According to recent media reports, former President Donald Trump wasn’t just spouting “right-wing conspiracy theories” when claiming coronavirus could’ve been leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And now that Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser, is saying he is “not convinced” that coronavirus developed naturally, the mainstream media is back to address it. When Trump talks about it, it’s a conspiracy theory. When Fauci talks about it, it makes the headlines and prompts an investigation.
On CNN’s morning news coverage, panelists discussed the evidence that supports the Wuhan lab leak theory as the potential origin of COVID-19. They pointed to an article by the New York Times about Li Meng Yan, a virologist from Hong Kong who claimed that the coronavirus was a “man-made Chinese bioweapon” and was studied in the Wuhan lab before it escaped.
While the paper mostly mocked the allegations made by Yan, the New York Times recently updated the piece with the possibility that the coronavirus was from a lab leak. Yan opposed the theory that the virus came from a bat in a Wuhan “wet market.” Other scientists have also called for further inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus and have called the lab leak and natural spillover “viable.”
When talking about it on CNN, co-host John Berman spoke with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman about the recent findings from an intelligence report released by a Trump Administration’s State Department back in January. The report revealed that many researchers from a Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019 for a COVID-like illness, just weeks before the supposed first case was found in China.
Berman also played the clip of Dr. Fauci saying he is “not convinced” that the virus developed naturally and talked about “understanding where coronavirus comes from” and how the pandemic began. But the radical left news hosts seem to forget how quickly they dismissed the theory last year (because Trump said it) and how mixed Fauci’s messaging has been over the last year. He even noted that the media “freaked out” over the Trump Administration’s being tough on China over their lack of transparency and poor handling of the virus outbreak.
“A lot of the discussion about the lab leak was clouded early on because there was a suggestion by some that it was somehow a Chinese weapon that caused this. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a lab accident. But we’ve come a long way from people dismissing this as a conspiracy theory to a lot of people taking this seriously, Maggie,” Berman said.
Reporter Haberman, however, was refusing to take any responsibility for the media politicizing the virus. She even tried to blame the Trump Administration for immediately suggesting that the virus was formed in a lab without releasing the evidence to show what it was. She said that made things “instantly political.”
“I think this was example 1000 where the Trump administration learned when you burn your own credibility over and over again, people are not immediately going to believe you, especially in an election year. However, that does not mean it’s not worth discussing,” Haberman said.
But the mainstream media doesn’t want to admit that they’ve been pushing Chinese propaganda since the beginning and that Trump wasn’t wrong to talk about this being a lab leak.
Even Mike Pompeo, who served as Trump’s secretary of state, says he is convinced that the coronavirus was leaked from a Chinese lab. He said that he is confident with the evidence he’s seen to date, that this is consistent with a lab leak. Pompeo told Fox News that the United States government could impose real costs on the Chinese Communist Party until they come clean about what they know. He said that when Trump officials tried to get information from China, they went dark.
“They wouldn’t take our phone calls, they wouldn’t answer our questions. We sent inquires, we couldn’t get a straight answer … The Chinese Communist Party clearly knew they had a problem, they didn’t want the world to know it and I’m convinced they still know they have a problem and don’t want us to know it,” Pompeo said.
Other reports have indicated that there has been a “lack of cooperation” from the People’s Republic of China and that the military had involvement. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky also said that the lab-based origin is certainly “one possibility.”
We knew about the hospital reports in December 2019 when Trump was talking about it. Did everyone suddenly forget? Nothing like being on the RIGHT side of the political spectrum. The only remaining question is whether or not the CCP did this deliberately.