Tom Cotton Raises a Question the Washington Post Fails to Debunk

This is a weird read from the Washington Post. It is another example of putting the narrative above facts.

Media outlets, if you have not noticed, are emotionally invested in the idea of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia directed towards Asians during the coronavirus outbreak. On top of that, the Washington Post has taken an extraordinarily large amount of money from the Chinese communists to run “special advertising” from the propaganda arm of the Chinese government.

It should come as no surprise that a liberal media outlet that has taken money from the Chicoms would invest energy in attacking Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) for daring to suggest the coronavirus might have originated in a bioweapons lab located in Wuhan.

The Washington Post headline is “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Except the story has not been debunked and the Washington Post does a poor job trying to debunk Tom Cotton.

“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

To rebut this, the Washington Post first relies on a Rutgers University professor who says, “There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered…. The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”

Then there is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who says it is “highly unlikely” that a Chinese bioweapon got accidentally released.

Then there’s the Chinese Ambassador to the United States who told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan, “It’s true that a lot is still unknown. But it’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous, to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people. For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing is that it will fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus.”

Cotton, for his part, is not assuming an intentional release of a bioweapon, but perhaps an accident of some kind in a lab. Not a single one of the people who supposedly “debunk” Cotton’s claim actually debunked it, including China’s ambassador. In fact, it is striking that China’s ambassador not only did not unequivocally deny it but pivoted immediately to xenophobia.

The Washington Post raced to presume Cotton was talking about China intentionally or unintentionally releasing a bioweapon. Cotton has insisted he has no knowledge of that, but it could be an accident. After all, this bioweapons lab experiments on the coronavirus and the Chinese are being alarmingly coy on the matter.

Nonetheless, the Washington Post is ruling Tom Cotton is debunked when the foremost authority on the matter they cite, the Ambassador of China to the United States, actually says, “A lot is still unknown.”

It makes you wonder if Jeff Bezos doesn’t want China mad at him.