Facebook shows it’s ‘true and ugly colours’ over Wuhan censorship

Facebook was today accused of ‘showing its true and ugly colours’ and smothering free speech as it scrapped its ban on posts debating whether Covid-19 could be man-made – but only after Joe Biden ordered the CIA to probe if the virus came from a Wuhan lab.

Mark Zuckerberg‘s global policy chief Nick Clegg, the former British MP and Liberal Democrat leader, has also been branded ‘feeble’ for allowing months of censorship on the social network.

Critics branded Facebook’s behaviour ‘contemptible’ and begged them to respect free speech rather than ‘ingratiating’ themselves with states such as China, which has banned the website but remains a $5billion-a-year ad market. 

The theory that coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab was originally dismissed by left-leaning media outlets last year as a conspiracy theory after it was mentioned by Donald Trump, but they have now changed course with the launch of the US investigation.   

British Conservative MP Peter Bone told MailOnline: ‘It does seem to me that Facebook is not an open platform for people to put their views on. It is an open platform for people to put their views on as long as they agree with Facebook.

‘Their decisions are based on politics not on principle… if it is fashionable with the liberal elite it can go down. If it is liberal elite say it it must be OK, if it’s President Trump that says it it must be awful.

‘The thing that Trump was saying is exactly the same as Biden is saying, but Trump was according to Facebook not allowed to say that. Whereas everyone loves Biden from Facebook therefore it must be right. It is one rule for one political view and another for another.’

And the liberal media in the US, who lampooned Donald Trump when he said a year ago said he had ‘a high degree of confidence’ that the virus escaped from a lab, have finally conceded that he may have been right – after a year ridiculing the suggestion. 

Facebook ruled in February it would ‘remove’ any posts that claimed that coronavirus was ‘man-made’ or that the virus was ‘created by an individual, government or country’ – branding it ‘misinformation’ and a ‘debunked claim’ that required ‘aggressive action’ from moderators.

But today the tech giant reversed its ban on its users discussing the theory, just hours after President Biden ordered his intelligence agencies to launch a probe into whether it was man-made after all – and report back in 90 days.  

 ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,’ the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

‘We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.’

The tech firm has been accused of bowing to Beijing, liberal media outlets as well as left-wing politicians and commentators, who reacted furiously when then president Donald Trump laid blame for the fast-spreading virus on Beijing, calling it the ‘China virus’ or ‘Kung Flu’ and suggesting there was evidence it was borne from a laboratory in Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic in early 2020.  

President Biden’s top epidemiologist Dr Anthony Fauci has also u-turned about where the virus may have originated this week, saying ‘you never know’ – but last year he insisted there was ‘no evidence’ to point to coronavirus having been manufactured when Trump raised it as a possibility.    

America is looking at the theory seriously, leading to China hitting out at the ‘dark history’ of the US intelligence community after President Biden’s probe was announced.

But critics also turned on Facebook, accusing them of stifling free speech. 

Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline that Facebook’s behaviour was ‘contemptible’ and he hoped they would now respect free speech rather than ‘ingratiating’ themselves with states such as China.

‘I think it is absolutely contemptible and it shows their commitment to democracy is an incredibly thin veneer over their commercial interests. So many big tech firms are showing their true and frankly really ugly colours,’ he said.

‘This is not a conspiracy theory. There is a genuine debate about where the Wuhan virus came from.

‘For Facebook to be shutting that conversation down is absolutely appalling.

‘Time and again these wretched big tech firms are showing that when it comes to their taxes, when it comes to telling the truth, when it comes to protecting freedom of speech, they are absolutely on the wrong side of the argument.

‘I find Nick Clegg’s behaviour, given he once professed to have ‘liberal values’ particularly feeble and contemptible.’

Mr Seely said he hoped the change in position was now honoured ‘My very strong recommendation is that they re-embrace freedom of speech and understand their job is not to censor people but to provide a platform where people within the law can express themselves and ideas freely,’ he said.

‘I suggest they get back to that function rather than trying to ingratiate themselves with China or anyone else.’

Tory former leader Iain Duncan Smith said the ‘coincidences were too great’ to assume that Covid came out of a market in Wuhan and debate should not be ‘stifled’. ‘You have a real problem I think the power now of the social media giants is transcending the power of governments,’ he said.

‘These are decisions about debate. They are not about conspiracy.’

China has reacted furiously to Biden’s call for a new investigation into the virus’s origins, accusing him of ‘politicising’ the issue and suggesting that US biolabs should be investigated instead.

Lijian Zhao, foreign ministry spokesman who has been Beijing’s point-man in trying to pin blame for the pandemic outside the country’s borders, accused the US of trying to shift blame away from its own high Covid case and death counts – and suggested security services may be involved in a cover-up.

