Tucker Carlson: The coronavirus changed the balance of power in the world forever
Fox News host Tucker Carlson argues no one benefited more from the COVID pandemic than China on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
A look back for a moment, the coronavirus pandemic, that would be the virus itself, and our government's response to it turns out to have been the single most destructive event to take place in the United States in our lifetime – so destructive that it's going to be many years before we know for certain what the last two and a half years have caused to all of us. But even now, the outlines of it are clear.
COVID crashed our economy first and foremost. GDP fell by the biggest percentage since the Great Depression; 22 million Americans lost their jobs in the first two months of the lockdowns. Remember that? What you may not know is that at least 5 million of them never went back to work. They dropped out of the workforce, apparently for good. At the same time, as fewer people were working thanks to the profligate lunacy of our leaders, our national debt rose by nearly $10 trillion, unprecedented, and along with the debt, our debt to China also rose and then at the level of our society, every bad thing became more common: drug ODs, suicide, illiteracy, crime, all of them skyrocketed. So did obesity, anxiety and alcoholism has been virtually every other marker of social decay.
Marriages and birth rates, meanwhile, dropped, so did church attendance. We could go on, but you know what happened because you live here. And none of that is even counting the deaths from the coronavirus itself. That's a topic that public health authorities have lied about so consistently that we will likely never know what the real number is, but we can be confident the toll was in the hundreds of thousands.
So, on every level, COVID crushed America. Centuries-old traditions just evaporated. It's a different country, and not a better one. But that doesn't mean that everybody suffered under COVID. Countless small businesses went under. That devastated our middle class, but at the same time, thanks to the lockdowns, the tech monopolies thrived. Apple, Google, Amazon all saw their market caps explode. Jeff Bezos wound up much richer than ever before, not that he needed the money. But no group benefited more from the COVID pandemic than the leaders of communist China.
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By April of 2021, that would be more than a year into COVID when we are suffering, here in China, the GDP had reached the highest level ever recorded. China's economy was growing faster after the pandemic than it had been before the pandemic and as a result of that, China will soon overtake the United States as the world's dominant economy soon. Now, if someone had predicted that you ten years ago, you would have laughed. It would have seemed ridiculous, but that was before COVID. Now it's real and COVID made it possible.
In other words, the coronavirus didn't simply change the United States. The coronavirus changed the balance of power in the world forever. So, when you think of COVID that way, and that's the way the people who run governments think about it, trust us, when you think of it that way, it becomes pretty obvious that this was more than an overhyped public health emergency. In fact, it may very well have been a crime, the greatest crime in history. Was it? It's hard to think of a more important question, and yet our leaders seem curiously uninterested in answering it.
Shortly after Joe Biden took office, he ordered the intel agencies to determine where COVID came from and the report he got back stunned him. It was inconclusive. There are two theories, of course. One is that COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan. The other was it came from a pangolin or some kind of animal. Here's what the Intel agency said. "The majority of elements within the Intel community do not believe there's sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other."
That may seem like not a big deal to you, but if you're the Democratic Party, if you spent a year dismissing any talk of a lab leak as a racist conspiracy theory, this was stunning because it suggested that actually the CIA thought it was entirely possible that the Chinese government manufactured coronavirus. So, in May of last year, Joe Biden publicly, very publicly, sent that report back to the intel agencies and told them to, "redouble their efforts to find out where COVID came from," and he gave them a deadline of 90 days. In August, the report arrived. It was just a page and a half long, but it was more conclusive: "one IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with the SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory associated incident probably involving experimentation, animal handling or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Now, that should have been a running headline for months after. It wasn't. It almost immediately disappeared, but think about what they're saying. A lot of people in the intel community believe this came from a lab, not on talk radio, people who work at the CIA. And there are a lot of reasons to think they're right.
State Department officials had visited that lab in Wuhan back in 2018, and according to The Washington Post, "they sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronavirus from bats." Then it turns out one of the biggest funders of the Wuhan lab, a man called Peter Daszak, who received millions in grants from Tony Fauci, boasted about manipulating coronaviruses in a lab right before the pandemic began. Remember this?
PETER DASZAK, PRESIDENT OF ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE:: Coronavirus is a pretty good, I mean, you're a virologist, you know all this stuff. You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. It's just spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into a backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.
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Kecia Harris, with the environmental services department, cleans the room of a patient fighting the coronavirus at Our Lady of Angels Hospital in Bogalusa, La., Monday, August 9, 2021. (Chris Granger/The Advocate via AP)
That's an incredibly incriminating piece of tape and yet that man, Peter Daszak, has not been hauled before a congressional committee. Has the CIA spoken to him? There's no evidence that they have. It looks to be that the experiments he was conducting, in part with American tax dollars, may have led to the destruction of the U.S. economy and millions of deaths.
