“The View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin defended Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and went after her fellow co-hosts for denying the validity of the lab leak theory Wednesday.
The panel discussed the U.S. Department of Energy’s report concluding that COVID-19 likely originated in the Wuhan Virology Institute, a laboratory testing gain-of-function research experiments with coronaviruses in Wuhan, China. The report came out after years of the media and political figures branding the lab leak possibility as a conspiracy theory.
Cotton came under intense scrutiny by the corporate media on February 16, 2020, when he adamantly said that the virus originated in the lab. The Washington Post reported that his statements were “debunked,” and The New York Times accused the senator of pushing a “fringe” theory.
“We missed out on important facts along the way,” Griffin said. “Josh Rogan whose at the Washington Post, who is one of the best reporters in my opinion on covering China, obtained cables that the state department said in 2018 from the Wuhan lab that said there’s some issues here, they’re not taking it seriously, something like a pandemic could happen. I’ve to go to mention, Senator Tom Cotton was raked over the coals for suggesting what many people believed, that this was an accidental lab leak.”
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“Let’s be realistic in our time frame, here, because when this came out, nobody wanted to talk about it. The government wasn’t talking about it. They weren’t listening to him,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said. “It wasn’t until the poop hit the fan that people start hearing, and then when it becomes it’s your fault, you did it, as opposed to how do we solve it, it’s no good.”
Goldberg and co-host Joy Behar then ran cover for White House senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who previously denied that the virus originated in a lab. (RELATED: ‘The View’ Promises To Talk About Daily Caller Disruption In White House Briefing, But Gushes Over Fauci Instead)
“He didn’t dismiss it, he said he didn’t know,” Goldberg said.
“He didn’t know,” Behar said. “You don’t know what the truth of it is yet.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin said Fauci dismissed the idea of lab-leak until July 2022, when he said he would “keep an open mind.” The panel has consistently praised Fauci and accused his opponents of attacking him for political reasons.
The panel addressed Fauci and the lab-leak theory in May 2021, in which Behar accused former President Donald Trump of scapegoating China. Co-host Sara Haines said the lab-leak theory should be investigated deeper.
“I mean, you know, this anti-science crowd on the right with the — with Trump has been criticizing Fauci from the giddy-up as if he’s an Oracle of Delphi,” Behar said. “Trump was blaming the Chinese from the beginning. He was using them as scapegoats. If it happens to be true it was from Wuhan, that was a lucky break on his part because he took a guess, in my opinion.”
Fauci joined a group of scientists working to “disprove” the lab leak theory in the early days of the pandemic in a paper titled, “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” around the same time Cotton stated that the virus originated in a lab. Emails also show that the leader of a non-profit tied to the Wuhan lab personally thanked Fauci in April 2020 for rejecting the lab-leak theory.
Fauci later changed his tune on the theory in 2022 after reports learned of the lab conducting gain-of-function research. In November 2022, he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he had a “complete open mind” about the possibility of the virus originating in the lab.