Journalists tripped over themselves to dismiss a theory that’s now been endorsed by the Energy Department.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at the pundits and reporters who tripped over themselves to dismiss the lab-leak theory, examine another pathetic “gotcha” attempt aimed at Ron DeSantis, and hit more media misses.
Will the Media Finally Take the Lab-Leak Theory Seriously?
The time has come for yet another media reckoning. The U.S. Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory leak, according to a new Wall Street Journal report that offers the latest piece of evidence that the media were wrong to roundly dismiss the theory as a conspiracy for much of the last three years.
The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, made its judgment with “low confidence,” the Wall Street Journal reported. But the assessment nevertheless marks a change from 2021, when the department was undecided on how the virus originated.
A declassified intelligence report released in November 2021 previously revealed that the FBI concluded with “moderate confidence” that the pandemic began with a “laboratory accident” following a 90-day review ordered by President Biden. The FBI still holds this view, according to the report, while four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council assess with “low confidence” the pandemic was likely caused by natural transmission from an infected animal. Two other agencies, including the CIA, are undecided.
Taken together, the assessments indicate that, at the very least, a lab leak was a real possibility from the beginning and not a fringe conspiracy theory.
But that news is too little, too late for scientists, politicians, and other figures who were ridiculed and “fact-checked” for daring to suggest the virus could have emerged from a lab in a city that is home to several virology labs — including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where bat coronaviruses were studied and where, according to State Department cables from 2018, basic safety precautions were often flouted.
Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said in February 2020 that, “We don’t know where [COVID-19] originated and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
He added, “Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, 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 any evidence on that question at all.”
The media quickly hung Cotton out to dry. The New York Times accused Cotton of repeating a “fringe theory,” while CNN claimed he was playing a “dangerous game.” The Washington Post reported that Cotton “keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” and USA Today called the theory a “myth.”
Meanwhile, the Lancet published an op-ed in February 2020 from a group of scientists who wrote, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
In March 2020, Vox wrote that “conspiracy theories are a distraction” in a public-health crisis, confidently adding that “no, #coronavirus did not start in a Chinese lab…” Two months later, Vice reported that “Trump’s Wuhan Lab Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory is Bogus, According to, Uh, Everyone.”
That same month, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) accused the Washington Post of “abandoning all pretenses of journalism to produce CCP propaganda” in response to a video from the paper suggesting a lab leak was doubtful. Washington Post fact-checker replied to Cruz saying, “I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”
I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves. https://t.co/TprMnaHSZL
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 1, 2020
CNN’s Don Lemon asked CNN senior reporter Alexander Marquardt at the time how “far off” then-President Trump’s claims about a possible lab leak were “compared to what your sources are telling you.” Marquardt said, “Well, Don, they’re pretty much the exact opposite.”
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace accused Trump of “turning his intelligence community to now investigate a conspiracy theory about COVID coming from a lab in Wuhan.”
At best, the lab-leak theory was “debunked” as a conspiracy theory; at worst, it was condemned as racism.
An August 2020 study in the European Journal of Cultural Studies said the lab-leak theory was an example of “anti-Chinese racism” and “toxic white masculinity.”
New York Times science and health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted in May 2021, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” Though she quickly deleted the tweet after it was met with backlash.
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta claimed in March 2020 that Trump referring to Covid-19 as a “foreign virus” “smacks of xenophobia.”
On CNN, Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta says President @realDonaldTrump referring to the coronavirus as a "foreign virus" "smacks of xenophobia." pic.twitter.com/1aibFjZp5R
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 12, 2020
In September 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former post-doctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, spoke about the lab-leak theory on Fox News, saying she “can present solid evidence . . . [that] it is a man-made virus created in the lab.” A PolitiFact “fact-check” rated her claims as a “pants on fire” lie.
That same month, Media Matters criticized podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading the “unfounded conspiracy theory that Covid-19 started in a lab.”
Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of the Scientific American, went so far as to accuse former CDC director Robert Redfield of sharing “the conspiracy theory that the virus came from the Wuhan lab” when he appeared on CNN in March 2021. Helmuth tweeted, “Epidemiologists and virologists are doing heroic and urgent work on social media debunking everything he said. Thanks so much to them.”
Helmuth defended her earlier comments in a statement to National Review on Monday: “We still don’t know exactly how SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats and other species to humans. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Energy has estimated, with ‘low confidence,’ that it may have come from a lab. Other agencies, and many experts who study zoonotic diseases and disease transmission, say a natural spillover is much more likely.”
She added: “Many theories with little or no evidence have been circulating since the beginning of the pandemic. We would need much more evidence to conclude what the origin was, and it may never be possible to settle this question.”
In May 2021, Facebook announced it would no longer remove posts referencing the lab-leak theory, reversing course from a policy it set months earlier of censoring what it called false and misleading health claims, including suggestions that “Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured.”
Still, as late as June 2021, Forbes was still authoritatively claiming that “the Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis Is A Conspiracy Theory, Not Science.”
