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

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

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

Goldberg also referenced comedian Jon Stewart’s remarks this week describing his surprise over the “anger” he faced for emphatically backing the COVID-19 lab leak 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 looking for the truth,” Goldberg said after playing a clip of Stewart’s comments.

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

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

“I know that when the last guy before Biden said anything about this, he made it about Asian people,” she added. “I’m sure Jon Stewart didn’t realize that that’s what was happening, because I’m sure he didn’t know what was going on all over the country, with Asian folks getting smacked and hit and people saying stuff to them about bringing the disease here.”

“If ‘you know who’ had not started it with that, had he not made it about that … it probably would have been listened to a lot differently,” Goldberg added.

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

“I remember February of 2020, before a lot of countries were even shut down for travel, I was at the [Department of Defense] and we were talking about an accidental lab leak as a very legitimate way that this could have come about,” Griffin said.

“The effort to silence it, I think, was disruptive to getting aswers,” she added.

Sunny Hostin argued the Chinese government played a key role in fomenting uncertainty about the virus’s origins 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 first to report on the exchange.