The Times of London reported that a virus 96% identical to the Wuhan coronavirus had been found in an abandoned copper mine in China in 2012. That virus was collected in 2013 and then stored and studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And then on this show, we spoke to a Chinese virologist who says she was at the scene who said that COVID originated from a lab experiment. All of this was taking place in public. Our intel agencies could not deny it, but in their report, they gave Joe Biden an out.
In the report that was not even two pages long, they said that in order to reach a definitive conclusion about where the virus came from, we would need the help from the government of China. And of course, the intel agencies knew we would never get that help. "China's cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19."
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So, if you're the Biden administration, and you really wanted to know where COVID came from, that line would justify putting immense pressure on the government of China to hand over the answers so we could find out what the hell just happened, but Joe Biden didn't do that. A few months after the Intel Community second report came out, a reporter asked Joe Biden," Why haven't you followed up on the recommendation and pressured the government of China to answer basic questions about where COVID came from?" And you may remember this, or maybe you've never seen it before. Here's Biden's response. He just smiled and walked away.
REPORTER: 800,000 coronavirus deaths. Do you have a statement on your responsibility? Why haven't you asked China to do more, to be transparent on the origins?
He just smiled and walked away and no one followed up. There was no outrage in the United States Congress. No one in the media yelled at him for that. It was clear that Joe Biden had zero interest in finding out where the virus came from and whether or not China was involved now. Why is that? Well, the Chinese government has made Joe Biden's family extraordinarily rich, richer than we knew. In fact, we learned from the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden administration has sent a million barrels of oil from our, not belonging to him, but to us, the American people, our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese owned energy company that Hunter Biden has invested in.
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Remember they used to tell you that the Trump kids were so corrupt? All of them got poorer after four years of the Trump administration. But not Joe Biden's son. But it's not just Biden and his administration that has ignored China's potential involvement in creating COVID. The media are not interested either. Why is that? Well, keep in mind, the government of China pays American media a lot of money in an exchange, why not ignore what could be the crime of the century? In recent years, China has spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising in American newspapers. That would include The New York Times and maybe that's why the New York Times' COVID reporter Apoorva Mandavilli sent out this tweet last year, "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that date is not yet here."
So, it was racist to ask whether the outbreak of a global pandemic in Wuhan might be related to the Chinese government lab in Wuhan that was experimenting on a version of the same virus. Yeah, that was racist, but the entire media took that posture throughout the pandemic. Note that it's a foreign virus, which it is, and you're a racist.
BIDEN, MARCH 2020: But neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia, labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability.
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JIM ACOSTA, MARCH 2020: The president referred to the coronavirus as a, "foreign virus" and I think it's going to smack, it's going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia.
ALI VELSHI, MARCH 2020: The administration's labeling of this virus as foreign is undoubtedly playing into this rising xenophobia about it. Trump isn't cautioning us to check our racism, but is rather stoking xenophobic sentiment.
CHRIS CUOMO, MARCH 2020: The president says it's a foreign virus, as if this was launched on us like an attack. We know what that's about. That's about him playing xenophobia. It works with his base.
ABC REPORTER CECILIA VEGA, MARCH 2020: Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus? Why do you keep using this? Because a lot of people think it's racist.
TRUMP: It's not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China.
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These people, they're stupid and they're dishonest, but it's more than that. Where did this talking point come from? It's racist to point out that COVID came from China. Well, this talking point became prevalent in March of 2020 and it just so happens that's exactly when China's state-owned media tweeted that terms like Wuhan coronavirus were racist. Before China's government issued that order, our media here in the United States didn't recognize the term Wuhan coronavirus as a slur. In fact, they themselves said it constantly. Here's the proof.
DAVID CUVER, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: The Wuhan coronavirus has now surpassed the 2003 SARS outbreak.
DON LEMON, CNN HOST: The first U.S. case of Chinese coronavirus was confirmed at her hospital, one of her hospitals.
CNN REPORTER: Inside that building is the world's first lab grown copy of the Wuhan coronavirus outside mainland China.
YASMIN VOSSOUGHIAN, MSNBC ANCHOR: The Chinese coronavirus death toll has jumped to at least 26 people.
CNN REPORTER: The death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus spiked today.
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: The Chinese virus, the coronavirus, that is worrying the whole world.
Those clips are all from February of 2020. Chinese media tells them that the term Chinese coronavirus, Wuhan coronavirus, those are racist terms. So, the American media immediately declares that those are racist terms. They're taking their orders directly from Chinese state media. Are you surprised? They aren't we interested in finding out where the COVID virus came from, but we're interested in the topic, and it turns out there's a lot of very interesting information that the intel community somehow left out of its page and a half long report.
