At the start of the pandemic, prestige US media outlets were quick to dismiss the hypothesis as a Dangerous Republican Lie. “The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it pants on fire,” ruled the Pointer Institute’s notionally nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking operation, Politifact, on the lab leak hypothesis. The
Washington Post accused Senator Tom Cotton of spreading “conspiracy theories” for wanting to investigate the theory. NPR enthusiastically “debunked” the claim.
You cannot make sense of the firmness with which the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed without appreciating how Trump changed American media. After the 2016 election, the top tier of American media traded objectivity for opposition. As the
New York Times has more or less
admitted, normal standards no longer applied. Success was now defined by the extent to which you made Donald Trump’s life difficult. This mattered when it came to the origins of the pandemic.
Anyone entertaining the possibility that lab negligence caused the pandemic wasn’t just peddling “misinformation”, but worse: misinformation that might have played into Trump’s hands in an election year. At a time when the only honest answer to the question of how the pandemic started was “I don’t know”, the most highly-regarded outlets in American media had decided that the answer most convenient to the president should be vigorously discredited.
But the more we learn, the less outlandish the lab leak theory looks. Don McNeil, a science reporter at the
New York Times and one of the best journalists covering the pandemic until his
recent firing, published a lengthy
Medium post this week in which he explains his initial reservations about the lab leak theory as well as why the argument has become “considerably stronger” as time has gone on. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control under Trump, recently said he believes that a lab leak is the most likely explanation of how the pandemic started.