How the American Media Got it Wrong
The Daily Beast reported on June 17 that rumors of a top Chinese official defecting to the U.S. have swept the Chinese media.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/rumors-of-us-secretly-harboring-top-china-official-dong-jingwei-swirl
The Chinese official, Dong Jingwei, is said to have flown from Hong Kong to the US with his daughter in February. According to The Daily Beast story and another account from RedState.com, “Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concernign the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
If true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the Chinese Community Party. The reports also claims that the CCP raised the issue in a meeting with the US and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in March, demanding that Dong be returned, and Blinken is said to have refused.
On June 3, Catherine Eban wrote a story on the Wuhan leak theory that changed the narrative in the American media on the origins of COVID-19. Eban’s Vanity Fair story The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins makes the case that the virus originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab.
“So this is one of the central mysteries of this SARS-CoV-2 outbreak that needs to be unpacked, which is, you know, how, in the dead of winter in central China in a city that doesn’t have bats, at a time when bats would likely be hibernating, would you have an outbreak like this? What explains that? Now, two Chinese scientists looking at this fact pattern early on posted a pre-print paper saying, how did this happen? And they say, well, we looked around the area, and there are these two laboratories, which is – one is run by the Chinese equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is right near the Huanan Seafood Market. The other one is this Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is about 7 miles away,” Eban told NPR.
In reporting Eban’s story, most of the major media said that her story was “inconclusive,” and that there has been “No scientific consensus yet on virus origins.”
But Eban’s story does anything but lend credibility to any alternative theories about the origin of COVID-19. “So I believe that the Chinese government has sampled something like close to 80,000 different wildlife samples to try to identify a host animal and has not been able to do so yet,” Eban told NPR.
Eban’s story also discredits a letter that went out last year from 27 scientists supporting the Bat Theory, that COVID came from a wet market in Wuhan. “On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Eban, while not committing 100% to the Lab Theory, told Morning Joe, that “the Wuhan Institute of Virology has smoke coming out of every single window.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in May that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the COVID-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228
There are some hard truths forthcoming about COVID-19 and the coverup by the CCP. But there are also truths about the fact that we, the American taxpayer, paid for some of the same experiments in China, one of which has caused the death of 3.5 million people worldwide.
I hope that the American Media would report this future truths openly and honestly. And I hope that Catherine Eban wins a Pulitzer Prize. Please read her article, and appreciate her journalistic integrity.
