NYT and others denied the lab leak theory because Trump put them in an impossible position by constantly stirring up racial tensions regarding COVID. His actions led to real violence against Asian Americans and promoting the lab leak would have furthered it.
It’s a conversation we could have easily had with proper leadership. The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective.
Meanwhile Trump and his followers were out there making racist comments and saber-rattling at China. That astoundingly boneheaded diplomatic failure unnecessarily ratcheted international tensions to the point where, no, we absolutely were not able to simultaneously research the cause and also collaborate on mitigating the impact on the virus. That diplomatic tension was repeatedly highlighted as a specific reason that investigation would not be tenable. If you're going to talk about the erosion of trust, be honest and look at how the conspiracy theorists have been contributing to that erosion.
Trump started calling it the Chee-I-na virus early on in a blatant move to justify his trade war, nationalism, and anti-intellectualism. This caused liberals to reflexively reject the lab leak theory in the US. At that time, it didn’t matter where it came from, people just had to wear a goddamn mask, which Trump didn’t want, he just wanted points.
But it’s okay that we were all wrong for a couple years: what we need to prevent is the next pandemic.
Covid being accidentally leaked from Wuhan lab (by honest mistake) is a totally viable theory.
Since Trump said it first, Dems immediately deemed it as a racist theory, so there was not much attention for this theory because people were scared of being labeled a racist.
This happened with every policy that disadvantaged China. Trump would be labeled racist for coming up with such policy.
Not sure who to blame to be honest.
At least Biden can do this without being called racist, so we can have a more balanced policy to counter China influence with a discussion that doesn't involve being called racist.
Trump didn't dub it the China virus, the mainstream media did, as was the fashion of the time, that is to name it after where it originated.
Trump didn't really start playing it up, until China blamed the USA for the virus.
While I think we could have done a better job in protecting our elders, instead of shutting everything down, I'm not sure you can really blame Trump for extra days as USA is basically right along with the rest of the world. Reality was, there wasn't much we could have done.
And blaming the president for making this political seems odd. The mainstream media pushed the narrative that it could NOT have been a lab leak after a republican suggested it was. And scientists were afraid to suggest a different possibility
See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media coverage of Covid-19.
For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA.
Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach.
The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.
First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.
Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.
Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.
So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.
From my perspective, this is sadly, the likely explanation. The media and opposition party was so worked up, that anything at all that came from Trump or his admin, was simply wrong, a lie, etc.
That, in part, was why no one took this thing seriously at the beginning in the US.
In retrospect, the constant hounding and attacks on Trump damaged all US citizens, simply by blunting messages, by causing unnecessary conflict. While Trump is out of office, the leaders who caused this confusion are still in office. And that is wrong. They need to be fired.
Indeed, a reasonably large contingent of those hesitant to get a vaccine, are parroting the (then) opposition politicians, who cast doubt on the processes. How much damage, how many lives have been lost, because these fools wanted to win a political contest, and score political points?
The media bear significant responsibility in this as well. Their consistent efforts at painting the former administration as "full of crap" all the time, as lying all the time, blunted and confused many messages, and forced secretaries of departments to have to try to handle/answer often idiotic questions.
So here we are today. Lab leak, far from being a paranoid fantasy, is a real possibility. And yet, the media is still playing these games.
We in the US, need, need ... to fire all the pols responsible for this. To no longer consume the media products of the organizations that encouraged this. And to stop believing that just because someone on one side says something that the other side has free rights to attack that without regards for facts.
I'm quite disgusted with the interplay between politics, media, and the pandemic.
Donald Trump was president and was making a lot of offensive inflammatory comments, like calling covid “the China virus.” WaPo and other increasingly politicized news outlets did no investigation into this, instead calling all discussions of facts around this Occam’s razor explanation “conspiracy theories.” Now Donald Trump is not president so now we are slowly re-examining some actual evidence.
A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1].
According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia". This became Woke dogma the minute Trump said the opposite.
This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power. I fear for the next pandemic, because if it's anything deadlier than COVID it might legitimately end civilization given the amount of incompetence we've now entrenched into our civilizational safeguards.
Because we had a racist president who said stuff like "China virus" in a stupid and demeaning way--i.e. what may have been a valid and reasonable argument or position had its credibility ruined by being taken up by Trump and his ilk for their own ends.
