So about that COVID-19 lab theory …
A second look.
Related highlights:
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The press dragged Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas over the coals this year for suggesting the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
Now, months later, major newsrooms are saying we cannot discount the possibility that the viral pandemic that has killed 1.8 million people and counting may indeed be the product of a Wuhan lab experiment gone terribly wrong.
Where does Sen. Cotton go for his apology?
“We don’t know where [COVID-19] originated,” the senator said in February, “and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
He added, “Now, 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. And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.”
The press was quick to denounce the Republican lawmaker. It’s a “myth,” declared USA Today. The senator is playing a “dangerous game,” said CNN. It’s a “fringe theory,” proclaimed the New York Times.
But that was then. This is now.
“The possibility of a laboratory accident or inadvertent leak having caused the coronavirus outbreak must not be ignored,” the Washington Post’s editorial board said this week. “The genetic makeup of the coronavirus is similar to a variant found in bats. Research into bat coronaviruses was being conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which collected samples from a mine in Yunnan province in 2012 and 2013.”
The board adds, “A credible investigation of how the pandemic began will require China to be completely open and transparent, including about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Well, see, this is funny because it was the Washington Post specifically that published a news report in response to the senator that stated with total certainty, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”
Elsewhere this week, New York magazine published a lengthy article titled simply, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.” The story's subhead reads, “For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?”
“There are,” writes novelist Nicholson Baker, “in fact, some helpful points of agreement between zoonoticists — those who believe in a natural origin of the SARS-2 virus — and those who believe that it probably came from a laboratory.”
He adds, “Both sides agree, when pressed, that a lab origin can’t be conclusively ruled out and a natural origin can’t be ruled out either — because nature, after all, is capable of improbable, teleological-seeming achievements.”
Earlier, however, certain New York magazine staffers were content to dismiss the lab hypothesis out of hand as “embarrassing” speculation “discounted by virologists,” while others accused Cotton of “xenophobia” for maintaining that China is responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.
What happened between now and then?
Indeed, the question now is: Why? Why are newsrooms only now taking a serious look at the lab theory after so many in the press saw fit to dismiss it out of hand? What changed?
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This post has been updated.