Emily Kopp: The Media Overlooked COVID Lab Leak Evidence

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as “racist,” up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn’t respond to our interview request, said it wasn’t worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

“Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically,” says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It’s also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed‘s Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

via reason.com

As horrible as this story is, it at least confirms that the only way to get the truth out is through — I was going to say “our system, but it’s more our lack of a system, of free thought and inquiry. Not “The Science,” which if we followed Dr. Tony’s version of it, we would still be shrugging our shoulders and saying “those Chinese and their darn bat soup.” Of course, of course, it may still turn out that the Covid-19 virus did indeed jump across species into pandemic fame rather than having been cooked up in the decrepit Wuhan lab, but that looks more and more unlikely. And those saviors of humanity, our brave virus hunters, gazing intently at their test tubes held up to the light, and sending frantic emails to each other the morning after, may yet drop a test tube and unleash hell upon our innocent, un-PhD’ed species, while in the course of seeking knowledge and publications. But, and it’s not nothing, at least we are finally finding out what the heck happened. The reason we are is that here in the US, in addition to funding these nightmare experiments, we also support journalists and investigators, as well as some scientists, who can dig out the facts and largely not be punished, or not punished enough, to stop them. So that’s a good thing. Now if we all can just rise up and say, Stop that!, all will be peachy until the next thing comes along.