We were told that it was a debunked conspiracy theory. There's no way an authoritarian regime with an appalling human rights record and a secret police apparatus would ever cover up a massive screwup, like a pathogen escaping from a lab and causing a global pandemic. That can never happen, right? We thought so.
The liberal media and the Big Tech establishment thought this was too crazy to even consider and smeared and censored those who lobbed such a claim. Both parties have Chinese interests, so I guess it makes sense. But also, Donald Trump and the GOP lobbed this allegation, so the media automatically thought it was false. They couldn't do their job to investigate this claim because they're the enemies of the people, the opposition press, and that's why they're eating it as the lab leak theory looks more like a fact every day.
Even comedians like Jon Stewart are buying into this narrative. We have reports that a top-level Chinese intelligence official defected, who not only has information about the origins of COVID but China's bioweapons program and spy network here. Another piece to the lab leak narrative is that China ordered the U.S. National Institutes of Health to delete gene data on COVID (via WSJ):
Chinese researchers directed the U.S. National Institutes of Health to delete gene sequences of early Covid-19 cases from a key scientific database, raising concerns that scientists studying the origin of the pandemic may lack access to key pieces of information.
The NIH confirmed that it deleted the sequences after receiving a request from a Chinese researcher who had submitted them three months earlier.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement.
The removal of the sequencing data is described in a new paper posted online Tuesday by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The paper, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, says the missing data include sequences from virus samples collected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and February of 2020 from patients hospitalized with or suspected of having Covid-19.
Some of the deleted information is still available in a paper that was published in a specialized journal, but scientists typically look for gene sequences in major databases like the one the NIH maintains, Dr. Bloom said. Dr. Bloom said he was able to find the deleted data after searching for it elsewhere online.
The missing sequences are unlikely to change researchers’ current understanding of the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan. But Dr. Bloom said their removal sows doubts about China’s transparency in the continuing investigation into the origin of the pandemic.
Some other scientists agreed.
“It makes us wonder if there are other sequences like these that have been purged,” said Vaughn S. Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist who wasn’t involved in the new paper and said he hasn’t studied the deleted sequences himself.
The purge request was submitted in June 2020. And, of course, China's National Health Commission refused to comment on this development reported in The Wall Street Journal. They're hiding something. It's sad that some folks in these massive media empires don't get that. This is the hallmark characteristic of any totalitarian government. It's not racism to point that out, which I think is part of the trepidation among these woke reporters now. China lied, and people died. The purge, them sitting on their hands for that critical week when the virus was spreading in Wuhan, the lab technicians mishandling bats and getting sick with COVID-like symptoms, the corroborating evidence brought by the Chinese defector—it all leads to China being responsible. And that's because they are.
Oh, and Trump was right.
