At the beginning of the pandemic, liberals hammered U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton as the bad guy – not the people who brought the virus into the country.
That’s because last February the Arkansas Republican dared to question whether the “Wuhan virus” really originated in a bioweapon’s lab in Wuhan, China. The liberal media immediately pounced, saying Cotton was peddling a “fringe,” “debunked,” “fake,” or “conspiracy” theory about the genesis of the disease.
Publicly Cotton had actually said, “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” and added that because of China’s “duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.”
But the media refused to ask questions, nor accept the notion that Cotton may be onto something even after a scientist who had worked at the lab fled to America and said the coronavirus was in fact a lab creation.
Nonetheless, in recent days, one of President Donald Trump’s top advisers has said there is mounting evidence the virus leaked from a Wuhan facility.
“’There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus,’ Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, said of the secret Wuhan Institute of Virology, which sits 11 miles from the wet market that was supposedly ground zero for COVID-19.
“Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story,” Pottinger added, saying a “leak” or an “accident” at the lab was the most likely source.
The Daily Mail of London first reported on this because Pottinger was discussing the virus during a Zoom call with members of Parliament.
Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party ho heard Pottinger’s comments, seemed receptive.
“The truth is there are people who have been in those labs who maintain that this is the case,” he told the Daily Mail. “We don’t know what they have been doing in that laboratory. They may well have been fiddling with bat coronaviruses and looking at them and they made a mistake. I’ve spoken to various people who believe that to be the case.”
Pottinger is no kook.
The Daily Mail noted that he speaks fluent Mandarin and spent seven years covering China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He joined the Marine Corps in 2005 and served in military intelligence before moving to the National Security Council in 2017. His brother, Paul, is a virologist at the University of Washington.
Last week another British paper, The Sun, reported that Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted of “trouble-making” for having reported on efforts by Wuhan officials to mas what was happening in the city.
The Sun noted Zhan had taken photos of the facility and “posted videos of crematoriums working at midnight that cast doubt on the official death toll.”