How the Media Botched the Lab-Leak Story

Hostility to Donald Trump led many to dismiss the theory, just because he floated it.

By
204

A remarkable consensus has emerged in the last few weeks: It’s no longer crazy to think that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a “lab leak” in Wuhan, China.

Just to set the stage, the lab-leak theory isn’t that China deliberately unleashed the virus as some sort of biological attack. If that were the plan, it seems unlikely that Chinese leaders would deploy this bioweapon on their own people first. 

No, the theory is that this was some sort of accident—quite likely the deadliest and most costly accident in all of human history—and that the Chinese government covered it up. While not as villainous as a deliberate release, that would nevertheless be a monumental outrage because it would mean precious time was squandered that might have been better spent containing the outbreak before it became a pandemic. The death toll as of now is at least 3.5 million worldwide and roughly 600,000 in the U.S. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, the lab-leak theory was dismissed by most of the media, public health officials (at home and abroad), and virtually the entire Democratic Party as a dangerous and debunked conspiracy theory. 

Keep reading with a free account
Create a free Dispatch account to keep reading Get Started ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
204
By
Comments (204)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. Alexander Kurz

    I want to understand better whether there is something wrong with the following argument. The media was right to dismiss the lab story early in 2020 because (1) there was no evidence supporting it and (2) Trump has a track record of not being interested in truth, so pushing back against him is a respectable thing to do. Also note that whether the lab story will turn out to be true in the future is irrelevant to the question of whether it was right to dismiss it in 2020.

    Collapse
  2. WILLIAM JORDAN

    No, it is not the moral of the story. The moral is if you lie almost all the time no one will believe you anytime. And then you will get eaten.

    Collapse
  3. JohnO

    The predictable defenses of major (ie left) media's take on this emphasize how little credibility Trump had earned on anything. It's true his credibility is justifiably low with reasonable people (including IME a lot of people who voted for him one or both times given the alternative, and some people who positively support him). But that should never have carried over to branding the lab leak possibility a 'debunked conspiracy theory'. Basic curiosity and healthy skepticism demands a pretty high standard of evidence that a coincidence as striking as this (a bat virus that first spread widely among humans in the city with that country's main virology lab studying bat viruses) is really a coincidence. There's also some revisionism in even focusing on Trump with respect to this case. The possibility of a lab leak wasn't something he came up with and he wasn't even the one most harshly criticized by 'fact checkers' for bringing it up.

    Cases like this are why major (ie. left) media's credibility is approaching zero. Without any other major information source on an upswing in credibility AFAICS. That's just bad.

    Collapse
  4. Slavirish

    As a moderate Democrat I do believe that the Trump administration deserves credit for the vaccine, but that is mostly due to the fact that that was the administration in office at the time. The development of the vaccine so quickly was by definition not "impossible" nor was it a "miracle." There is no reason to believe that any other administration would not have provided the same result, though if HRC had been president the conservative media would have blasted the same vaccine drive as "criminally slow" and label it "Operation Molasses" or some such. As for the lab escape theory, if it turns out to be true Trump was accidentally right, as his touting of it had nothing to do with careful study, evidence, and briefing but rather everything to do with politics and scapegoating.

    Collapse
    1. Will

      The Trump administration made some very deliberate choices early on in the pandemic to partner with private industry to develop a vaccine, and to do so through distributed, market based incentives (most specifically, by guaranteeing purchases from several manufacturers whether or not the vaccines panned out). There were quite a few people clamoring for a more active government role in the operation of the healthcare/pharmaceutical industry at the start of the pandemic (see all the calls to invoke the Defense Production Act), so I don't think it's a given that a Democratic administration would have taken the same tact or had the same success. They could have, but there's a plausible alternate history where President Clinton announces that she is nationalizing US COVID Vaccine Development and puts all of our bets on the wrong horse.

      I don't have many good things to say about the Trump administration's pandemic response, but they made the right call on how to incentivize and expedite vaccine development, and they deserve credit for that decision.

      Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    Trevor Reid

    I’m unconvinced that the media would have responded any more responsibly or rationally had a more conventional Republican (say George W Bush, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney...) had been President and floated the lab leak theory. While lacking the extreme intensity of TDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome was still pretty intense.

    Collapse
  6. Avatar photo
    Trevor Reid

    I’m unconvinced that the media would have responded any more responsibly or rationally had a more conventional Republican (say George W Bush, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney...) had been President and floated the lab leak theory. While lacking the extreme intensity of TDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome was still pretty intense.

    Collapse
  7. Avatar photo
    rlritt

    Yes, and no. We all accepted that the virus came from Wuhan specifically and China in general. No one denied that. The more accepted theory was the "wet markets", which is also a sound theory. There were also rumors that it came from a lab, but that theory, even if true, sounded coming from Trump, like another outlandish insult because he started calling ot the Chinese flu or the Wuhan flu. That might have also been taken seriously if it had been said with a modicum of seriousness instead of his usual scorn and sneer. Perhaps if he had not undermined Dr. Fauci, he could have repeated this theory and would have been taken seriously, and we would have been better off. He also should be held responsible for dismissing the vaccine and then secretly getting vaccinated. Many of his supporters would not, to this day, be denying the efficacy of the vaccine.

    Collapse
    1. Avatar photo
      Victor Clairmont

      To be fair, Tom Cotton actually was the first senator to bring this up. Not Trump. And he was villainized by WAPO and NYT's and other outlets as conspiracy theory stuff. I know, since I was debating people in these forums about it last year with the data we had then and how it was not outlandish as everyone was saying. The next step people tended to defend after dismissing the Lab Hypothesis, was the outlandish idea that Cuomo was not covering up numbers of Covid deaths (he was) and that somehow magically, NY's numbers were better than Florida's (also false now). And grants, Trump's reactions after the first two months just went ludicrously sad to.

      So it doesn't matter if it later came from Trump. Anyone going outside the wet markets narrative was mocked.

      And it seems, they may be completely wrong.

      Now, whether its the lab leak or wet markets, at the end of the day, China is responsible for 3.5 million deaths and trillions in damages, since it seems they knew about this back in November of 2019, and covered everything up. Everything else is secondary, and we should use this as a club and wield it against China's CCP every step of the way.

      Collapse
  8. Avatar photo
    Joe Delanis

    As much as I appreciate Jonah's writing, this seems like a column which started as an anti-Trump screed and then got "repurposed" as being about the media later (a bit like Kevin Williamson's comment about how a Paul Krugman column written about Larry Kudlow added a paragraph at the beginning making reference to KDW's "Atlantic" departure to make the column "timely"). The sudden change of focus and direction gave me whiplash.

    Collapse
  9. IamJACKSventedSPLEEN

    The real reason for not entertaining the lab lead possibility was completely political - the left didn't want to allow it to be addressed seriously because it would have DEFLECTED from the narrative that Trump was solely responsible for the pandemic in the US.

    From the beginning, the pandemic was a tool to remove Trump, and anything that got in the way of using it was pushed aside by the media and the tech elite. ANYTHING. No journalist would support it in the MSM because they didn't want to be seen as aiding Trump, even if the truth had to be sacrificed.

    Now, everyone is re-calibrating because some new news is likely going to drop, and make them all look like the hacks they really are. The left won - they removed Trump. Now, they are looking to walk back the damage in the light of some new evidence they can't contain - since they have to protect themselves and the guy they helped elect.

    Collapse
    1. Avatar photo
      Slp

      Way off base. Jonah's right... Trump earned distrust of his claims even from us who don't read the MSM.

      Collapse
  10. DJ

    It's almost as if lying thousands of times leads journalists to doubt your credibility.

    Also, this was hardly the only thing he was blathering on about. Yglesias has mentioned how annoying it was that he had to spend three days researching hydroxycholoroquine in order to write an article about it. Those three days could've been spent on other questions.

    When you flood the zone with shit, a lot of stuff falls by the wayside.

    Collapse
Load More