Month: January 2021

A man who had his penis held for ransom by hackers locked in an internet-connected chastity belt spoke with Motherboard about his crazy ordeal.

Sam Summers thought it would be a good idea to strap a Chinese made chastity cage onto his penis with an app connected to the internet. He said not too long after putting on the device – a message popped up informing him that someone had taken control of the device and demanded $1k in Bitcoin to unlock it. 

“Initially, I thought it was my partner doing that,” Summers told Motherboard. “It sounds silly, but I got a bit excited by it.” 

Summers called his partner, who said she did not lock the device. He even used their “safeword.” Still, she told him it wasn’t her.

That’s the moment when he knew something was terribly wrong.  

“Oh, shit, it’s real,” Summers said. “I started looking at the thing. There’s no manual override at all. It’s a chastity belt, I guess it kind of shouldn’t [have an override.] But when it’s a digital thing like that, it should have a key or something. But it obviously didn’t.”

“I started freaking out a bit,” he added. “I was just panicking at this point.”

Motherboard said Summers is one of a handful of people late last year that bought a chastity cage device called CellMate. These devices are manufactured in China and were running on a flawed app that hackers were able to enter and lock users out of their devices.

Summers gave the hackers what they wanted, but soon they asked for more.

“That’s when I felt fucking stupid and angry,” Summers said. 

After brainstorming, he decided to use heavy-duty bolt cutters. He said the way he was holding the bolt cutters put his penis in a dangerous spot, adding that it was a “terrifying” experience. 

Summers was able to cut the chastity cage off and vowed never again to strap an internet-connected device to his body for fear that hackers would seize control of it. 

Perhaps this foolish man has learned his lesson? 

Authored by Jocelyn Neo via The Epoch Times,

Years ago, the horrors of the holocaust paved the way for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; however, our basic right to freedom of religion or belief is still being trampled in societies ruled by totalitarian regimes.

In communist China, practicing a certain faith, printing, or even reading religious books could result in prison terms and abuse. Spiritual believers in China – be it Christians, Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, or Falun Gong practitioners – are faced not only with brutal suppression or forced-labor terms but also have their religious books burned or trashed at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The coercive policies are aimed at forcing these religious followers to renounce their faith and follow the communist ideologies based on atheism and Marxism.

Ban on Religious Publications

According to Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China, a Three-Self Church venue in one of the villages under the jurisdiction of Lanling County was demolished in July 2020.

A county government official told the congregation that “all churches too close to government institutions must be destroyed” and the same goes for “those that look better than government buildings.”

“Belief in the Communist Party is the only religion allowed,” the official said, according to the report.

In another report, the magazine stated that in the same month, 26 people in Jiangsu Province, China, were sentenced under the charges of “illegal business operations” for being involved in printing religious publications meant for internal circulation for the South Korean Good News Mission.

The director and two members of the mission were fined heavily and handed prison terms of 3 years and 10 months and 3 years and 6 months, respectively, while some printing house managers were fined as high as US$15,000 and sentenced to 3 years, with a probation period of 3 to 5 years.

Even postal and courier services are being strictly monitored. In another recent report, a courier company staff member from the city of Luoyang, Henan Province, told Bitter Winter that the CCP exerted “strict control over mailed goods” in the year 2020.

“Only the mailing of government-approved books is allowed. All books with ‘bad information,’ including religion, are not allowed to be dispatched. If public security authorities discover violations of these regulations, the company will be fined and closed down,” the staff member said.

A woman reads the Bible at the Christian Glory church in Wuhan on Sept. 23, 2018. (NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images)

Citing yet another incident, the report said a mother of Christian faith from Jiyuan City, Henan Province, visited a post office in June 2020 to mail gospel texts to her daughter living abroad. But authorities told her that her publications were “illegal objects,” the report said.

“I knew that it was illegal to send combustible objects, drugs, guns, and ammunition, but even religious materials are now illegal,” she said.

As the communist regime is escalating its restrictions on religious publications, those in the printing industry are left in distress. A sales department manager in Luoyang City, Henan Province, told Bitter Winter in September 2020 that printing of religious materials, “especially Christian,” is not allowed.

