Facebook ends ban on posts claiming COVID-19 is man-made

You are now free to speak about what the Facebook overlords previously considered a “debunked” idea on the social network cum global cancer, Facebook. Yes, the ad-tracking behemoth has, with egg on its collective, uh, face, ended its ban on posts that say COVID-19 is potentially man-made.

Thomas Barrabi for FOXBusiness:

The announcement marked a reversal for the social media giant. In February, Facebook said it would remove posts claiming the virus was man-made or manufactured “following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization” who had “debunked” the claim.

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.”

Public calls for further investigation into the pandemic’s origins intensified in recent days after the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology displayed symptoms severe enough to seek hospital treatment. A previous State Department fact sheet noted the researchers had “symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”

Facebook and other social media platforms have faced pressure from both sides of the aisle regarding their COVID-19 content policies. Democratic lawmakers have pressed platforms to crack down on the spread of misinformation, while Republicans have accused the companies of stifling open debate, including discussions on the lab leak theory.

Oh, by the way:

Jim Geraghty for National Review:

There is a clear and verified sequence of events that strongly suggests that this pandemic, which has caused more than 168 million cases and more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide, may well have originated from viruses carried in bats in an abandoned mine that then passed through a Chinese research facility before spreading out of control among the people of Wuhan…

Perhaps the least plausible argument in opposition to the lab-leak theory is that the staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Chinese facilities are just too diligent to ever make a consequential mistake. The original SARS virus had accidentally leaked from the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing, part of China’s Center for Disease Control. Twice.

The State Department memo also noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s research into the viruses in bats in Yunnan Province was funded, at least in a small part, by U.S. taxpayers:

Over a five-year study, [redacted] and their research team widely sampled bats in Yunnan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies… it demonstrated that SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bat in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronaviruses originated in this bat population.

If the onset of symptoms in the first diagnosed patient was December 1, the infection probably occurred sometime in November. One of the oddest reports in the past year arrived in May 2020, when NBC News reported, “Private analysis of cellphone location data purports to show that a high-security Wuhan laboratory studying coronaviruses shut down in October, three sources briefed on the matter told NBC News.” It continued, “The report — obtained by the London-based NBC News Verification Unit — says there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.”

Since that report, there has been no subsequent elaboration, no further details, no ensuing leaks of new information of what, if anything, happened in that laboratory building in that autumn.

MacDailyNews Take: Facebook is a bucket of slime run by slime buckets.