So-called experts advising Big Tech are experiencing a crisis of credibility as the once-condemned laboratory leak theory rises in popularity.
Big Tech’s initiative that Americans must listen to the experts has sounded more ridiculous and ill-informed by the day. RedState Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar reported in a June 11 blog: “The man who worked on coronaviruses with Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘Bat Woman’ Dr. Shi Zhengli as long ago as 2013, whose company gave WIV $800,000 in funding to study bat coronaviruses from 2014-2019, and who served as a Facebook COVID fact-checker, is bitterly clinging to the narrative that the pandemic originated at the wet market in Wuhan.”
The same article recounted how the aforementioned expert cited in fact-checking, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, also reportedly spoke absurdities during a 60 Minutes interview:
Daszak, incredibly, was a member of the [World Health Organization] “mission,” and believes that the group made a big discovery during their time in China – the 1,000-mile ‘pathway’ the virus took from bat caves in southern China to Wuhan. If that were true, why haven’t we heard about it before now?
60 Minutes summarized his claim that the pathway led “not to the lab in Wuhan but from wildlife farms in southern China directly to the wet market in Wuhan, the Huanan Seafood Market.”
Fox News torched Daszak for his relation with one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners and his refusal to humor the lab narrative:
Daszak was also cited by Facebook fact-checking partner Science Feedback in a February 2020 post headlined, “Scientific evidence indicates virus that causes COVID-19 infection is of natural origin, not the result of human engineering.”
The fact-check entry from Science Feedback did in fact cite Daszak by name in condemning the lab leak theory:
Peter Daszak, epidemiologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance who has collaborated with WIV researchers, warned during an interview with the journal Science: “These rumors and conspiracy theories have real consequences, including threats of violence that have occurred to our colleagues in China.”
The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have appeared to be a referendum on trusting experts to set policy or decide who must be censored.
The House Judiciary GOP verified account tweeted an open letter from Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY) condemning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for coordinating with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In a damning indictment, the letter recounted: “Facebook amplified sources like the World Health Organization—even though such sources have proven to be conflicted and unreliable in the past.” The World Health Organization misinformed nations around the globe that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of COVID-19 as late as Jan. 14, 2020.
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