DAMNING REPUBLICAN REPORT INTO WUHAN LAB CLAIMS COVID LEAKED OUT IN SEPTEMBER 2019 SHORTLY AFTER IT TRIED TO IMPROVE AIR SAFETY AND WASTE TREATMENT SYSTEMS. “It says that months before the Covid-19 outbreak a Wuhan Institute facility sent out a request for bids for ventilation and waste management system renovations. The facilities were less than two years old, raising questions, the report says about how effective they were. The report also says traffic at local hospitals surged before the accepted start of the outbreak. It is part of a larger report due in September, in which Republicans on the committee seek prove [sic] the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Reminder: Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate? Were commercial relationships with China a factor?

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world’s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

(Emphasis added). To be fair, the Times has a near-century-long history of lying on behalf of communist dictatorships.