Come with me on this journey because we need to go back in time for this one. Remember the Wuhan lab? Remember the folks who said the COVID pandemic occurred because of a leak, and that the wet market theory was used as a cover story? The ‘bat woman’ of Wuhan is at the center of this theory that was mocked, denigrated, and dismissed as tin foil hat material. It was lobbed during the Trump administration where every reporter rushed to take a swipe at the president. If Trump said the sky was blue, they’d fact-check and declare it orange. That’s how warped our media is because they’re not our friends. They’re not your friends either. They’re whores for the Democratic Party. So, while this theory and anyone who peddled it was dismissed, the experts have finally declared that it cannot be ruled out.
These are my favorite stories, not the least subjecting the liberal media to their own nonsense. We get to rub their faces in it. Tell them they’re morons while knowing that with every fake news story they peddle, their tall walls which protect them get weaker. It’ll all come crashing down. Some could argue that it has as most people now think that reporters intentionally mislead the public. With the Russian collusion fiasco, could you blame them?
So, take my hand as we review Drew Holden’s receipts of the liberal media being absolute morons and de facto mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party on the Wuhan Lab leak theory:
@SenTomCotton took much of the initial heat for suggesting this as a possibility back in January.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
Here’s what the @nytimes had to say about his “fringe theory” that “lacks evidence” and which “scientists have dismissed.”
Apparently those concerns have been un-dismissed since. pic.twitter.com/u61hJGI7Mj
In another piece in 2020, @nytimes concluded that “most agencies remain skeptical” and “scientists are dismissive” of the lab leak theory. Unfortunately, appears that was certainly true, but not to their credit.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
Yet another story continues to describe the idea as a conspiracy. pic.twitter.com/XbSi4pmXzQ
But it wasn’t just NYT. @CNN was at the forefront, writing up a poll dismissively suggesting that an accidental release was “almost certainly not true,” called the lab in question “the focus of conspiracies” and, of course, used it to take shots at President Trump. pic.twitter.com/grBgezu9vk
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
@NPR might’ve been the most dismissive, running stories on back to back days suggesting there was nothing to the allegations & that scientists “debunk[ed]” & “dismiss[ed]” the idea of an accidental release.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
They were, in retrospect, entirely wrong, but memoryholed these pieces. pic.twitter.com/JGYatFMSts
Perhaps the worst offender, though, was @washingtonpost who, in January of 2020, said that @SenTomCotton’s concerns about a potential lab leak in Wuhan were “fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts” (!!!) pic.twitter.com/eIj03VpQ3K
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
This from @politico is precisely the type of amnesia that infects reporting like this.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
Two months ago, they were lamenting how warnings and concerns about bat research had been ignored.
A year before that, they chalked concerns about the Wuhan lab up to “conspiracy theories.” pic.twitter.com/J1PkKnI6Db
It’s hard to fault @CBSNews when the sources weren’t exactly bulletproof, in retrospect.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
But that makes a broader point: journalists should be distrustful of official sources of info. That’s historically been true. Lately, it’s been anything but - leading to errors like this. pic.twitter.com/BM3t9TSXOd
@business apparently heard about the concerns tied to the lab, asked the lab run by communist autocrats if they were responsible for loosing a pandemic on the world, and when they (unsurprisingly) said no, Bloomberg reported it as fact. @forbes did the same. pic.twitter.com/zcARwHe8dt
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
And remember, all of this is coming from the same people who purport to be deeply concerned with the supposed plague of mis- and disinformation.@NellieBowles puts it perfectly: https://t.co/LugkwwvTVp
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
I never want to hear about Politifact. Ever. Never. Ever. I’m going to use these two screencaps if anyone ever cites that source. pic.twitter.com/5EPgpxEgiW
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) May 19, 2021
And finally, the finale (via Reuters):
The origin of the novel coronavirus is still unclear and the theory that it was caused by a laboratory leak needs to be taken seriously until there is a rigorous data-led investigation that proves it wrong, a group of leading scientists said.
COVID-19, which emerged in China in late 2019, has killed 3.34 million people, cost the world trillions of dollars in lost income and upended normal life for billions of people.
"More investigation is still needed to determine the origin of the pandemic," said the 18 scientists, including Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, and Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
"Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable," the scientists including David Relman, professor of microbiology at Stanford, said in a letter to the journal Science.
The authors of the letter said the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of the virus had not made a "balanced consideration" of the theory that it may have come from a laboratory incident.