“Anyone who takes on such orders breaks the law and might be put into prison. This is the line that we absolutely can’t cross,” the manager said, according to the report.

The authorities also conduct thorough checks to make sure that the businesses are adhering to the rules.

“They checked my storehouse, scrutinized all records, and even looked at paper sheets on the floor, to see if they have prohibited content,” said a printing house manager in the same city.

“If any such content is found, I’ll be fined, or worse, my business will be closed. Any religious content makes the issue political, not religious. Although banners on the streets say people are allowed religious beliefs, the only faith they can practice freely is that in the Communist Party,” he added.

A worker operating machinery in a printing factory in Nanjie Village, in China’s central Henan Province, on Sept. 26, 2017. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

The magazine reported in 2019 that the communist regime is also attempting to “sinicize” the Bible by forcing clergymen to interpret the teachings based on the Marxist and socialist ideologies.

“This is a distortion of the Christian faith. It is the work of the devil,” a Three-Self preacher told Bitter Winter. 

“The situation is becoming increasingly dire; the government [the CCP] is increasing pressure step by step. In the end, they want to eliminate religious belief completely.”

Trashing and Burning Religious Books

Apart from banning the spiritual publications, the Chinese authorities spare no efforts in confiscating religious books that aren’t officially approved by the CCP.

In March last year, the local authorities demolished a Three-Self church in Jining City’s Yutai County after deeming it an “illegal construction.”

“Officials stormed into our church before we even finished collecting our belongings,” a congregation member told Bitter Winter. “They tore up all Bibles and images of the Lord Jesus.”

Chen Yu, the owner of a Christian online bookstore in Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, was sentenced to seven years and fined 200,000 yuan (US$31,000) for “selling unapproved religious publications imported from Taiwan, the United States, and other countries,” according to an October 2020 report by International Christian Concern. The authorities also planned to destroy the 12,864 Christian books from his bookstore.

Dictating full control over spiritual followers by destroying religious books and demolishing places of worship is nothing new for the CCP in order to advance its authoritarian reign. As a regime rooted in atheism and materialism, the communist party has been cracking down on religious and spiritual groups constantly since it came to power in 1949.

When the CCP launched the decade-long Cultural Revolution in 1966, temples were looted, and scrolls, books, relics, and even Buddha statues were burned.

The Buddha statues destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. (Pat B/CC BY-SA 2.0)

A few decades later in July 1999, the then-leader of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, ordered the eradication of the spiritual practice of Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa), an ancient meditation system based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

The Public Security Bureau then issued official documents prohibiting the display of any symbols or images associated with the Falun Gong practice and possessing or distributing its books, according to Falun Dafa Information Center.

Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website dedicated to documenting the persecution of Falun Gong, compiled a report, which includes several news reports documenting the CCP’s “nationwide unified destruction” of millions of Falun Gong publications, namely books and videotapes, by throwing them into a pulping machine or burning them.

Falun Gong books are set on fire in Shouguang City, China’s eastern Shandong Province, on Aug. 4, 1999. Chinese authorities in cities across China burned millions of Falun Gong books and materials after the communist regime launched a campaign to persecute the spiritual practice in July 1999. (STR/XINHUA/AFP via Getty Images)

Since then, countless Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, with some even having their organs harvested. Many of them were arrested for refusing to renounce their faith or for possessing the books.

In its full report on the “Public Destruction of Books and Tapes,” Minghui cited several cases reported by foreign journalists, state-run newspapers in China, eyewitnesses, and adherents of Falun Gong confirming that millions of publications were trashed, burned, and torn apart during the mass-destruction activities.

Falun Gong books being crushed under a road roller during the 1999 nationwide destruction of the spiritual practice’s publications and materials. (ClearWisdom.net/CC0 1.0)

Although Buddhism is one of the recognized religions in China, the Buddhist temples and their followers are still being targeted by the authorities.

Bitter Winter reported that the government officials in Shanxi Province confiscated nearly 882 pounds (approx. 400 kg) of religious books and CDs from Fengci Temple in October 2020. In the same month, some impoverished households in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, were ordered to burn the Buddhist books in the Foguang Temple or else risk having their minimum subsistence allowance revoked.

