The Washington Post quietly has walked back its claims regarding the theory that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
But The Post asserted the theory that the lab was involved was debunked, quoting a political science professor and a professor of chemical biology to support the claim.
“There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was cited as saying. “The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”
In addition, The Post added a correction.
“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus,” the paper stated.
“I again discussed both the genome sequence and the lab-accident hypothesis—this time, both on the record—with WaPo. I was surprised that the February 17, 2020, article in WaPo quoted only my comments on the genome sequence and not my comments on the lab-accident hypothesis,” he said.
Cotton didn’t respond to multiple inquiries. The senator on Fox News last week addressed the wave of corrections and updates to stories about the lab leak theory, saying: “The media last year was singing a very different tune. That’s because I was pointing out that common sense says this virus probably came from those labs; I mean, it originated just a few blocks down the road from them in a city larger than New York not exactly known for its large bat population.
“But because the media doesn’t like my politics, and because [former] President [Donald] Trump said the same thing, the media lied and they spun and they covered up for the Chinese Communist Party, in effect,” he added.
“There needs to be an accounting for all of the reporting from last spring that denied this reality now that almost every mainstream outlet is acknowledging that it is not only possible, it is probably the case that this came from a laboratory in Wuhan.”