![]() ![]() Even some scientists who initially pooh-poohed the idea are now demanding an investigation. In recent months, there has been one bombshell disclosure after another. Desperate to avoid those risks, media outlets, health organizations, government agencies, even the scientific community labored seemingly in concert to discount the lab-leak possibility and discredit anyone who raised it.īut, to the frustration of gatekeepers like Mandavilli, evidence that COVID-19 did originate at the Wuhan Institute of Virology keeps getting stronger. Moreover, focusing on China’s sloppy research practices and possible cover-up would distract the public from the media’s preferred COVID narratives: Trump’s incompetence, racial injustice, and red-state recklessness. From their perspective, the issue was raised by the wrong sort of people-including Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald Trump-and giving the story oxygen might mean lending credence to conservative talking points. Elite institutions and media outlets had been trying to get people to “stop talking about the lab leak theory” for over a year. In a way, you can understand her frustration. And yet here was one of the New York Times’ top pandemic reporters fretting that too many people were interested in the question. But, with a global death toll likely to approach 4 million, a Wuhan lab leak, if it did in fact occur, would be perhaps 10,000 times deadlier than the Ukraine nuclear accident.įor a science journalist, helping figure out the true genesis of this catastrophe would be the opportunity of a lifetime. (A slightly less creepy-but still horrifying-possibility: COVID-19 is caused by a naturally occurring virus that happened to leak while being studied at the Wuhan Institute.) Many observers have compared the accident to the Chernobyl meltdown, another high-tech screw-up compounded by government deceit. If researchers had manipulated the SARS-CoV-2 virus to be more virulent, and then that virus had escaped the lab, it would mean the pandemic was arguably the worst manmade disaster in history. The mounting evidence that the COVID-19 coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously emerging from nature, had become the hottest topic in journalism and potentially the most consequential science story in a generation. It would have been easy to scroll right past the comment-Twitter is full of people ranting about COVID and calling everyone racist-but for the writer’s Twitter bio: “Reporter on mainly #covid19.” Later that day, the Times reporter took down her tweet, saying it had been “badly phrased.” The day in question was May 26, 2021. But alas, that day is not yet here,” a writer named Apoorva Mandavilli recently posted on Twitter. ‘Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. ![]()
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