Hillsdale College’s Imprimis: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/lessons-from-the-great-covid-cover-up/ Imprimis is excellent and available no charge and hassle free.
Archived here.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on November 1, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
The Covid cover-up began in China. But in a way we make too big a deal of that. No one should be surprised that a totalitarian government run by the Chinese Communist Party would seek to cover up its responsibility for a worldwide pandemic. What was mind-jarring—and what we should focus our attention on—is the cover-up in our own country spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow public health bureaucrats. And they might have gotten away with their deception if a federal judge hadn’t ordered their emails released.
In brief, these emails reveal that at the same time Dr. Fauci and other public health “experts” were publicly disavowing the idea that the Covid virus originated with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, they were in general agreement among themselves that that was likely what had happened. So why hide the fact?
In January 2020, Fauci was told that the Covid virus appeared “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He and his fellow scientists were worried that it may have originated in the Wuhan lab because they knew that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under Fauci’s direction, had been funding work at the lab for years. They also knew of a paper by Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli describing gain-of-function research—which involves taking two viruses and combining their genetics to create something more dangerous, more lethal, or more contagious—on various coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.
On February 1, just before 3:00 a.m., Fauci sent an email to Robert Kadlec, then-Secretary for Preparedness and Response at Health and Human Services. It read: “This just came out today. Gives a balanced view.” He attached an article published in Science arguing that Covid had jumped from bats to humans and seeking to discredit the lab-leak theory. When this email came to light, I was initially puzzled about its timing and urgency. But then I learned that one of Kadlec’s duties was to chair the committee responsible for screening gain-of-function proposals for safety purposes—and that the Wuhan coronavirus research proposal never came before his committee!
For a long time, even we in the U.S. Senate didn’t know that Kadlec headed the gain-of-function screening committee because of the pervasive secrecy throughout our government. The makeup of the committee is a secret, its deliberations are secret, and those on the committee do not like answering questions asked by the American people’s elected leaders in Congress. To this day, it is an open question how gain-of-function research was funded in Wuhan without committee review. It is not a stretch to think that someone with authority skirted the safety review process. If so, that person would have had a good reason to be very worried, even to the point of dishonesty, when the pandemic broke out.
Jeremy Farrar, the Anthony Fauci of the UK, told his brother that in the early stages of the pandemic, “a few scientists, including me, were beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident.” Farrar writes in his book Spike: “During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.” Indeed, many Western bureaucrats, especially in the U.S., began using various forms of communication to shield their messages from future records requests. We have an email from one of Fauci’s assistants instructing other government employees to avoid using government email addresses. Which, by the way, is a crime.
Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, headed up a group of virologists who, by his own account, were “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and [National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins” to research and publish a paper that would “provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypotheses around the origins of the virus.” Andersen had written to Farrar a week earlier, alarmed by the fact that the virus appeared to be manmade. But now, under pressure, he and others were circling the wagons and changing their tune.
By mid-February, British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a Fauci ally, organized a letter that was published in The Lancet stating that the authors stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” What the letter failed to mention is the fact that Daszak’s organization received many millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State Department—before and during the pandemic—and that millions were funneled through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab, some of which went to coronavirus research.
In March, the Andersen group’s paper, arguing that Covid didn’t come from a lab, was published in Nature Medicine. By that time, corporate media and Big Tech had taken to labeling anyone who supported the lab-leak theory as a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation. An ABC News article that cited the Andersen paper is a case in point: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’”
As we now know—thanks to the release of the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company—the mainstream media and Big Tech did not act alone. In fact, many of their efforts to censor speech about the lab-leak theory, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, school closures, and a host of pandemic-related topics were directed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies. In other words, the First Amendment was thrown out the window.
***
The moral debate over gain-of-function research has been going on for a long time. It came to prominence with the debate over avian flu research in the early 2010s. Avian flu is a very bad disease, but like most animal viruses, it is adapted for its host—in this case chickens or other birds. It does not often infect humans, but when it does, certain strains kill up to 50 percent of those infected.
During an outbreak in 2010, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier wondered if it would be possible to make the avian flu contagious through the air to mammals, and his research became highly controversial. Proponents argued that it could provide valuable data for scientists to predict or combat future pandemics. Opponents argued that it could cause pandemics either through lab leaks or terrorism. Fauci was intimately familiar with this debate, because Fouchier’s research was funded by Fauci’s agency, and he argued at the time that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.
