Jesse Watters Hosts Author Pushing Theory That Chinese Government ‘Cover Story’ Is Hiding Truth About Coronavirus Origin

Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted an author that pushed an unproven theory that the Chinese government is using a “cover story” to hide the truth about its culpability in the origin of the coronavirus.

Speaking with Population Research Institute president Steven Mosher on his weekend show Watters’ World, the Fox News host told viewers that “one theory” about how the COVID-19 outbreak began involved the virus being transmitted from bats to humans at a Wuhan, China wet market, where locals can sometimes purchase exotic animals to eat. But Watters then teed up his interview with Mosher by citing as an alternative “theory” an evidence-free claim that the virus came from a “China biolab” where “Chinese lab workers may have been contaminated while studying infected bats triggering an outbreak.” Watters did not mention that there is no hard evidence so far supporting this claim.

However, that has not stopped the spread of broad speculation that the Chinese government either accidentally leaked or manufactured the virus in a microbiology or bioweapons lab. In fact, a W.H.O. study of the virus concluded that COVID-19 is naturally occurring — not man-made — and possibly came from bats or pangolins. This China cover-up narrative has become so prevalent on the right that a Pew poll found self-identified Republicans are now twice as likely to believe coronavirus can be traced back to a Chinese lab than Democrats.

Mosher, author of a highly critical book on China entitled Bully of Asia, has been a driving force behind this claim. Back in February, he wrote an innuendo-filled and evidence-free New York Post column intimating the same thing: that the coronavirus may have originated from a Chinese government microbiology lab in Wuhan that was studying the coronavirus and then accidentally released it into the public.

He went even further on Fox News, though, outright claiming the Chinese government is engaged in a massive cover-up.

“I think the Chinese wet market story is a cover story. And I think that cover story is now blown. And let me tell you why,” Mosher said to Watters, before offering a list of circumstantial details but no real proof, which included the fact that two of the country’s microbiology labs, which have collected extensive samples of bats and bat droppings, are located in Wuhan.

“Jesse, it’s amazing over the last 15 years China has collected 2,000 dangerous viruses from the wild, including 300 coronaviruses roughly we understand, many of which came from horseshoe bats that we’re talking about as original carrier of the virus,” Mosher said. “But if those viruses had stayed in bats and caves 600 miles away from Wuhan they would have never come in contact with people.”

“Why are they taking the bats out of the caves bringing them to research facilities and investigating the viruses that the bats have?” Watters asked. “What is the purpose of that kind of virus research?”

“Well I think there were a number of purposes, one goes back to SARS epidemic back in 2003 which killed a lot of people in China and infected a lot more. The SARS virus, by the way, was studied in a lab in Beijing in 2004 and twice leaked from the lab,” Mosher claimed. Then, putting a decidedly an ominous spin on Chinese research of a documented public health risk within its borders, Mosher added: “But think about over the last 15 years, China has double the number of known viruses, over 200 years we’ve collected 2,000. Now we have 4,000 why? Because all of these hundreds, thousands of viruses are being kept from the two biolabs in the city of Wuhan. Many of them are dangerous.”

“I mean — it really is, you know, because I think as you told our producers:  ‘If this had actually come and originated from the wet market, the Chinese Communist government would have just burned it to the ground,'” Watters said, repeating another unsubstantiated claim from Mosher. “But for some reason, these wet markets, we’re hearing reports, are reopened which doesn’t make a lot of sense if that is the prevailing theory for how it originated.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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