Now that the Washington Post reported on it, is it finally OK to say out loud that the China-borne coronavirus may have come out of a science lab in Wuhan?
I only ask because the national media and left-wing denialists, right up to this very moment, have been nearly snapping their own spines while bending over backward to dismiss the idea. They pilloried Republican Sen. Tom Cotton as a lunatic for stating the obvious — that China, one way or another, is solely responsible for the global disease outbreak that has so far left more than 100,000 dead and nearly 2 million infected.
The Post itself called it a “conspiracy theory” to suggest that, contrary to the consensus, the virus may not have originated in one of those filthy wet seafood markets popular in China. It was a “fringe theory,” according to the New York Times, to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the pathogen came about in a less innocent way.
So far as the media were concerned, even to think such a thing was tantamount to a hate crime. Yet here’s Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin writing on Tuesday:
Huh, interesting. Turns out that’s precisely what Cotton said. He was belittled as a conspiracy theorist for it — oh, and I’m sure that his being a Republican close to President Trump had nothing to do with that.
Cotton had explained this in expert detail on Twitter back in mid-February, when the media were trying to shut him down and cast him as a deranged sidewalk fortuneteller.
“There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus,” he wrote. “1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market). 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in).”
None of that is unreasonable or illogical. In fact, it’s the opposite: How the virus got to us and Europe and Africa and Australia all traces back to one place, no matter which hypothetical you pick, and the regime that made it possible should face consequences.