A growing number of virologists and other scientists worry that a lab leak will happen again, and with even more serious consequences. With Covid, the mortality rate was far less than one percent. Experiments are now being carried out with viruses that have the potential for mortality rates between 15 and 50 percent. In 2021, MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt wrote:
Once we consider the possibility of misuse [of gain-of-function research], let alone creative misuse, such research looks like a gamble that civilization can’t afford to risk. . . . I implore every scientist, funder, and nation working in this field: Please stop. No more trying to discover or make pandemic-capable viruses, enhance their virulence, or assemble them more easily. No more attempting to learn which components allow viruses to efficiently infect or replicate within human cells, or to devise inheritable ways to evade immunity. No more experiments likely to disseminate blueprints for plagues.
The potential for disaster cannot be overstated. Right now, people can order synthetic DNA on the internet, and if they know what they’re doing, they can make the polio virus, among many others. And there are increasing numbers of individuals who have the knowhow: according to Esvelt, “The U.S. grants 125 doctoral degrees in virology each year, accounting for one-third of the total worldwide. At least four times as many individuals with degrees in related fields . . . possess similar skills.”
The required information is publicly available due to taxpayer-funded initiatives to identify all the viruses in the world. With the support of people like Peter Daszak and Bill Gates, the U.S. has been the top international funder of pandemic virus identification for decades. This should give us pause: these programs involve digging rare viruses out of caves where humans might never encounter them and transporting them to major metropolitan areas, manipulating viruses to make them more dangerous and transmissible, and publishing the resulting knowledge to the world.
Even if the goal is preventing future pandemics, the risk-benefit ratio doesn’t add up. While advocates for identifying the world’s viruses argue that the knowledge gained will aid in developing vaccines, decades of virus identification have been fruitless, as no human vaccine has been developed in advance of a human epidemic. If we continue down this path, Esvelt believes that “deliberate pandemics” will kill “many more people than identification could save.”
To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris. Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.
***
In December 2022, Congress passed a 4,155-page spending bill. It had a price tag of $1.7 trillion, including over a trillion dollars that had to be borrowed. It was appropriately called an “omni,” since everything but the kitchen sink was thrown in. On page 3,354, the Secretary of Health and Human Services was directed “not [to] fund research conducted by a foreign entity at a facility located in a country of concern . . . involving pathogens of pandemic potential or biological agents or toxins.”
This was a welcome attempt to stop the funding of dangerous research around the world, but Americans and their representatives must watch carefully to see whether our public health agencies attempt to sidestep it. The recent behavior of NIAID and NIH bureaucrats, as exemplified by their attempts to deceive Congress and the American people during the Covid pandemic, does not instill confidence.
A group of 34 prominent scientists recently presented a series of reforms to “strengthen the US government’s enhanced potential pandemic pathogen framework.” This Gain-of-Function Reform Group (GoF Group) recommended that gain-of-function experiments that confer “efficient human transmissibility” on a pathogen should be regulated. Adopting this standard would explicitly stop bureaucrats like Fauci from dancing around the gain-of-function definition and looking the other way as researchers create viruses that spread more easily in humans.
Current regulations allow gain-of-function research to occur if the research is said to be concerned with “developing and producing” vaccines. However, dangerous research should not be permitted or funded on the basis of a potential product. Rather, we should ban clearly dangerous research and highly scrutinize anything else that “could enhance the virulence or transmissibility of any pathogen,” as the GoF Group recommends.
We should treat this research as we do nuclear weapons—as the potential threat to human life is even greater. Ideally, as Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright recommends, “responsibility for US oversight of gain-of-function research of concern should be assigned to a single, independent federal agency that does not perform research and does not fund research. The oversight of research on fissionable materials by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides a precedent and a model.”
Another pervasive problem is conflict of interest. Under our current lax guidelines, researchers can essentially approve their own grants if they toe the official bureaucratic line. Consider the particularly egregious example of Kristian Andersen receiving a million-dollar grant mere months after abruptly switching his scientific opinion on Covid’s origin from a likely lab leak to “natural spillover.” We have always known that recipients of federal dollars might try to game the system. Conflict of interest regulations are littered throughout the federal code. One would think recusal for a conflict of interest would be the standard fallback procedure for all federal science funding. Yet when I questioned Fauci about whether any of the scientists on the vaccine-approval boards also received royalties from the drug companies that make vaccines, he responded that he did not have to inform Congress about royalty payments. In addition to the fact that he was the highest paid employee of the federal government, his own net worth is estimated to have doubled to more than $12.5 million during the pandemic. This is an insult to the American taxpayer and the American ideal. We should not allow this kind of obvious corruption.
The GoF Group calls for regulators to “recuse any individual whose agency is funding or participating in the proposed [gain-of-function research] from decision making in the [pandemic] review process.” Reviewers “should be subject to conflict of interest rules.” They also recommended including “representatives of civil society” in the review of potential pandemic pathogens.
