If it turns out that the COVID pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving ethically dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the entire world.
But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal, which remains to be digested.
I mean the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social as well as mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously. The reasons for this — rank partisanship and credulous reporting — and the methods by which it was enforced — censorship and vilification — are reminders that sometimes the most destructive enemies of science can be those who claim to speak in its name.
Rewind the tape to February of last year, when people such as Sen. Tom Cotton began pointing to a disturbing fact set: the odd coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses; the troubling report that some of the original COVID patients had no contact with the food markets where the pandemic supposedly originated; the fact that the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis. Think what you will about the Arkansas Republican, but these were reasonable observations warranting impartial investigation.
The common reaction in elite liberal circles? A Washington Post reporter called it a "fringe theory" that "has been repeatedly disputed by experts." The Atlantic Council accused Cotton of abetting an "infodemic" by "pushing [a] debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab." A writer for Vox said it was a "dangerous conspiracy theory" being advanced by conservatives "known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China)."
There are many more such examples. But the overall shape of the media narrative was clear. On one side were experts at places like the World Health Organization: knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative, noble. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a risible fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration's mishandling of the crisis.
Yet it was also a narrative with holes larger than Donald Trump's mouth.
Was it outrageous to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan Institute? Not if you listened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's patient, lucid, scientifically rich explanation of the lab-leak hypothesis — which he delivered almost a year ago on the decidedly non-mainstream Joe Rogan podcast.
