Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan was torched by mainstream media as a fringe conspiracy theory. Outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN didn’t just question it—they buried it. In February 2020, The Washington Post ran a piece calling it a “debunked” notion, leaning on a Lancet letter from scientists that dismissed it as misinformation without evidence – this piece, since edited, can be found here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy
The New York Times followed suit, framing it as a right-wing fantasy unfit for serious discussion. Here is a newer article from them stating how we were badly misled about the Covid origins:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html
Fact-checkers like PolitiFact slapped “false” labels on it, citing the World Health Organization’s early stance that a lab origin was “extremely unlikely”:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/may/17/debating-origins-covid-19-virus-what-we-know-what-
The message was clear: this wasn’t up for debate.
Experts who dared to disagree got the cancel treatment fast. Take Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute. When she co-authored a paper in 2021 suggesting the lab leak deserved scrutiny, she faced a firestorm—smeared as a contrarian on social media and sidelined by peers: see this article from the MIT Technology Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/1027140/lab-leak-alina-chan
Or look at Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC director, who told CNN in March 2021 he thought a lab origin was plausible. The backlash was swift: pundits mocked him, and his comments were buried under a pile of “official” denials:
Even Senator Tom Cotton, who raised the possibility in early 2020, was branded a conspiracy peddler by outlets like The Washington Post, despite later vindication as the theory gained traction
The dismissal wasn’t just loud—it was coordinated. Posts on X from that time show users pointing to a pattern: journalists and scientists seemed hell-bent on shutting down the idea, often without digging into the circumstantial evidence—like the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) proximity to the outbreak or its history of bat coronavirus research:
The worm has turned: After spending a year dismissing the lab-leak theory, mainstream US media are now beginning to give credence to it. Here's one example: https://t.co/alNKsTsv41. The irony is they ignored even the Jan. 15, 2021 official US fact-sheet, which said the following: pic.twitter.com/vLruBxsSqv
— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) May 24, 2021
In another piece in 2020, @nytimes concluded that “most agencies remain skeptical” and “scientists are dismissive” of the lab leak theory. Unfortunately, appears that was certainly true, but not to their credit.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 18, 2021
Yet another story continues to describe the idea as a conspiracy. pic.twitter.com/XbSi4pmXzQ
By mid-2021, though, the tide shifted. The Wall Street Journal reported on U.S. intelligence about sick WIV researchers in late 2019, and suddenly, the “debunked” theory was “suddenly credible,” as The Washington Post admitted in a rare mea culpa:
Too late—the damage to open inquiry was done.
Wuhan’s Research: Who Funded It, and Why the Silence?
Now, let’s follow the money. The Wuhan Institute of Virology wasn’t some backwater lab—it was a hub for cutting-edge coronavirus research, and it had deep ties to Western funding. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), under Dr. Anthony Fauci’s watch, funneled over $600,000 through a New York-based nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance to the WIV between 2014 and 2019:
https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins
This cash supported “gain-of-function” studies—experiments tweaking viruses to make them more transmissible or deadly, supposedly to understand pandemics better.
The WIV, led by virologist Shi Zhengli (aka “Bat Woman”), was neck-deep in this work, studying bat coronaviruses eerily similar to SARS-CoV-2.
EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, wasn’t just a middleman—he was a player in the narrative game. In February 2020, Daszak orchestrated that Lancet letter, signed by 27 scientists, that slammed the lab leak theory as a dangerous distraction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)
Conflict of interest? You bet—his group’s funding relied on the WIV partnership, and a lab leak would’ve tanked it. Emails later uncovered by FOIA requests showed Daszak rallying scientists to sign on, some privately admitting the theory wasn’t impossible but publicly toeing the line. The NIH, meanwhile, stayed mum on its role until Senator Rand Paul grilled Fauci in 2021, forcing admissions that, yeah, they’d funded WIV research—though Fauci quibbled over the “gain-of-function” label.
The ties don’t stop there. Daszak sat on the WHO’s 2021 Wuhan investigation team, which—surprise—concluded a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” after a 12-day visit with limited access.
Critics, including some WHO scientists, later called it a whitewash, noting the report glossed over the lab angle in a few pages. Meanwhile, NIH bigwigs like Dr. Francis Collins were pushing a “natural origin” story hard, with Collins dismissing lab leak talk as a distraction in public statements . Why the rush to squash it? Maybe because U.S. funding—and prestige—was on the line if the WIV was implicated.
Connecting the Dots
So, what’s the story? The media parroted a dismissal crafted by insiders with skin in the game—scientists and funders like Daszak, Fauci, and Collins, whose careers and projects hinged on the WIV looking squeaky clean. They leaned on authority (WHO, Lancet) to drown out dissent, while experts who questioned the narrative were ostracized or silenced. The funding trail shows a cozy network—NIH to EcoHealth to WIV—where self-interest could’ve fueled the cover-up. When evidence like the WIV’s sloppy safety record or early sick workers surfaced, it was too late to undo the “conspiracy” stigma they’d cemented.
The lab leak theory’s exile wasn’t about science—it was about control. The media didn’t just miss the story; they helped bury it, and the public paid the price in trust and truth.