Whoopi Goldberg admits ‘politics got in the way’ of COVID-19 lab theory

Media

Of Thomas Barrabi

March 1, 2023 | 15:29

“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg admitted Wednesday that political bias led many people to mistakenly dismiss the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

Goldberg and her talk show colleagues discussed revelations that FBI Director Chris Wray and the US Department of Energy had each concluded that a laboratory leak was the most likely explanation for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Goldberg also referenced comedian Jon Stewart’s comments this week describing his surprise at the “anger” he faced for emphatically supporting the Covid-19 lab theory during a 2021 appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“He’s right that politics got in the way of a lot of searching for the truth,” Goldberg said after playing a clip of Stewart’s comments.

“But they’re still not saying definitively, and that’s a problem,” Goldberg added. “They still don’t know for sure.”

Goldberg suggested that the initial skepticism of the lab leak theory was due to President Donald Trump’s handling of the situation — which, she argued, contributed to an increase in violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic.

“I know when the last guy before Biden said something about this, he did it about Asian people,” she added. “I’m sure Jon Stewart didn’t realize that was what was happening, because I’m sure he didn’t know what was going on all over the country, with Asian people being beaten and beaten and people saying things to them about bringing the disease here.”

“If ‘You Know Who’ hadn’t started it with that, he hadn’t made it about it … it probably would have been listened to a lot differently,” Goldberg added.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a “View” co-panelist and former Trump administration employee, said it was important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19.

“I remember February 2020, before a lot of countries were even closed for travel, I was at the (Defense Department) and we were talking about an accidental lab leak as a very legitimate way this could have occurred,” Griffin said.

“The attempt to silence it, I think, was disruptive to getting answers,” she added.

Sunny Hostin argued that the Chinese government played a key role in creating uncertainty about the origin of the virus by resisting efforts to investigate.

“The reason there is so much uncertainty is because the Chinese did not cooperate with the international community,” Hostin said.

Mediaite was the first to report the exchange.