Joe Biden's team shut down investigation of Wuhan Batshit Trump theory

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Biden shut down effort to prove theory COVID originated from Wuhan lab over concerns about lack of evidence Joe Biden's team shut down a State Department investigation into the Wuhan laboratory as a source of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a new report on Tuesday night. The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain. The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault." Among those watching the evolving news lines was Mike Pompeo, Trump's secretary of state. 'Over a year ago, I told @MarthaRaddatz that the Wuhan Virus most likely came from a lab leak,' he tweeted on May 20. 'She stopped just short of offering me a tin hat. The CCP said I was an enemy of mankind,' Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. 'And now? Well, now, the Left wing media is scrambling to get on the side of the New republicoon truth.' -------------------------------------------------- David Feith, a former senior State Department official who was briefed on the efforts, said Pompeo's was the only investigation taking the theory seriously. 'People in the US government were working on the question of where COVID-19 came from, but there was no other effort that we knew of that took the lab leak possibility seriously enough to focus on digging into certain aspects, questions and uncertainties,' he said. The former State Department official who was familiar with the investigation was suspicious of its secrecy. 'They basically conducted it in secret, cutting out the State Department's technical experts and the Intelligence Community, and then trying to brief certain senior officials in the interagency on their 'tentative conclusions' even before they'd let the department leaders they worked for know an investigation was underway at all. 'It smelled like they were just fishing to justify pre-determined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their 'science'. 'The reason for all this became clear when real scientists finally got a chance to see their analysis, and [the inquiry's] 'statistical' case fell apart.' Senior officials in the State Department did not know of the existence of the inquiry until it was well advanced. After the January session, Chris Ford, who was at the time Assistant Secretary, sent a memo to a handful of department officials, including top leadership, urging caution about the group's findings. Ford called aspects of the analysis 'gravely flawed' and urged officials 'against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious - and suggestive of biological warfare activity - about People's Liberation Army involvement at WIV on classified projects.' Eventually, the probe was shut down after Biden officials were briefed on the findings earlier this year. A State Department spokesperson confirmed work on the inquiry had stopped, saying: 'Even though this discrete project has concluded, the State Department continues to work with the interagency to look into the COVID origins issue.' Did coronavirus originate in Chinese government laboratory? The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been collecting numerous coronaviruses from bats ever since the SARS outbreak in 2002. They have also published papers describing how these bat viruses have interacted with human cells. US Embassy staff visited the lab in 2018 and 'had grave safety concerns' over the protocols which were being observed at the facility. The lab is just a few miles from the Huanan wet market which is where the first cluster of infections erupted in Wuhan. The market is just a few hundred yards from another lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WHCDC). The WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in its labs, including some 605 bats. Those who support the theory argue that Covid-19 could have leaked from either or both of these facilities and spread to the wet market. Most argue that this would have been a virus they were studying rather than one which was engineered. ------------------------------------------------------------------ New York Times When any Trump-supporting lawmakers said that the Wuhan lab theory merited further exploration, the New York Times was quick to dismiss their claim. In the first month of the pandemic they seized on questions raised by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator for Arkansas. 'We don't have evidence that this disease originated there,' Cotton said. 'But because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.' His words, on February 17, 2020, would prove prescient - yet the New York Times headlined its coverage: Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins. By April 30, 2020, the paper was describing the efforts from the Trump administration to get to the bottom of the virus' origins as a political witch hunt. 'Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, according to current and former American officials,' the paper reported. The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain. The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who, as Lindsay Beyerstein of Alternet explains, feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault." Last fall, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lead an investigation to answer whether China's biological weapons program may have played a role in the pandemic, sources told CNN on Tuesday. But the probe was met with internal opposition by those concerned it was part of political effort by the Trump administration to blame China for the virus. And when Biden's team was briefed on the investigation's findings in February and March, they decided to shut it down amid concerns about the legitimacy of the evidence, sources say. 'The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,' said one former State Department official of the probe. The revelations will lead to uncomfortable allegations for Biden that his team politicized the public health effort, and harmed the nation by shutting down a useful inquiry begun by his predecessor. The theory of the virus coming from a Wuhan lab had been promoted heavily by Donald Trump, who blamed China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world. Critics said that Trump was blaming China to distract from his own mishandling of the pandemic. Yet now the idea that the virus came from a Chinese lab is gaining mainstream support, with leading scientists who previously expressed skepticism - such as Anthony Fauci - now saying it is plausible. Trump on Tuesday night told Newsmax he's always believed the virus stemmed from a Wuhan research facility - and felt vindicated that scientific opinion and the mainstream media was finally coming round to his point of view. A team working for Joe Biden, (right, on the White House lawn on Tuesday) shut down the inquiry after being briefed about it in February and March. U.S. former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left in April with members of the Republican Study Committee) began the investigation in fall Donald Trump, speaking to Newsmax on Tuesday night, said he was vindicated Trump on Tuesday night said he stood by the Wuhan theory, and still felt it was most likely 'I said it right at the beginning, and that's where it came from,' he said. 'I think it was obvious to smart people. That's where it came from. I have no doubt about it. I had no doubt about it. I was criticized by the press.' Trump said that he remained confident his theory about the origins of the virus was correct. 'People didn't want to say China. Usually they blame it on Russia,' he told Newsmax. 'I said right at the beginning it came out of Wuhan. And that's where all the deaths were also, by the way, when we first heard about this, there were body bags, dead people laying all over Wuhan province, and that's where it happened to be located. 'To me it was very obvious. I said it very strongly and I was criticized and now people are agreeing with me, so that's okay.' He said he felt the media was at long last beginning to come round to his point of view. 'Now the shameful corporate media is starting to come around to recognize that perhaps that is the origin, in fact, of the China virus,' he said. 'When it comes to China, the more we learn about their malfeasance regarding the virus and what they knew very early on - and lied to the world about it - is important for the United States.' He said China should be punished for their lack of transparency, and for failing to cooperate with international organizations like the World Health Organizations - whose investigators were not given full access.