Disinformation Inc: Government-backed group tried to punish sites boosting COVID lab leak theory

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The Washington Examiner/Restorng America

 Gabe Kaminsky, Investigative Reporter
February 27, 2023

This is part of a Washington Examiner series on self-styled "disinformation" tracking groups that are blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media.  Here  is where you can read other  stories  in the series.

A State Department-backed "disinformation" tracking group blacklisting conservative news outlets pressured advertising companies to punish websites boosting the COVID-19 "lab leak" theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus.

The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, has continued to come under fire for feeding conservative news blacklists to advertising companies. This same government-funded entity repeatedly applied pressure on companies to cut ties with websites promoting the once alleged right-wing "conspiracy" that COVID-19 emerged from a lab — which the Energy Department recently concluded is probable based on intelligence.

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One month later, in March 2020, GDI released a report titled, "Why is Ad Tech Funding These Ads on Coronavirus Conspiracy Sites?"

The report, which slammed Google and other companies for "providing ad revenue streams to known disinformation sites peddling coronavirus conspiracies," called out the conservative blog American Thinker for publishing a commentary article titled "The Wuhan Virus Escaped From a Chinese Lab." GDI also took aim at a company selling N-95 masks for advertising in the article.

"GDI’s own content on the lab leak perfectly fits its own definition of 'disinformation,'" Justin Goodman, senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste Project, a federal spending watchdog, told the Washington Examiner. "A growing majority of taxpayers, scientists around the world, lawmakers, and even the Biden Administration’s FBI and Energy Department agree that dangerous animal experiments at the NIH-funded Wuhan lab caused COVID."

"Yet, in early 2020, before a pandemic was even declared and any investigation had taken place, GDI was apparently using U.S. taxpayers's money to gaslight the public by labeling the lab leak a 'conspiracy theory' and seeking to censor and demonetize media outlets reporting on it," he added.

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China Responds To U.S. Energy Department’s Revised Wuhan Lab Leak Theory
Brandon Drey
Feb 27, 2023

China officials said Monday that “certain parties” should stop politicizing the origins of COVID after the U.S. Department of Energy assessed the virus likely leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

During a press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that “origins-tracing” of the virus should be referred back to a March 2021 report published by China and World Health Organization officials, which concluded with an “extremely unlikely” verdict about the lab leak theory.

“Certain parties should stop rehashing the ‘lab leak’ narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicizing origins-tracing,” Ning said after defending the joint WHO-China report she claimed was received by the international community.

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[Geee]

Turns out it was the lab-leak deniers who wore the tinfoil hats

A still-classified report from the federal government’s top biowarfare experts has concluded, albeit with “low confidence,” that COVID really did leak from that Wuhan lab. So much for three years of vehement denial, and outright suppression of even discussion of the idea, from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Big Tech and countless US liberals in the throes of COVID panic. 

Yes, it’s a bit odd that those experts work for the Department of Energy, which officially owns the report. But it’s going to be tough for holdouts to pretend the famed Livermore Labs is a nest of racist, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists. And this follows the FBI’s similar conclusion in 2021.  

Since China’s rulers haven’t allowed (and never will) an independent on-the-scene investigation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, hard proof’s unlikely to ever show. But every hysteric from the government-media censorship machine sure owes apologies and explanations.  

Including to The Post: We published Steven Mosher’s column raising the lab-leak theory back in February 2020, and Boom! came down the Big Tech hammer, as our opinion piece got suppressed as disinformation.

Emails show that Fauci (and scientists who depended on his goodwill for funding) worked from early on to denounce the theory. Supposedly objective reporters attacked it as nothing but racism (as if only bigots are suspicious of China’s government) and woke social-media censors jumped on the bandwagon.

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Judicial Watch: Records Show Funding for EcoHealth/Wuhan Institute Research to Create Coronavirus ‘Mutants’

4/19/23

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 552 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which include the initial grant application and annual reports to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from EcoHealth Alliance, describing the aim of its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to create mutant viruses “to better predict the capacity of our CoVs [coronaviruses] to infect people.”

Eco Health planned to sequence the spike protein from coronaviruses obtained from bats for the purpose of “creating mutants to identify how significantly each would need to evolve to use ACE2,” which is explained as “the receptor to gain entry to human cells.”

Judicial Watch obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it filed in December 2021 for:

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4/24/23