{"id":9988,"date":"2021-09-20T11:02:02","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T15:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9988"},"modified":"2021-09-20T11:02:02","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T15:02:02","slug":"the-covid-19-disinformation-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9988","title":{"rendered":"The COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written several times about the origin of COVID-19 but there are still no answers. What has become clear, however, is that we\u2019ve been subjected to an organized disinformation campaign. In February of 2020 The Lancet<\/a> published a letter<\/a> from Charles Calisher, Dennis Carroll, Rita Cowell, Ronald Corley, Peter Daszak, Christian Drosten, and others stating that COVID-19 originated naturally through animal transmission and that the idea that the outbreak originated from a lab accident was unfounded and a conspiracy theory. They repeated these claims in another July 2021 letter to The Lancet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now become clear that this is actually the opposite of the truth<\/a>. There is, in fact, no compelling scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of a natural, zoonotic origin and the idea of a lab accident is, far from being a conspiracy theory, a plausible explanation. Indeed, those with the means to know and who don\u2019t have a vested interest in the outcome, have long believed the lab accident hypothesis a good explanation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An article in BMJ<\/a> examines the possibility that the press\u2014an therefore all of us\u2014were taken for a ride by an organized disinformation campaign by actors with a vested interest in denying the lab accident explanation<\/a>. The Lancet letter campaign turns out to be an organized effort by Daszak and others associated with the EcoHealth Alliance who did their best to obscure their connection with EcoHealth Alliance.<\/p>\n

This disinformation campaign even trickled down\u2014or is it up\u2014to Facebook and Google, both of whom spent a year censoring any content that suggested COVID-19 might have originated in the lab. You can say what you want about those who refuse to \u201ctrust the experts\u201d but they might be onto something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written several times about the origin of COVID-19 but there are still no answers. What has become clear, however, is that we\u2019ve been subjected to an organized disinformation campaign. In February of 2020 The Lancet published a letter from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[206],"class_list":["post-9988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-covid-19"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9989,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988\/revisions\/9989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}