In the 2020 springtime, the religious books and CDs were burned in the Reclining Buddha Mountain Temple in Ulanqab City in China’s Inner Mongolia, according to the report.

“Those books and CDs were burned in the incense burner for three to four days,” a Buddhist from Ulanqab City said.

“The rest of religious books and CDs were taken away in a fully loaded truck. The CDs alone weighed three to four hundred kilograms.”

”You can’t make this up,” Tom Von Essen, the New York City fire commissioner during the 9/11 attack, was quoted as saying in Newsmax. ”The ridiculousness of what we get from our government. They will run the vaccine down to those lowlifes at Guantanamo Bay before every resident of the United States of America gets it is the theater of the absurd.”

That’s right, guess who’s first in line to get the jab? The New York Post reported Friday:

Here’s a real kick in the shin: chances are accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will get the COVID vaccine before you do.

Accused terror masterminds like KSM and other detainees at Guantanamo Bay will begin receiving the coronavirus vaccine, the Pentagon confirmed Friday, even as the United States continues to experience severe shortages of the miracle jab.

The Pentagon confirmed to the Post that prisoners at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba could get the vaccine as early as in the coming week.

”It will be administered on a voluntary basis and in accordance with the Department’s priority distribution plan,” DoD spokesman Michael Howard said.

This means about forty terror suspects, including the man deemed the ‘mastermind’ behind the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 Americans, will likely receive the vaccine before hundreds of millions of US citizens. 

The NY Post report cites another understandably outraged former law enforcement official:

Brian Sullivan, a retired special security agent with the Federal Aviation Administration, said, “I’m incensed. It’s totally outrageous. I’m 75. I haven’t gotten my COVID vaccine. They’re going to give it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?”

Sullivan added it’s a scandal that the terrorists haven’t faced justice approaching the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. “This news adds insult to injury. It’s slap in the face to the 9/11 victims’ families,” Sullivan said.

“The order to administer the inoculations was signed Wednesday by Terry Adirim, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, an appointee of President Joe Biden who was sworn in on Inauguration Day,” it was revealed. 

The other interesting angle to the story is that this action is presumably being taken to prevent a broader COVID-19 outbreak among federal and military administered prisons – and yet, the shot will still be “voluntary” for the terror suspect inmates.

Given there will likely come a time when common American citizens will be told something to the effect of “take the shot or else…consequences/ repercussions” (for example in the form of job or travel restrictions – rhetoric which is already being entertained), it’s a bit ironic that the most dangerous terror suspects held at Gitmo will have “freedom” to choose to get vaccinated or not.

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Biden’s presumption of telling the Europeans that Nord Stream-2 is a bad deal shows that ultimately the Europeans are considered to not have sovereignty when it comes to setting their energy policy.

The European Union got a rude memo this week indicating there may be a new president residing in Washington, but it’s still the same American policy of treating them like vassals.

Democrat President Joe Biden may have more transatlantic finesse and sensibility when compared with rough-edged Republican Donald Trump. But the bottomline is Biden feels every bit as entitled as his predecessor did to order the Europeans around like a bunch of flunkies. Perhaps not with quite the same terse rhetoric, but nevertheless with the same overbearing attitude.

This was clear from the Biden administration’s declaration on the Nord Stream-2 natural gas project which is soon due for completion between Russia and Europe. “President Biden thinks this is a bad deal for Europe,” said White House spokesman Jan Psaki with an air of finality on the matter.

The new administration is looking into ways to implement sanctions formulated by the previous Trump which will target European companies involved in the construction of the gas project. After a year of suspended work due to American sanctions, construction of the Nord Stream-2 pipeline resumed this week. The €10 billion project involving 1,225 kilometers of piping under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany is over 95 per cent complete. The final few kilometers of pipe-laying resumed in Danish waters heading for the German coastline.

The new Nord Stream supply line will double the existing volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany and the rest of the European Union. Increasing consumption of cleaner natural gas is crucial for German plans to move away from dirty coal and nuclear power. Russian gas is also much more economical than alternative sources such as plans by the Americans to export seaborne liquefied natural gas.

