Tucker Carlson has slammed U.S. government officials who he claims helped China cover up the origins of COVID-19, after a bombshell Vanity Fair report detailing the early days of the outbreak.
Carlson, speaking on his Fox News program on Thursday, also blasted a 2020 letter in the esteemed scientific publication The Lancet that is believed to have first stifled investigations into Wuhan lab leak theory.
At the start of the segment, Carlson noted that Chinese scientists concluded 15 months ago ‘that the novel coronavirus probably escaped’ from a government lab in Wuhan ‘in the clearest possible terms.’
Since then, the ‘plausible’ theory has faced mostly silence while some branded it a ‘racist’ and a ‘conspiracy theory,’ Carlson said, as he criticized ‘the smirking morons’ who have recently changed their views on the theory.
‘Of course, COVID escaped from a Chinese virology lab. Duh. Did you really think it came from the wet market? Come on,’ Carlson said.
On his show, Carlson commented on the bombshell Vanity Fair report that detailed how the investigation into the origins of the coronavirus have been impeded
He also reacted to the recent troves of emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci, pictured, and other top officials
Recently revealed evidence has given credibility to the theory that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, pictured
Carlson pointed to a ‘an avalanche of evidence’ from top national publications like the Washington Post and Buzzfeed, which have each obtained troves of illuminating emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top officials.
Carlson also pointed to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, which he said ‘confirmed that the first COVID victims seem to have been researchers working with bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
That article cited a U.S. intelligence report which detailed how three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became sick in November 2019 ‘with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness’ and sought hospital care.
‘The lab leak theory, it turns out, was never crazy. It was always likely true,’ Carlson said.
‘So why did they lie to us about it for so long? A shocking new piece in, of all places, the celebrity suck-up magazine Vanity Fair, answers that question in great detail. You should read it.’
He added: ‘In short, many research scientists are addicted to tax dollars. If the public understood just how recklessly they’ve behaved — endangering the entire world with their weird little experiments in poorly relegated labs in China — the money might dry up.’
Carlson then cited a quote included in the Vanity Fair article from Jamie Metzl, a former National Security Council official.
Metzl had written a blog post on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, in which he wrote: ‘If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.’
Carlson commented: ‘Can’t have that. Got to keep the money flowing. So they lied about it. And then they intimidated anyone who told the truth.’
He noted that those who faced criticism for supporting the lab leak theory included Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Redfield had said in a March interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that his opinion was that the coronavirus had spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it had been spreading in China for months before it was detected.
‘I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,’ Redfield said.
Carlson commented: ‘That’s not some guy on Twitter. It’s the former director of the CDC, so you’d think the world would stop and ask follow-up questions like ‘why do you think that?’ and ‘Where’s the evidence?’ But that’s not what happened.’
Redfield spoke to Vanity Fair detailing why he believed the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, telling the outlet that he had received a call from his counterpart at China’s CDC on January 3 of last year.
In a subsequent call, Gao revealed to Redfield that the virus appeared to be jumping from person to person’ leading him to ‘immediately’ suspect the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Vanity Fair.
‘Redfield, a virologist by training, was suspicious of the WIV in part because he’d been steeped in the yearslong battle over gain-of-function research,’ Vanity Fair reported.
However, Redfield told Vanity Fair that he ‘was threatened and ostracized’ by politicians and other scientists alike just because he ‘proposed another hypothesis.’
‘Redfield had dared to buck the orthodoxy that had imposed by the global scientific establishment. It began on February 19, 2020, just as the virus was getting to this country and scaring the hell out of all of us,’ Carlson commented.
Carlson, as well as Vanity Fair, noted that the suppression of the Wuhan lab-leak theory appears to have started with the article in The Lancet.
Last February, during the emergence of the pandemic, The Lancet published a letter from a group of 27 prominent public health scientists that pushed back on suggestions that the virus had come from the Wuhan lab.
‘The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,’ that letter reads.
Carlson noted that The Lancet letter was organized by Peter Daszcak, a zoologist whose organization EcoHealth Alliance provided grant money from the United States to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the same funds that reportedly paid for research into bat coronavirus at the lab.
Daszcak thanked Fauci for pushing back on the theory in an April 2020 email published as part of a trove of emails obtained by Buzzfeed through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Carlson described Daszcak as ‘a man with everything to gain by pretending COVID came from a wet market’ and said he was involved in gain-of-function research at the institute.
‘Emails show that Daszcak carefully selected other signatories to The Lancet letter so that this obviously disqualifying conflict of interest would remain secret,’ Carlson said.
Carlson noted that, at one point, Daszcak wrote to another scientist named Ralph Baric and told him not to sign The Lancet letter.
‘We’ll put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration, so we maximize an independent voice,’ Daszcak wrote, according to emails obtained by Buzzfeed.
Carlson commented: ‘The whole thing was a fraud, and yet it worked. It was in The Lancet, everyone trusts The Lancet. In fact, Tony Fauci himself cited Daszcak’s letter as proof the virus wasn’t caused by research he was funding.’
The Fox News host then pointed to Fauci’s own comments in an interview with National Geographic, in which he said the virus ‘could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.’
‘So really, this is a story about the self-licking ice cream cone that is the federal bureaucracy. No matter how badly they screw up, it’s never their fault. “Oh, we didn’t imagine WMD in Iraq” etc. Pick your screw-up. But it’s your fault, racist,’ Carlson said.
Vanity Fair noted that a group that identifies itself as DRASTIC discovered that Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology ‘Bat Woman’, had collected samples of a bat coronavirus that were similar to COVID-19 from a cave in the Yunnan province in China where several miners had died in 2012.
Daszcak later published a paper with Shi categorizing hundreds of various coronavirus strains they’d encountered ‘but somehow they omitted the deadly viruses found in the Yunnan mine,’ Carlson said.
‘Were those viruses significant? The government of China seems to think so. Late last year, journalists with the BBC tried to visit the mine to get some answers,’ Carlson said.
He noted that when the BBC journalists arrived, they were followed by plainclothes police officers and found the road to the mine was blocked ‘by a well-placed broken-down truck.
‘So, the Chinese government covered this up,’ Carlson said. ‘Here’s the worst and most shocking part if you’re an American: Some within the U.S. government helped them cover it up. They knew all of this was going on. But they buried the truth too. Because their interests were aligned with the interest of the Chinese government.’