Dr Alison Broinowski (Australian researcher): “Are we being lied to about the origins of the pandemic? Even in the days when people used to read TIME to stay informed, it was always worth applying the home-base test. If the magazine got facts about where you lived wrong, what else in the magazine could you believe? In Pearls & Irritations (27 July) Nury Vittachi provided insights from a Twitter post people in Hong Kong the times responded to a question posted as to when they stopped trusting Western media’s ‘constant lies’. But it’s not just the media that lie, and not only in the West either. Governments lie, IF Stone used pithily to tell his students. On matters of life and death, are governments or the media any more truthful? Not if the pandemic and chemical and biological weapons research are indicators. They are connected by a long history of secretiveness, politics, and vested interests… An American observer wrote recently, ‘While there’s no smoking gun that answers where SARS-CoV-2 originated, there’s a whole lot of evidence showing that some very powerful people have worked quite hard to shape public opinion and suppress information that runs counter to their natural-origin hypothesis’” (Dr Alison Broinowski, “Truth , lies, and pandemics”, Pearls & Irritations, 2 August 2022: https://johnmenadue.com/truth-lies-and-pandemics/ ).