Disinformation and the Wuhan Lab Leak Thesis

It has been a bad week for patronizing crusaders who seek to bar controversial speech on the grounds of “disinformation.” On February 26, the Wall Street Journal broke a story regarding a classified Department of Energy report that the Covid‐​19 virus most likely originated with a leak from China’s Wuhan lab. FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed the DOE’s conclusion in a February 28 interview with Fox News. Such developments should be a monumental embarrassment to numerous figures in both government and the establishment news media who worked diligently in 2020–2021 to block accounts that endorsed—or even favorably considered—the lab‐​leak thesis.The new bombshell revelations will likely create turbulence in multiple respects. It will exacerbate already contentious relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Xi Jinping’s government made every effort to prevent an independent investigation of Covid’s onset, and PRC officials were aided by Western medical bureaucrats who insisted that it was virtually certain the virus came from nature. The already tattered reputations of those bureaucrats have taken a new hit and may now be damaged beyond repair. That is especially true for Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the Covid pandemic and was the principal spokesperson for U.S. government policies.Members of the establishment press worked very hard to bury the lab‐​leak thesis as wild, baseless speculation. Until May 2021, allegations that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology were widely dismissed as an unfounded conspiracy theory. President Donald Trump’s receptivity to the theory led to knee‐​jerk conclusions about it being explicitly or implicitly racist as well. Only a handful of media outlets, principally Fox News, National Review, and The American Conservative, treated the lab‐​leak hypothesis seriously, and they were mocked, denounced, and vilified for doing so. Facebook and other social media information gatekeepers summarily barred posts embracing the argument that the deadly virus more probably came from the Wuhan virology lab than from bats being sold at a Wuhan market as “disinformation.”