We're going to start in May of 2021. That's when Joe Biden ordered the intel community to assess this, but we're going to include information that they left out. Here it is. On May 5 of 2021, a former New York Times science reporter called Nicholas Wade wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a review of something called the "furin cleavage site" of the virus. That's something that increases the viral infectivity of human cells. His analysis included this quote from David Baltimore who is a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology "When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence with its, arginine codons, I said to my wife, it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARs2."
In other words, when I look carefully at the virus, I realized it was manmade and then later in May, 18 prominent scientists published a letter in the journal Science saying a new investigation was needed because "theories of accidental release from the lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable."
Keep in mind, this is how scientists write, but the headline is actually the lab leak theory might not be a theory. Now, among the people who signed that letter was Ralph Baric. He's a virologist in the United States who works closely with Shi Zhengli. That's the infamous "bat lady" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If Ralph Baric's name seems familiar to you, it's because that name was in many internal emails that we now have seen from inside the National Institutes of Health. Those emails came out in June of 2021 and in those emails, we learn that in the earliest days of the pandemic, researchers warned Tony Fauci that the virus appeared to come from the lab, that it wasn't natural, it was manmade.
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Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, wrote this: "The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (< 0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features potentially look engineered."
It's just the very beginning. People who are looking through microscopes at the virus said to themselves, "Wait a second. Someone made this." The emails also show that Tony Fauci demanded information for a gain-of-function experiments from subordinates, particularly gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan. Fauci then sent an urgent email to his deputy, a man called Hugh Auchincloss. The subject of that email is in all caps and it was: "IMPORTANT" quote "Hugh, it is essential that we speak this a.m. Keep your cell phone on. Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward. You will have tasks today that must be done."
Fauci then attached to document the email mail titled "Baric, Shi, et all- Nature Medicine- SARS Gain and function.pdf."
Now, keep in mind that Tony Fauci denied under oath that Ralph Baric, a researcher in the United States, had ever conducted gain-of-function research in Wuhan and yet here was Tony Fauci emailing his subordinates about Ralph Baric’s work with Wuhan's bat lady, who was the person conducting infamous experiments on bat coronaviruses that may have changed the global order, that may have caused this pandemic and put China ahead of the United States and therefore in charge of the world
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Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health, speaks at the Milken Institute 21st Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., April 30, 2018. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
Now, around the same time, the emails show the director of the NIH, the now completely discredited Francis Collins, was trying to bury the lab leak theory. Collins wanted his underlings to find, "something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy." Now, keep in mind, Francis Collins at the very same time was running around telling everyone what a great Christian he was and doing all these interviews with the evangelical websites, telling people to listen to what Tony Fauci was saying, believe the U.S. government.
"No, the lab leak theory is ridiculous. Get the vax." That was Francis Collins.
Well, it turns out he was lying, but none of this made it into the Intel agency's one-and-a-half-page report to Joe Biden. Neither did the news that the Wuhan lab spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new filtration system shortly after the pandemic began. Really? On September 16, 2019, nearly three months after the first reported cases of COVID-19 emerged, the Wuhan lab agreed to spend $606 million on a "central air conditioning renovation project." $606 million. That's a lot for HVAC.
So, in the face of all of this evidence, which at this point is overwhelming, the World Health Organization, of all places, is demanding a new investigation into the origins of COVID. Keep in mind, W.H.O. rigged the last investigation by making Peter Daszak the sole U.S. investigator, but officials in this country, for reasons we can't understand, are still resisting efforts to find out what was happening at the Wuhan lab with, by the way, the support of U.S. taxpayer.
Now, what's the Wuhan lab up to now? Well, it may come as a surprise to you that at the Wuhan lab, they're now working on monkey pox viruses. In fact, they're more than working on monkey pox viruses. They're assembling new monkey pox viruses. According to one study underway at this moment, "since MPXV infection" (what would be monkey pox) "has never been associated with an outbreak in China, the viral genomic material required for qPCR detection is unavailable," and therefore the lab has to engage in "viral DNA recombination's" creating a fragment of the virus from the ground up, which they call a "fail safe."
In other words, Frankenstein c--- with monkey pox. Amazing. In the face of all of this, the White House has buried any real investigation into the origins of COVID and so this research is allowed to continue, research that could make COVID look like nothing.
No one's saying anything about this. So, tonight we want to talk to someone who has not been in lock step, someone who from the very beginning has been brave enough to point to the most obvious origin of COVID and that would be the lab in Wuhan and that man's name is Steven Mosher. We first talked to him in February of 2020.
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STEVEN MOSHER: Well, I think it escaped from the lab because we have the Chinese government basically telling us that it did. Wuhan is the only level four laboratory in all of China. So that's where you would put a dangerous pathogen, whether you were a genetically engineering it to be a weapon or not, that's where you would be experimenting on it. So, it makes sense that the epicenter of the epidemic, that the lab there would be the source of that virus.
Steven Mosher was the first person we heard say that. Very few honest people would disagree at this point.