Some 17 months ago, Tom Cotton was warning anyone who would listen that the novel coronavirus very likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The media have finally caught on that, huh, maybe the Chinese Communist Party really was lying when it insisted that the virus evolved naturally.
With the sole exceptions of Josh Rogin at the Washington Post and Nicholson Baker in New York magazine, the corporate media still refuse to consider honestly the lab leak hypothesis in their pages or programs. But on Twitter, the conversation has finally gone mainstream. We primarily have the dogged push of Senate Republicans such as Cotton and Rand Paul pressing the issue to thank.
We can also thank Donald McNeil, the former star New York Times science writer canceled by some woke teenagers upset about their own hurt feelings. McNeil put out a lengthy piece explaining how he “learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak hypothesis” that made the rounds on social media.
“We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic,” McNeil writes. “We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.”
McNeil’s piece is otherwise a sober analysis of the evidence granting credibility to the lab leak hypothesis, but the entire premise of the piece is based on a lie. The argument supporting the hypothesis has not gotten “considerably stronger.” It was always strong — the single strongest hypothesis to explain the origin of the coronavirus, in fact. It’s not that we found new evidence backing the hypothesis. It’s just that the same journalists who parroted the talking points of scientists with obvious conflicts of interest were so blinded by their partisan loathing of then-President Donald Trump that they could not be trusted to evaluate the evidence themselves.
By April 2020, we knew that:
- The State Department had warned in 2018 that the WIV, China’s only BSL-4 laboratory, was conducting dangerous gain-of-function experiments on novel coronaviruses.
- The WIV lab of Shi Zhengli, China’s “bat woman,” experimented on RaTG13, the closest known genetic cousin to SARS-Cov-2, with a 96% nucleotide similarity.
- Despite the fact that RaTG13 and other bat-borne coronaviruses were discovered over 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, we have zero evidence of COVID-19 infections between Yunnan and Wuhan prior to the pandemic. This makes it extraordinarily likely that the virus did indeed originate in Wuhan.
- The Huanan Seafood Market did not sell bats.
- The Lancet letter lividly denouncing the possibility that COVID emerged from a lab was organized by Peter Daszak, the virologist who funded Zhengli’s gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses.
- Daszak himself was funded by Anthony Fauci’s NIAID even though the Obama administration tried to end the funding of gain-of-function research, citing safety concerns.
- The NIH demanded Daszak stop funding the WIV after the onset of the pandemic.
- The United States government was actively considering the lab leak hypothesis probable.
- The Chinese Communist Party was blocking any attempt by outside investigators to enter the WIV.
What have we learned since then? Not much, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party. Even World Health Organization boss Tedros Adhanom, who was bought and paid for by the party, conceded that his team’s “investigation” of the lab was not credible or complete. And considering that Daszak was the only American on the WHO investigation team, Tedros was obviously right.
So, why the seismic shift in public discourse? It’s here where McNeil gives the game away.
“The ‘lab-leak theory’ migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion,” McNeil writes of the media’s early decision to discount the hypothesis. “It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like ‘Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.'”
This is an interesting line of reasoning — as if Pizzagate nutjobs could perhaps make Jeffrey Epstein or his famous friends innocent. The fallacy here is obvious. Just because the Stop the Steal lunatics spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump doesn’t mean that individual instances of election fraud did not happen. And just because some people used the term “Kung Flu” doesn’t make the Chinese communists any less disgusting or less responsible for covering up the origins of the pandemic — and possibly for creating it.
Furthermore, while journalists are happy to question rightly anything from the mouth of a politician, the pandemic turned the press into parrots. The Chinese Communist Party, Daszak, and even Fauci had ample reason to want the lab leak hypothesis to be written off as an alt-right delusion. Not one virologist dependent on Fauci’s funding had an incentive to speak up and contradict him — quite the contrary, actually.
The odds are now slim that we will ever find a smoking gun explaining the pandemic’s origin. China’s regime has surely destroyed any relevant evidence, while it has been blocking all independent investigations. At best, we have circumstantial evidence, and that evidence does support the notion that the lab leak hypothesis is more likely true than the absurd idea that the virus emerged from a wet market over a thousand miles away from China’s bats, and that didn’t even sell bats.
This was as true in April 2020 as it is now, and any “journalist” pretending the lab leak hypothesis is only now credible based on new evidence has some real soul searching to do.
