A staunch supporter of the ‘it came from nature’ school.....today they published this damning criticism of ‘fact checking’ with a bias:
Why all the dismissals?
It appears to be a classic example of groupthink,
exacerbated by partisan polarization.
Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront
Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an
animal to a person.
In the U.S., one of the theory’s earliest advocates was Tom
Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often
criticizes China — and who has a history of promoting
falsehoods (like election fraud that didn’t happen). In this
case, though, Cotton was making an argument with
plausible supporting evidence.
The media’s coverage of his argument was flawed,
Sub-stack’s Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage
exaggerated Cotton’s comments to suggest he was claiming
that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological
weapon. (Cotton called that “very unlikely.”) And some
scientists and others also seem to have decided that if
Cotton believed something — and Fox News and Donald
Trump echoed it — the idea had to be wrong.
The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake
consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible,
like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought
the theory was wacky received widespread attention. It’s a
good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where
almost nobody is always right or always wrong.