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The Importance Of Being Wrong
In January 2020, two months before the COVID pandemic began ruining our lives in earnest, Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, questioned the Chinese government’s claims that it originated in a seafood market.
Citing a Lancet study, Cotton claimed that fourteen cases, including the person believed to be “patient zero,” had no prior contact with the market. He went on to float the possibility (among others), that the virus had originated in the “bio-safety, Level-4 super laboratory” based in Wuhan, China.
A month later, he appeared on Fox News and made the same claim:
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 evidence on that question at all.
As the lockdowns started to bite, the lab-leak hypothesis was associated with the fear-mongering and conspiracy theories and anti-Asian racism circulating on the internet. Until, eventually, the media stopped trying to tell the difference.
“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” wrote the New York Times. “The Lab-Leak Theory Is Unbearably Racist,” said The National Review. Apoorva Mandavilli, a COVID reporter for the New York Times, looked to the future, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But today is not that day.”
Just like that, the idea that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, might have come from the lab studying coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, became unutterable (the idea that it came from a bat in a Chinese wet market was fine for some reason).
And it stayed that way, at least in liberal media, until Jon Stewart pointed out that if there was an “explosion of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania,” it would be reasonable to ask if had something to do with the chocolate factory.
For over a year, a highly plausible origin for a virus that brought the entire world to a standstill was off-limits. Not disputed or circumstantial or unproven, but racist and unscientific and wrong. Maybe we…
