Where did the coronavirus begin?
Was it of natural origin?
Or was the scientist who said that just covering for his colleagues?
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
Before I start, did you know YouTube demonetizes a lot of our videos?
Especially when they’re about the coronavirus. That’s why
we rely on direct viewers support. Go to Patreon.com/ChinaUncensored to learn more.
An update on the coronavirus situation. First, you may remember that early on last year,
scientists condemned the idea that the coronavirus could have come from a Chinese lab.
Back in February 2020, U.S. scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based
EcoHealth Alliance, pushed back against that idea in this article in the medical journal the Lancet.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy
theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
He also wrote in a February 2020 email that “Scientific evidence overwhelmingly suggests
that this virus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging diseases.”
Well it turns out the scientific evidence wasn’t actually scientific evidence at all.
Last week, Dr. Daszak’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that actually,
“The Lancet letter was written during a time in which Chinese scientists were receiving
death threats and the letter was intended as a showing of support for them as they were
caught between important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online harassment.”
Ok, that’s understandable that he didn’t want Chinese scientists to get
death threats in the early days of the pandemic. But then he wrote another article in June about
why the idea of the coronavirus coming from a lab was a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Dazak’s statements are under scrutiny because he’s one of the World Health Organization
investigators who are traveling to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus.
But other scientists have brought up some pretty big conflict of interest problems. That’s because
“Dr. Daszak has been a longtime collaborator of Dr. Shi [Zhengli]
since they worked together to trace SARS viruses to bats after the 2003 epidemic.”
Dr. Shi’s work studying bat coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been theorized as
one of the possible origins of the current pandemic.
Over the past year, more and more people have been questioning—could
the coronavirus have begun in a Chinese lab?
Once upon a time, you could get deplatformed from social media for even suggesting that.
But the State Department recently suggested that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology had a coronavirus-like illness in the Autumn of 2019.
“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan
Institute of Virology became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak,
with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises
questions about the credibility of senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim
that there was ‘zero infection’ among the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s staff and students.”
It also says, “The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators,
and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology],
including those who were ill in the fall of 2019.
Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with
these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.”
So it really is possible that the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. Of course we don’t
know yet, as the investigation is still ongoing. But this whole incident with Dr. Daszak just
goes to show: Sometimes conspiracy theories just turn out to be investigative journalism.
Thanks for watching China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.