Despite the Department of Energy’s assessment offering yet another opportunity for media introspection, it appears some are not entirely ready to let go of their imagined intellectual superiority. The Hill dismissed the reaction to the report as another example of “Republicans pounce” in an article titled, “Republicans jump on ‘lab leak’ report, call for action against China.”
“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 report says.
It adds: “The lack of confidence or details on the assessment didn’t stop Republicans from claiming validation and calling for urgent action against China.”
Yet as NR’s Jim Geraghty reported, the Department of Energy assessment comes from its Z Division, “a special division that, as part of its mission to track and mitigate the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, specializes in the study of biological weapons such as viruses.”
Geraghty writes:
The Division’s assessments are not to be ignored, dismissed, or hand-waved away.
And yes, Z Division’s conclusion is of “low confidence,” meaning it’s only leaning a little in the direction of a lab leak. But clearly, it has encountered something new that prompted it to reevaluate its conclusions and shifted its thinking — and whatever that “something new” is, it’s probably extremely significant; Z Division doesn’t change its mind willy-nilly or on a vague hunch.
Meanwhile, attorney Jill Filipovic said she is “very (darkly) fascinated by the many many people with absolutely no relevant training or expertise who have nonetheless spent the past two years insisting either that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory, or that a lab leak is the only possible pandemic explanation.” Yet she then goes on to offer a possible explanation for why much of the media and the Left “understandably” dismissed the possibility of a lab-leak: “The best explanation I can come up with is that Trump’s racist ‘China virus’ bullsh**, which resulted in lots of anti-Asian bigotry and attacks on Asian people, put liberals understandably on the defense against any theory that seemed to blame China for Covid.”
Headline Fail of the Week
The Daily Beast published a hard-hitting piece of journalism this week: “Ron DeSantis’ Yearbook Reveals He Didn’t Always Hate AP.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been battling the College Board since Florida rejected a pilot AP course in African American studies. Critics argued that a part of the course focused on contemporary political and culture controversies centered on hard-left voices and left out conventional liberal and conservative perspectives. DeSantis told reporters last month that the course advocates radical political positions and attempts to indoctrinate students. He specifically took issue with one section of the course focused on “Black Queer Studies.”
While College Board later announced changes to the framework of the course, many of which addressed conservative concerns, DeSantis later suggested at a press conference that Florida could abandon the Advanced Placement program and seek to allow students to qualify for college credit using a different program, such as the International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment programs. “It’s not clear to me that this particular operator is the one that’s going to need to be used in the future,” he said of College Board.
Or as the Daily Beast reported: “When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis floated the possibility of eliminating Advanced Placement classes from his state’s curriculum, he conveniently left out an important fact. DeSantis was once the “AP US History student of the year,” according to his high school yearbook, pages of which were obtained by The Daily Beast.”
NR’s Dan McLaughlin said it best:
This is such a dumb person's idea of a gotcha. DeSantis isn't against advanced placement courses, he's questioning whether a monopoly is doing its job well a quarter century after he was a customer. https://t.co/3nSvtwTwIG
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 26, 2023
Media Misses
-Self-identified “award-winning multimedia journalist” David Leavitt falsely charged that:
“Transphobic hate group @libsoftiktok have been banned from Slack for promoting the ‘National Day of Hate,’” and suggested it’s “time for @elonmusk to remove them from Twitter too.”
Libs of Tik Tok creator Chaya Raichik quickly disputed that “reporting”: “I’m literally a religious jew. I also never tweeted about the National Day of Hate. Slack also never mentioned the National Day of Hate in their message to us. Hope this absolute garbage tweet of lies was worth the clicks, though!”
I’m literally a religious jew. I also never tweeted about the National Day of Hate. Slack also never mentioned the National Day of Hate in their message to us.
Hope this absolute garbage tweet of lies was worth the clicks, though! https://t.co/A73a7sgza8 pic.twitter.com/HOcR53fd3v
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) February 26, 2023
–Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, recently got into a Twitter argument with a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution over oppression, with Hannah-Jones confidently telling Xi Van Fleet that her “vision of America does not match the reality.”
Mine is not a “vision”. Mine is “lived experience” under the enslavement of Communism, freedom in America, and the current Woke Revolution aiming to undo America.
Black Americans are enslaved no more thanks to the persevering principles and humanity of this country.
— Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) February 26, 2023
–Brian Stelter offered a defense of CNN’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop when the story first broke in October 2020: “I think newsrooms just looked around and said, ‘We don’t have the laptop. We don’t have evidence. We don’t have evidence it’s real. And we know that there are reasons to wonder if it’s disinformation,'” Stelter said.
“A lot of the lies that happen now about what happened in 2020 go like this — they say, ‘All these a**holes, they all called it disinformation!’ That’s not true,” Stelter added. “A lot of us just wondered, we said out loud, ‘could this be?’ We said things like ‘some former US officials think it might be,’ it was always cushioned — it was not always, it was often cushioned that way. And now in retrospect, two years later, three years later, people like partisans like to pretend that it was labeled disinformation, which it wasn’t. There was concern. There was reason to be concerned not because of the Hillary emails, but because of the Russian attempt in 2016.”