For several years, I have proposed something similar for all grants funded by the federal government. Even before I became aware of the extent of Fauci’s abusive reign, I introduced the BASIC Research Act, which would add at least one scientist to each funding committee from a major field of research that has unanimity of support, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The goal is to create more debate on the best use of limited government research funds. I would also add a taxpayer advocate to all funding committees. Perhaps then we would start to question absurd “scientific” research grants, such as the $2.3 million the NIH spent injecting beagle puppies with cocaine, or the $3 million NIH grant to put hamsters on steroids and watch them fight.
In addition, my legislation would prohibit grant applicants from requesting their own friends for funding review. We should also make all federal grant applications public.
To prevent what happened during the Covid pandemic from happening again, Congress must address the concentration of power over long periods of time in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. In particular, it should divide the power of the NIAID into three separate institutes overseeing allergic diseases, infectious diseases, and immunologic diseases. Each institute should be led by a director who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a limited term of five years.
Anthony Fauci—who wielded tremendous power over many decades—funded dangerous research, lied to Congress and the American people, flip-flopped on many of his prognostications, issued edicts that defied science, and attacked and smeared his scientific critics. His reprehensible behavior reminded me of nothing so much as C.S. Lewis’s description of the moral busybody: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. . . . [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
We the American people must not allow bureaucratic “experts” to endanger our lives, lie to us, or curtail our constitutional rights. Never again.
Bud’s comment: Never again.
February 2, 2024 by Jason D. Hill
Read the original post here by Dr. Hill: https://www.frontpagemag.com/david-horowitzs-radical-mind/
Archived here:
I remember the first conversation I had with David Horowitz, though I am sure that he does not. I was a young undergraduate student at Georgia State University majoring in philosophy and English literature. I was working up to 45 hours a week in two – sometimes three — jobs to put myself through school. This was before I won a full scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. One of my side gigs then was repurposing my philosophy papers into newspaper editorials. I was doing all of this while attending university full-time. A newspaper editor gave me Horowitz’s telephone number (this was in the 1990s) and suggested that I call him. Horowitz had just started a new magazine called Heterodoxy, devoted to exposing the excesses of political correctness on university and college campuses across the United States. I acquired a few copies of the burgeoning magazine, read them, and cold-called him.
I don’t think David had any writing opportunities for me at Heterodoxy back then. But here is what I remember, and it has left me with an indelible imprint on my mind and a lasting respect and personal fondness for David Horowitz: he spoke to me about my plans for my future. I told him of the few articles I had published in the United States despite having worked as an investigative journalist in Jamaica before emigrating to America. He spent quite a bit of time telling me I might have a long struggle ahead, but that I was to keep on writing. He encouraged me to never give up. He said that, based on my articulacy in speaking with him, he could tell that I had talent. He laid out how difficult the publishing world could be not just for a young writer, but for all writers.
A lot of people know David Horowitz as a fiery personality. And he is a brilliant intellectual with a fiery disposition. I say this with affection; however, I remember him being possessed of a paternal gentleness and nurturing demeanor towards me. Although I would not be able to contribute to the magazine, in the end that was irrelevant. In our short conversation David had managed to make me feel like an accomplished writer. This, it must be emphasized, does not consist merely in heaping praise on a young writer. It is speaking to a young writer in a non-patronizing and non-condescending manner such that he is made to feel that he is already part of the pantheon of the community of writers. Our conversation made me feel that I was ready for the struggle, the rejections, the enjoyment of the process of writing itself, apart from the outcomes of my efforts. All this Horowitz communicated to me. Our conversation left me with a sense of excitement and exhilaration because I realized my vocational calling was not just affixed to getting published; it involved a spiritual and aesthetic approach to the art of writing itself. I began to see what a writer’s life truly consisted of.
I would not speak to David until some 27 years later when I was awarded a Shillman Journalism Fellowship at the Horowitz Freedom Center where I am now a proud columnist filled with gratitude towards him and Dr. Bob Shillman for giving me a permanent platform to express my views. I had gone on to become a professor of philosophy for well over two decades, and the author of five books. There is, however, no greater thrill than writing my articles for FrontPage Magazine, largely because David has given me a great deal of freedom to simply be true to my political sensibilities and my vision in the pages of his magazine.
I’ve gone on to devour almost every book Horowitz has written, and I have had the pleasure of reviewing quite a number of them for this magazine. Throughout his career David has established himself as one of the most preeminent and brilliant public intellectuals in both the 20th and 21st centuries. He’s also been—to my mind—one of the most defamed and slandered scholars and intellectuals in this country. He is often accused of being a racist and Islamophobic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Horowitz is simply a principled thinker whose philosophical views and sensibilities are forged in the crucibles of hard facts. And I can think of no other publisher (and I’ve by now worked with plenty) who has offered black conservatives a chance to develop themselves as thinkers and writers.
