China’s state-run Global Times on Monday published an “exclusive” claiming “white supremacists” are pressuring Dr. Anthony Fauci and scientists at the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to investigate the possibility the Chinese coronavirus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
According to the Global Times, this white supremacist conspiracy – which also has tentacles in Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom – is “sidelining” pro-China scientists with political pressure or silencing them with death threats:
Since the Biden administration ordered in May US intelligence agencies to report on COVID-19 origins within 90 days, several US scientists have been put at the center of the political storm. These scientists have been facing the suppression of Republicans. For example, Anthony Fauci, who advises US President Joe Biden and leads National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a target of the GOP. Elise Stefanik, the House Republicans conference chair, sent a fundraising email recently with the subject “Fire Fauci” and senator Josh Hawley also tweeted that Fauci’s recently released emails and investigative reporting about COVID-19 origins are shocking. The time has come for him to resign and for a full congressional investigation into the origins to take place, according to US media reports.
Under such growing political pressure, Fauci has been increasingly ambiguous on his rhetoric. Another US scientist, who also took part in the WHO-China joint team on the origins research, has also been a target of such attacks, the Global Times learned. After collaborating in the project with China, Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, was recused from the UN-backed commission work on the origins of the epidemic.
A source close to the matter told the Global Times earlier that the US scientist is being personally threatened by emails, phone calls and messages on social media, and people who attacked him generally have far-right and even white supremacism leanings. GOP members of Congress are whipping those extremists up now.
The article did not identify any white supremacist groups or “far-right” entities allegedly responsible for the threats.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda is laboring mightily to create a conspiracy theory around resurgent interest in the Wuhan lab leak theory, when in fact a growing number of scientists, politicians, and media figures around the world are realizing lab leak was never really discredited, debunked, or disproven at all. Much of that “discredited” narrative flows from a small number of Western scientists with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology who acted quickly to divert attention from the lab, prominently including the above-mentioned Fauci and Daszak.
Daszak was not forced away from investigating the origins of the coronavirus by some shadowy conspiracy of white supremacists; he recused himself because he was credibly accused of making inaccurate conflict of interest disclosure statements when he spearheaded the writing of the now-infamous letter to British medical journal The Lancet in February 2020 that supposedly “debunked” the lab leak theory.
The lab leak hypothesis is also gaining traction because the Communist Party’s false statements about the Wuhan Institute of Virology keep falling apart, as with the recent discovery that the lab did keep live bats on its premises, contrary to a year of constant denials. China’s refusal to provide vital source data to W.H.O. investigators this year was a red flag to the scientific community. Many scientists are also puzzled by the lack of evidence for the supposedly more “likely” theory that the Chinese coronavirus originated in the wild and was passed to humans by animals.
The Global Times built its screed from remarks by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, who told a press conference on Monday that scientists who want the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan investigated are politicized fakes and attention-seekers.
“We have seen, contrary to this, many scientists who truly uphold the scientific spirit – objectivity and impartiality – were attacked or abused by some governments and extremists and some even received death threats. Such malicious behavior is really revealing,” Wang said.
The Global Times claimed true scientists all agree the lab leak theory is utterly impossible, but some have been intimidated against speaking out in defense of China by death threats from the white supremacist conspiracy.
The article concluded by repeating the unsubstantiated Chinese government conspiracy theory that the virus may have originated in an American laboratory and surreptitiously shipped to Wuhan – possibly by the U.S. Army e-cigarette manufacturers:
Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist from Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Monday that the research has shown the epidemic in the US probably emerged earlier than in Wuhan. In other words, the epidemic in the US was probably caused by a domestic virus rather than one transmitted from Wuhan.
But more large-scale epidemiological surveys are needed in the US to identify the relationship between these cases and those in other countries and regions, including Wuhan, to determine the origin and transmission route of the virus.
Yang mentioned the outbreaks of flu and pneumonia related to the use of E-cigarette in the US prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, calling for the US to release epidemiological surveys into these outbreaks, if they did any, to find out if they were COVID-19 cases.
Yang rested his case by arguing that since all of the coronavirus variants are supposedly present in the U.S., the original virus must have originated there. In reality, epidemiologists have expressed a high degree of confidence that the most widely-known coronavirus variants did not originate in the United States. The much-discussed “Delta variant,” for example, was first detected in India in December. Only four variant strains are currently believed to be circulating in the U.S., and all four of them appeared in other countries months before the first case was identified in America.
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