As president, the guy said a lot of things that were outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in my eyes, and in those of many other Americans.
Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these sources didn't start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at that point[2].
"it would have been a scandal as big as Watergate."
Wow, absolutely no hyperbole here.
What a stupid take. There was no hit job. Trump's a moron. Anything he did at all in response to the virus was reactionary and too little too late. Ban travel from China. Ok. Oh look, the virus is coming over from Italy. "narrative to hurt a political candidate" give me a fucking break. I would've loved someone to go hard on China. We didn't get it. We got lazy inaction, straight up denial and racist diatribes upon baseless claims without any precautions
Also journalists aren't a monolith. What in the fuck are you smoking.
I mean, the reality also is that there were in fact serious attempts to unleash bigotry instead of focusing on response. That is reality of what happened too. Huge reason why people painted it as anti-Chinese bigotry is that such a thing played a huge role in Trump response. Renaming Covid-19 to Chinese virus while downplaying need for tests and such was exactly that.
you are the one doing whataboutism right now. I am just arguing that trump was never racist against asian and that he tried to do things and was deemed a racist as a result. I never said he did not downplay covid. everyone did including Sir Fauci and all the democrats.
It's politically incorrect to blame anyone for this virus. I hated the way Trump politicized it, but let's not deny accountability because we had an absolute head banging idiot for a president.
Let's just act like that Chinese lab was a top notch research facility, with strict safety protocols in place?
It's simply because Trump hinted at this theory, so we say it's conspiracist and racist.
The same thing happened to "China virus". It is racist because Trump said it. Indian-variant of covid is not racist because Trump hasn't said that yet.
They have not in fact said that. And fwiw, I think Trump is a monster and an idiot. I do think it’s plausible that they were researching corona viruses for perfectly good reasons and accidentally released it, though.
Even if not, there are risks associated with continuing to research new viruses. I live five minutes away from where the lab was that nearly released Ebola into the us 30 years ago.
This all happened because Trump dubbed it the China virus at the beginning and brought up specific treatments like Hydroxychloroquine. The political climate in America was such that just those two stances coming from Trump established the dividing line. We had no chance from the beginning to discuss this without the political shadow.
The accessory to all of this was the vaccine/lab origin censorship by big tech, who are kind of seen as over-woke liberal bastions.
To lockdown or not lockdown, to mask or not mask, to vaxx or not vaxx, to Ivermectin or not Ivermectin, lab leak or no lab leak … why so binary? Ah, because we went political with this a long time ago.
If there was one person we needed to literally not say anything about this, it was Trump. But alas, he was the fucking president and we also needed him to say something.
The Pandemic histrionics are an age old Shakespearean play. A tragedy.
History is something else when you have the primary sources right before you. I would never need to read a book on all the nuances of everything that happened. Makes you wonder how easily historians can spin history in all those books, when in reality those events could have been as simple and silly as this one.
(I didn’t downvote you). I actually think this is the one time the media’s criticism isn’t hyperbolic (Trump always merits criticism, but somehow the media takes it to ridiculous extremes). I don’t think Trump is the frothing racist he’s made out to be (although I’m sure he has all sorts of subconscious biases), but he is an idiot narcissist with a national crisis on his hands and he seems to be handling it miserably.
Why didn’t we have testing in place sooner? Even if you pin the blame on the CDC, why weren’t there remediation plans announced publicly/immediately? Why is there still no word about how we will manage the crisis when it hits? What of ordering more ventilators and other necessary equipment or scaling up hospital capacity? What of containment measures to slow the spread? How are we going to ramp up testing (I’m grateful for the Roche test deal but who knows if Trump was even aware of or involved in it)? This isn’t leadership even by the crudest standard, and people will die as a consequence.
To his credit, he’s working with “Google” to make the website and that’s not nothing, but there’s still a lot to be done and he gives no impression of proactivity or even merely reacting to what is already happening in other countries. I don’t want to be in the middle of the crisis hearing him shift the blame onto the Obama administration when there’s plenty he could have done or plenty he could be doing to mitigate.
It’s a conversation we could have easily had with proper leadership. The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective.
reply