Monkeyshines Over Monkeypox Outbreak

Editors Note:  With apologies to the Babylon Bee, this column is meant to be humorous and satirical. It is a complete fabrication. Don't spend your valuable time at Snopes website fact-checking the details. The Washington Post would  give it five Pinochios. It is a work of fiction. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Dr. Anthony Fauci, El Jefe of an agency called NIH, issued an urgent warning about the spread of Monkeypox.  There have been 92 cases in 12 countries.  The oldest living federal government executive appealed to Americans to take Monkeypox "really, really seriously."

"We can't let our guard down," Fauci told a media conference.  "I'm still mad that some Red States dropped masking requirements during COVID. That ain't happening again on my watch.  The Monkeypox scourge is an existential threat to our very civilization. Even in Florida."

The saintly Fauci, an icon on morning television, explained that Monkeypox is spread through close contact with people, animals or material infected with the virus.  Human-to-human contact is believed to occur through respiratory droplets,  according to the World's Worst Health Organization (WWHO).

"Everyone will need to mask up," the diminutive doctor told reporters, straining to get a view of him.  "One of the first symptoms likely to appear is an insatiable appetite for bananas.  Others signs include walking on all fours, picking at sores on your body and swinging from tree-to-tree."

In rare cases, Fauci said some individuals may grow long, furry tails after four weeks.  "It usually only occurs in males because, let's face it, some men act like apes.  Especially those dimwits who won't follow the science.  They think Monkeypox is just like having the flu."

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advised the most vulnerable in the population will need two pox shots and 14 boosters. "Those most at risk are Americans with hairy bodies," she warned.  She recommended full body waxes as a precaution. 

Walensky, formerly with the Flying Walenskies, promised her agency would send 10 billion home tests kits to Americans over the next 20 years.  In addition, the CDC is urging the use of masks indoors, outdoors, in your bed and in the closet, while you cower in fear of the pox.

The CDC honcho urged the Department of Justice to hunt down and arrest anyone appearing in public without a mask.  Merritt Garland issued a statement pledging his department would deputize a self-righteous squad of virtual signaling elites to aid in the effort to Mask Up America.

"Mask vigilantes are just the first step,"Garland revealed.  "There will be $1,000 bounties paid to  people who snitch on their neighbors." Asked by a reporter if this was unconstitutional, Garland replied: "Under our constitution there are no absolute rights.  The only rights are those granted by the DOJ."

WWHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus (yeah, that's his real name) called on all countries to institute harsh lockdowns like those China employed during the COVID pandemic. "No one should be allowed out of their house, even for a Starbucks latte.  No trips to grocery stores either."

The Ethiopian WWHO master challenged a reporter's question about the severity of such lockdowns. "What would you rather be--well-fed or alive?" Tedros (etc) barked.  "Look how well this has worked in China.  Locking people up helps the government keep track of everyone. It's genius."

The federal Department of Agriculture tasked the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service to round up monkeys in America's zoos and place the primates in isolation to protect the public. Zookeepers will be quarantined for the next six months to prevent the spread of Monkeypox.

(If you're shaking your head in disbelief, your federal government is so large it does have an Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service to enforce the Animal Welfare Act approved by Congress in 1966. Your tax dollars pay for it. Don't you feel safer?)

The New York Times, Washington Post and ABC, CBS and NBC praised the administration for its quick action on Monkeypox.  "We may be running out of gasoline, infant formula, while inflation is wiping out ordinary people's savings, but the nation's health is THE priority," the media echo chamber gushed.

Forty-three scientists with federal government grants, the entire intelligence community, eight retired Postmasters and a couple of homeless people in San Francisco took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal appealing to Americans to become sheep-like, following the health shepherd Fauci.

When pressed on the science behind the monkeypox restrictions, Dr. Fauci became defensive.  "I am science. We don't need research. That's why we are allies with the United Kingdom and Israel.  They do scientific studies.  I don't need a study to tell me Monkeypox is bad, bad, bad."

Within hours of the media show, President Biden signed his 110th executive order, this one requiring grocery stores to pull bananas from store shelves.  In addition, songs and books mentioning the word "monkey" have been banned. "Monkey is now a four-letter word," the president said earnestly. 

Polls show Americans plan to remain unmasked.  However,  77% of the population believe monkeys have the right to self-identify as elephants. "This could end the Monkeypox crisis," Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell said.  "But I guess then we'd have elephants showering with monkeys."

Evidence Mounts Virus Escaped From Wuhan Lab

A  clump of square buildings hunker in the forests of Wuhan China.  At the epicenter is a windowless steel structure, which houses a bio-safety level 4 laboratory. The sterile lab handles some of the world's most contagious pathogens and also conducts classified research for the Chinese military.

The facility is located just a few kilometers from a "wet market" where the first Coronavirus infections  emerged. In recent weeks, the Chinese scientific lab has bolted into the headlines as scientists take a fresh look at a once discredited theory that a leak at the facility may have been the origin of the Coronavirus.

Nearly 18 months ago, the official version circulated by American and Chinese health officials claimed the virus spread from the market, where vendors sell meat, fish, produce and some live animals. Scientists agreed the Coronavirus was naturally transmitted from a bat to humans. Few questioned the thesis.

A brave scientist speculated the virus may have spread as a result of an inadvertent leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (WIV).  Molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright expressed concerns because of previous leaks at labs in Beijing.  Facebook and Google banned any discussion of the lab leak theory. 

