To most people, news that yet another government agency now believes the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab is the least surprising development in the last three years. What, though, should we make of journalists who spent so much time and effort trying to suppress the story, attempting to discourage inquiry and independent thinking by threatening those who dared voice it, accusing them of outlandish and even racist conspiracy theories?
“Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,” wrote Apoorva Mandavilli, the New York Times journalist covering COVID-19. “But alas, that day is not today.” She later deleted the tweet amid an understandable backlash against it. What does her clear and profound ignorance say about New York Times coverage? Note that her tweet, in late May 2021, came after the Wall Street Journal reported that researchers at the Wuhan Institute had been among the first to fall ill.
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By that late date, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler had finally stopped singing with the chorus and was admitting that most news outlets had got the story wrong. Months earlier, apparently based on an animation he had seen online, Kessler had called it “virtually impossible” for a lab leak to have caused COVID-19. He even criticized Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for suggesting otherwise.
The COVID know-it-alls’ ignorance and arrogance arise from the same ideologically motivated reasoning that impelled news media to suppress true stories about Hunter Biden’s inculpating laptop. But the ramifications of COVID-19 are far worse because the laptop didn’t make more than half a billion people sick or kill 7 million of them.
Big Tech, of course, took the side of arrogant idiots in both cases, as it was taking orders from the Biden administration to suppress “disinformation.”
It was always a telling coincidence that a coronavirus of bat origin would suddenly infect humans where an immunology lab was experimenting on bat viruses. A lab leak was always the simplest and most likely explanation. It should have been thoroughly investigated and taken seriously, not downplayed and censored.
The real spreaders of disinformation are people esteemed in liberal circles. They showed themselves to be tendentious and untrustworthy. People willing to discard truth out of fear and social pressure are unworthy of readers’ trust. Those who used such social pressure to discourage others from seeking the truth should especially be ignored.
Still, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) put it, “Being proven right doesn’t matter. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.” He is right. Leaders need to abandon their fear of being called “racist” or any other insult by bad-faith leftists, start calling out China for what it inflicted on the world, and recognize the grave threat it continues to pose. Fortunately, the recent flight of a Chinese spy balloon has forced many people to rethink their positions on China.
The investigation into COVID-19’s origins must continue because there are key questions unanswered, among them whether this was a simple accident or something more sinister. Totalitarian China cuts corners on health and safety and is also an aggressively malignant force in world affairs. Which of these two caused the pandemic? Was it both?
China’s efforts to arrest doctors and scientists, destroy evidence, and, in the words of the State Department, “systematically prevent a transparent and thorough investigation” of COVID-19’s origins must be viewed as evidence of culpability. So are the Chinese government’s efforts to blame the virus on the U.S. Army, which look like the desperate deflections of a guilty party. How deep does China’s culpability go, and how dark are the reasons behind the deed?
Journalists and commentators who tried to enforce groupthink about COVID-19 should be discredited and ignored. The new focus must be on China and the danger it poses to the world. COVID-19 is just one symptom of a pandemic of authoritarianism for which some vaccine must be found.