In his latest book: The Radical Mind: The Destructive Plans of the Woke Left, Horowitz, with indefatigable rigor and solid research, unmasks the nefarious agenda of the Woke Left in its attempt to destroy American civilization. The book is an intellectual tour de force written for a broad readership. And in reading it, one can understand why irrational and evil people would defame Horowitz. He simply states the truth as it exists in objective reality.
For example, in debunking the plethora of lies around the issue of race, Horowitz rightly points to the myriad programs that exist for the advancement of black Americans in the United States. Whether it is the United States government spending seven billion dollars to send a black woman to the moon for no other reason than her skin color; or pointing to the ways in which the welfare state has destroyed the black family; or noting that the slave trade actually existed in Africa where slaves were bought and auctioned by fellow Africans and then sold to Europeans; or showing how DEI programs end up granting a status to blacks that exists nowhere else in the world – Black Skin Privilege in the United States — Horowitz takes no prisoners, and he proves that facts ought not to care about feelings. If you want to find out why black lesbians in the United States are among the most privileged groups in America, read The Radical Mind. If you still think that systemic racism against blacks exists after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or that the United States is today a White Supremacist nation, Horowitz explains by way of several examples why this is putatively false.
Readers are perhaps not aware that five hundred million Muslims approved of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, or that the student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is funded by the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) which is funded by Hamas. Merely by revealing the disgraceful fact that American campuses harbor a terrorist organization within their folds, Horowitz incurred the wrath of many Progressives.
In The Radical Mind, Horowitz outlines the agenda of the Progressive left as it seeks to inflict a sustained racist attack on white Americans. He proves that Democrats are not soft on crime; they are pro-crime—citing numerous examples of how left-wing city officials across our nation deliberately fail to prosecute roving gangs of criminals that terrorize small businesses in smash-and-grab robberies.
Whether it is Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, or the radical leftist, antisemitic Squad in Congress consisting of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Cory Bush, Horowitz unearths the overt ways in which these Progressives are part of the socialist-communist criminal axis that advocates theft and expropriation of private property in America.
The book is not just critique, though. Horowitz shows why the concept of equity and equality are untenable concepts by way of discussing the genius of Elon Musk and tying creative genius to the overall well-being and prosperity of all Americans. He celebrates the spirit of capitalism and its ability to make blacks and women the freest and most privileged groups in the world today. Yes, you will find Horowitz’s formidable intellect permeating every page; but it is an intellect that also celebrates the best within America and, a fortiori, the best within each of us. As bankrupt as much of our culture is, Horowitz, in his inimitable manner, leaves you feeling that you can and should suffuse the world with your own personal agency; and that if you undertake that responsibility of fighting to preserve liberty and freedom in the United States, you can alter the destructive trajectory the American civilization (taken hostage by the nihilistic Left) seems to be pursuing.
What I find remarkable is the way Horowitz is able to cover so much ground in such a relatively short book. From the nature of government and the rationality of an undemocratic Senate, to the logic behind the Electoral College, the role that the Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci played in cultivating the sensibilities of today’s Progressives, to a measured discussion of the persecution of Donald Trump, to a biographical account of his early days as a Leftist revolutionary, along with a profound analysis of the destructive nature of wanting to change the world by an appeal to the slogan that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice—Horowitz gives us a comprehensive and well-integrated philosophic discussion of the principles behind the nihilism that governs today’s relativistic Woke culture, and deep-dive analyses of current events as they unfold. There are fundamental principles that guide the book that are consistent and logical such that, if you follow them, one should be able to predict with accuracy what Horowitz’s position on any subject might be in the future.
But you never know. Horowitz’s mind is nuanced and complex. Just when I thought I had figured out the mind of David Horowitz he comes along with a new book that is more insightful than his previous works and chock full of deep analyses of the malarkey that passes as received wisdom in our culture. Even if one disagrees with any of the ideas and conclusions drawn in Horowitz’s new book, there is much to recommend by way of simply watching a brilliant mind at work. He offers us a method of cognition, and of moral and political reasoning, that teaches us how to think efficiently. As a teacher of logic this is a wonderful gift from a writer. In this book, too, to use an apt metaphor, Horowitz is like an elegant battering ram that ruthlessly destroys the shibboleths which turn folks from rational thinkers into sentimental adherents of Woke nonsense.
I hope to read a dozen more forthcoming books from this often-unsung hero in American intellectual life. For now, it was a delight to sit with a book that, like a cup of strong morning coffee, you wished never had to come to an end.
Jason D. Hill is professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His latest book is “What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression”. Follow him on Substack.
National Security Advisor Dr. Walid Phares says President Joe Biden should respond to Iran’s attacks by publicly ending Iran Deal negotiations, stopping all financial transfers, and shutting down the Syria-Iraq border. “His advisors are very aware of [these options] and he will have to make that decision. The problem is that he has been bound by the Iran deal and that transaction,” says Dr. Phares.
