in World News House Report Finds (Nearly) Every COVID-19 ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Was True
Expressing any of these would have been enough to get one banned from social media.
Twitter, now X, infamously set up a portal for government agents to flag “misinformation” and target posts or whole accounts for shadow bans, censorship, or removal. Meta, owner of Facebook, boasted that, since December 2020, “following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO),” the company had “removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts” from Facebook and Instagram. In February, Meta broadened its list of verboten ideas “to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines” such as “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” and “Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease.”
The new House report debunks this “debunking.”
1. The COVID-19 virus was probably man-made and originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
From the outset, public health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci presented the novel coronavirus outbreak as the result of a “zoonotic spillover”—that the virus transferred from an animal to humans, probably a bat purchased at a wet market and eaten. Yet, the report says in a headline, the balance of the evidence shows that “SARS-CoV-2, the Virus that Causes COVID-19, Likely Emerged Because of a Laboratory or Research Related Accident.”
“The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, writes in his introduction.
In 2018, the nonprofit EcoHealth applied for a federal grant to fund a new project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which “sought to do what nature had not been ever known to do—insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS2 virus,” states the report. “EcoHealth and its WIV partners stated their intent to create a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site, which is the exact same feature that made humans susceptible to COVID-19 infection.”
Rather than come clean about this federal funding, “Dr. Anthony Fauci Played Semantics with the Definition of Gain-of-Function Research,” the report concludes.
“The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses,” noted a State Department fact sheet released in January 2021. “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19.”
Further, “key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing,” such as infected animals. Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that “the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the Trump administration’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before Congress on March 8 that “COVID-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event.”
Weeks earlier, the FBI and the Department of Energy expressed their support for the lab leak theory, with varying degrees of confidence. Even legacy media fact-checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, who originally claimed “it is virtually impossible for this virus [to] jump from the lab,” later acknowledged that the lab leak theory was “credible.”
2. Social distancing of 6 feet had no science to back it up.
The rule that Americans keep “social distancing” of 6 feet between one another to prevent COVID-19 transmission became one of the most consequential events of the pandemic. Businesses deemed worthy of being open had to limit how many customers they could serve, and schools had to rearrange rooms or resort to virtual learning to comply with the new guidelines.
The House report states bluntly: “There Was No Quantitative Scientific Support for Six Feet of Social Distancing.” Yet the report merely repeats what the guidelines’ authors have already admitted.
Last Jan. 9, Fauci replied “I don’t recall” when asked where the guideline of 6 feet came from.
“It sort of just appeared” from the ether, he said. “I was not aware of studies” that justified the social distancing decision.
The rule, Fauci said, amounted to “just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”
Two days later, Dr. Francis Collins, Fauci’s boss as former director of the National Institutes of Health, testified that he “did not see evidence” to support the 6-foot rule. On June 3, Fauci admitted that “there wasn’t a controlled trial … there wasn’t that scientific evaluation of” the rule.
In short, says the House report: “There were no scientific trials or studies conducted before this policy was implemented, there appeared to be no pushback or internal discussion amongst the highest level of leadership, and more importantly there appears to be no acceptance of responsibility. That is an unacceptable answer from public health leadership.”