Jul
27
2026

He Really is Indispensable

As I type, the "respectable" MSM outlets seem to be ignoring this, but it's kind of a big deal. Jim Geraghty at NR: Dr. Anthony Fauci, January 2020: 'Now We Know the Market Was Not the Source, It Was the Amplifier'. (NR gifted link)

Very few people seem to care much about the origin of the Covid pandemic anymore. But Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is an exception, and on Saturday, he dropped a bombshell.

According to Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.”

On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

If the wet market was not the source and was merely an amplifier, then the virus had to come from somewhere else. That “somewhere else” could have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats), or some other location. (Horseshoe bats are believed to be the type of bat that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, originated in. Their natural habitat is several hundred miles away. As of May 2021, Chinese authorities have “tested 50,000 animal specimens, including 1,100 bats in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. But no luck: a matching virus still hasn’t been found.”)

Jim was one of the early promoters of the Lab-Leak hypothesis back in 2020, when it was widely derided as a wacky conspiracy theory. And still is, in many corners. For example the relevant Wikipedia article maintains (again, as I type): "Many scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories."

Google and read for yourself, but quickly, as I speculate a lot of this "debunking" of the lab-leak will get memory-holed.

Jim deserves to gloat.

Also of note:

  • Also leaking from the labs… Patrick McGee sounds the warning at the Free Press: Here Comes ‘Death by AI’.

    Between the writing of this column on a Sunday morning and the time most people read it the following day, more than 3,000 people will likely die in a car crash. Every one of those accidents is a tragedy, yet traffic deaths are so common that they usually get little news coverage.

    During the same 24 hours, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will die from the actions of an AI agent. Unless you count military uses or suicides that may have become more likely after someone’s conversations with a chatbot, “death by AI” isn’t really a thing. But we are getting uncomfortably close to situations where an AI agent attempts to accomplish a task, finds a human in the way, eliminates him (or her!), and carries on with the job.

    Last week OpenAI disclosed what it called “an unprecedented cyber incident” after one of its AI agents unexpectedly hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, an online AI platform. The maker of ChatGPT had been conducting a test aimed at measuring the capabilities of its latest models. The AI agent had been given a test within a sandboxed environment—that is, a closed area without internet access—but managed to escape, gain access to the internet, figure out which company’s server likely had the answers to the test, and hack into it.

    I started out as an AI skeptic, turned into an AI optimist a few years back, and now… I'm not sure.

  • For residents in other states: "FITN" stands for "First in the Nation". Michael Graham analyzes some early election-rigging attempts: The FITN Problem Isn't the DNC. It's the AOC.

    New Hampshire didn’t lose the First in the Nation presidential primary because of the DNC. It lost it because of AOC.

    It was an unhelpful coincidence that, at the same time the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee was meeting to set the calendar, a UNH Survey Center panel showed U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) leading the pack in the Democrats’ FITN primary poll.

    The public debate at the DNC may have been explicitly racial (excuse me, it was explicitly racial), but there was subtext to the talk about South Carolina’s Black voters vs. Nevada’s working-class Hispanics. It was the hope that these voting blocs would save the party from the AWFLs: Affluent White Female Liberals.

    You can read about the Democrat proposed primary schedule here. And you can read the latest UNH Survey Center poll results here.

    Spoiler: AOC does technically come in first (22%), but that's essentially a tie with Mayor Pete (21%).

    Kamala is not exactly on fire, getting 5%, in fifth place.