FNC’s Carlson: Media Said COVID-19 Lab Leak Was a ‘Conspiracy Theory — ‘Now, They Are Pretending They Never Said That’

Wednesday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson highlighted the walk-back of claims the COVID-19 virus did not originate from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, operated by the Chinese government, as it is appearing to look increasingly likely that was the case.

Carlson described the media’s response as “frantically updating its lies about this story.’

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Joe Biden wants you to know that he has suddenly a year and a half in, developed mild curiosity about where this pandemic came from. It turns out the virus probably didn’t originate in Omaha. More than that, Joe Biden can’t say, but he has put some of his top slews on it — the super spies in the so-called Intel Community, and they have promised to report back at some point.

As of today, two thirds of Joe Biden spies believe the virus jump naturally to human beings from an infected animal. As viruses so often do, as you peruse the pangolin island at your local wet market. The spies who believe that are the ones who have never spoken to a working virologist and don’t have internet access.

But the other third, Joe Biden told us today, quote: “lean more” toward the theory that COVID escaped from a nearby government lab in Wuhan that happened to be conducting dangerous experiments on nearly identical bat coronaviruses at the same time. That’s a minority of spies who believe that, but they’re open to the possibility. Who knows really?

Either way, Joe Biden explained we’re going to get some answers or at least more questions, possibly several months from now. So rest assured, the White House is on it. And to be honest, we doubted that.

Just two hours before Joe Biden’s announcement, we learned that the White House had shut down a large, ongoing and legitimate Federal investigation into the origins of this pandemic. That investigation had been going on for months. It was being conducted by the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control Verification and Compliance. That’s the bureau responsible for ensuring that countries like China are not stockpiling deadly illegal bio weapons, such as, for example, obscure bat coronaviruses that have been manipulated in labs by military scientists to make them more transmissible in say, New York City.

So why did the White House shut down that ongoing investigation?

Well, at a hearing today, senior officials at the National Institutes of Health that would include Dr. Tony Fauci said they had no idea why the White House shut it down. He said he first heard about it on the news. And that seemed odd given that the NIH does employ the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases and of course, they’re closely linked to the story.

It was NIH, it was your tax dollars, actually, but funneled through NIH that funded some of the grotesque and dangerous research at that now infamous Wuhan Institute of Technology that may have caused the destruction of the West.

So today, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked all of these questions. Here’s how it went.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): Why did you guys spike — not guys — and ladies, why did you all spike the prior administration’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus in whether it could have come out of the Wuhan lab?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Sir, I — we did not spike anything in the prior administration. I’m not sure what you mean by spike, but we have no influence —

KENNEDY: The State Department spiked the prior administration’s study.

FAUCI: But that has nothing to do with the National Institutes of Health.

KENNEDY: So, they didn’t consult with you all?

FAUCI: They did not.

KENNEDY: Did they consult with you, Dr. Collins?

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: I read about it in the press this morning.

KENNEDY: Doc?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.

KENNEDY: They just spiked it without talking to their experts? You don’t want to answer that one, do you?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: No, they definitely didn’t want to answer. So we still don’t know why the White House ended a months’ long investigation into the central question of the moment. We also don’t know what that investigation found before it was closed. We do have some ideas about that, though.

A factsheet released from the State Department in the closing days of the last administration written by some of the same people who are doing the investigation that the Biden administration shut down told us that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became seriously ill in the fall of 2019. They had quote, “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” Three of them went to the hospital.

Now that came out in January. The American media caught up this week, the Intel Community confirmed it. In a statement to FOX News today, the State Department contractor that led that now defunct probe, a man called David Asher reiterated that based on that investigation’s findings so far, quote, “There is probable cause for deep suspicion that the virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan and the Chinese government lied about it.”

So why don’t we know more? Well, according to that same David Asher, powerful forces in the State Department did not want to know more. They didn’t want to continue asking questions. They didn’t like the investigation.

Whose side are they on? You wonder.