Indeed Russia has objected to the American sanctions on the Nord Stream-2 on grounds that Washington is trying to strong-arm commercial decisions using political instruments. (So much for American free-market capitalism!)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reiterated her government’s commitment to finishing the Nord Stream-2 project. German business consortiums have also underscored the strategic importance of securing affordable gas energy supplies for future economic growth. Energy costs are paramount for Germany’s export-led economy as well as for keeping household consumer bills down.

This German commitment is spite of the controversy over Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny who was flown to Germany last August claiming that he was poisoned by the Kremlin in an outlandish assassination plot. The Kremlin has categorically rejected the claims as a deliberate provocation, suggesting Western intelligence involvement in a bid to destabilize Russia. Navalny stayed in Germany for nearly five months as a de facto guest of the Berlin government. On his return to Moscow on January 17, he was arrested for violations of his parole license for a suspended sentence concerning a past fraud conviction.

Merkel and other German politicians have certainly given Navalny a lot of media support for his unsubstantiated allegations against the Kremlin. Their indulgence of such provocative accusations is certainly a contemptible disregard for Russia’s sovereignty and laws, elevating a dubious agitator over the office of President Vladimir Putin.

However, the Germans are not that stupid. They know full well that to abandon Nord Stream-2 is tantamount to shooting their economy in both feet. Hence, despite the brouhaha over Navalny, Berlin is sticking with Nord Stream-2.

Enter Joe Biden. The president is presuming to tell the Europeans what he thinks is good or bad for them. An American leader from across the Atlantic is hollering to European states that taking delivery of economical Russia gas is “not a good deal”.

Of course, the Americans have to disguise their naked commercial and strategic interests with the rhetorical garb that Washington is “only” concerned for Europe being exploited by Russian political blackmail if Europe is dependent on Moscow for gas supplies. The inference being that Russia could turn off the gas lines whenever it is politically expedient. That cynical view is premised on dark Russophobia, and in any case from a legal, contractual perspective it would be implausible.

Biden’s arrogant opposition to Nord Stream-2 is not just a continuation of Trump administration policy. In the former Obama administrations (2008-2016) in which Biden served as vice president, it was also policy to oppose the ambitious gas project, which began in 2011.

With Trump, most European leaders came to loathe his brash and boorish manner. Touting his America First slogan, Trump browbeat Europeans over alleged unfair trade tariffs as well as for allegedly slacking on military spending commitments to NATO. Only Poland and the rightwing Baltic states seem to have had any favor for Trump whom they admired for his anti-Russia sanctions over Nord Stream-2.

Now with Biden in the White House, various European leaders have expressed relief and warm welcomes to the new president who openly talks about renewing and strengthening the transatlantic alliance. The implicit belief is that Biden appreciates European allies in a way that the vulgar Trump did not.

Any notions of newfound American appreciation of European allies should be disabused. Biden’s presumption of telling the Europeans that Nord Stream-2 is a bad deal shows that ultimately the Europeans are considered to not have sovereignty when it comes to setting their energy policy. Uncle Sam, as always, knows best for his little European vassals.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

When Facebook censors Ron Paul, or Twitter bans President Trump, is that censorship?

Or because these are private companies, does that automatically make it NOT censorship?

Amazon banned Parler, but is it their right as a private company to choose their customers?

That’s the crux of the issue I need to address with you in today’s post-Trump world of social media.

Because make no mistake “Big Tech” repression is a foundational problem facing any society that considers itself even somewhat free. In the wake of the allowed ‘assault on the Capitol’ and the confirmation of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the U.S., the big tech firms which control access to speech went ballistic.

Conservatives along with President Trump himself were wiped from the public square. Any mention of the election being stolen or open support on Twitter of Trump himself was flushed down the memory hole.

This is censorship of the highest order by these firms to put parameters around political speech in the U.S. where such a right is enshrined in the Constitution. None of it is constitutional.

But the problem is far deeper than that. The deplatforming of Parler, one alternative social media platform to Twitter, via corporate collusion by Apple, Google and Amazon was something far more sinister than Twitter silencing the sitting president of the U.S.

