It was never a conspiracy theory. This narrative isn’t plotline fodder for the X-Files or filled with unsubstantiated material. The coronavirus leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, had plenty of preliminary evidence. No one had to pick unlikely events or hypotheses to string this along; the blood trail went right to the facility’s door. It wasn’t wet markets or bat soup. It was crappy containment policies at a research facility in a secretive, authoritarian regime that let it get out. Even worse, the Chinese government wasn’t transparent—shocker— about this lab leak, and we might have financed some of the research that led to the pandemic. Spencer wrote about how the Energy Department came to that determination over the weekend.
Yet, those who uttered it for months were banned, silenced, and smeared as paranoid racists. We have the receipts of the liberal media once again placing feelings over facts and making themselves look like idiots. If it made Donald Trump or the Republicans look good and the Democrats wrong, then you were a racist. The best was how the media said this theory was used to gin up anti-Asian hate; COVID didn’t birth racial prejudice against Asians. It’s always been around, but it was another liberal media attempt to control the flow of information when everyone and their mother knew months ago that the Fruit Roll-Ups lab probably had better security protocols—and that place isn’t even real. Even now, some outlets are still holding out hope that this wasn’t a lab leak (via The Hill):
Republicans are seizing on a new Energy Department conclusion pointing to a “lab leak” as causing the COVID-19 outbreak to call for swift action against the Chinese government, which has refused to cooperate with global probes into the pandemic’s origin.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported Sunday that the Energy Department had determined with “low confidence” that the virus was leaked from a lab, though it is unclear what new intelligence that was based on.