Exclusive — Rep. Scott Perry Rips on PolitiFact for Rating His Wuhan Lab Leak Claim as ‘False’

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) on Tuesday ripped into website PolitiFact for rating his comment in an interview that coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China, as “false” in 2020, just weeks before he faced re-election.

“If PolitiFact wants to go down the same road as the Southern Poverty Law Center, certainly that is their choice. But no one takes them seriously, because anybody that is serious knows that they are just an ideological mouthpiece for the left and they’re not interested in checking factual information. They’re interested in promoting the narrative of the left,” he said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.

“If all these fact checking organizations want to have any credibility whatsoever, what they need to do is make it right, and say that they were wrong so that people like us can have our reputation restored,” he added.

Perry had said in an interview in October 2020 that President Donald Trump’s recovery from coronavirus “gives us hope as Americans in our ability to conquer the virus that came from China, in my opinion, was constructed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then was spread around the world, either by accident or on purpose.”

PolitiFact’s Tom Kertscher fact-checked Perry’s claim as “false” in an article titled: “Pa. Rep. Scott Perry airs debunked claim that Wuhan lab ‘constructed’ coronavirus.”

Kertscher wrote: “Perry said the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was “constructed” in a Wuhan, China, lab. There’s no evidence to support this. Scientists who’ve studied the virus’s genetic makeup say that it is a naturally occuring virus. We rate Perry’s statement False.”

An editor’s note on May 20, 2021, added that the assertion that COVID-19 was “manipulated” is “now more widely disputed,” but again stated, “That dispute notwithstanding, the claim that COVID-19 was constructed at the Wuhan institute remains False.

However, just recently, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, the FBI, and former Center for Disease Control Director have all said it is “likely” the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to the Wall Street Journal on February 28, 2023:

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

In addition, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News on the same day the “FBI for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

“Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab,” he added.

Former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield also recently testified to Congress he believed the virus emerged from the lab.

“Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe and I still believe today that it indicates that COVID-19 more likely was the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event,” he testified last week.

Perry told Breitbart News that PolitiFact, which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, should “check themselves.”

What would be better for credibility, for fact-checking organizations to rate their own performance, and their own performance in this case — it’s not only dismal, but has had a profound effect on our society and the world where our society, America, over 1 million deaths attributed to the pandemic, and what 7 million across the globe to the pandemic that originated in communist China.

So if they want to be a serious player and actually add something to society, here’s an opportunity to do that, and they should do that.

Perry said PolitiFact and others censoring the lab leak theory let China off the hook.

“They did China’s work, because China didn’t want it to be to be called the Wuhan Flu and the Wuhan Virus, like the Spanish fFu, or like Ebola, that are named because of their origin,” he said.

“And so Poynter University and PolitiFact and all those organizations that did that actually did the work of the despotic communist regime in China. Good for them,” he said.

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