Letter from Washington: The great lab leak U-turn | Oliver Wiseman | The Critic Magazine

You cannot make sense of the firmness with which the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed without appreciating how Trump changed American media. After the 2016 election, the top tier of American media traded objectivity for opposition. As the New York Times has more or less admitted, normal standards no longer applied. Success was now defined by the extent to which you made Donald Trump s life difficult. This mattered when it came to the origins of the pandemic.

Anyone entertaining the possibility that lab negligence caused the pandemic wasn t just peddling misinformation , but worse: misinformation that might have played into Trump s hands in an election year. At a time when the only honest answer to the question of how the pandemic started was I don t know , the most highly-regarded outlets in American media had decided that the answer most convenient to the president should be vigorously discredited.

But the more we learn, the less outlandish the lab leak theory looks. Don McNeil, a science reporter at the New York Times and one of the best journalists covering the pandemic until his recent firing, published a lengthy Medium post this week in which he explains his initial reservations about the lab leak theory as well as why the argument has become considerably stronger as time has gone on. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control under Trump, recently said he believes that a lab leak is the most likely explanation of how the pandemic started. In March, the WHO s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the matter required further investigation. President Biden s Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, says he wants to get to the bottom of the matter.

via thecritic.co.uk