Tom Cotton: a year ago and now

[George K]

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy/

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/11/republican-tom-cotton-coronavirus-china

A Republican senator who floated a conspiracy theory which said the Chinese government created Covid-19 in a weapons lab claimed on Saturday that since he first learned of the outbreak, in mid-January, “common sense has been my guide”.

The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/158101/conservatives-believe-chinese-lab-created-coronavirus

When mainstream news outlets reported that most experts considered the Wuhan facility to be secure, he conceded that they had a good point, “except … can we be sure that no researcher at any point made any mistakes?” Soon, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was accusing the “Chinese Communist Party” of releasing the virus through willful negligence, and Donald Trump was hinting that researchers had let the virus loose by “mistake”—a classic act of Trumpian projection designed to distract from the many disastrous miscues his administration has committed in its efforts to contain the virus.

This is CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cotton-fact-check/index.html

Early January statements from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission had said most cases were related to the South China Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, based on preliminary studies.

Besides Cotton, The Washington Times, citing an Israeli biological warfare analyst, suggested the virus was developed in a lab, potentially as part of a Chinese bioweapons program. A story claiming China planned to admit the virus came from the lab was also circulating on Facebook but flagged by fact-checkers as false.

Facts First: Experts have dismissed Cotton’s “engineered bioweapon hypothesis” but noted it’s possible, yet unlikely, that the lab was connected to the start of the outbreak.

Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT with a background in chemical engineering told CNN, “the thing that weighs against the claim is that it’s a terrible bioweapon. If you were engineering a bioweapon this would have the absolute opposite of the characteristics you would want.”

Flash forward a year. The editorial board of the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavirus-origins-mystery-china/?arc404=true

But there is another pathway, also plausible, that must be investigated. That is the possibility of a laboratory accident or leak. It could have involved a virus that was improperly disposed of or perhaps infected a laboratory worker who then passed it to others. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, is a major transportation hub and a center of virus studies in China, with at least six facilities with BSL-3 laboratories for handling infectious agents. Published papers show that some of these institutions have been very active in coronavirus research. The most active is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli leads a research team that has extensively studied and experimented on bat coronaviruses that are very similar to the one that ignited the global pandemic.

[…]

China actively covered up the early stages of the pandemic, concealed the transmissibility of the virus from its own people and the world, and punished Wuhan doctors who expressed worry about it in late December 2019. President Xi Jinping did not warn the public in China or abroad until mid-January.

Since then, Chinese officials and scientists have advanced a host of dubious theories to suggest the origin of the virus was beyond China’s borders: perhaps brought to China by contaminated packaging of frozen food from abroad or from the U.S. military biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., or from mink farms. The disinformation only heightens suspicions that China is trying to distract from or conceal something.

[…]

We don’t know where the pandemic began. But a major step toward finding the answer is to examine all the relevant databases and laboratory records, including those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere, and the clues they may hold.

[Jolly]

Been saying this for a year.

[Mik]

There was a PBS documentary on their efforts to conceal this that was pretty damning.

China is an asshole. I read that somewhere lately.

[Renauda]

@mik said in Tom Cotton: a year ago and now:

There was a PBS documentary on their efforts to conceal this that was pretty damning.

I watched that too. China has a lot to account for on this pandemic.

[taiwan_girl]

Wasn’t there something that came out yesterday that indicsated that it started from a animal —> human transmission, probably in the market?

(Of course, i think the source was from China so that immediately makes it suspicious)

[Doctor Phibes]

Just take a look at the data for the number of Covid infections currently in China. What an amazing job the Chinese government does of controlling what is elsewhere such a chaotic situation!