Media Bias May Be Literally Killing Us
Politicizing the lab-leak theory could have cost lives.
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All is tranquil in the mighty jungle. Monkeys chatter in the trees, birds call. Then, a crashing disruption. A growling motor and the stink of fuel exhaust. A yellow bulldozer rolls into view, matting down the lush greenery. As it topples a tree, a startled cauldron of bats screeches into the sky, carrying a deadly pathogen toward the first unsuspecting victims.
It’s a scene straight out of “Contagion,” a movie about a virulent global pandemic. Mankind, in the name of progress, resource, and industrialized animal agriculture, has been pushing his way deeper into the natural world where we’re bound to cause trouble.
And now we have Covid-19.
The Pangolin
In March 2020, a widely-circulated Vox video theorized that the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 was a Chinese wet market. As the story went, the novel coronavirus likely came from a bat, transmitted to a pangolin (a highly trafficked animal worldwide), and then, in the blood-and-guts muck of a Wuhan wet market, hitched a ride on a human. Patient zero.
It seemed a reasonable explanation.
But around the same time, early days of the pandemic, an alternative narrative was circulating.
The Lab-Leak Theory
I’d first heard of the theory that SARS-CoV-2 had been created in a lab from my sister, a Trump supporter. One of her various texts linked me to a report from The Epoch Times. I had never heard of The Epoch Times, but learned after a quick look that it was a right-wing media outlet.
A little later, discredited scientist Judy Mikovits came forward with claims that the virus was man-made, based on a spike-protein that appeared artificially inserted. Mikovits appeared in the short film “Plandemic,” which was quickly mocked by the left, debunked, and even removed from YouTube for a short time (though that was over a copyright issue).
But she wasn’t alone. The authors of a British-Norwegian vaccine study, published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics, also claimed that the spike-protein in coronavirus appears artificially inserted.
