In dismissing the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, journalists betrayed their mission to seek the truth.
In February 2020, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, 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 that 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.”
