Backtracking on the lab leak – hey, Trump was right

by Neo-NeoCon:

From Legal Insurrection comes this example of many people eager to take back things they said or wrote some time ago about the lab leak theory of COVID’s origins:

Professor Robert Garry, a respected microbiologist who works at Tulane University in New Orleans, is one of five bylined on a paper in March 2020 entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2’.

…The letter, published in the journal Nature Medicine, concluded: ‘We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.’

Now, Dr Garry has told the BBC this statement was never meant to dismiss all types of potential lab leak.

Speaking to Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, an eight-part BBC Radio 4 series, he said they were aiming to dismiss the idea the virus had been intentionally crafted as a bioweapon.

‘At that point we were still largely under the influence, when that particular sentence was written, with the notion that this may have been a bioengineered virus or maybe a weapon that just sort of accidentally released,’ he said.

That’s sounds ridiculous to me. I remember reading about the lab leak theory very early on, and although it wasn’t proven it certainly was plausible and was considered a possible accident rather than a purposeful weapon, although weapon was (and remains) another possibility.

Garry’s words in the 2020 letter were clear, but he’s trying to explain what he really meant:

Professor Garry admitted the wording was wrong.

‘Maybe we went a little too far there,’ he said.

Maybe.

Scientists are supposed to be precise. But there probably were pressures brought to bear on the group writing the letter in 2020. I could understand why they would want to be cautious. But to rule out the possibility? No.

And then there was this – and note the date of the Trump quote, May 1, 2020. But oh, what a lying stupidhead Trump is, according to CNN and virtually all of the replies at the time:

President Trump contradicts the US intel community by claiming he's seen evidence that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab https://t.co/mnUSHUyZXf pic.twitter.com/pInZ4Of18X

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 1, 2020

All of you who are on Twitter might want to add some new comments there.

In the late May of 2021, when the lab leak theory started gaining more traction in the MSM (now that Biden was safely president), the WaPo corrected its reporting on COVID origins from back in February and March of 2020:

The Washington Post issued a correction 15 months after alleging Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was peddling a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Much of the media last year was quick to dismiss the possibility that the virus stemmed from a leak from the Wuhan Virology Lab in China, a theory that was promoted by top Republicans including Cotton and then-President Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Over the weekend, however, the Post revised the February 2020 report which had the headline, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.

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