The Times of London celebrated July 4th this year by stepping up the campaign to push President Donald Trump to break with China over the lie that “China created the COVID-19 pandemic.” Today, former British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, infamous for his role in directing the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, added his voice (again) to British intelligence’s “China, China, China” hoax, in a “separate” interview.
“Revealed: Seven Year Coronavirus Trail from Mine Deaths to a Wuhan Lab,” The Times headlined its story. “An investigation by The Sunday Times has found evidence that China has failed to publicly share … crucial information about [a] sister virus to COVID-19, even though it is the strongest lead in the hunt for the origin of the pandemic.”
The “evidence” presented for this new charge of alleged Chinese cover-up is as flimsy as the “Russian Taliban bounties” hoax. No matter. The subscribers-only Times of London story was, as expected, disseminated broadly by loads of other British media, from Establishment newspapers to the tabloids. The Independent adopted a “balanced” approach, citing scientists, pro and con, over “whether a coronavirus sample held for years in a Wuhan laboratory could have mutated naturally or via genetic experimentation to become the virus which causes COVID-19.” No such subtlety was shown by the Sun, headlined this “shocking new report”: “DEADLY SECRET: China ‘Found Coronavirus Strain SEVEN YEARS Ago and Sent It to Wuhan Lab To Study but Said Nothing after Pandemic.”
Enter Dearlove. In his interview arranged with Sky News, Dearlove insisted that the proposition that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Wuhan laboratory must not be dismissed. He used the same arguments he had made a month before in a June 4 interview with the Telegraph. “I subscribe to the theory … that it’s an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute (of Virology)…. There is an accumulation of evidence that this is something that has to be openly discussed in the scientific community. I am just staggered,” he said, that British and U.S. intelligence have not accepted the theory that the virus was manufactured. “They clearly haven’t read the science. And they haven’t attempted to understand it. The onus is now on the leadership of China to explain why the theory and the hypothesis that it could be engineered is wrong.”
To buttress his claim, Dearlove cited the same paper by British clinical scientist Professor Angus Dalgleish and Birger Sorensen, chairman of Norwegian company Immunor, which he had cited in his earlier interview with the Telegraph, which asserts that it is more likely that the virus was manipulated in a laboratory than that it occurred naturally. The Telegraph reported at the time that that another author originally on the paper, John Fredrik Moxnes, the chief scientific advisor to the Norwegian military, had asked for his name to be withdrawn from the paper, and journals such as Nature and the Journal of Virology had dubbed it unfit for publication. The editor of Nature magazine, Magdalena Skipper told Sky News that she is not allowed to discuss whether individual papers have been received and turned down, “but in the end if one doesn’t see many publications in favor of a certain theory, one has to conclude that that’s because there isn’t robust evidence in favor of that theory.”
Sky News notes that Dearlove spoke ahead of the arrival of a team of scientists from the World Health Organization in China this week to investigate the origin of COVID-19.