If it turns out the COVID pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the world.
But this possible scandal, yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal: the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social and mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously.
Rewind to February of last year, when people such as Sen. Tom Cotton began pointing to disturbing facts: the coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses; the report that some of the original COVID patients had no contact with the food markets where the pandemic supposedly originated; the fact the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis. Think what you will about Cotton, but these were reasonable observations warranting impartial investigation.
The common reaction in elite liberal circles? A Washington Post reporter called it a “fringe theory” that “has been repeatedly disputed by experts.” The Atlantic Council accused Cotton of abetting an “infodemic” by “pushing a debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab.” A writer for Vox said it was a “dangerous conspiracy theory.”
There are many more examples. But the overall shape of the narrative was clear. On one side were experts like the World Health Organization (WHO): knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis.