The Chinese government intentionally manufactured and released the COVID-19 virus that led to mass shutdowns and deaths across the world, a top virologist and whistleblower told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday.
Carlson specifically asked Dr. Li-Meng Yan whether she believed the Chinese Communist Party released the virus “on purpose.” “Yes, of course, it’s intentionally,” she responded on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Yan said more evidence would be released but pointed to her own high-ranking position at a World Health Organization reference lab as a reason to trust her allegation.
“I work[ed] in the WHO reference lab, which is the top coronavirus lab in the world, in the University of Hong Kong. And the thing is I get deeply into such investigation in secret from the early beginning of this outbreak. I had my intelligence because I also get my own unit network in China, involved [in] the hospital … also I work with the top corona[virus] virologist in the world,” she said.
“So, together with my experience, I can tell you, this is created in the lab … and also, it is spread to the world to make such damage.”
Yan’s comments conflicted with the opinion of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and White House coronavirus adviser, who previously cast doubt on the idea the virus was artificially created. In May, he told National Geographic: “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what’s out there now is very, very strongly leaning toward this [virus] could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated — the way the mutations have naturally evolved.”
Other scientists have panned the idea that COVID-19 served as a sort of bioweapon or was released by a lab.
Fox News previously reported on Yan back in July, when she blew the whistle on China’s alleged attempts to suppress information about its handling of the virus. With a vast network of contacts in Chinese medical facilities, Yan attempted to gather more information about the virus as China blocked overseas experts from conducting research in the country.
Her revelations fueled ongoing complaints that the Chinese government failed to tell the world early on about the virus’ threat. Specifically, she believes the Chinese government ignored research that could have saved lives. The State Department did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
In response, her former employer, the University of Hong Kong, criticized her account. A press release noted “that the content of the said news report does not accord with the key facts as we understand them.”
“Specifically, Dr Yan never conducted any research on human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus at [the University of Hong Kong] during December 2019 and January 2020, her central assertion of the said interview.”
Yan, who said she was one of the first scientists in the world to study the novel coronavirus, fled China and currently fears retaliation. She was allegedly asked by her supervisor at the University/WHO reference lab, Dr. Leo Poon, in 2019 to look into the odd cluster of SARS-like cases coming out of mainland China at the end of December 2019.
What was social media’s reaction to this? Fox News again:
Facebook and other tech giants have engaged in a troubling pattern of censoring speech surrounding major issues in the coronavirus debate, Fox News host Tucker Carlson argued during his Wednesday night monologue.
Carlson’s comments came after Facebook slapped a warning label on video of his Tuesday interview with Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who claimed to have evidence showing China “intentionally” released COVID-19 onto the general population.
“Within a few hours of her interview last night,” Carlson said, “a video of the segment reached 1.3 million people on Facebook.”
“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,” he added.
“Instagram, which Facebook also owns did the same thing. Twitter suspended Dr. Yan’s account entirely. It did not explain why. Nor did the tech companies explain how they would know more about disease transmission than an MD, PhD virologist like Dr. Li-Meng Yan. Instead, Facebook and Instagram linked to three so-called fact checks which supposedly proved Yan was lying.
“But if you clicked on the provided links, you’d noticed something odd. The fact checks were all published months ago, many months — in January, February, and March, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with what Dr. Li-Meng Yan said on our show… One of the fact checks attacks a completely unrelated claim, the virus was patented and that a vaccine was prepared and ready to go.
“What does that have to do with the interview we did last night? No one will tell us that. The truth is, and you know it if you’ve watched carefully, experts have been wrong frequently throughout this pandemic … They have changed their prescriptions many times.”
Carlson argued that the solution to experts being fallible was more speech. “The solution to this age-old problem, and we used to understand this intuitively is more informed voices in the conversation. That’s how you make wise decisions, that’s how you get to the truth. Diversity of view. Facebook doesn’t believe this,” he said.
“They believe in censorship. Censorship does not make us wiser. It does not make us better informed. If it did, we’d be speaking Russian right now, the Soviet Union would run the world. It would have worked. But instead the Soviet Union is extinct. It collapsed under the weight of its own absurdities — absurdities abetted by censorship. And that’s the most basic lesson of dictatorships, all of them. Anything built on lies falls apart over time.”
Carlson also defended Yan and her research. “COVID-19 is not from nature, she said. It was created in a lab in Wuhan, China. The Chinese government intentionally unleashed it on the world. Those are her claims. Are they true? We have no way of verifying them. We do know that Dr. Li-Meng Yan is not a quack,” Carlson said.
“She’s authored peer-reviewed papers on coronavirus transmission in both Nature Magazine and The Lancet. Those are two of the most respected publications in all of science. Her paper on the origin of COVID-19, which she has published online, is not frivolous. In it, she points to specific evidence for the claims that she makes. She identifies so-called cut sites which are frequently used in genomic engineering that would allow scientists to swap in sequences from other viruses to create what she described last night as a Frankenstein bioweapon.”
Whether or not the doctor is correct, Carlson certainly is. The solution to speech you disagree with has never been censorship. The solution to science you think is incorrect is more science. Liberals used to believe these sorts of things.
Kind of ironic for this to take place the week of Constitution Day, isn’t it?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 