And David Asher clearly is wondering the same thing, quote, “Some of our colleagues were deliberately playing down possible links to China’s biological weapons program,” end quote.

Now why would they be doing that? Again, whose side are they on?

This was all very troubling to David Asher who spent a lot of time looking into this given that countries like China, quote, ” … openly aim to incorporate synthetic biology into the future of warfare, apparently with our naive material and scientific assistance,” end quote.

Now, that’s a reference of course to the money that flowed from the U.S. government through NIH to the Wuhan lab, to do research that may have been connected to this pandemic.

David Asher named a man called Chris Ford, that’s the former Acting Undersecretary for Arms Control at the State Department as someone who quote, ” … didn’t want to delve into the potential of an accidental lab release, let alone one related to a possible classified Chinese military program in violation of arms conventions.”

Now, why would an official in the U.S. government not want to know more about an adversary, a foreign adversary violating international law and imperiling the lives of millions? That’s a great question.

Now, Ford himself responded to FOX News. And he said he had, quote, ” … procedural and structural concerns about the probe, including that he was kept out of the loop until December.” Hmm. But he emphasized quote, “The lab origin theory is very possible and China must be held to account. There are all sorts of reasons to worry about possible lab origins. And it’s critical to get to the bottom of it.”

So that’s Chris Ford’s position now. We hope it always has been. It should be the position of everyone in the U.S. government. Suddenly, it’s the position of the U.S. media. Virtually every news organization in the country has spent the last week frantically updating its lies about this story.

They’ve told you for more than a year, it was a conspiracy theory. Now, they are pretending they never said that.

Even Tony Fauci has had revised his views on this. He dismissed it out of hand, he and Francis Collins at the NIH called it outrageous to ask questions about it. Now, a new Tony Fauci.

Just a few hours ago, Fauci admitted that he really has no idea what kind of research was going on at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, but we probably should look into it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KENNEDY: How do you know they didn’t lie to you and use the money for gain-of-function research anyway?

FAUCI: Well, we’ve seen the results of the experiments that were done and that were published and that the viruses that they studied are on public databases now. So none of that was gain-of-function. So …

KENNEDY: How do you know they didn’t do the research and not put it on their website?

FAUCI: There’s no way of guaranteeing that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So Fauci with a straight face just said, we can be certain that no U.S. tax dollars went to gain-of-function experiments because the Chinese didn’t write about it on the internet. That’s how we know — with a straight face.

And when pressed just a little bit by one of the very few senators who is not brain dead, Fauci admitted that actually, no, he has no idea really what U.S. tax dollars went to, which experiments they funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Either way, this is a total revision of Anthony Fauci’s position on the subject. It was just a few days ago that he was incensed. He was outraged, morally appalled by the suggestion that he had funded gain-of-function experiments in China. Now, he is conceding, yes, it’s totally possible.

But of course, he has always known that it was totally possible.

The grant that Tony Fauci approved for research at the Wuhan lab explicitly permits gain-of-function experiments. In 2014, Tony Fauci’s NIAID approved a grant for a project called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That project would be run by a group called EcoHealth Alliance overseen by a man called Peter Daszak. If that name sounds familiar, that’s the same Peter Daszak who spent the last year telling the world at high volume, there is no chance this virus escaped from the lab, and then was appointed by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of COVID and declared the Wuhan lab blameless.

What a scam.

But the grant from Fauci’s NIAID states that it will fund Peter Daszak to quote: “Test predictions of coronavirus interspecies transmission predictive models of host range i.e. emergence potential and will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudo virus and receptor binding assays and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”

Oh, so actually, that’s quite a broad range. Run that by any scientist and they will tell you a lot, it fits under that description.

But specifically, what did those virus infection experiments with bat coronaviruses consist of precisely? Well, we don’t know. We have some idea. It seems like maybe the results are all around us.

The White House wants you to calm down. They want you all to know that the Intelligence Community, and no one else will have to answer these questions at some point in the next few months. And if you can’t trust them, who can you trust. You don’t need a real investigation, you can take their word for it.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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