Politico-Harvard study finds majority of Americans now believe COVID was leaked from the Wuhan lab in China, marking the dangers of allowing Big Media and Big Tech to censor information.
Bipartisan support for the Wuhan lab leak theory is highly unusual, with Bob Blendon commenting, “Usually, our polls find a big split between Republicans and Democrats, so this is unique.”
Blendon is a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The study revealed that 52% of Americans—including 59% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats—support the lab leak hypothesis, which was long dismissed as a fringe “conspiracy theory.”
The Daily Mail reports, “The Politico-Harvard study shows that what was once covered by liberal media as a far-right fake news story is now broadly accepted on a bipartisan basis.” And “By contrast, in March 2020 just 29% of Americans accepted the lab leak theory.”
Only 28% of the 1,009 adults surveyed supported a zoonotic (infected animal) source of the pandemic.
“More conservative media have been carrying the ‘lab leak’ issue, and it’s been a Trump talking point from the beginning, so we expected people who lean Democratic would say either ‘It’s not true’ or ‘I don’t know.’ But the belief is bipartisan,” added Blendon.
According to Summit News:
Indeed, for many months the media and social media networks characterized the whole idea as a dangerous conspiracy theory and those who promoted it were censored and deplatformed.
…
[…] Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that has extensive ties to the Wuhan lab gain of function research, thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory early on in the pandemic.
Daszak was also tasked by Facebook with ‘fact-checking’ (censoring) information related to the hypothesis, while Google, which via YouTube also censored information about the theory, also funded Daszak’s virus research.
The Wuhan lab leak issue once again underscores how ‘fact-checkers’, media outlets and Silicon Valley giants shouldn’t be handed monopoly power to dictate reality.
By blacklisting content related to the lab leak theory up until just a few months ago, those entities may well have been complicit in facilitating one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history.
