All media in China is either aligned with, controlled by, or operated by the Chinese government, so it is natural to expect everything that flows from those outlets to be Communist-approved propaganda.
But when American media outlets become propaganda distributors for the Chinese, that's another thing altogether.
The National Pulse reported in recent days that USA Today and CBS News quoted Dr. Ian Lipkin in stories to "debunk" a claim made by former Centers of Disease Control and Prevention chief Dr. Robert Redfield in late March that he believes, based on evidence he's seen, that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as others have speculated in the past.
"I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped," Redfield told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta during an interview that was taped in January but only aired in full recently. "Now, other people don't believe that, that's fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in the laboratory to infect the laboratory worker."
"I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient," Redfield, a virologist by training, continued, adding that he does not believe that the release was "intentional."
"I'm allowed to have opinions now," he told Gupta. "Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That's the way I put it together."
He's not alone by a long shot. Chinese researchers have said as much, and so, too, has former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said in February there is "significant evidence" to substantiate the claim.
But American media instead relied on Lipkin, who simply mouthed the same claim the China-allied World Health Organization and the Chinese government itself have put forth: That the virus 'jumped' from an animal to humans.
“That seems to be the most likely and plausible explanation, particularly since we’ve seen so many of these viruses emerge in just this way,” Lipkin, director of the center for infection and immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told USA Today, citing the first SARS virus, Zika, and West Nile.
"The fact that we haven't seen it before, doesn't mean it was created in a laboratory," he told CBS News.
"The modifications that have been exploited by the virus are not ones that we would have predicted," he said, adding, "even if we wanted to design such a virus, we wouldn't have known how to do it."
“We should be moving away from finger-pointing,” Lipkin told CBS after saying there is “no evidence to suggest that it was created in a lab.”
The National Pulse reported:
In 2016, Lipkin received the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, presided over by Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping.
The award is “China’s top science honor for foreign scientists, and, as quoted in a Columbia University press release, Lipkin said: “It solidifies my relationship with dear friends and colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health, and with the people of China” – all of which are wholly-owned and operated Chinese Communist Party entities.
The American media is worse than their Chinese counterparts because they willingly allow themselves to be ministers of propaganda whereas Chinese media figures don't have a choice.
See more reporting like this at Pandemic.news.
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