China’s state-run Global Times on Monday called for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate the undercover Project Veritas video that caught a Pfizer executive talking about intentionally mutating coronavirus strains to develop new vaccines.
The bombshell video fits neatly into Beijing’s ongoing effort to distract the world from investigating the origins of the Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan, China.
Project Veritas released an undercover investigative video last Wednesday that showed a Pfizer executive named Jordon Trishton Walker chatting about his company considering the possibility of using “directed evolution” to create new variants of the coronavirus so it could develop new vaccines against them.
Walker suggested Pfizer scientists may have already begun such experiments, but they are “going slow because everyone is very cautious.” Although he stressed that directed evolution is not the same thing as the now-infamous “gain of function” research that might have created Chinese coronavirus by enhancing less dangerous natural viruses into the far more dangerous and contagious disease that shook the world, he acknowledged that the public might see similar risks.
Walker, in fact, was inclined to believe that gain-of-function research in Wuhan unleashed the pandemic, but he thought directed evolution research by Pfizer would be a safer practice that could help the company remain profitable.
“You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bulls**t,” he said.
The Global Times was naturally disinclined to quote the parts of the video where Walker talked about the probable role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the origins of Chinese coronavirus. Instead, the Chinese Communist paper focused on the ethical and safety concerns of virus mutation research – at least, when anyone outside the Chinese Communist Party does it – and desperately fanned the flames of scandal:
Walker also bluntly said in the video that [Chinese coronavirus] is going to be a “cash cow” for Pfizer for a while going forward. Is Pfizer really manipulating [Chinese coronavirus] for profits and does it in secret? How far has the research gone? What risks will it bring? The public naturally has many questions and demands answers. However, most of the US and Western mainstream media outlets and US politicians have collectively kept mum on the issue revealed in the video. This is quite abnormal in the American public opinion field known for its diversity.
The Global Times accused the U.S. media of hypocrisy for focusing on the recent coronavirus explosion in China while purportedly downplaying the implications of the Project Veritas video. This included the knee-slapping assertion that China – which was notorious for covering up huge pharmaceutical scandals even before it started throwing Wuhan’s early Chinese coronavirus whistleblowers in jail to shut them up – would take similar revelations about a Chinese company very seriously:
Till now, the vast majority of US media outlets and politicians are ignoring it. This is in stark contrast to their keenness to hype the odds of new [Chinese coronavirus] mutations after China optimized its [Chinese coronavirus] policies. On the issue concerning a big US pharmaceutical company, it seems American media outlets are all much more “professional and rational.” They are quite prudent to make any conclusion.
If an undercover video of similar kind was exposed in China, there is no doubt that the Chinese public and officials would take it very seriously. Not only the company involved must give a detailed explanation, relevant authorities will quickly conduct an investigation to find the truth.
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China’s Hubei province, on February 23, 2017.(Johannes EISELE / AFP) (Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
Pfizer responded to the Project Veritas video two days after it was released, insisting it has not “conducted gain-of-function or directed evolution research.”
The statement did not completely satisfy critics such as Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who want the company to provide more unambiguous details of exactly what experiments it is conducting or seriously considering, as Walker discussed in the Project Veritas video.
The most forceful criticisms of the Pfizer response argue that the company did not actually refute anything Walker said in the Veritas video about engineering viruses to perform vaccine research. The Global Times was correct about the minimal legacy media attention paid to the Project Veritas report; in fact, Newsbusters contended on Friday that media and tech companies are aggressively working to suppress the video.
As for Walker, he was extremely displeased to discover his comments about directed evolution research were recorded and exposed to the public and is apparently not inclined to discuss the matter further.