At long last, “the most trusted name in news” has confessed that the China Virus might have escaped from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
But CNN’s grudging admission about the U.S.Energy Department’s “low-confidence” assessment, which “raises more questions than answers,” won’t make up for the network’s pushing the leftist lie that the lab-leak hypothesis was a “right-wing conspiracy theory.”
Orders to push that lie, Fox News reported today, came from disgraced former CNN chief Jeff Zucker. CNN wouldn’t report or even try to confirm what is now almost certain because it was a “Trump talking point.”
And denying the truth was a “talking point” from CNN and the rest of the leftist mainstream media.
Debunking the Truth
But calling the hypothesis a “conspiracy theory” was a means to smear Trump.
“In the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a ’Trump talking point,’” Fox reported. “People are slowly waking up from the fog,” a “well-placed insider” told the network. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”
Not really, given the network’s galvanized hatred of Trump. As Fox reported, CNN “bent over backwards to knock down” the lab-leak theory.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy published a story to help readers “debunk” the crazy uncle who peddles the “conspiracy theory”:
But, in some cases, relatives and friends share poor information — whether it is bad science related to how to prevent the virus, debunked rumors about cities being put on lockdown, or conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. While any strain of misinformation is not ideal, misinformation related to a public health crisis has an especially dangerous element to it.
CNN also “fact-checked” GOP Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who said the Asiatic pathogen might have leaked from the lab. “Experts have dismissed Cotton’s ‘engineered bioweapon hypothesis’ but noted it’s possible, yet unlikely, that the lab was connected to the start of the outbreak,” the hate-Trump network reported.
Here’s another CNN offering:
Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn’t made in a lab. There’s still much we don’t know about the coronavirus pandemic, but virus experts agree on one piece of its origin story: The virus likely originated in a bat, not in a Chinese lab.
“Now, before we play the game of ‘he said, he said’ remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert,” the network’s Chris Cilliza wrote, speaking of Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “And it’s not Donald Trump”:
In short, Fauci’s view on the origins of the disease matters a whole lot more than Trump’s opinion about where it came from. Especially because, outside of Trump and his immediate inner circle, most people in a position to know are very, very skeptical of the Trump narrative that the virus came out of a lab — whether accidentally or on purpose.
The order to “debunk” a very sound theory had to have been approved by Zucker, who quit in ignominy last year after his affair with an underling was revealed.
Vanity Fair Blamed Trump for Media Malfeasance
By the time he was forced out, Zucker and CNN had lost what little credibility they had. Project Veritas had published audio of morning meetings at which Zucker and his torpedoes openly discussed pushing hate-GOP, hate-Trump propaganda.
That aside, the left-wing media took their cues from Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes for Health. They lied not only about whether their agencies subsidized highly dangerous research at the Chinese virus institute, but also about the lab leak theory. Both men knew top scientists favored the lab leak hypothesis, emails show, yet they claimed it was a “conspiracy theory.”
Thus did leftist Vanity Fair blame Trump for the media’s calling the lab leak theory a “conspiracy theory.”
Writer Katherine Eban claimed that his early claim that the virus probably leaked from the lab was the real problem, not the failure of her and her colleagues to see whether he was right.
“Trump’s premature statement poisoned the waters for anyone seeking an honest answer to the question of where COVID-19 came from,” she wrote:
According to [Deputy National Security Adviser Mark] Pottinger, there was an “antibody response” within the government, in which any discussion of a possible lab origin was linked to destructive nativist posturing.
It was Trump’s “divisiveness and lack of credibility” that impeded “those seeking the truth.”
And, of course, his racism was partly to blame, too:
And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.…
Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility.
Unhappily for Eban and her ilk, they are the only characters with “less than zero credibility.” They dismissed the lab leak theory because they hated Trump, and he just couldn’t be right.
Indeed, before Trump said he saw evidence that the virus came from a lab, intelligence sources had told Fox News’s Brett Baier that they suspected a lab leak. U.S. science diplomats were concerned about the lab’s safety protocols and incompetent technicians.
Other sources told Fox’s John Roberts that most of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies agreed that the virus leaked from a lab.
In May 2021, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade explored the dangerous research and the possibility of a lab leak in detail.
U.S. also intelligence knew that three lab workers caught the virus in November 2019, which all but confirmed that the virus leaked from a lab.
