Opinions
I've been seeing a lot of turbulence against and in favour of the lab leak theory about the potential leak of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus, which causes the Covid-19 virus, which has killed nearly 3.5 million people. This theory resurfaced after the Trump adminstration got kicked out from the White House and President Joe Biden came. So why wasn't the lab leak theory got coverage from its initial visible talks in early 2020, but now? And what's role of mainstream media in this fiasco? Some of my thoughts on the same, from a person living in India who has seen the devastation caused by the pandemic, and a timeline of the theory, below.
When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first emerged in the late 2019, and spread throughout the world in early 2020, everybody asked what should have been asked, that where did this virus originate from? What was its ground zero, or patient zero?
China quickly pointed out and said it came from a wet market in Wuhan, where there is business of dead meat of nearly every oceanic animal and bats too, and the place happens to be the home of Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high level-4 biosafety lab where the scientists funded by the communist party of China were experimenting with bat viruses or Coronaviruses, and genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-1, along with it, study of spike proteins of Coronaviruses.
The World Health Organization toed the line drawn by the Chinese government, and said the exact same thing. A WHO fact finding team went to China and did an investigation for nearly one month, and found nothing about the origin of the virus, instead said the same old crap of natural emergence of Covid-19, which came from a bat, jumped to some intermediary organism, and then to humans.
The then President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump, said this can't be it, and asked China about the origin of the virus, he also talked about the lab leak theory as China's answer wasn't convincing, he said the virus could be accidently or deliberately let loose to spread throughout the world, destroying economies and livelihoods.
After the spread of this hypothesis, the big tech companies regulated the mention of lab leak theory or people asking or inquiring about this hypothesis were silenced, banned, and suspended from Twitter, Facebook etc. They even banned Donald Trump later on after his incendiary tweets, but after President Joe Biden came to the helm, media and politically motivated scientists again started talking about the hypothesis, and this time Facebook said they won't censor the lab leak theory on their platform as more and more evidence in favour of the hypothesis is emerging day by day. People asking maybe, just maybe, the virus could have been leaked by an accident from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were relieved by the news.
Now that the whole story is emerging every day, even the Biden administration has started talking about the hypothesis, and said they'll conduct an investigation against the origin of the virus, and US lawmakers, like Senator Rand Paul too asked questions about the theory and its censorship to America's top Virologist, and once the national health advisor to President Trump, Dr. Fauci. Everyone is openly discussing about the news, which is a refreshing thing, as this virus has killed millions of people already, and needs to be stopped.
This new found interest came after the emergence of news that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with COVID-19 in early November of 2019, before China even saw some of their first cases of the virus.
Many liberal journalists are now coming forward after the hypothesis took a concrete hold, and openly admitted that they rejected the theory because it came from the GOP, President Donald Trump, and the Conservatives, which the media described as Trump Derangement Syndrome, as liberals believe that anything coming from the mouth of Donald Trump must be wrong, and a lie or a conspiracy theory, but this was a grave mistake, as many journalists working with liberal news outlets are coming forward and admitting that they were suppressed to beleive that anything coming from the Chinese government is 100% correct. Now, shouldn't rationale, reasonable pundits must ask themselves why the hypothesis was frowned upon, and why they hate their counterparts from the political right so much so they won't even believe facts?
The Daily Wire reports: “Most MSM reporters didn’t ‘ignore’ the lab leak theory, they actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective out of a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias (their scientist sources lied to them), group think, TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] and general incompetent,” Rogin wrote Saturday on Twitter. He noted that lab leak theory has not changed and “suddenly become credible.” “The theory has always been the same,” he wrote. “The people who got it wrong changed their minds. They are writing about themselves, with zero self awareness. All these reporters scrambling to defend their own records on the lab leak theory are exposing their own hypocrisy and ignoring their basic error.” “Just report the facts. Don’t act like it's your job to tell us what’s ok to think or talk about. Own up to it when you fail your readers,” Rogin wrote."
On May 26th, 2021, the Biden administration shut down a probe against the Covid-19 virus which was launched during the Trump adminstration to examine, and investigate about the lab leak hypothesis, if it was indeed true or not. It was launched by the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, under the US State Department.
The investigation against the origin of the virus was focused on whether China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role to play with the pandemic's origin in Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Biden administration said that the reason that they shut down the probe was because they were worried about the quality of the probe against the origin of the virus and evidence emerging out of it. The story comes out as the U.S. mainstream media has rapidly shifted its reporting and analysis on the lab leak theory from showing it as an initial conspiracy during the Trump-era to now portraying it as a genuine theory, which isn't surprising, as the government of USA isn't same as before, and due to media's generel disbelief of conservative issues.
Among all these political sycophancy, and liberal hate against rationale, reasonable pundits, the scientific community must tell the world the truth about the leak hypothesis, and WHO, government of USA, and other superpower nations must play a greater role to confront China about the hypothesis.
