Skip to content

Lab-Leak Segment: Fear, Family Division, No Evidence

Day 4 · 0:45:12 · Rodney Palmer · Glen Motz

  • 📺 An April 2020 National piece with Adrienne Arsenault coached viewers to correct “dumb old dad” sharing a lab-origin link.
  • 🔬 At that moment CDC had not ruled out a lab; Washington Post and later Vanity Fair documented Wuhan safety warnings and gain-of-function papers already public.
  • 🎭 Palmer calls the segment propaganda that sold fear, supplied no news-gathering, and cast the broadcaster as sole arbiter of truth.

First case study of alleged state-broadcaster technique on origin of the virus.

← Palmer: CBC Morphed From Public to State Broadcaster | CBC Kids, Blank Safety Claims, and Early Signals →

Transcript

Rodney Palmer · 0:45:12

One of the first things I noticed was a story on The National at CBC Television, the national news, with Adrienne Arsenault, one of the greatest broadcasters we have, by the way. She's amazing in the way that she is on camera, and she's very believable and trustworthy. But when I saw this I did not recognize it as news.

Rodney Palmer · 0:45:31

So what do you do when this happens? A loved one, let's say it's your dad, drops into the family group chat with something he thinks is real.

Glen Motz · 0:45:39

It's something about China manufacturing the coronavirus.

Rodney Palmer · 0:45:43

There's a link to a site you've never heard of with a message calling it scary stuff.

Glen Motz · 0:45:48

So what do you do with this? Do you ignore it? Do you call him out saying how ridiculous you think this is?

Speaker F · 0:45:54

So hold back on all that reactive talk.

Rodney Palmer · 0:45:56

Maybe try something like this.

Glen Motz · 0:45:58

Yeah, these are scary times, we're all a bit afraid, but let's be careful.

Rodney Palmer · 0:46:02

What you're sharing is inaccurate and it feeds into that fear we all feel.

Rodney Palmer · 0:46:08

Fear was what they were selling here, it wasn't news. And more interestingly, on April 4th, 2020, CDC had no idea that this didn't come from a lab. I covered the SARS outbreak in 2002 in Beijing, and I followed the World Health Organization, the virus hunters determining who was patient zero. And I know that the amount of time that this takes, and it hadn't been determined yet. So how did they presume in that story, number one, that it wasn't from a lab. They presented no evidence. There was no news gathering. And more importantly, they said, don't trust your dumb old dad. That's what the focus of this story was. Don't trust your family member. So this is another thing that state broadcasters do. They attempt to supplant themselves as the arbiters of truth and divide you from your standard— the person you seek as a true person, a wise person in your life, in this case, your father. So they had no evidence, and yet they did this. It's because this was propaganda, and I recognized it instantly. Just a few days later, The Washington Post did news gathering. It published a story that there were safety issues at the Wuhan lab.

Rodney Palmer · 0:47:10

This is 10 days after the Adrian Arsenault's piece. Going back to 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing had been warning Washington about safety and management weaknesses at the, the Wuhan Institute of Virology that stated specifically there was a potential human transmission representing a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. This is 2 years before. Did the CBC come on 10 days later and said, sorry, The Washington Post has broken a story that we're looking into, that it might be from the lab? No, they didn't do that. They kept telling you, you know, it's ridiculous to be from the lab. The next year, Vanity Fair did a deep dive and found 5 scientific papers published 7 years prior to that broadcast by the scientists at the Wuhan lab in public domain that showed that they were creating a brand new infectious pathogen, some Frankensteinian bacteria that— or virus rather— that was merging the SARS-2002 virus with a new bat virus.

Rodney Palmer · 0:48:13

They said there were safety deficiencies at the Wuhan lab. They said there were genetically engineered rats with humanized lungs. And all of this information was available to Adrienne Arsenault, the CBC, and The National at the time they told us, don't believe it to be true. So they, with the billions of dollars that they have from the people of Canada and the federal government, they failed to tell us this. And it's probably not because they didn't know how. It's probably because they were acting as a state broadcaster. The next thing they did was when the vaccine—.

Glen Motz · 0:48:47

Can I just stop you? Because don't we now, with the Fauci Diaries, it, it's pretty clear that this lab leak theory is very, very probable.

Rodney Palmer · 0:48:57

The U.S. Congress issued a report that it was definite. The, the U.S. FBI has issued a report that it is definite from the lab. And, but my point here is, in the moment, it was provable, and a journalist would have proved it. Or at least strongly pointed the finger. Not only was it probable, but it was the most likely scenario at the moment that she was telling us, don't believe your father if he says, 'cause he's kind of dumb, 'cause dads are. This is, this was a scenario that they were creating because they were not exercising the journalism that we expected them to do. They were simply exercising state propaganda. And it gets worse, Mr. Buckley.