Watch LIVE➡️http://bit.ly/plutorav
This video is even handed and non-political. After watching you may wish to re-direct your charitable gifts to other organizations.
Although this video is about mass migration into the USA, the UN 2030 mass migration program applies to all developed countries and is ongoing, as is illustrated with the text of the UN 2030 Agenda documents.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HUklrX2dVk4
Let me know if this video is removed from YouTube. I will post original copy.
Related posts on this blog
Here is a short set video clips by this godless blaspheming false prophet, advisor to WEF:
I was asked this week by an email correspondent, “Could you help me understand the issue in a different aspect? I mention Henry’s Law often and I get push back that it doesn’t apply to CO2 in atmosphere.” Some may be interested in my detailed explanation.
I suppose those people are regurgitating what someone has taught them in school or what they have read somewhere. You will need to ask them for data or explanation.
CO2 is routinely measured like any other atmospheric gas by several different cross confirming methods. It is simple to measure in air but very difficult to measure with accuracy and reproducibility in water because greater than 90% of the CO2 gas rapidly reacts with water ions (i.e., hydrolyzes) and becomes an ionic species instead of a gas, but then the ionic species produced are also rapidly and easily reversibly reacted by minor changes in temperature, pH, alkalinity, salinity and agitation in the water and air. When aqueous CO2 gas hydrolyzes in water the CO2 molecule (which is linear O-C-O in air) is bent into a triangle when one of the weakly held hydrogens is pulled away from one of the oxygens.
A container half filled with sea water and half with normal air at sea level is held precisely at lab standard temperature and pressure (STP, 25.6 C and 1 atm) is allowed to come to equilibrium. CO2 (and all other gases) are sampled from the headspace above the water by a pressure and temperature-controlled gas sampling valve into a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC/MS). The gases are separated, identified and quantified by the GC/MS. The CO2 gas concentration in the water is routinely calculated by the text book reference Henry’s Law constant, the CO2 gas concentration in the measured gas headspace, and the measured temperature. This method is more accurate and precise than attempting to sample CO2 gas in the water. Then, if a large and known amount of CO2 gas is added to the headspace and the container is allowed to come to equilibrium, then again the gases are sampled from headspace, the result will be that all of the added CO2 will have been absorbed by the water and the CO2 concentration in the headspace will be returned to the original equilibrium CO2 concentration before the CO2 was added. This experiment is identical to experiments done and documented by William Henry in the early 1800s except Dr. Henry used a pressure manometer instead of a GC/MS to measure the CO2 gas in the headspace.
“Henry’s law described the equilibrium distribution of a volatile species between liquid and gaseous phases. In original form, Henry’s law is an observational result for a two-phase equilibrium A(l) – A(g) under dilute solution conditions and for low pressures.
PA = K’CA (1a)
Where PA is the partial pressure and CA is the liquid-phase concentration of species A. (For example, with PA in atmospheres and CA moles per liter, units of K’ are atm liter mol-1)”
“The physicochemical significance of Henry’s law is this: there is a linear relationship between the activity of a volatile species in the liquid phase and its activity in the gas phase. (This simple notion is sometimes lost sight of when fundamental gas solubility equilibria are combined with other equilibria, e.g., acid-base, in order to generate overall distribution constants.)”
Usually, the problem people have is that many textbooks and online sites state (incorrectly) that Henry’s Law does not apply to gases which react with the solvent liquid. That is an unfortunate misunderstanding. Henry’s Law does not apply to chemical products of the reaction, but it does apply to the unreacted gas which remains in the liquid with the ionized reaction products. This is true for all gas solutes and liquid solvents, not only CO2 and water.
In the case of CO2 and seawater, we are referring to the physical phase-state for the transition of the CO2 gas molecule from the gas phase within the mixed gases of the atmosphere to a CO2 gas molecule within the mixed liquid water matrix of the ocean surface. Among other changes as the CO2 gas molecule passes into the liquid thin film at the air/liquid interface, the gas molecule enters a matrix of much higher surrounding pressure and more intermolecular and ionic interactions with other species in the water matric. But at this point the now aqueous CO2 gas molecule is still an intact, unreacted, un-ionized gas molecule. Henry’s Law applies to this intact, unreacted, un-ionized gas molecule in the liquid phase, which is less than about 1% of the CO2 gas which was absorbed into water surface. Colder, denser ocean water at depth contains more CO2 gas than surface ocean water; there is a steep vertical gradient. Ocean is estimated to hold about 50 times as much CO2 gas as atmosphere with a vertical gradient with three distinct layers.