This was a blatant hit job by companies stifling competition in the public square for hosting material which is constitutionally protected as ‘free speech.’

But these firms, especially Amazon, who terminated Parler’s server hosting agreement with 24 hours’ notice, lazily applied their vague and ever-changing ‘Terms of Service” to single out Parler and hide behind their status as a private company.

The worst part about this is that libertarians see this as a rational and defensible free market action. And for years adolescent libertarian arguments about corporations being private actors preferable to governments have now been turned around by authoritarians who hang us with our own words.

And we wonder why conservatives look at us like we have four-heads when we make such arguments?

When this attack on free speech began, during the 2016 presidential campaign with the first deplatforming of alt-right provocateurs like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer website, it was obvious then that these were dry runs for the mass action we’re seeing today, in the name of creating an information-free literal one-party police state.

It was this that prompted former Silicon Valley programmer Andrew Torba to start Gab. Crazed liberals then said, “If you don’t like Twitter, leave and build your own.”

So, he did. And after the attack on the Pittsburgh Synagogue in 2018, Gab was given the even worse treatment than Parler got last week.

They survived that.

All the while myself and people like Torba were screaming about the duopoly controlling the on-ramp to the mobile web, and no one cared. But we could see this day coming.

And now it’s here.

But this is most certainly not a private property issue as much as it is a contract law issue allowed to fester because of government interference into the marketplace for communications.

Government interference altered the landscape these companies operate in. The grew to the size they are now because of government largesse and federal and state tax revenue into the networks and systems they depend on.

It doesn’t matter that the duopoly is Google and Apple. It could have been Palm and Microsoft. Or Blackberry and IBM. What matters is that the environment wasn’t a level playing field between the companies and the people using the services.

They were paying not only for access but at the same time subsidizing the revenue streams by accepting costs these companies outsourced to government.

It is a cozy arrangement.

The companies outsource their fixed costs and the government outsources their censorship desires that pesky First Amendment forbids them from doing directly.

No wonder the response to the allowed assault on the Capitol was so swift and coordinated.

Think it through folks.

Amazon’s AWS doesn’t become a dominant player without those vaunted contracts with the CIA. Parler, at a minimum should have an expectation of service per any legal contractual arrangement, and as such is due damages from Amazon for unilaterally breaching that basic trust.

Facebook doesn’t grow to become the monster it is without strategic investments by quasi-governmental companies like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Google doesn’t become the ad revenue generating machine if it had had to properly pay its bandwidth costs for the content they forced on us.

Trump nixing ‘Net Neutrality’ put some of that onus back on them, giving ISP’s some latitude to price usage according to their needs rather than Google’s.

All of the above companies, including Microsoft, have been chosen by our government to succeed in this tilted marketplace.

Apple doesn’t dominate the mobile internet in the U.S. without all those user fees and taxes tacked onto the cost of your monthly cellphone bill.

If these companies were operating on their own private satellite and wire networks then they would absolutely be in the right, via the application of private property rights, to set whatever terms of service they wanted.

I, as a libertarian, fully support that.

And also, as a libertarian, understand that public property always creates a tragedy of the commons scenario.

But when you operate in the public sphere, when you move your goods and services on the digital equivalent of the public road system (not a digression I want to get into today) and your corporate charter exists within the framework of U.S. and state contract law it is clear that these companies are neither wholly private entities with respect to their customers nor neutral actors trying to enforce public decency standards.

They are acting in their best interest to stifle competition – Gab, Parler, Minds, etc. – while setting precedents to allow for even further restrictions of speech through lawfare thanks to a complicit and fully cowed legal system.

And herein lies the smart path to reining them in, if it is at all possible at this point, since it’s clear the Biden Administration is ready to reframe all speech critical of the U.S. government as ‘domestic terrorism’ giving all of these companies the legal justification into the future to unperson all dissent.

Removing their Section 230 immunity under the Communications Decency Act is paramount. It will not happen now. The government is in on the grift, folks, so looking ahead to the 2022 election cycle isn’t an option.

They just proved to you your vote doesn’t count, so it means hitting them in the only place they truly care about, their bottom lines.

