We Were Right All Along!
Late last month ( February) the Department of Energy released a confidential report that the strain of coronavirus identified as SARS-COV-2 that causes the viral infection known as COVID-19 that resulted in the pandemic, may have “possibly” come from an accidental lab leak. The report came with a “low confidence” assessment that is a follow up from the National Intelligence Council report released in 2021 of the possible origin of the virus, which also reached no definitive conclusion.
According to ABC News, “the U.S. Department of Energy now believes with “low confidence” that COVID-19 pandemic “most likely” was the result of a laboratory leak in China.”
"First reported by the Wall Street Journal and not independently confirmed by ABC, the DOE, which oversees a system of labs in the U.S., changed it's stance from undecided - becoming the second agency, after the FBI, to believe a lab accident resulted in the global health emergency.
"Four other U.S. agencies believe the the virus was a result of natural transmission... two other agencies are undecided."
John Kirby, the National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, told reporters, “There’s just no consensus across government agencies. The president believes it’s important that we get to the bottom of this.”
John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s hospital, and an ABC news contributor, said, “It really becomes impossible to speculate. Without it ( seeing the contents of the report ), it’s very hard to make any type of judgment on what took place. And I think, ultimately, all hypotheses remain on the table. While this headline is very attention grabbing, it doesn’t change the game in any significant way.”
What this means is, nothing has been proven. The lab leak has not been proven to be fact, and the natural origin theory still remains the most plausible. However, this has not stopped proponents of the lab leak from claiming that with the release of the report, that they have been vindicated.
First up, Fox News with this headline written by Brian Flood: Credibility Crisis: New York Times Helped Mislead America Over COVID Lab Leak Theory. This bit of subtext under the headline reads, “The legacy media abandoned any pretext of objective journalism,” Chris Barron said.
"The New York Times was among the many media organizations in 2020 that pushed the narrative that the COVID Lab leak theory was some sort of wild conspiracy theory being pushed by the far right...
"A February, 2022 headline, "New Research Points To Wuhan Market As Pandemic Origin," featured a biologist who penned both studies claiming "it's an extraordinary clear picture that the pandemic started in a Huanan market."
"Outkick's Bobby Burack mocked the times over the piece.
" 'An extraordinary clear picture, huh? While the studies are compelling -and I encourage everyone to read them - the research does not disprove the lab leak theory, as the Times says," Burack wrote. "So, why has the New York Times so quickly declared Saturday's finding to be true? Well, the Times is motivated to dismiss the Wuhan Institute of Virology's involvement in COVID-19 to absolve it's own role in what could be a world-wide cover-up.'"
"Now that the Energy Department report and Christopher Wray have given the left no other choice but to break from the mainstream narrative, the media's already floundering reliability has taken another blow. Conservative strategist Chris Barron believes the media created the credibility crisis simply because it didn't like president Trump.
"During the Trump administration the legacy media abandoned any pretext of objective journalism. Every single issue we confronted as a country they looked at as an opportunity to score political points and hurt president Trump," Barron told Fox News Digital. "They prioritized petty partisan politics over protecting the health and welfare of the American people - a shameful and unforgivable sin."
Note the lack of self-awareness in this statement. Throughout the pandemic, Fox News and other conservative media pundits did nothing but prioritize “petty partisan politics” in order to frame a president who was waist-deep in the Washington Swamp, as an anti-establishment outsider who was “draining the swamp.” A president who never took the pandemic seriously, while attacking public health officials who did take it seriously and did everything to inform the public. They undermined any effort by the CDC, Fauci, and state, Federal and local officials to mitigate the severity of the pandemic – including masks, quarantines, and vaccines. Every positive response by responsible agencies was met with accusations of tyranny.
If we’re going to be accusing any media of having a “credibility crisis” when it comes to objective journalism, it would be conservative media. The recent revelations regarding the billion dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News and other conservative networks for their allegations that Dominion voting systems deliberately and somehow managed to flip millions of votes from Trump in favor of Biden. The same scandal that revealed that Fox pundits knew they were broadcasting falsehoods and having no regard for objective journalism or truth. These election conspiracy theories were not just broadcast on Fox News, Newsmax and One America Network, but all over the conservative echo chamber. But, apparently now we’re to believe that conservative media are all of a sudden concerned about truth and objectivity.
The Government And The Liberal Media Silenced Us!
Next up, this speculative headline, COVID Lab Leak Theory Appears Vindicated After Energy Department Report: ‘They Censored Us, Trashed Us”:
"The lab leak theory, or the theory that the virus came from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, was widely dismissed as a conspiracy and "fringe" theory," Ashley Carnahan writes for Fox News. It was labeled as "misinformation" by Democrats, major news outlets and social media companies in the early stages of the pandemic who tried to suppress the theory from being circulated.
