The Lab Leak Fiasco – Tablet Magazine
By couching the Daily Mail article one of the very first, if not the first major news story to raise the possibility of an accidental lab leak in a piece about fringe theories with thinly backed claims of a bioweapons program, the Post set off a chain of events that would lead to the creation of the bioweapons straw man: the conflation of an accidental lab leak, a theory considered plausible by scientists, then and now, with the actually fringe bioweapons release theory.
Are the WP and the NYT incompetent, malicious or both? I would say both, but admittedly it is hard to tell.