Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire ON TUCKER: As I, and other Conspiracy nuts said, C 19 was man made and released by China

Surely the Naysayers are gonna call bullscchitt on all of this.

Surely so in 5....4....3...2...

A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.

The study, co-authored by a Chinese virologist who fled Hong Kong this year, claims that “laboratory manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2.” Its findings were quickly picked up by a handful of prominent news organizations such as the New York Post, which hyped the “explosive” allegations that run counter to virtually all existing scientific literature on the source of the virus.

The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating. According to documents posted on the Society’s website last year, he served as that group’s chair. The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study “bizarre and unfounded.”

A search of Google Scholar and the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation websites indicates that the organizations have not previously published scientific or medical research, and it’s unclear whether the paper received any peer review. It was posted on Monday on the website Zenodo, a publicly available repository of scientific and academic research to which anyone can upload their work.

Both of the nonprofits behind the study were formed in conjunction with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, with whom Bannon has collaborated on a number of advocacy efforts targeting the Chinese government and business endeavors that have drawn the scrutiny of federal law enforcement officials.

In addition to their work on the Rule of Law nonprofits, Bannon and Guo have also collaborated on a news website, G News, that has published stories suggesting that the coronavirus was manufactured by the Chinese military.

In July, Bannon appeared to tease forthcoming scientific studies supporting his contention that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. He told the Daily Mail that scientists from the lab had “defected” to the U.S. and were collaborating with American intelligence agencies. On the “War Room: Pandemic” podcast, Bannon has hosted others who have speculated that the virus may have been a Chinese “bioweapon,” but he has said that he believes the most plausible explanation is that it “came out of experiments that were going on” at that Wuhan lab.

That’s a line that has been echoed by some prominent U.S. officials. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both alluded to intelligence reports supporting that theory. “This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) in an April column for the Wall Street Journal, “but it all points toward the Wuhan labs.”

While an accidental leak from the virology lab in Wuhan remains a theoretical possible source of the initial outbreak in the city, the vast majority of the scientific literature on the virus has determined that its origins were natural, and that it was not laboratory manufactured. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Trump administration’s coronavirus point-person, has stressed repeatedly that all evidence indicates the virus was not man-made.