For the past few days, woke liberals have looked past obvious evidence – offered by the shooter himself – to somehow try to pin the slaying of six women of Korean descent in Atlanta on former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the coronavirus.
Never mind that the shooter also allegedly killed two white women in that attack. Democrats and the media must blame Trump all the time.
So, given the American media’s willingness to shield China from culpability, one of the paragons of the left, USA Today, surprisingly gave oxygen to a politically incorrect theory about the virus.
On Monday, Alison Young, who spent a decade as an investigative reporter for USA Today, suggested in an op-ed that we should not be so dismissive of claims that COVID-19 erupted from a lab accident in Wuhan.
Young notes that the World Health Organization, which has been among the worst shills for China since the pandemic began, has said it was “extremely unlikely” that lab malfeasance contributed to the outbreak.
“I have uncovered exotic and deadly bacteria that have hitched rides out of high-security labs on workers’ dirty clothing, silently spreading contagion for weeks. I have revealed how spacesuit-like protective gear and tubes carrying safe oxygen to scientists have torn or broken – repeatedly – and high-tech safety systems have failed dramatically. Vials of viruses and bacteria have gone missing. Researchers bitten by infected lab animals have been allowed to move about in public – rather than being quarantined – while waiting for signs of infection to appear,” Young wrote.
“These and similar safety lapses are happening with disturbing regularity at elite U.S. labs operated by government agencies, the military, universities, and private firms. There is no reason to believe they aren’t happening at labs in other countries as well.”
Young acknowledged that the “lab-leak theory has been politically and racially weaponized in ugly ways.” Still, skeptics of the claim of some sort of natural occurrence deserve better than to be treated as promoters of “a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric.”
“Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor,” she added. “So far, … no evidence has been found that directly ties the pandemic virus to an animal source.”
And, Young noted, “Lab accidents aren’t rare.”
In her own experience, Young wrote, she believed U.S. labs housing potentially killer pathogens “were impenetrable sterile fortresses, heavily regulated and guarded, equipped with layers of cutting-edge technology and staffed by workers who zealously adhered to safety protocols.”
Yet, “U.S. laboratories reported more than 450 accidents during 2015 through 2019 while experimenting with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens – those subject to federal regulation because they ‘pose a severe threat’ to health and also have the potential to be turned into bioweapons.”
Those viruses included the ignitors for anthrax, Ebola, plague, deadly strains of bird flu, and certain types of SARS coronaviruses.
“Coronaviruses similar to the one causing the COVID-19 pandemic have repeatedly escaped labs,” noted Young, who pointed out the 2002 SARS outbreak, which had a more aggressive lethal-infection rate than COVID-19.
“Against this backdrop, it’s surprising that questions about any lab accidents in Wuhan continue to be dismissed as promoting a conspiracy theory,” Young concluded.
“We might never know whether the COVID-19 pandemic started in one of Wuhan’s laboratories. But what is known is that as the number of these kinds of high-security labs grows worldwide and more researchers are storing and experimenting with dangerous pathogens, so too does the risk of laboratory accidents causing outbreaks. That’s why all of us have a stake in knowing what is happening in these labs here in the United States and around the world.”
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