The CIA assessment should prompt introspection among journalists who mocked the theory for years.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at the progression of the lab-leak theory from “racist” conspiracy theory to likelier-than-not possibility, and we cover more media misses.
Still Waiting for the Media Mea Culpa on Covid
It’s been nearly five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. And for those of us waiting on members of the mainstream media to acknowledge they were wrong for spending two years flatly denying the possibility that the virus first emerged from a lab leak, well, it’s been a long five years.
In fact, the tables first began turning back in November 2021, when a declassified intelligence report revealed that the FBI had concluded with “moderate confidence” that the pandemic was started by a lab leak in Wuhan, China — but still no apologies were issued. The same could be said when, two years later, the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, came to a similar conclusion with “low confidence.”
This weekend, we found out the Biden-era CIA similarly assessed with “low confidence” that a lab leak is “more likely” than a natural origin, with both possibilities remaining plausible.
If history is any indication, the news is unlikely to inspire any soul searching from the media, which spent much of 2020 and 2021 dismissing the lab-leak theory and shooting down anyone who dare suggest otherwise as racist or anti-science, even as evidence suggested 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.
In fact, even now, several media outlets focused their reporting of the latest update on China’s denial of the CIA’s assessment or the fact that the assessment was given with “low confidence.”
“China says it’s ‘extremely unlikely’ COVID pandemic came from lab leak, as CIA now indicates,” reads a headline from CBS. Politico’s European division reports, “China hits back at CIA over Covid lab leak accusation.”
“The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the joint China–WHO expert team based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” said Mao Ning, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson.
(This being the same World Health Organization that said in 2021 that it was “definitely too early” to conclude the coronavirus had even started in China at all. And who can forget when WHO secretary Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed frustration over delays in beginning its investigation in China, caused by the Chinese government’s efforts to block the experts from starting their probe.)
Nonetheless, Mao claimed, “This has been widely recognized by the international community, including the scientific community.”
And yet, the pandemic taught us that interested actors rely on appeals to the “scientific community” to advance their own narrative, alternative evidence be damned. Of course, we later learned that it was Dr. Anthony Fauci who commissioned a scientific study that purported to debunk the hypothesis that Covid escaped from a lab — a study that was widely used to put down anyone who dared to look at any evidence to the contrary.
Those like Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who said in February 2020, “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.”
Cotton is likely still waiting for his apology from the media. 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.”
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.”
And Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) deserves his own apology from the Washington Post’s “fact checker.”
After Cruz 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 Glen Kessler 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.”
Laura Helmuth, the then-editor of the Scientific American, even accused 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.
Then there’s New York Times science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli who claimed 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 today.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Rolling Stone published this eyebrow-raising headline yesterday: “Karine Jean-Pierre Would Not Have Done It Any Differently.”
The reporter, Tessa Stuart, asked Jean-Pierre hard-hitting questions like “how are you doing?” and “what was your best day on the job?” and this paragraph-long question:
You’re a Black woman, an immigrant, a queer person — and the first of all of those categories to work as White House press secretary — but your identity also places you at the center of the Venn diagram of all of the groups that the Trump administration has threatened or is already targeting. On his first day, for example, he revoked executive orders banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. How are you processing it? Are you concerned about your safety at all?
Finally, the interview gets to a question of some substance: The reporter asks Jean-Pierre if there was anything she would have done differently in handling questions about Biden’s age and health, and whether questions on those topics from reporters were “substantive.”
Jean-Pierre’s reply:
Historians will certainly look back at all of this, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how that part of the administration is looked at. This is a president who showed that he was able to govern in the way that many presidents who had two terms were not able to govern. The president that I saw was a president who pushed us hard, asked the tough questions, really wanted to make sure we were either talking about what he was doing in a way that was connecting with the American people — that was my role as a press person — or, for the policy people, coming up with creative, out-of-the-box ideas to figure out how to deal with issues. That’s what I saw. That’s what I experienced. I was out there, pushing back, I was laying out why we believed this was the best person to do this job, and why he’s done this job well, and why he is up for the job.
But, going back to the press part for a second, I’ve said this at the podium, and I truly, truly believe it: Freedom of the press is incredibly important. It is the cornerstone of our democracy. There are moments where I do not agree with them, and they do not agree with me, and we have this healthy back and forth. And that’s what we did: That’s what I did for my two-and-a-half years, that’s what we did as an administration for four years. We pushed back when we thought that the way something was reported was not accurate, and they pushed back when they wanted more answers and more information. And that is what makes this country so beautiful. That is what makes democracy work.
Well, there you have it.
Media Misses