BRETT: A great piece of writing from Jim Geraghty over at National Review Online: “The Taboo on the COVID Lab-Leak Theory Lifts.” He notes, “On the menu today: Out of nowhere, it’s seemingly hip and cool to point out the long-obvious fact that SARS-CoV-2,” which is covid-19, “could well be the result of a lab accident in Wuhan. And Politico drives me to do the unthinkable: call for people to get off Kamala Harris’s back.”
That’s a separate concern, but what he notes in this piece is that he’s happy. He’s happy because, “Some of us are COVID-origin hipsters,” who were the people who believed in the “lab-leak theory before it” was cool are starting to be justified. “I’m glad Donald G. McNeil Jr., the prize-winning former science reporter for the New York Times, has concluded that, ‘the argument that [covid-19] could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.'”
Jim Geraghty writing, “I’m glad that 18 scientists have written to Science magazine that, ‘We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.'” We remember what happened a year ago, when anybody who mentioned that thought you were crazy.
There are 18 scientists speaking and writing with a single voice and a message. A number of the publications on the left and the right, from National Review to the Washington Post and back again, now identify the lab in Wuhan as being the potential source. It’s incredible. Do you remember? When you mentioned that a year ago, you were nuts?
(impression) “Tom Cotton was saying it; he’s practically out of his mind! Where is his medical degree?” Now people are like, “Eh, you know, it may have just leaked,” because believing people are eating bat soup and civets that ate bat soup or whatever weird wet market narrative that was out there from the Chinese Communist Party?
That totally made sense! That totally made absolute sense. Geraghty notes, “Back when this pandemic began, I was like most people; I thought the virus most likely jumped from an animal at a wet market, because virologists had been warning about this sort of scenario for years.”
But when he published pieces like “The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs,” oh, now you start cutting a little close to the bone marrow there of the scandal. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology was indeed studying novel coronaviruses found in bats, as was the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control. Wuhan is indeed a great distance away from the natural habitat of bats…
“Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’ for her work with that species, told Scientific American that when she heard about the outbreak, her first thought was, ‘Could they have come from our lab?'” It just goes on and on and on and on and on and still they try to dismiss you as a kook.
Rush made it clear it should not be shocking at all to hear the ChiComs released the virus intentionally.
RUSH: This is Paul in Greensboro, Georgia. I’m glad you waited. It’s great to have you here with us. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, two nights ago Tucker Carlson had a scientist on who worked in the Wuhan lab in China, and she basically stated that this virus was a designed virus. It was not something that was in nature. And I wanted to talk about that. And I don’t want to go with the obvious where Google, Facebook, and Twitter censored her, but there’s two things very interesting about that interview.
One, she didn’t have an answer as to why they would be creating the virus. And the other thing is, the deeper ramifications if what she’s saying is true. The “why” thing’s very obvious. It’s a country that has 1.4 billion people to feed, and it’s struggling to do that. All this urbanization that you see taking place in both China and India is just really another source for the irrigation that comes out of the Himalayan mountains. And China’s on the buying binge across the globe, buying land across the globe.
So I think there’s an obvious answer to the “why.” But the deeper question also is, if that’s true, what the hell else is going on in that lab? If they can create a very specific virus that’s tailored to the old, the people that are weak, that have pre-existing conditions, what else are they working on there? Suppose we get a vaccine, which we’re gonna have very shortly —
RUSH: Well, I don’t think it’s that complicated and I don’t think there needs to be this much intrigue about it. If what she said is true — I saw her interview — I fully expect this woman to be disappeared very shortly. The ChiComs will find a way to find out where she is. I’m stunned she got out of China. It was thought that she had been disappeared months ago. I don’t mean to be dismissive here. I just think that the ChiComs and the Russians and us, we are working on the old name for this, germ warfare.
We are constantly working on biowarfare. The fact that the Chinese would be doing this is not a surprise. The fact that they might use it as a way to eliminate some of their own population because they can’t feed them all and they can’t keep them all in the countryside and out of the cities. They’re communists. Communists kill their own people. None of that would surprise me if that’s what’s going on. The “why” of this, if this Chinese scientist is right, is not hard to understand at all.
The more troubling aspect here is the reluctance of people who otherwise have common sense to reject this out of hand as an impossibility.
BRETT: As Rush said, and as we played just a couple days ago, “A tiger is a tiger.” China is an aggressor nation. China has long demonstrated a lack of regard for human rights, both inside of its borders and outside of its borders. We understand that to be the case. And again, we should separate, because we always know that the monitors on the progressive left are recording this program.
When we speak of a disrespect for human rights, we’re talking about the Chinese Communist Party as constituted and headed by Xi Jinping. We don’t know what their actual infection rate was. We don’t know what the actual body counts was. We don’t know any of that. But one thing we do know is the point of origin.
This goes all the way back into 2019. You know, it’s interesting. In the late fall of 2019, there was reporting coming out of China about this virus. Remember when they tried to blame it on the United States military because we had participated in the international games between all the militaries that get together and send their teams?
It’s sort of like an Olympic-type event, and they were trying to blame the Americans for bringing that in. That was absolutely false. China never put the travel ban on their citizens. They sent them into Europe, tried to send them into the United States, sent them around the world, and this spread.
Imagine what could have been done had they been forthcoming and fulsome and told us all that they knew about this. Any country on the planet… Set aside China… I’ll even set aside the United States to just keep it politically even. Pick a country, a random country out in the middle of Europe.
They’re accused of being the point of origin and this spreading out there into the rest of the world. That country is gonna do everything they can — hold press conferences, show charts, give up scientific data and information — and say, “No, we didn’t do this. We didn’t come from us. We didn’t do a release! This is all of our stuff. Come and look at our lab.”
What happens?
China goes and hires the guy that arranged the funding to the virology lab to do the investigation of the virology lab that got the funding that he arranged. Please. Was Hunter not available? Was somebody for friendly not available? Give me a break. We need to know the truth. Not just for a political purpose, but for the purpose of science and moving forward.
Millions died.
We lost trillions of dollars. Let’s find out what really happened.