American Journalists Shielded China and Erased the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory | Opinion

In February 2020, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton asked a provocative question: Was there some relationship between COVID-19 emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan and the fact that there's a biochemical lab in the city that specializes in studying coronaviruses? Was it possible that this lab was studying an animal who carried the virus and failed to properly secure it?

"We don't have evidence that this disease originated there," Cotton said of the lab, "but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all."

Cotton's comments were nuanced: He wasn't certain that COVID-19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but he considered it to be a possibility, and he was troubled that the Chinese government was failing to offer the transparency necessary to prove it one way or another.

But the response to Cotton's theory and nuanced line of questioning was brutal. The New York Times dismissed him as repeating a "Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins," as the headline put it. The Washington Post insisted that Cotton "keeps repeating a conspiracy theory that was already debunked." And the rest of the mainstream media and wasn't much kinder.

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