As mentioned, this CO2 gas molecule which is dissolved in the liquid phase (that is aqueous CO2 gas or CO2(aq) ) is very difficult or impossible to measure reproducibly and accurately in the liquid phase. This is part of the problem found in textbooks and references. In these texts, unfortunately, since the molecule is difficult to quantitate it is frequently merged with one of the reacted products resulting in a hypothetical species which does not actually exist. For example, the aqueous CO2 gas is merged with the fleeting intermediate ionic species carbonic acid (H2CO3) and then included in a category called dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and called something like CO2*. This is a serious mistake because the several variables which affect the aqueous CO2 gas and the products of its hydration reaction affect these chemicals entities in the same directions and amounts, for example pH and salinity.
In other words, the CO2 gas which is dissolved in but unreacted with the liquid water is omitted from further explanation and understanding. In fact, that CO2 gas which is dissolved in the liquid but unreacted is always in the water, and it can be measured and quantified, but when the measurement is made in the water, the quantitation will be highly variable because most sampling methods change the phase-state reaction. In practice, the quantity of CO2 gas in the water is calculated using the Henry’s Law ratio, an accurate temperature of the water, and the highly accurate and reproducible measurement of CO2 gas in the air above the water. This type of experiment is called a “extent of reaction” or “completion of reaction” experiment.
“…ionization equilibria in the dissolved carbonate system are established very rapidly. Somewhat slower (seconds), however, is the attainment of equilibrium of the hydration or dehydration reaction of CO2 (Kern, 1960) CO2(aq) + H2O <-> H2CO3 “ Stumm, Werner. Aquatic Chemistry (1966) page 192.
“That is, the hydration reaction is first order with respect to dissolved CO2 and has a rate constant of kCO2 = 0.025-0.04 s-1 (250C). The activation energy is approximately 15 kcal mol-1 . Similarly, the rate of dehydration has a first order rate constant kH2CO3 of 10-20 c-1 (20-250C); its activation energy is ~16 kcal mol-1 . Considering the order of magnitude of the rate constants, it is obvious that not more than a few minutes are necessary to establish the hydration equilibrium. (Figure 4.17)” Figure 4.17 is copied below from page 194.
Here is a diagram of the reactions from the same page 192 in the Stumm, W. (1996):
From the graphic above “Kinetics of Hydration of CO2 , reaction (3) shows the reactants for the hydrolysis reaction. The products of the hydrolysis reaction are (1) and (2). The hydrolysis reaction proceeds rapidly in one of two directions depending on conditions and both directions are reversible simply by agitating the water or minor change in temperature, pH, alkalinity, salinity. The products of this reaction are both or either (1) or (2). Henry’s Law applies to the CO2 gas in (3). Henry’s Law does not apply to the reaction products (1) and (2). But (1) and (2) are quickly and easily reversible reactions (as indicated by the double arrows) by changes in temperature, pH, alkalinity, salinity and agitation result again in (3). All of the reactant CO2 in (3) is never converted to products (1) and (2), leaving CO2 gas in the aqueous solution and subject to Henry’s Law. The reaction constants for the reversible reaction are shown by the k values. Also note that reaction (1) and (2) are also reversible reactions with each other. Note that (1) and (2) are chemical reactions, that is, there is a chemical change in the resulting molecular products.
“5.10 GAS TRANSFER ACROSS WATER-GAS INTERFACE”
“The rate of mass transfer of a substance across a water-gas phase boundary has been described in terms of a diffusion film model. In general, it is necessary to consider two diffusion films, one in the liquid phase and one in the gas phase. The two bulk phases are well mixed to within a small distance of the interface. From Fick’s first law we conclude that the flux through the film of thickness z is given by
F = -D dc/dz
F, for example, is in mol cm-2 s-1 if c is mol cm-3, z in cm, and D in cm2 s-1. The negative sign corresponds to the convention for the orientation of the z axis. The flux through both boundary layers will attain a steady state
F = Fa = Fw
that is, the number of molecules passing through each boundary film per square centimeter and second will be the same. (see Figure 5.16).”
F = -(Da/za) (ca – ca/w) = (Dw /zw)(cw/a – cw) (34)
” Suffixes a and w refer to the air and water film, respectively, and ca/w and cw/a refer to the concentration in the air film at the air-water interface and the concentration in the water film at the water-air interface.”
“ Equation 34 presumes that the chemical does not undergo a chemical reaction within the layer (i.e., fast in comparison to the transfer process). We then imply that the interface concentrations can be interpreted in terms of the Henry factor, H.”
H = (cw/a / ca/w)(mol (liter water)-1/mol (liter air)-1) = KH RT (35)
Conversion between H and KH is straightforward KH = H/RT. (6)
where R is the gas constant (0.082057 liter atm K-1 mol-1 and T is temperature(K). Henry constants are KH values given in M atm-1.”
