Is Mehdi Hasan One Of The Last 26%ers That Believe COVID Was Natural?

After hours of trying to figure this out... we're still not too sure.

A few weeks ago, MSNBC talking-head Mehdi Hasan took to his far left-leaning studio to... uh... do something. We're still not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish here, but we'll give you the details anyway.

So as we were saying, Mehdi Hasan took to his show on MSNBC a few weeks ago to - either "debunk" the lab leak theory of COVID-19, or something similar to that (we guess) - and he put on quite a show consisting of article headlines, Fox News clips, and screen caps from Nate Silver's Twitter account.

Again, we're not quite sure what he was trying to accomplish in this segment, as he even admits toward the end of the segment that he's not actually claiming that the lab leak theory is false. Nonetheless, he spent close to a half hour seemingly making the case for that claim.

And we'll preface the rest of this article by saying we reached out to Mehdi Hasan earlier this afternoon with quite a few questions for him, in a good-college-try attempt to get some clarification on his positions on all this, and as of this writing we have yet to hear back. As always, we guarantee we'll update this article if/when we hear back from him, but as of right now, we're assuming Mr. Hasan has joined the ranks of Sam Seder with The Majority Report, Matt Binder with Mashable.com, Rashad Richey with The Young Turks, and a myriad of other left-wing commentators who are always seemingly too afraid to ever answer any questions we have for them.

Anyway, early on in his MSNBC segment, Hasan attempts to "debunk" the "claim" that the "intelligence community agrees on a lab leak" - a claim that the The Wall Street Journal didn't actually make - by showing data from WSJ's own article that says there are apparently still two more "agencies" in the U.S. government that believe COVID originated naturally instead of from a lab leak, even though the Dept. of Energy and the F.B.I. do believe it came from a lab. Hasan's logic, in his own words, is that "4 is a bigger number than 2," and therefore this proves nothing. Well, we won't argue that 4 is a bigger number than 2, because it most certainly is, but we are wondering what these 4 agencies are. What are the names of these U.S. government agencies? We've been completely unable to find this information on the internet. We reached out to Mehdi Hasan, who has MSNBC's fact-checking team behind him, to ask whether or not he or his team of fact-checkers over at MSNBC have been able to find this information. This just happens to be one of the questions he hasn't responded to yet.

Mehdi Hasan then goes on to "debunk the claim" that - and we're not kidding, even though this is going to be absurdly difficult to write in a sentence that's actually understandable - the lab leak theory wasn't about bioweapons. You read that right. He tries to "debunk" the claim that conservative media wasn't talking about bioweapons when discussing the lab leak theory. We guess Mehdi Hasan is upset that conservative media hasn't been speaking enough about Chinese bioweapons lately. Surprisingly or not surprisingly, he only refers to these bioweapon theorizers as "they" or "tin foil hat wearers" and never actually mentions any specific people, with the exception of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), whom Hasan never actually attributes any specific quotes to about bioweapons. Hasan then plays a short montage of right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon. To be fair, Jones and Limbaugh do suggest in their short clips that SARS-CoV-2 could've been a bioweapon, but in the clip he played of Bannon, it was actually just a random caller to his show that suggested SARS-CoV-2 could be a bioweapon. Hasan then plays a short clip of Mike Pompeo not suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon, but only that there is a potential threat of bioterrorism from China (which is certainly true).

We should note though that the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, did publish an article in August of 2020 called "Preparing for the pandemic that came," in which contributor Robert Carnahan outlines a DARPA-funded program called the "Pandemic Prevention Platform." This "Pandemic Prevention Program" (or "P3" for short) was designed, in part, to determine how quickly antibodies could be discovered during an outbreak for "therapeutic" purposes. It was only about a year after this DARPA-funded drill was run that the first cases of COVID-19 were identified. Now, we're certainly not making the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon, but if it was, a drill like this would certainly give a lot of large pharmaceutical companies information about how profitable the release of a deadly pathogen could be for a company that developed vaccines and other sorts of therapeutics.

We should also mention that any theory of bioweapon manufacturing by the Chinese government, Hasan claims, have been "dismissed" by "every respected scientist on earth." Mehdi, good sir, how does a "scientist" get the professional authority to "dismiss" a claim that a deadly pathogen that, by your own standards, could have been created in a lab, is not a bioweapon? What class in a biochemical engineering major does a scientist take that teaches them to determine whether or not a deadly man-made pathogen is in fact a bioweapon? Do they take Is This A Bioweapon 101? Sorry Mehdi, but to say that your run-of-the-mill scientist gets to make a hypothesis on such a thing is, by any standard, a pretty fucking stupid claim to make.

But then, Hasan goes on to "debunk" yet another "myth": that the media suppressed the "lab leak theory." Well this is certainly true by almost any reasonable standard, but Mehdi Hasan apparently has a different opinion then the vast majority of the western world on this issue, and we're not just talking about the bitter irony that Hasan attempted to "debunk" this myth in the same segment in which he's seemingly attempting to "debunk" the lab leak theory altogether. Hasan then attempts to make his point by claiming that New York Magazine wrote a story about the lab leak hypothesis in January 2021, according to Hasan "less than a year" after the pandemic began, even though the first identified cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Wuhan in December 2019, and the mainstream media was already running stories on COVID-19 in January of 2020. But hey! We should all believe Mehdi Hasan here, because apparently some liberal magazine nobody reads wrote a story about how the lab leak might be real 12 months after the pandemic started! Needless to say, Hasan either forgot or ignored all the cable news networks (including his own) and newspapers, that even claimed almost a year and a half into the pandemic, that the lab leak theory was debunked. Here, in June of 2021, The Washington Compost wrote: "One would have to come to the firm conclusion that not only was the virus developed in a lab — something experts have said is nearly impossible given the virus’s features..." Would you like to issue a retraction on your opinion on that "myth," Mehdi?

