After President Joe Biden announced he directed the intelligence community to investigate the origins of the coronavirus and whether it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Washington Post stealth-edited a report that falsely claimed the lab-leak theory had been “debunked.”
The original report from February 2020 stated, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” referring to the Republican Arkansas senator’s suggestion that COVID-19 might not have emerged naturally.
Health “experts” and mainstream media outlets immediately dismissed Cotton as a conspiracy theorist.
Now, however, the lab-leak theory appears much more credible to those “experts,” even though much of the circumstantial evidence supporting it has been available for months.
The Post changed the headline of the Cotton report to state, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”
The publication did not announce the change and only added an editor’s note after conservatives noticed the headline had been edited quietly.
The report now includes a correction at the beginning: “Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus,” it says. “The term ‘debunked’ and The Post‘s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”
Cotton was one of the first Republicans to suggest the coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Former president Donald Trump also pushed this theory and directed his State Department to investigate it.
Biden quickly shut that investigation down after taking office.
“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said in February 2020. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
