Big Tech has cracked down on the Chinese scientist who says the Chinese government engineered the COVID-19 virus in a lab and released the pathogen intentionally.
Facebook and Instagram warn that virologist Li-Meng Yan’s claims are false, and Twitter has suspended her account.
Fox talker Tucker Carlson discussed the censorship on last night’s program after broadcasting Yan’s claims on Tuesday.
Yan’s claims are in a research paper published at the non-peer reviewed website Zenodo, and the mainstream media is pushing the claim that Yan is peddling a “debunked conspiracy theory.”
The Paper, Carlson Appearance
Yan’s paper says the evidence shows that the virus sprang from a Chinese lab, and that the bats-to-humans theory is unlikely.
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“Despite its tremendous impact, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has remained mysterious and controversial,” the paper’s abstract says:
The natural origin theory, although widely accepted, lacks substantial support. The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus. In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory.
On Tuesday, Yan told Carlson, “This virus … is not from nature. It is a man-made virus created in a lab.”
Yan said the genetic fingerprint of the virus proves it, and that China released the virus intentionally.
After the video went viral on Facebook and Instagram — shared 62,000 on the former and viewed 478,000 times on latter, the New York Times reported — censors at the two social-media giants sprung to action.
Carlson addressed that last night: “Within a few hours of her interview last night a video of the segment reached 1.3 million people on Facebook,” Carlson said:
And why wouldn’t it? The coronavirus pandemic has touched the life of every American. And justifiably, people want to know where it came from. But Facebook still doesn’t want you to know that. So Facebook suppressed the video, presumably on behalf of the Chinese government. Facebook executives made it harder for users to watch our segment. Those who found the video had to navigate a warning that the interview “repeats information about COVID-19 that independent fact-checkers say is false.”
Twitter went farther and completely silenced the bespectacled scientist, Newsweek reported.
Politifact, the leftist Poynter Institute’s fact-checking site, rated Yan’s claims “inaccurate and ridiculous” and “pants on fire” because, it reported, “the genetic structure of the novel coronavirus, which has been shared by thousands of scientists worldwide, rules out the possibility that it was manipulated in a lab.”
Politifact cited a report published in Nature magazine and others from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control.
The leftist website also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency does not believe China created the virus as a bioweapon or unleashed it purposely.
Fauci Lab Subsidies
Politifact and others observed that Yan is affiliated with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s Rule of Law Society. But they don’t note that some of those promoting the theory that the virus originated in nature have a possible conflict of interest as well.
One of the authors of the study in Nature received an award from the Chinese Communists.
That said, and Yan’s affiliations regardless, reports published several months ago suggest Yan might be right.
Intelligence sources told Fox News that the virus likely sprang from lab unintentionally: “The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus — a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there — was bat-to-human and that ‘patient zero’ worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan,” Fox reported.
As well, the Washington Post reported that U.S. science diplomats worried about safety protocols and poorly-trained technicians at the lab.
U.S. and Canadian taxpayers subsidized research at the Wuhan Virus Institute that was studying bat coronaviruses. Some of those U.S. subsidies came from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci strongly backed controversial research at the Wuhan lab. Subsidies from Fauci’s agency ended after the pandemic began.