“The primary variable that determines whether the controlling resistance is in the liquid or gas film is the H or Henry constant” …”Gas transfer conditions that are liquid film controlled sometimes are expressed in terms of thickness, z, of the water film… z decreases with the extent of turbulence (current velocity, wind speed, etc.). Typical values for z are in the range of micrometers for seawater, a few hundred micrometers in lakes and up to 1 mm in small wind-sheltered water bodies (Brezonik, 1994). Inorganic gases (O2, N2, CO2, H2S, CH4, NO2) are – with the exception of HCl, NH3, SO2 and SO3 (which are extremely soluble) – sufficiently volatile that the boundary layer in the gas phase need not be considered. Because the molecular diffusion coefficient of typical inorganic solutes span a relatively narrow range of values (1-5 X 10-5 cm2 s-1) , the transfer of inorganic gases is dominated by the hydrodynamic characteristics of the water; it is independent of the nature of the gas.” Stumm (1996)p243.
“…for small values of H the water phase film controls the transfer, and for high values of H the transfer is controlled by the air phase film.”
“The temperature dependence of the Henry’s law constant can be estimated from the temperature dependence of the vapor pressure: d ln p0/dT = delta Hvap/RT2 )delta Hvap = heat of vaporization; always positive) or ln p0 = – delta Hvap/RT + constant and from the temperature dependence of the aquesous solubility; since the latter is smaller than the former, an increase in temperature reduces KH – that is, it favors the partition into the gas phase.”
“The distribution of gas molecules between the gas phase and the water phase depends on the Henry’s law equilibrium distribution. In the case of CO2, SO2, and NH3, the dissolution equilibrium is pH dependent because the species in the water phase – CO2(aq), H2CO3, SO2, H2O(aq), NH3(aq) – undergo acid base reactions.”
The graphics and quotes above are from Werner Stumm’s Aquatic Chemistry. https://archive.org/details/aquaticchemistry0000stum/page/192/mode/2up?
The paper (attached) by Roger Cohen and Will Happer (2015) describes this cyclical hydration reaction series (equation 30 above) as it is affected by pH. The following diagram is from that paper. Notice the faint green line for CO2 near the horizontal axis in the graphic on page 4 (reproduced below). NOTE the CO2 gas in ocean does not disappear but instead increases as atmospheric CO2 concentration increases. Henry’s Law applies to this unreacted aqueous CO2 gas and to the [CO2] gas in the in the ocean. The brackets [ ] on the entities indicate that the reaction expression is stochiometric, a precise ratio of the reactants and products is given.
You may also notice that in every paper on paleoclimate across the long ice ages that CO2 concentration never drops to zero. The CO2 is never totally absorbed from the air into the environment even though CO2 gas is highly absorbed by cold water. This is an observed case of Henry’s Law for CO2 and water, but is rarely if ever acknowledged in the literature. The CO2 gas concentration in air drops to about 150 to 180 ppm in ice ages but not lower as a Henry’s equilibrium partition ratio is established for the local temperature.
When water freezes it expands and becomes less dense than liquid water and one result of that is CO2 gas is emitted as the water freezes. Do you think this might be a problem for claims that CO2 concentration from ice cores is representative of global CO2 concentration?
You might pass along to your naysayer commenters the extensive list below of references for Henry’s Law measurements for CO2 and water, probably thousands of measurements. This begs the question, if Henry’s Law does not apply to CO2 and water, then how and why are there so many experiments and references providing Henry’s law constants for CO2 and water showing that it does apply? In fact, William Henry, M.D. used this knowledge in the 1800’s in his wealthy family business, which was making carbonated beverages, and it is still used today for that purpose. In addition, Henry’s Law is the fundamental science underlying the multi-billion dollar per years scientific instrument industry of gas chromatography.
Thanks for the question. I hope this helps.
