Another Contagious Disease

“When Republican Sen. Tom Cotton speculated that the coronavirus outbreak might have come out of a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan,” Timothy Carney wrote for the Washington Examiner on Friday, “he was roundly pilloried, mocked, and chastised by politicians and journalists.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” declared a Washington Post headline. Only problem? What the Post’s “experts” debunked, if anything, was that COVID-​19 was man-made. 

That’s not what Sen. Cotton said at all. Cotton simply noted that the Wuhan lab did work with bats and coronaviruses and that this contagion may have come from that lab, possibly by accident.

“[I]t turns out that Cotton might have been correct,” informs Carney, “and the very expert the media used to attack Cotton as some kind of conspiracy theorist now admits as much.”

In his column last week for The Washington Post, David Ignatius quoted Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, the “biosafety expert” used in earlier stories blasting Sen. Cotton, explaining that “the first human infection … could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker” — even noting that the Wuhan lab “provides only minimal protection” against such a dangerous event.

As Carney points out, “the idea that the virus accidentally came out of that lab may seamlessly move from ‘fringe opinion’ to respectable — even to consensus.”

“The first question,” argues Carney, “should be whether the folks who attacked that notion in February” — including The Washington Post and the Huffington Post — “will explain why they were unwilling to consider it.”

Media narratives — which Carney skewers regularly — are easy to come by. 

Objective news? Not so much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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