In recent weeks, a drizzle of conjecture has evolved into a downpour of circumstantial as well as unambiguous evidence that the Coronavirus may be linked to a leak from the Wuhan facility, despite continued and often contentious denials from Communist Chinese officials.

Last year President Trump publicly speculated the virus may have been engineered in a laboratory, fueling a firestorm of outrage from scientists and the media. They coordinated an attack on the accusation, demeaning it as a conspiracy theory.  The lab leak thesis was effectively banned. 

The Washington Post huffed that the president and his supporters were "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts."  The New York Times labeled the claim a "fringe theory."  The media piled on to promote its narrative that Trump was solely to blame for the virus.

Still questions lingered in medical chat rooms and among scientists whose concerns were never made public.  There were coincidences too foreboding to deny.  However, Dr. Anthony Fauci led a chorus of scientists who blotted out even the possibility of a leak being the origin for the pandemic.

A recently-released trove of emails from Dr. Fauci, the government's top specialist during COVID, revealed at the time he was pooh-poohing the leak publicly, he and his associates and colleagues privately discussed the possibility that the virus had indeed escaped from the Wuhan lab.

As early as last January, Dr. Fauci was alerted about the suspicious characteristics of COVID samples.  Kristian Anderson and five virologists, noted "unusual features" in the virus and added "one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered." 

Anderson also noted in his email to Dr. Fauci that he and his team "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from an evolutionary theory."  The team's initial impression later flip-flopped, but they offered no evidence to support their new claim the laboratory scenario was no longer plausible.

The emails were publicly disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Judicial Watch.  The duplicity of Dr. Fauci was further exposed when another FOIA request uncovered U.S. tax-payer funding of the Wuhan lab, in spite of the virologist's earlier denials in a Senate hearing.

Pressed  again on the matter, Dr. Fauci told lawmakers the government granted $600,000 in funding over a five year period.  But documents furnished by the Health and Human Services divulged that between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. provided $826,277 in taxpayer funds. 

The money came from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) directed by Dr. Fauci.  Documents show the funds were provided over a six-year period for "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." NIAID funneled the money through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance.

Perhaps, it was just a coincidence that the Wuhan lab was conducting studies on bats and Coronavirus at the time of the outbreak.  The U.S. State Department raised eyebrows in January when it released a bombshell fact sheet that was generally ignored by a partisan media.

The fact sheet confirmed Wuhan was conducting experiments on a bat virus, including "gain of function" research on the engineering of "chimeric viruses" or man-made pathogens.

Gain of function is used to describe a process that alters an organism or a disease in a way that increases its pathogenesis, transmission or the types of hosts it can infect. Done ethically, this type of research is useful because it allows scientists to develop vaccines and medicines for treatment.

In the wrong hands, this research could be used to engineer an existing virus for rapid transmission or to cause a pandemic pathogen to replicate more quickly, increasing the spread to humans.  Research groups in the EU and US both regulate the oversight of this process in most labs to ensure safety.

In its document, the State Department insisted it had "reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV (Wuhan lab) became sick in the autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."

Vanity Fair reported some officials at the State Department were explicitly told not to explore the Wuhan lab's "gain of function" research because it would bring what the publication described as "unwelcome" attention on U.S. government funding of the research. It would open "a can of worms" the outlet said.

The State Department claims triggered questions about the credibility of Wuhan lab's senior researcher Shi Zhengli who said there were "zero infections" among the WIV staff.  Denials from Chinese officials escalated in the face of a Wall Street Journal investigative report that fueled renewed speculation.

NBC News, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, followed with a broadcast revealing that a database of more than 22,000 virus samples at the Wuhan lab were removed from public view for so-called security reasons.  The disclosure cast a shadow over the probe by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Peter B. Embark, the head of the WHO group that investigated the origins, admitted in late February that his group "didn't do an audit of any of these labs, so we don't really have hard facts or detailed data done at the Wuhan lab." Yet he still contended it was "extremely unlikely" the virus originated at the lab.

That explanation did not satisfy some virologists.  Last month, 18 virologists published a letter in Science criticizing WHO 's joint investigation with China.  "Although there were no finding in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident...the two theories were not given balanced consideration."

Even the WHO director general conceded the joint investigation's report lacked data to support its findings. The State Department backed by 13 countries said the WHO probe was "significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data samples."  

With interest heating up, Republicans are calling for President Biden to declassify all U.S. intelligence related to the Wuhan lab and the COVID-19 pandemic, so the American people can get answers they deserve.  Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan initially balked at releasing the intel.

This is the moment for politicians to put aside their differences and use the full resources of the government  to investigate the lab leak theory.  There has been too much government foot-dragging, failed probes derailed by China and a lack of transparency on this critical matter. 

What's maddening is why it has taken so long for the country's chief pandemic expert Dr. Fauci to unequivocally determine the origin of a deadly virus that killed nearly 600,000 Americans. The media has been complicit by its lazy reporting of the standard, approved version of the origin.

Why was it so critical for Dr. Fauci and other scientist to cling to the wet market theory?  Why did it take 18 months for the circumstantial evidence to appear in the public domain?  Was scientific curiosity shelved until after a presidential election because Coronavirus was the Democrats' campaign gift?

Don't expect answers to those questions from the administration, the media or the party in power. The opinion here is the wet market thesis will never be overturned.  The lab leak scenario will be swept under the Oval Office carpet after a "show" investigation.  There is no appetite to rattle relations with China.