Grabien founder Tom Elliott released a supercut Wednesday that showed a series of media personalities dismissing the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab.
The video began with a few clips of people — such as Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and former President Donald Trump — suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory where bat coronaviruses were being studied. (RELATED: Russian Bounties, Find The Fraud, Lab Leak Theory: Here Are All The Media Narratives That Fell Apart)
Following those, however, came clips of media personalities and experts — from MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Al Sharpton to CNN’s John Harwood and Dr. Anthony Fauci — claiming that the evidence did not point to coronavirus leaking from a lab.
WATCH:
SUPERCUT!
Media mock Trump, @TomCottonAR for “debunked” Covid lab leak theory pic.twitter.com/nb0621y2e7
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 26, 2021
A CNN segment framed the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” that had been generated to fill the void left by a lack of direct evidence. MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt announced that concerns about the virus leaking from a lab had been “debunked.”
The New York Times reported that Trump was pressing the intelligence community to find a link between the spread of the virus and labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused the former president of pushing “debunked bunkum.”
One MSNBC guest suggested that Trump’s goal was to foment xenophobia with respect to the Chinese, and another claimed he was trying to “change the narrative from his own failings.”
In the wake of news that three patients from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were treated in November of 2019 after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms, many in media have suddenly begun to revisit the idea that the virus could have originated in a lab.
President Joe Biden has called for a full investigation into the pandemic’s origins.