They are a group of amateur sleuths, with few resources except curiosity and a willingness to spend days combing the internet for clues. The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. Amateur sleuths pulled together the evidence of a lab leak as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers are seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China's Hubei province, on February 23, 2017. The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab kept growing-until it became too substantial to ignore.
And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. ( Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right.
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