This article originally appeared in LifeSiteNews on June 2nd, 2021
I thought that my New York Post article of February 23, 2020, understated the lab-leak hypothesis. After all, I only called it a possibility. But Facebook quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17.
As it happened, I was only the first of many who were censored for questioning China’s cover story – that someone had gotten a bad bowl of bat soup in something called the Wuhan Wet Market.
In my article, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab,” I marshalled several plausible pieces of evidence – all of which pointed to the lab:
- China had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
- Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
- Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ ”
- As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.
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Yet despite my careful caveats and the fact that this was published in the “opinion” section of the paper, Facebook’s so-called “fact-checkers” blocked posters’ friends from reading it for themselves. The mainstream media piled on, hammering me a “conspiracy theorist” and slamming the Post for publishing it.
Over the past few months, the attempted cover-up has finally started to unravel. The evidence pointing to the China Virus as a genetically engineered product of the lab is finally getting the serious consideration it deserves.
For example, New York Magazine’s January cover story, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” concluded that COVID-19 is probably a human-engineered virus that escaped from a Wuhan lab.
Last weekend, a Wall Street Journal report noted that according to U.S. intelligence, three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill and went to the hospital in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. This was, perhaps not coincidently, the time the virus began circulating in the city.
The week before, 18 highly respected scientists wrote to Science magazine that “we must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously.” Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mr. Pandemic himself, has now made a 180 and no longer rules out the lab theory.
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Finally, Facebook itself announced that it “will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured.”
Of course, Facebook’s shameful censorship did not occur in a vacuum. Those who perpetrated this fraud on the public include lying scientists, self-interested politicians, and those suffering from TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome.
We were told that there was a “scientific consensus.” But experts called for comment were themselves often engaged in “gain-of-function research” that manipulates deadly viruses — and didn’t want to lose their funding if the public turned against it. Others had worked with Wuhan’s researchers and had done experiments in their lab.
These were the same characters who, deliberately concealing their conflict of interest, published letters in the journal Lancet in February 2020 and another in Nature Medicine a month later ridiculing the lab theory, and calling anyone who suggested it – like me – a “conspiracy theorist.”
The chief offender in this regard was, of course, Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, who was doing everything in his power to discredit the idea that the virus was a laboratory construct. His behavior is perhaps understandable: his grants had helped to train the scientists who worked there, not to mention indirectly funding the lab itself.
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The incompetent media echoed the message of the “scientists,” who were insisting that the science was settled. When they mentioned it at all, the major media treated the Wuhan lab theory as a paranoid fantasy, not all that different from the claim of Chinese propagandists that the virus had actually escaped from the U.S. Army’s labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Politics played a role as well. Once President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested last summer that the virus might have begun in a Chinese lab, the Democrats and their followers in the media blindly took the opposite position. There was an election coming up, and Trump couldn’t be allowed to be right – about this or anything else.
Mainstream media reporters didn’t simply “ignore” the lab leak theory, they gave free rein to their TDS and relentlessly attacked anyone suggesting that it might be true as a hater or ignoramus. Their real target, of course, was Donald Trump.
Now that we know, with near certainty, that it came from a lab, don’t expect an apology from those who got it wrong and misled millions.
Or from those, like Facebook, who shunned dissenters and stifled debate.
As for me, I don’t expect to hear from Mark Zuckerberg any time soon.