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld argued this is a great example of how "racism can suppress conversation."
" 'So when you brought up that the origins of COVID had to be in China, then you were obviously Asian-phobic. Right? And it was racist to say Chinese or China virus, and they would link it to Asian people getting brutalized - including homeless people in Oakland, California,' " Gutfeld said.
" 'What the race card does is it can crush actual dialogue and theories based on ,'Oh, it comes from somewhere else...' "
Again, note the lack of self-awareness. Gutfeld is blaming the media for playing “the race card” for doing responsible reporting in pointing out that Trump and his defenders referring to the virus as the ‘kung flu,’ the ‘Chinese virus,’ etc., is racist. Multiple news outlets in the early days of the pandemic – including the New York Times, and The New York Post – reported numerous incidents of Asian Americans who were assaulted while their attackers used virus related slurs such as that used by Trump and other Republican politicians.
"Co-host Judge Jeanine argued the government politicized COVID to silence conversations and shut down free speech.
" 'How many people in America lost their businesses? Or weren't allowed to go to their business? And then there was the unequal treatment. If you go to your salon, we're going to throw you in jail. But the amazing part of this is from day one you were not allowed to have an opinion," ' she said.
" 'What they did was they censored us. They trashed us. They silenced us. And if you look at it from a bigger umbrella, this was the first time in America that the left had the chance to really silence us...
..." 'So it was a first time, I believe, and I think this is a huge issue, that the government was able to literally silence the American public and say and have everyone else say, yeah they must be silenced because it's disinformation.' "
Anyone who has paid attention to how the media handled the pandemic from the beginning, is well-aware that claims of a “left-wing media censorship” and being effectively “silenced” on the origins of the coronavirus – are blatantly false. There was no mainstream media cover-up to silence dissenting voices. No one was prevented from expressing “an opinion” on the possible origin of the virus, and most certainly neither was Jeanine Pirro. Jeanine and the rest of the lab leak proponents have been openly and freely discussing it for three years, and no one has ever silenced them or told them to shut up.
Responsible media sources – the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, reported on the pandemic with facts and knowledge. They aligned themselves with the experts, and followed their advise and recommendations and gave that knowledge to their readers. Irresponsible media – Fox News, Newsmax, and others, including print – aligned themselves with cranks and crackpots masquerading as experts, who were only interested in lining their own pockets by spreading vaccine and anti-Fauci conspiracies, and conspiracies about the “true” origin of the coronavirus that the “liberal media” was supposedly covering up.
Pirro’s claim that “you were not allowed to have an opinion” is in reference to a letter to the editorial staffs at The Lancet, The New York Times, and Nature Medicine magazine. The letter, signed by partisan observers ( including former national security advisors and members of conservative think tanks such as the Heritage and Hoover institutes ), distributed by the Vandenberg Coalition and released in January of this year, accuses the former publications of playing partisan politics in an attempt to “censor dissenting voices.”
The letter in part reads: “From the beginning of the crisis, when the information environment was undoubtedly contentious, divisive, and confusing, some editors and reporters of news organizations and scientific publications stifled debate on the origin of the virus.”
Scientific consensus at the time was that the coronavirus emerged via a natural origin, in or around the wet market in Wuhan. But that explanation was not acceptable to the conservative media echo chamber. While responsible news media were reporting on and criticizing the Trump administration’s downplay and lackadaisical response to a pandemic, their mission was to counter any narrative that didn’t jive with their own. They needed a new villain and they found it in scientists like Dr. Fauci and any other scientific source, or media that did not play along with their conspiracy-minded viewers and readers.
The rest of the letter is predictable bullshit – that “scientific journals censored dissenting voices,” and news outlets “promoted narratives or asserted conclusions unsubstantiated by evidence”; accusing The Lancet of failing in it’s journalistic responsibility by publishing a couple of letters supporting the consensus and research of scientists that SARs-COV-2 is of natural origin, while discouraging “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
As MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan reported on his program last month, The Truth About The Lab Leak Theory, there was no media suppression of the lab leak story. It was “demonstrably false,” he concluded after showing clips of multiple news sources – including MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and PBS – discussing the lab leak theory.
He also pointed out that what the lab leak theory is really all about, is not one of an “accidental lab leak,” but one of a virus whose genome has been altered through genetic manipulation and deliberately released to infect the populations of the world, and of America in particular. In other words, a bioweapon. He then showed clips of conservative media figures talking about Chinese bioweapons in regards to the lab leak hypothesis going all the way back to the very beginning of the pandemic.
Sources: ABC News.com; Fox News.com; the Lancet.com; Twitter.
The Weekly News 