The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend’s big story about the probable origin of the Covid-19 virus in China’s Wuhan lab. In the related editorial this morning the Journal calls its scoop “Another turn in the Covid lab-leak story.” The editorial harks back to the April 2020 op-ed column “Coronavirus and the laboratories in Wuhan” by Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton has posted the column in accessible form here. Today’s Journal editorial recalls: “The media conformity caucus immediately derided Mr. Cotton for peddling a ‘conspiracy theory’ that had been ‘debunked,’ as the Washington Post put it at the time.”
It has seemed to us from the outset that the circumstantial evidence supporting the origin of the virus in a Wuhan lab was overwhelming. Scrolling through our archives, I see that John Hinderaker and I have devoted many, many posts to the subject. I wrote “Rocking pneumonia or the Wuhan flu?” in a post dated May 24, 2021, a year after Senator Cotton’s column. Based on Wall Street Journal reporting that I found powerfully suggestive, this is what I wrote nearly two years ago and this has been my theme: “It’s not too late to apply common sense to the available evidence, including the circumstantial evidence provided by the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party authorities.”
[Yes, this has been obvious for at least two years. And yet today, we still have a bunch of revanchists trying to tell us that “low confidence” debunks the report, when all it means is that the intelligence community hasn’t got a smoking gun for its assessment in hand. — Ed]
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