If Donald Trump had listened to Tom Cotton in January of 2020, he would likely still be president today. But while the rest of the Hill obsessed over the (first) impeachment proceedings against Trump, the Arkansas senator was trying to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus. Cotton was right when he repeatedly warned the White House that China was actively concealing the extent and nature of the virus, and he was right when he questioned its origins.
Neither Trump nor the media took the virus seriously when Cotton tried to warn the world. Key Trump allies encouraged him to ignore the pandemic, fearing a strong response’s potential impact on the next phases of his trade deal with Beijing and his electoral odds. Less responsible news outlets such as the Washington Post and BuzzFeed mocked that we ought to worry more about the flu.
And even as the coronavirus exploded into a complete pandemic, Cotton was written off as a conspiracy-theorizing Cassandra for pointing out the likelihood that SARS-Cov-2 had emerged from a Chinese lab, likely the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” Cotton said during a February 2020 Fox News hit. “China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.” Cotton was speaking specifically of China’s only BSL-4 lab, one that we already knew was conducting gain-of-function experiments on novel coronaviruses.
Last April, we already had most of the evidence we have today establishing circumstantial ties between SARS-CoV-2 and the WIV. We already knew that the WIV’s “batwoman,” Shi Zhengli, had experimented on RaTG13, the virus’s closest known natural relative. Josh Rogin at the Washington Post then broke the news that in 2018, diplomats had sent cables to the State Department, warning that the lab’s gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses were extremely risky. Furthermore, we knew that the Chinese Communist regime had gone to great lengths to conceal the virus’s origins and lock down the lab.
And yet, the Washington Post proudly branded Cotton’s lab leak hypothesis as an “already-debunked” conspiracy theory. The New York Times deemed it a “fringe” theory widely “dismissed” by scientists. By both scientists and the press, Cotton was written off first as a fearmonger and then as a kook. Given the Chinese Communists’ stranglehold over the World Health Organization, it seemed possible that we would never get the discussion we needed about the origins of the virus.
But now that Trump is out of office, the media have slowly but surely deemed it safe to raise the topic again. We have learned almost nothing new about the virus’s origins since one year ago, but now the public health “experts” and the press are finally taking the lab-leak hypothesis seriously.
Cotton asked all the right questions while the rest of the Beltway obsessed over stupid Trumpian palace intrigues and petty partisan fights. He was the leader we needed when we weren’t ready to listen. He deserves an apology from the media and the scientists who smeared him. Any insistence otherwise is driven by pure political animus.
