Jon Stewart courts controversy with wild talk show virus rant - NEWS.com.au

Jon Stewart speaks to Stephen Colbert.Source:YouTube.

US comedian Jon Stewart veered wildly off script during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week, putting forward his own theory that Covid-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan.

Jon Stewart speaks to Stephen Colbert.Source:YouTube.

“Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking China?

The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.

Fact check: The lab Stewart’s referring to is in fact the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute located around 15km from the seafood wet market that reported the first cluster of Covid cases late in 2019.

“You ask a scientist, ‘So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab, how did this happen?’ And they’re like, ‘mmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle?’ No.

“It could be possible that they have the lab in Wuhan to study the novel coronavirus diseases because in Wuhan there are a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because of the bat population,” Colbert countered.

The only coronavirus we have is in WUHAN, where they have – what’s the lab called again, Stephen?”.

“The Wuhan novel coronavirus lab,” said Colbert, before telling his guest: “You know we stopped filming a long time ago.”.

But various right-wing figures applauded Stewart for the speech, with US senator Tom Cotton claiming that Stewart was “right about the Wuhan lab – even if he’s 18 months late.”.

This week, new footage revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”