But for Wednesday’s whistleblower accusations of a coverup, you may have already forgotten the hotly contested debate about COVID’s origin. From early in the pandemic, there were two competing theories about where the virus came from. The first was zoonotic, the dominant theory among the expert class early in the pandemic, which held that COVID migrated from animals to humans, likely at the type of illegal wet market with live animals for sale common in many areas of China.
The second theory, the lab leak hypothesis, is relatively straightforward. As the name implies, it posits that COVID first infected humans not through an infected animal but escaped or was released from one of the many high-level biosafety labs in and around Wuhan. These labs were well known for their research on coronaviruses – sometimes supported with U.S. funding. These labs often lacked the appropriate safety conditions required of such facilities, making an accident of any kind more plausible.
Well, apparently not plausible enough for the press. Despite the presence of a level-four Chinese Communist Party-controlled biolab doing coronavirus research mere miles from where cases first originated, the legacy media rejected the idea that it was appropriate to so much as ask whether the pandemic might stem from anywhere but nature. I’ve highlighted examples of how quickly the media wrote off the lab leak theory (latest example here, original thread here), but I wanted to add a bit more analysis to those look-backs. Do check those other stories out if you’d like to see the full rundown of headlines like these:
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