Meanwhile Hu Xijin, editor of the state mouthpiece Global Times newspaper, accused Biden of trying to discredit a WHO investigation which concluded that a lab leak is ‘unlikely’ – though critics have previously blasted that report as a China-centric whitewash.

China’s American embassy also hit out, accusing Biden and his security services of being ‘fixated on political manipulation and (the) blame game’ in a statement on its website.

Previously the lab theory was banned by Facebook, with several of the earliest reported cases of covid linked to a wet market in Wuhan, which sold a range of fresh food produce, including fish and animals. 

Some suggested it may have come from a bat, because they are host to a more diverse range of coronaviruses than humans or from a pangolin, a scaly anteater from Asia used in Chinese medicine and sold for their meat and skin.  

In April of last year, Facebook announced that it was imposing limits on ‘harmful misinformation about COVID-19’, including about how dangerous the virus is and how many people it was killing.

And in February of this year, the company announced that it was expanding its crackdown to include claims that the virus was man-made, insisting it was a conspiracy theory that had been ‘debunked’. 

But last year Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as chief of Britain’s MI6 spy service from 1999 to 2004, said last year: ‘I subscribe to the theory… that it’s an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute [of Virology].’   

Facebook has insisted that its ban was based on advice from experts, including from the World Health Organisation.

A spokesman said: ‘Throughout the pandemic, based on guidance from leading global health organizations and local health authorities, we have been removing content with false claims or conspiracy theories that could cause harm. Our policies mirror the public health response and therefore in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove claims that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps’.

The social network’s about-face comes on the same day that President Joe Biden asked his intelligence agencies to ‘redouble their efforts’ to pinpoint the origins of the coronavirus.

Last year, claims by the Trump administration that the coronavirus may have originated in a lab in Wuhan were met with skepticism from mainstream media, which appeared to adopt the view that pathogen was transmitted from bats to humans.

Claims that vaccines are not effective against preventing disease and that it is safer to get the disease than to get a vaccine have also been banned from the platform.

Posts making such claims will be removed from the website, as well as Facebook-owned Instagram, the company said in the post that came with a list of ‘misinformation’ it was banning from its platforms.

Earlier this week, Project Veritas claimed that it obtained leaked documents from whistleblowers inside the company which prove that the social network is testing an algorithm that would rate users’ comments according to a ‘vaccine hesitancy score.’

Those comments which discourage others from taking the vaccine would be demoted, according to the documents obtained by investigators.

After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off GOP complaints the president has not been tough enough as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.

Biden asked US intelligence agencies to report back within 90 days.

He directed US national laboratories to assist with the investigation and the intelligence community to prepare a list of specific queries for the Chinese government.

He called on China to cooperate with international probes into the origins of the pandemic.

Republicans, including former President Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory accident rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal in Wuhan, China.

Biden in a statement said the majority of the intelligence community had ‘coalesced’ around those two scenarios but ‘do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.’

He revealed that two agencies lean toward the animal link and ‘one leans more toward’ the lab theory, ‘each with low or moderate confidence.’

‘The United States will also keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence,’ said Biden.

His statement came after weeks of the administration endeavoring to avoid public discussion of the lab leak theory and privately suggesting it was farfetched.

In another sign of shifting attitudes, the Senate approved two Wuhan lab-related amendments without opposition, attaching them to a largely unrelated bill to increase US investments in innovation.

One of the amendments, from Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, would block US funding of Chinese ‘gain of function’ research on enhancing the severity or transmissibility of a virus.

Paul has been critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, and aggressively questioned him at a recent Senate hearing over the work in China.

The other amendment was from GOP Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and it would prevent any funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Both were approved without roll call votes as part of the broader bill that is still under debate in the Senate.

As for the origin of pandemic, Fauci, a White House coronavirus adviser, said Wednesday that he and most others in the scientific community ‘believe that the most likely scenario is that this was a natural occurrence, but no one knows that 100 percent for sure.’

‘And since there’s a lot of concern, a lot of speculation and since no one absolutely knows that, I believe we do need the kind of investigation where there’s open transparency and all the information that’s available, to be made available, to scrutinize,’ Fauci said at a Senate hearing.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that the White House supports a new World Health Organization investigation in China, but she added that an effective probe ‘would require China finally stepping up and allowing access needed to determine the origins.’

Biden still held out the possibility that a firm conclusion may never be reached, given the Chinese government’s refusal to fully cooperate with international investigations.

‘The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19,’ he said.

Administration officials continue to harbor strong doubts about the lab leak theory.

Rather, they view China’s refusal to cooperate in the investigation — particularly on something of such magnitude — as emblematic of other irresponsible actions on the world stage.

Privately, administration officials say the end result, if ever known, won’t change anything, but note China’s stonewalling is now on display for the world to see.

