Media outlets that derided COVID lab-leak theory last year now scramble to save face
https://justthenews.com/accountability/m...-now-scrambling
Hypothesis has gone from "fringe theory" to a major presidential consideration.
By Daniel Payne
Updated: May 30, 2021 - 11:43pm


Major media outlets are scrambling to adjust their coverage of the COVID-19 "lab-leak" theory that many of them spent the past year deriding, one sign among many that the theory is gaining broader currency in the coronavirus debate after being dismissed as a "fringe" conspiracy for much of the pandemic.

The theory, which was first proposed in the earliest days of the pandemic at the start of 2020, holds that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a major coronavirus research site located just a few miles from the putative first outbreak of SARS-Cov-2, may have been responsible for a laboratory leak that launched the pandemic.

The Wuhan lab has for years been conducting experiments into coronaviruses to determine their "emergence potential," or their capacity for jumping into human beings and potentially causing epidemics or pandemics. The lab has reportedly been at least instrumentally involved in risky "gain-of-function" research, in which scientists increase the pathogenicity of viruses in order to determine their pandemic potential.

Some commentators and public officials, such as Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, were in the earliest months of the pandemic quick to note the first outbreak's proximity to the Wuhan lab and argue for the need to investigate it as a possible source of the pandemic. Yet media outlets spent much of last year either subtly or directly minimizing such suspicions, arguing instead for the allegedly high likelihood of the virus's natural origin. -- excerpt, rest at link above --