MCViewPoint

By Ron Unz

The Unz Review

https://www.unz.com/runz/the-wicked-flee-when-no-man-pursueth/

With well over a billion monthly views, Britain’s populist and pugnacious Daily Mail is one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers on the Internet, having twice the traffic of the Washington Post and five times that of the Wall Street Journal, even sometimes approaching the readership of the New York Times. The publication has stayed true to its original tabloid roots and its success comes from its willingness to wholeheartedly jump on those controversial stories that other outlets avoid.

Meanwhile, the British Lancet is located at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, being one of the world’s most prestigious and authoritative medical journals, as sober and responsible as any publication in existence.

So very early last Thursday morning the world witnessed a bizarre “Clash of the Titans” style controversy as an explosive headline in the Daily Mail denounced the Lancet for supposedly indulging in sensationalism.

• Fury as The Lancet sensationally claims Covid may have leaked from an AMERICAN lab – echoing anti-western claims peddled by Beijing
  A UK medical journal has suggested the US could have created the Covid virus
  John Ely • The Daily Mail • September 15, 2022 • 1,100 Words

Surely many millions saw that headline and reacted with shock—at least that fraction of the typical Daily Mail readership that had ever heard of the Lancet.

More than two years ago the Lancet had established the Covid Commission, tasked with investigating all aspects of the worldwide disease outbreak that was already beginning to claim millions of lives. As might be expected, the panel was heavily stocked with the “Great and the Good” of global public health policy, as reflected in its chairman Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, a pillar of the academic establishment who had twice been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Then last week the Covid Commission report was finally been released, prompting that immediate, ferocious attack by the Daily Mail, with the first two paragraphs of the article describing the controversy:

The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, has sensationally claimed Covid may have leaked out of a US lab.

Unveiling the results of a two-year investigation into the origins of the pandemic, the magazine’s team tasked with uncovering the truth stated it was ‘plausible’ the virus could have emerged in America.

Since April 2020 I’ve stood almost alone in publicly arguing that Covid was probably an American virus, with the global outbreak being blowback from a disastrously reckless biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). So I was obviously gratified to discover that somewhat parallel accusations were now apparently being made by so august and respectable a publication as the Lancet and the group of international experts it had convened.

See the rest here

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