Another 'right-wing conspiracy theory' proven true
Opinion by Elizabeth Stauffer • Washington Examiner • 19h ago
The Left has perpetrated too many hoaxes over the past several years for us to remember them all. But one of the most consequential was the lie that COVID-19 had zoonotic origins, meaning that it jumped from an animal to a human.
Without evidence, Democrats claimed this theory was settled fact, just as they did when they claimed former President Donald Trump was an agent of Russia or when they dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as the product of Russian disinformation. And those who had the temerity to reject their narratives were quickly targeted by the press and smeared as “conspiracy theorists” responsible for spreading “misinformation.”
But as is so often the case, it turns out the conspiracy theorists were right all along. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Energy Department had revised its assessment on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic based on new intelligence. Sources who were familiar with a “classified intelligence report” told the Wall Street Journal the agency now concludes with “low confidence” that the virus came from an accidental laboratory leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
This was always the most logical conclusion.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) was one of the first to raise the possibility of the lab leak in 2020, pointing out during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Wuhan, where the virus first broke out, is home to “China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens, including yes, coronavirus.”
Cotton was widely mocked by the liberal media over these remarks. He wasn’t alone. Everyone who thought it was possible the virus may have escaped from the WIV where gain-of-function research was being conducted and that the disease may have been enhanced, or made more lethal, during these lab experiments was smeared as racist and xenophobic.
Long after the fact, we learned that Dr. Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, told Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a Jan. 31, 2020, email that he and his colleagues had noticed “some of COVID-19’s features look possibly engineered.”
He wrote, “The genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
Within days, Fauci took steps to shut down the conversation about the lab leak theory among members of the science community. Yet evidence of the lab leak theory continued to grow.
In early February 2020, Botao Xiao, a professor at South China University of Technology, published a paper arguing that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” He “withdrew the paper a few weeks later after Chinese authorities insisted no accident had taken place,” according to the Washington Post.
Did no one wonder why Xiao withdrew his paper? Or find it curious that those who refused to fall into step with the Chinese Communist Party’s version of events had a way of disappearing?
The turning point in the debate over the pandemic’s origins came on Feb. 19, 2020, when a group of 27 “renowned” public health scientists released a joint statement in the medical journal the Lancet. They wrote: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent … and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
This pivotal statement was drafted and organized by Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific nonprofit organization that had funded research at the WIV. Daszak was also a member of the World Health Organization investigative team that concluded a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
But we now know that the lab leak is the most likely scenario, according to multiple U.S. government agencies, including the Energy Department, the State Department, and the FBI.
And suddenly, journalists who once scoffed at the idea abruptly and in unison opened to the possibility. They’ll never apologize for smearing those, including Cotton, who were right the entire time. Nor will they even admit that he was right and they were wrong — because to do so would be to admit that they, not the right-wing kooks whom they so despise, were the real conspiracy theorists all along.
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