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In early 2020, a New York Times headline scoffed, “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins”.

In early March, the newspaper of record is sounding a different tune: “Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says”.

It is only the latest example of a truth reset on all things Covid-19 — and a timely reminder that what Big Media dismisses as “fringe” this morning could well be gospel by eventide.

To be clear, the Times has not taken a definitive position on the origins of the virus. It has merely reported that the Department of Energy “has now ‘concluded’ — though with only ‘low confidence’ — that the pandemic most likely began with a laboratory leak”.

The paper hastens to add that “four other government agencies and a national intelligence panel have reached the opposite perspective, that the pandemic had what is called a natural or ‘zoonotic’ origin”.

Even so, it is telling that the Times and other major outlets have decided that the DOE reversal is, in fact, news. Why not simply ignore it? It’s not as though the legacy press is bound to report on world events that upset their pet narratives.

No. The Gray Lady’s concession suggests the tide is, in fact, turning.

Indeed, the Department of Energy is not the only US Government agency to have recently reversed course on the source of Covid-19.

In an interview with Fox News, no less than FBI Director Christopher Wray conceded point blank that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”.

Originally censored by Big Tech, the lab leak theory’s emergence as a leading raison d’être for the madness we all endured these three years almost feels like a real-time political thriller.

Yet for those who shrugged off the moral panic of the elites and simply stared at the facts, the Wuhan lab hypothesis has always been a sober and straightforward explanation.

The city at the epicentre of the pandemic is also home to China’s leading coronavirus lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The lab’s virus database was taken offline on 12 September 2019, and along with it, 22,000 coronavirus samples. The same day, security was beefed up and a tender issued to replace the lab’s air-conditioning system.

Personnel at the WIV fell sick in October 2019 with symptoms that were entirely consistent with what we came to know as Covid-19.

Despite their knowledge of the outbreak, the Chinese Community Party kept silent about it during the crucial early weeks and apparently “disappeared” a WIV researcher and citizen journalists who blew the whistle.

Cybersecurity analysts have recovered Chinese government data that had been wiped from the internet, showing a major buy-up of PCR supplies in Wuhan in late 2019 — equipment used to test for coronaviruses.

Then there’s the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, whose spike protein has unique inserts that seem to many researchers to be the result of human manipulation.

And don’t forget that Dr Anthony Fauci, in his role as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has for years funnelled American taxpayer dollars to the WIV for gain-of-function research — even though he is still doing his level best to cover his tracks.

There is also the February 2020 letter published in The Lancet, signed by 27 scientists denouncing the lab leak theory as “rumours”, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. The man behind the letter? Fauci associate Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, one of the major recipients of American grant money for — you guessed it — bat research at the WIV.

As I wrote as early as May 2020, “the greatest irony of the Covid-19 saga may be that the efforts to avoid such a catastrophe were the very events that created it”. And:

In the years to come, the lab leak theory will likely become the major, if not sole, explanation for the origins of Covid-19. And only petulance from the so-called “adults in the room” will have stopped this crucial discovery from being recognised sooner.

Author Michael Shellenberger highlights in the Twitter thread above that: “Journalists behaved like activists. They blindly trusted activist-scientists, went far beyond what the evidence showed, and morally condemned anyone who even suggested we consider the alternative theory.”

Shellenberger is right. Journalists made a dog’s breakfast of this one. And their industry is suffering the accumulated consequences as everyday people wise up to their dishonest antics.

A Gallup poll released earlier this month found that trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organisations deliberately mislead them. Just 26 percent of Americans surveyed told Gallup they have a favourable view of the news media — the lowest level ever recorded.

Will this latest embarrassment prompt journalists to stop shilling for highbrow interests and start doing their job?

We can only hope so.

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Originally published at MercatorNet. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.