The State Department, which ended one Trump-era probe into the Chinese lab theory this spring, said it was continuing to cooperate with other government agencies and pressed China to cooperate with the world.

‘China’s position that their part in this investigation is complete is disappointing and at odds with the rest of the international community that is working collaboratively across the board to bring an end to this pandemic and improve global health security,’ said spokesman Ned Price.

Research into the origins of the virus is critically important, said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatchewan, Canada, because: ‘If you don’t know where it came from, how are you going to stop it from spreading it again?’

‘The great probability is still that this virus came from a wildlife reservoir,’ he said, pointing to the fact that spillover events – when viruses jump from animals to humans – are common in nature, and that scientists already know of two similar beta coronaviruses that evolved in bats and caused epidemics when humans were infected, SARS1 and MERS.

‘The evidence we so far have suggests that this virus came from wildlife,’ he said

However, the case is not completely closed.

‘There are probabilities, and there are possibilities,’ said Banerjee.

‘Because nobody has identified a virus that’s 100 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2 in any animal, there is still room for researchers to ask about other possibilities.’

Andy Slavitt, Biden’s senior adviser for the coronavirus, said Tuesday that the world needs to ‘get to the bottom … whatever the answer may be.’

‘We need a completely transparent process from China; we need the WHO to assist in that matter,’ Slavitt said.

‘We don’t feel like we have that now.’ 

US liberal media’s Covid U-turn: A year after TRASHING theory that COVID originated from a Wuhan lab because Trump supported the suggestion – America’s woke mainstream news outlets suddenly start asking if it’s true!

The liberal media have finally conceded that COVID-19 may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory – after a year spent ridiculing the suggestion.

The first fatality from COVID-19 was reported by Chinese state media on January 11, 2020, when a 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at a market in Wuhan died. The first confirmed case in the United States was 10 days later, when a man returned to Washington state from Wuhan.

Within a week, on January 26, 2020, the first article blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the outbreak was published, in The Washington Times. Yet most mainstream media disputed the claims, dismissing them outright or even decrying them as racist.

When Donald Trump, on May 1, 2020, said he had ‘a high degree of confidence’ that the virus escaped from a lab, the New York Times, CNN, and NPR were quick to mock his comments.  

CNN, which by the end of the Trump administration was brazen in its hostility to the president and his advisors, was almost gleeful in its mockery of the idea that the virus could have come from a laboratory. 

The Washington Post, New York Times, and NPR were equally dismissive of suggestions that the virus could have come from a laboratory.

Some outlets, such as the Huffington Post, even branded any suggestion the virus could have stemmed from a lab as a ‘toxic conspiracy theory.’

Few were able to suggest that COVID-19 could have stemmed from a research facility without backlash but that didn’t stop some media, including the Daily Mail, from questioning the narrative.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was also clear in demanding an investigation into whether it could have escaped from the lab.

Finally, in the past few months, came the first signs that opinion was beginning to change.

In January, a World Health Organization (WHO) report only served to raise more questions after Beijing strictly controlled an on-site visit and who the researchers compiling the report spoke to. The WHO team was only allowed three hours inside the Wuhan lab and was unable to examine any of the Wuhan institute’s safety logs or records of testing on its staff.

China’s actions led to Biden’s White House calling for greater transparency.

Even Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said that the visit was inconclusive, adding that ‘all hypotheses are open’ and warranted future study.

By May 11, Fauci, had accepted that the idea of the virus escaping from a lab had been too quickly dismissed.

Asked whether the virus originated naturally, Fauci replied that he wants to look closer into the matter.

‘I am not convinced about that,’ he said. ‘I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened.

‘Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.’

Fauci’s revelation came as a shock to many on the left who have accepted China’s narrative that coronavirus spread from a wet market since the virus first emerged. 

Of course, China continues to insist that COVID-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab.

‘The U.S. keeps concocting inconsistent claims and clamoring to investigate labs in Wuhan,’ China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement on May 24. This fully shows that some people in the U.S. don’t care about facts and truth.’ 

CNN 

On May 1, 2020, CNN reported that Trump had ‘contradicted’ the intel community by claiming to have seen evidence the virus came from a lab. 

‘President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a ‘high degree of confidence’ the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but declined to provide details to back up his assertion.

‘The comments undercut a public statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued just hours earlier which stated no such assessment has been made and continues to ‘rigorously examine’ whether the outbreak ‘began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.’

‘Yes, I have,’ Trump said when asked whether he’s seen evidence that would suggest the virus originated in the lab. Later, asked why he was confident in that assessment, Trump demurred.

‘I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,’ the report read. 

Then on May 5, 2020, their editor-at-large Chris Cillizza wrote a scathing attack on the suggestion, entitled: Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus.

‘Before we play the game of ‘he said, he said’ remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump,’ Cillizza wrote.

