CNN anchor Chris Cuomo claimed that the U.S. government never took the lab leak theory for COVID-19’s origin seriously, despite him reporting on the matter last year.
“The government had not been open to the lab theory,” Cuomo said during his show Wednesday. “That is why it’s so politically charged … Trumpers who were complicit in playing down the pandemic reality in America are now seeing more interest in the China lab theory as some kind of vindication, enough to play ‘I told you so’ with Fauci.”
But Cuomo himself once reported breaking news in April of last year that the government was investigating the possibility that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
“All right, we have breaking news on our watch. It is a very provocative headline,” Cuomo said at the time. “Here’s the headline: ‘The United States is pursuing the theory that the virus started in a Chinese lab, not a market.’ I know the internet is rife with conspiracy theories and concerns that this was something that was worked on … and part of the curiosity is we don’t know a lot because somebody changed a virus structure enough to make it a mystery for us.”
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Cuomo went on to stress that the U.S. was only “investigating” the theory, which he said “isn’t as strong” as saying the government believes the theory.
“This is a story to watch,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo’s assessment that the U.S. government never took the lab leak theory seriously is also contradicted by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who, in May of last year, said there was “enormous evidence” that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
“And so, while the intelligence community continues to do its work — they should continue to do that, and verify so that we are certain — I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo said at the time.
While the theory that the virus could have emerged from a lab was largely dismissed by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci and much of the media, others such as Sen. Tom Cotton continued to sound the alarm that the theory was worthy of investigation.
“We know that it didn’t start in the Wuhan food market. That was the original story of the Chinese Communist Party, so it’s only responsible to ask where it did start,” Cotton said in February 2020. “I still think the most likely hypothesis is it was naturally occurring, but given the proximity of that laboratory to the food market, it is only reasonable that we ask the Chinese Communist Party to be open and transparent about the kind of research they were conducting there and the safety, protocols, and practices they had in place.”
Cotton would later go on to chastise the media for dismissing the theory, accusing the “mainstream media” of being “apologists” for the “Chinese Communists.”
“The mainstream media are largely apologists for Chinese Communists, and they will accept Chinese Communist propaganda,” Cotton said in April 2020. “They immediately try to accuse anyone who raises these reasonable questions as conspiracy theorists that are accusing China of creating a biological weapon.”
For his part, Fauci has now come around to the idea that a lab leak is a possible explanation.
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But Cuomo insisted Tuesday that it was the “political Right” that was guilty of obsessing over the origins of the virus as a way to “forward an agenda.”
“Why? Because the more that this is about China being sneaky, the less it is about our leadership failing under Trump,” Cuomo said.