Most interestingly though, in his segment, Hasan goes on to suggest based on three unidentified sources that "told CNN" regarding the Energy Dept.'s report, that the coronavirus research in question wasn't being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at all, but was actually being done at a different lab, which are only known currently as the "Chinese Centers for Disease Control" in Wuhan. But here at EndingPolitics.com, we've so far been completely unable to verify that such a lab with this name even exists in Wuhan. Attempting to Google or use any search engine to find an address for such a lab turns up nothing. But here's yet another problem for Hasan's theory: these three unidentified sources say "centers," not "center," suggesting that there could even be more than one. That said, we have been able to identify a research lab in Wuhan called the "Wuhan Jiang'an Center For Disease Control and Prevention," but it's still unclear whether or not this was the lab referenced by CNN's three unidentified sources, or whether or not they actually research coronaviruses there. But, here's a very interesting detail: we have been able to verify that the Huanan Wet Market and this particular research lab are extraordinarily close to each other, quite possibly even less than a 10 minute drive from one another. If a coronavirus outbreak was being investigated at this "Wuhan Jiang'an Center for Disease Control and Prevention," and the Huanan Seafood Market was the "epicenter of the outbreak," as Hasan, in his own words would like us to believe, then that actually could make quite a bit of sense. This is especially true if a tired (and coronavirus infected) research worker were to say, stop by the market on his way home from a hard day's work, pick up some fresh food for the evening, and leave behind a deadly pathogen he'd contracted at work during his research earlier that day. To be clear though, it's still not even verifiable that any of Hasan's theory here is true whatsoever, as it's only come from three completely-unidentifiable sources that are only at best "familiar" with the Energy Dept.'s investigation, and not to mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself is also only 7.5 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market, to which any WIV lab-infected worker could also make an easy and short commute to after a hard day's work (a very possible hypothesis that could easily connect all these different theories on the origin of COVID that no mainstream media talking-head, including Mehdi Hasan himself, will ask about).

At this point, we had to email Hasan and ask him some pretty simple questions because, let's face facts, if in fact this coronavirus did happen to originate naturally, from an animal in a wet market just a few miles away from a highly unsafe coronavirus research lab (and possibly several others), when three of the researchers at said lab fell ill with some mysterious unknown pathogen just a little over a month before the first identified cases of COVID-19 were identified, then this is quite possibly the biggest coincidence in the history of mankind. In our email, we ask Hasan a few questions about his opinions on the origins of COVID, which we've - in complete transparency - listed in entirety below, using our exact words verbatim:

1. Do you know which of the “four” American “agencies” are claiming SARS-CoV-2 originated from nature? If so, what are they? 

2. Do you believe that gain of function research was being done inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

3. If not, are you aware that the NIH itself has confirmed gain-of-function research was being done inside the WIV? (source: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-failed-report-experiment-wuhan-created-bat-virus-made-mice-sicker)

4. Do you believe that 3 Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers "fell ill” in November 2019?

5. Are you personally aware that U.S. taxpayers were funding research on bat coronaviruses through NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, and are still doing so right now, despite being found to have been out-of-compliance with the terms of their NIH grants? (source: https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-slams-nih-for-continuing-to-award-taxpayer-funded-grants-to-ecohealth-alliance/)

6. At 9:31 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHACkULrga8, you show a quote on screen from the Director of National Intelligence, which says that the IC “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” 

Are you personally aware that not only does the Director of National Intelligence admit that a lab leak was possible, but also states in declassified documents that (direct quote):

"One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with 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. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses." [source: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf]

7. Do you acknowledge that many mainstream media outlets including cable news channels and newspapers had once claimed that the “lab leak theory” of COVID-19 origins was “debunked” without evidence to prove so?

Also, just a couple more questions about your personal opinions.

-Are you personally in the remaining 26% of Americans that believe COVID-19 originated naturally? 

-If you do claim it originated “naturally,” does that include or not include the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab due to “animal mishandling”? 

-You said in your MSNBC segment that there’s no “consensus” on COVID origins. What level of “consensus” would there need to be for you to believe COVID-19 originated in a laboratory (or even that it definitively originated in nature)? Would you say 60%, 70%, or 90%, just as an example? We’d be looking for a number in percentages, and that number could be a percentage of consensus between governmental agencies, scientists, etc.. (Please try to be as clear and concise as possible with this question, so we report your answer accurately)



-Are you aware that former CDC Director Robert Redfield adamantly believes that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab? If so, do you believe him, or not? And, would you be more apt to believe Robert Redfield on the subject, or Dr. Fauci (assuming Dr. Fauci still believes the preponderance of the evidence suggests natural origin), and why? And finally, what would change your mind on the subject and make you believe the other?