Bud
| Hcp s | Hcp sT | References | Type | Notes |
| [mol/(m3Pa)] | [K] | |||
| 3.4×10−4 | 2300 | Burkholder et al. (2019) | L | 1) |
| 2.8×10−4 | 2600 | Burkholder et al. (2019) | L | 71) |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2300 | Burkholder et al. (2015) | L | 1) |
| 2.8×10−4 | 2600 | Burkholder et al. (2015) | L | 71) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Sander et al. (2011) | L | 1) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Sander et al. (2006) | L | 1) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2300 | Fernández-Prini et al. (2003) | L | 3) |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2300 | Carroll et al. (1991) | L | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Crovetto (1991) | L | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2300 | Yoo et al. (1986) | L | 1) |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Edwards et al. (1978) | L | 1) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Wilhelm et al. (1977) | L | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Weiss (1974) | L | 1) |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2300 | Zheng et al. (1997) | M | 382) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Murray and Riley (1971) | M | 383) |
| 2.4×10−4 | Power and Stegall (1970) | M | 14) | |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Morrison and Billett (1952) | M | 384) |
| 3.3×10−4 | Orcutt and Seevers (1937a) | M | ||
| 3.3×10−4 | 2300 | Kunerth (1922) | M | |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2500 | Geffcken (1904) | M | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Bohr (1899) | M | 385) |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2500 | Bunsen (1855a) | M | 43) |
| 6.5×10−4 | Duchowicz et al. (2020) | V | 187) | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Chen et al. (1979) | R | 1) |
| 3.1×10−4 | 2400 | Chameides (1984) | T | |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Edwards et al. (1975) | T | 1) |
| 3.4×10−4 | Perry and Chilton (1973) | X | 29) | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Lelieveld and Crutzen (1991) | C | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Pandis and Seinfeld (1989) | C | |
| 3.9×10−4 | Nunn (1958) | C | 12) | |
| 2.3×10−4 | Hayer et al. (2022) | Q | 20) | |
| 4.0 | Duchowicz et al. (2020) | Q | ||
| 2900 | Kühne et al. (2005) | Q | ||
| Scharlin (1996) | E | 1) 386) | ||
| 2400 | Kühne et al. (2005) | ? | ||
| 4.5×10−4 | Yaws (1999) | ? | 21) | |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Yaws et al. (1999) | ? | 21) |
| 2.6×10−4 | Abraham and Weathersby (1994) | ? | 21) | |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Dean and Lange (1999) | ? | 23) 387) |
| 4.5×10−4 | Yaws and Yang (1992) | ? | 21) | |
| 3.4×10−4 | 2400 | Seinfeld (1986) | ? | 21) |
| 3.3×10−4 | 2400 | Hoffmann and Jacob (1984) | ? | 21) |
Data
The first column contains Henry’s law solubility constant ��cp at the reference temperature of 298.15 K.
The second column contains the temperature dependence ��cp�, also at the reference temperature.
References
Type
Table entries are sorted according to reliability of the data, listing the most reliable type first: L) literature review, M) measured, V) VP/AS = vapor pressure/aqueous solubility, R) recalculation, T) thermodynamical calculation, X) original paper not available, C) citation, Q) QSPR, E) estimate, ?) unknown, W) wrong. See Section 3.1 of Sander (2023) for further details.
Notes
| 1) | A detailed temperature dependence with more than one parameter is available in the original publication. Here, only the temperature dependence at 298.15 K according to the van ‘t Hoff equation is presented. |
| 3) | The vapor pressure for water from Wagner and Pruss (1993) was used to calculate Hs. |
| 12) | Value at T = 293 K. |
| 14) | Value at T = 310 K. |
| 20) | Calculated using machine learning matrix completion methods (MCMs). |
| 21) | Several references are given in the list of Henry’s law constants but not assigned to specific species. |
| 23) | The partial pressure of water vapor (needed to convert some Henry’s law constants) was calculated using the formula given by Buck (1981). The quantities A and α from Dean and Lange (1999) were assumed to be identical. |
| 29) | Value given here as quoted by Durham et al. (1981). |
| 43) | The paper by Bunsen (1855a) was written in German. English versions with the same data were published by Bunsen (1855b) and Bunsen (1855c). |
| 71) | Solubility in sea water. |
| 187) | Estimation based on the quotient between vapor pressure and water solubility, extracted from HENRYWIN. |
| 382) | The data from Zheng et al. (1997) were fitted to the three-parameter equation: Hscp= exp( −144.44443 +8071.06186/T +19.20040 ln(T)) mol m−3 Pa−1, with T in K. |
| 383) | The data from Murray and Riley (1971) were fitted to the three-parameter equation: Hscp= exp( −167.86941 +9146.24434/T +22.67331 ln(T)) mol m−3 Pa−1, with T in K. |
| 384) | The data from Morrison and Billett (1952) were fitted to the three-parameter equation: Hscp= exp( −126.83009 +7302.88179/T +16.55553 ln(T)) mol m−3 Pa−1, with T in K. |
| 385) | The data from Bohr (1899) were fitted to the three-parameter equation: Hscp= exp( −140.70007 +7951.73013/T +18.60961 ln(T)) mol m−3 Pa−1, with T in K. |
| 386) | As mentioned by Fogg and Sangster (2003), the fitting equation by Scharlin (1996) is erroneous. It appears that a correction factor of about 106 is necessary for consistency with their own data in Table 1. |
| 387) | The data from Dean and Lange (1999) were fitted to the three-parameter equation: Hscp= exp( −138.54120 +7859.16351/T +18.28486 ln(T)) mol m−3 Pa−1, with T in K. |
The numbers of the notes are the same as in Sander (2023). References cited in the notes can be found here.
https://henrys-law.org/henry/casrn/124-38-9
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