Liberal media FINALLY admit they made a mistake dismissing Wuhan Lab leak theory just because Trump backed it: Washington Post, New York Times and ABC pundits say some 'have egg on their face'
Liberal media reporters and pundits admitted over the weekend they were wrong to dismiss the Wuhan lab leak theory just because it was espoused by former President Donald Trump.
Mainstream reporters had pushed back at the idea that COVID-19 may have originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, China, and openly ridiculed the idea as Trump spoke openly about it in the early days of the pandemic.
But now, those same reporters have admitted that it is possible that the virus came from a lab leak — as more scientists and political officials openly question the virus' origins.
'I think a lot of people have egg on their face,' ABC News' Jon Karl told Martha Raddatz Sunday morning.
'This was an idea that was first put out by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, [and] President Donald Trump,' he continued on ABC's This Week, 'and some things may be true even if Donald Trump has said them.'
Jon Karl told ABC This Week host Martha Raddatz on Sunday that he thinks reporters 'have egg on their face' for originally refusing to consider the lab leak theory
He noted that the idea was widely dismissed at the time, but now 'serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.'
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt also said on CNN that he thinks people 'leapt to dismiss' the theory too quickly because it was being espoused by then-President Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who has also said that the 2020 election was stolen.
'I think a lot of people on the political left and people in the media made this mistake and said 'Wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something it can't be true,' Leonhardt said. 'Or they assumed that. And that's not right.
'Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud, he's said some things that are just wrong,' Leonhardt continued.
'But that doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong, and it seems like a lot of people, including a lot in the media, leaped to dismiss the lab leak theory because of where it was coming from, and the reality is we don't yet know how COVID started.'
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt said journalists were quick to dismiss the theory because it was being espoused by former President Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin slammed journalists for making a sudden U-Turn on their coverage of the lab leak theory.
'Most MSM reporters didn’t 'ignore' the lab leak theory, they actively c****** all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective out of a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias (their scientist sources lied to them), group think, TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] and general incompetence,' Rogin wrote in his first tweet Saturday morning.
He added that the lab leak theory has not changed and 'suddenly become credible.'
'The theory has always been the same,' Rogin wrote. 'The people who got it wrong changed their minds. They are writing about themselves, with zero self awareness.
'All these reporters scrambling to defend their own records on the lab leak theory are exposing their own hypocrisy and ignoring their basic error,' he continued. 'Just report the facts. Don’t act like its your job to tell us what's OK to think or talk about.
'Own up to it when you fail your readers,' he wrote.
The Twitter thread was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times, garnering several thousand likes.
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin slammed the mainstream media for trying to defend their initial reporting which refuted the lab leak theory
The lab leak theory has gained traction over the past few weeks, as more and more politicians and scientists start to question the origins of the virus and how it mutated to infect humans.
The Huanan wet market, where scientists say the first cluster of infections were officially reported, is just a few hundred yards from the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control and only a few miles from the the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, where scientists were reportedly conducting experiments on bats before the pandemic began.
The lab is one of only a handful in the world that is cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission.
Three researchers from the institute sought medical care in November 2019, before the virus began to spread, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.
Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology reported COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, before the virus began to spread around the world
The Institute is one of only a handful in the world that is cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission
The newspaper said the report - which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits - may add weight to calls for a broader probe of whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.
It reported that current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed a range of views about the strength of the report's supporting evidence, with one unnamed person saying it needed 'further investigation and additional corroboration.'
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has since said he was 'not convinced' that COVID-19 developed naturally and called for an open investigation.
'I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,' he said at a PolitiFact event on May 11 entitled: United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking.
President Joe Biden has also called for an investigation into the origins of the virus.
The former head of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that the likelihood COVID-19 originated in a lab is growing while the odds that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans grow longer.
‘The challenge is that the side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come out of a lab has continued to expand,’ Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as then-President Trump’s FDA commission from 2017 until 2019, told CBS News.
‘And a side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come from a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn't budged.’
Gottlieb said that there is enough evidence to rule out the earlier theory that coronavirus originated from a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
Gottlieb added: ‘And if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted because we've done an exhaustive search for the so-called intermediate host, the animal that could have been exposed to this virus before it spread to humans.
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