Vanity Fair, The Spectator, L’Express cover New Zealand pandemic initiative shunned by local politico-media class.
A scientific collective with roots in New Zealand and which anticipated the official whitewashing of the origins of the Covid-19 virus is being deliberately ignored by the politico-media establishment here.
The purpose of this scientific collaboration is described by one of its participants Paris-based geneticist Virginie Courtier as being straightforward. “There are unanswered questions,” she says “and a few human beings know the answer.”
Point man for the world-wide multidisciplinary movement is Auckland-based Gilles Demaneuf (pictured). He is co-founder of DRASTIC. The group came into existence when it became clear that existing authorities charged with identifying the origins of the virus were inadequate to do so because of undisclosed conflicts of interest.
This became evident to the group after the now widely recognised attempt by The Lancet medical journal to close down any debate centred on the possibility of a laboratory leak for the virus.
“Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone,” was Mr Demaneuf’s reaction to The Lancet, according to Vanity Fair.
It was now that there came into existence Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid -19. DRASTIC for short and which now began cataloguing all the relevant research laboratories in China.
As they posted their findings they were joined snowball-like by other scientists with the common purpose of investigating any connection between the pandemic virus and research laboratories in China.
The group now dug for example into why a vaccine was being developed for Covid 19 before there was in fact a Covid-19 virus.
Then there came the discovery that a central research database was rendered inactive just weeks before the world at large was confronted by Covid -19.
DRASTIC began charting the three dimensional structure of the Chinese research laboratories identifying for example plumbing reticulation. It evaluates building materials orders.
Similarly the group seeks to identify all laboratory exception report incidents such as accidents, hospitalisations, and equipment malfunctions. Also telecommunications logs. Who was calling who, and when?
Another conundrum. Why was so much of the Chinese exported personal protection equipment found to be so shoddy?
Normally an international scientific collective such as DRASTIC would have been the subject of considerable local media interest. Pickup would usually be assured because the scientific collective has also been widely covered in France and Australia among other countries
In The Spectator Mr Demaneuf is recorded as claiming that “Unless we fully understand what happened in Wuhan, another virus could bring the word to a halt….and the next one may be more virulent and much more deadly.”
DRASTIC has been substantially covered by Vanity Fair. The United States magazine observed “If the lab-leak explanation proves accurate, history may credit Demaneuf and his fellow doubters for breaking the dam…..
“They are now knee-deep in examining the Wuhan Institute of Virology construction orders, sewage output, and cell phone traffic.”
Concluded Vanity Fair of Mr Demaneuf and a DRASTIC colleague: “Now, at least, there appears to be the prospect of a level inquiry—the kind Gilles Demaneuf and Jamie Metzl had wanted from the start…..”
Occam’s Razor tells us that the obvious explanation is the probable one. This is that the media has always had a problem with scientific topics and their dissection.
Another reason is that Covid is not merely a health or “wellness” threat. It is also a distraction from the in-place politico media priority focus which remains fixed on climate warming as the unifying progressive preoccupation.
In the meantime and in the words of Vanity Fair’s extended DRASTIC coverage “Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population.”
Gilles Demaneuf views his task according to a foreign language medical publication as surmounting the “Chinese Wall” of vested interests that encircles the origin of the virus.