‘In short, Fauci’s view on the origins of the disease matters a whole lot more than Trump’s opinion about where it came from.

‘Especially because, outside of Trump and his immediate inner circle, most people in a position to know are very, very skeptical of the Trump narrative that the virus came out of a lab – whether accidentally or on purpose.’

Cillizza’s article followed on from one four days earlier, headlined: ‘Trump contradicts US intel community by claiming he’s seen evidence coronavirus originated in Chinese lab’.

Yet fast forward almost a year, and the tone had greatly changed.

Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, spoke on March 26 this year to Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC).

Redfield said that he had concluded the virus escaped from a lab.

‘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,’ he said.

‘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.’

On May 23, The Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers from Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report

The following day the paper reported on a mysterious mine around 80 miles outside Wuhan where, in April 2012, six miners here fell sick after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.

Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses. Yet they were not forthcoming with their information.

On May 24, CNN admitted that there may be more to the Wuhan lab than initially believed. They published an update: New information on Wuhan researchers’ illness furthers debate on pandemic origins

But Cilizza is still standing by his earlier claims it isn’t. 

He wrote an opinion piece on why Dr. Fauci was ‘hedging’ on the subject, and said just because Fauci said he was no longer ‘convinced’ of the origins, it didn’t mean he thought it came from a lab.  

New York Times

When any Trump-supporting lawmakers said that the Wuhan lab theory merited further exploration, the New York Times was quick to dismiss their claim.

In the first month of the pandemic they seized on questions raised by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator for Arkansas.

‘We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,’ Cotton said.

‘But because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.’

His words, on February 17, 2020, would prove prescient – yet the New York Times headlined its coverage: Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.

By April 30, 2020, the paper was describing the efforts from the Trump administration to get to the bottom of the virus’ origins as a political witch hunt.

‘Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, according to current and former American officials,’ the paper reported.

‘The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.’

The story was headlined: Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs

Yet this month two former science reporters at the paper – Nicholas Wade, who retired in 2012, and Donald McNeil, who left earlier this year amid a row about his language while guiding a tour of Peru – both said they now felt it was possible, indeed perhaps likely, that the virus came from a lab.

‘In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: ‘New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not a Lab Leak,’ Scientists Say,” McNeil wrote on Medium.

‘It never ran.’

He said that the paper was sharply divided over whether to believe the Trump officials saying it was a lab leak, or the scientists saying it wasn’t. 

‘We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know,’ he wrote.

‘But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.

‘And China’s lack of candor is disturbing.’

Wade came to the same conclusion.

‘Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached,’ he wrote.

‘That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. 

‘But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.’

Washington Post

Reporters for an article published on April 30, 2020, provided a nuanced and in-depth analysis of the Wuhan laboratory’s work, and emphasized the risks involved.

Yet their headline read: Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accidental release.

The following day, the dismissive tone continued: Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful.

By May 24 this year, the paper was very close to admitting that they had been blinkered.

‘Given everything we know about how Trump handled such things, caution and skepticism were invited,’ wrote Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter at the paper.

‘That (very much warranted) caution and skepticism spilled over into some oversimplification, particularly when it came to summarizing the often more circumspect reporting.’

He admitted: ‘We might never truly know the truth.’

Huffington Post

As concern was mounting about the virus in the spring of 2020, The Huffington Post was rapidly ridiculing all question of its origins.

‘A Toxic ‘Infodemic’: The Viral Spread Of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories,’ they headlined a story on April 7, 2020.

Yet a little over a year later, on May 24 of this year, the site followed up on the Wall Street Journal’s report into the hospitalization of the Wuhan lab workers in 2019, and the issues that this raised.

‘Wuhan Researchers Were Hospitalized With COVID-19 Symptoms Pre-Pandemic: Reports,’ they wrote.

NPR

On April 23, 2020, NPR stated: ‘Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else.’

The radio news network was determined to prove that there was no credibility to the Wuhan lab leak theory, and produced a series of ‘explainers’ insisting that COVID-19 was transmitted from animals to humans.

‘Where Did This Coronavirus Originate? Virus Hunters Find Genetic Clues In Bats,’ they reported on April 15, 2020.

Yet a little over a year later, NPR was following the WHO’s report – and its worrying conclusions – with interest.

‘Theory That COVID Came From A Chinese Lab Takes On New Life In Wake Of WHO Report,’ they concluded.

On March 31, they reported: Calls For An Open Investigation Into The Possibility COVID-19 Leaked From A Lab. 

Among those watching the evolving news lines was Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state.

‘Over a year ago, I told @MarthaRaddatz that the Wuhan Virus most likely came from a lab leak,’ he tweeted on May 20.

‘She stopped just short of offering me a tin hat. The CCP said I was an enemy of mankind,’ he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party’And now? Well, now, the Left wing media is scrambling to get on the side of the truth.’