So, the first thing to do is sue them into the ground. It will be up to the people themselves to hound these companies through both contract law violations and shareholder revolts because they have done irreparable damage to their brands and their future revenue streams.

That is what has to happen right now. Parler’s suit against Amazon is a good start. A class-action lawsuit by every small business in America now wondering about Amazon’s policies should end this nonsense quickly.

A good judge in a sympathetic jurisdiction should side with anyone making a strong case that modern tech company Terms of Service are ‘contracts of adhesion,’ defined as contracts entered into where one party is so much stronger than the other the weaker party is, in effect, coerced into signing it.

The second thing to do is to simply jack-out. Put the screen down. Stop using it as a substitution for real communications and pull back from the brink.

De-google your life, as I have. Close your Facebook account permanently. You will feel better immediately, trust me. I did this two years ago, to the detriment of the marketing efforts of my business, and I have never looked back.

If you need a social network, use Twitter for keeping tabs on things but save your thoughts and your content for Gab or some other, smaller private community you are a part of.

Being a global citizen is a canard they sold us as some true net positive. But it was something designed wholly to drive us mad and deracinate us to the point of having no home, no culture and no real friends.

It’s no wonder they are trying so hard to shut off the escape routes and only allow certain platforms to exist forcing us to interact with people we don’t like while locked in our homes over a wholly contrived public health emergency.

It was always part of the globalist plan.

Ending this starts with the very libertarian idea of simply opting-out. We don’t need to be plugged into their reality-generating nightmares every moment of every day.

But the thing about the web is that it is built on protocols which are themselves censorship resistant. So, the tyrants of today will be the footnotes of tomorrow. We’ve seen early attempts at censorship-proof blockchain platforms like Steemit. It’s still running even though its growing pains nearly killed it.

The next great service is just around the corner because necessity is the mother of innovation. But the first step is accepting the fact that they’ve won this round and it is now time to change the rules of the game.

P.S.: If you want to see what this looks like, just look at what the guys at Wall Street Bets are doing to the capital markets today. Brokerage outages, trading suspended, newly-minted millionaires.

All because a bunch of hedgies got over-confident of their one-way skimming and thinking no one would press their luck to the breaking point.

They have and it is glorious.

You beat them by turning their supposed advantages and bought-and-paid-for rules of the game back on them.

*  *  *

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The World Health Organization (WHO)’s probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, appears to be nothing more than the media blitz that most skeptics predicted.

According to Reuters, the team’s visit is being “tightly controlled by its Chinese hosts” as they visited a hospital on Saturday in Wuhan which treated early COVID-19 patients.

On its second day after two weeks in quarantine, the team went to Jinyintan Hospital, where doctors had collected samples from patients suffering from an unidentified pneumonia in late 2019.

“Important opportunity to talk directly w/ medics who were on the ground at that critical time fighting COVID!”, team member Peter Daszak said on Twitter.

Team members leaving the hospital did not speak to journalists, who have been kept at a distance since the group left its quarantine hotel on Thursday.

And of course, the team will visit the Wuhan ‘wet’ market tied to the first cluster of cases – except the CCP razed and sanitized the site months ago. Maybe the WHO team can take some memorable photos?

#Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market was claimed to be the origin of #COVID2019 #Coronavirus #CoronavirusOutbreak, although we may never be able to find out, as the market was closed and everything cleaned up on Jan 1. It was said that this market is now going to be demolished. pic.twitter.com/qRDyU0Dweg

— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) March 3, 2020

The WHO origins probe prominently includes Peter Daszak – president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Of note, Daszak drafted a February, 2020 statement in The Lancet on behalf of 27 prominent public health scientists which condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Via USRTK.org:

[E]mails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”.

Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.

…

The 27 authors “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and reported that scientists from multiple countries “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The letter included no scientific references to refute a lab-origin theory of the virus.

The emails show how members of EcoHealth Alliance played an early role in framing questions about possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 as “crackpot theories that need to be addressed,” as Daszak told The Guardian.

In short, the guy leading the WHO’s faux-investigation was working directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s bat research team, and who insists COVID-19 has a natural origin (and couldn’t possibly have escaped the WIV), has a massive conflict of interest.