ABC News White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl admits that a lot of reporters have “egg on their face” over the COVID lab leak theory.
Karl called out the media for flat out rejecting the lab-leak theory because it came from the Trump administration.
Karl said “I think a lot of people have egg on their face. This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Donald Trump,”
Last week, Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Karl added that “look some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. Because Trump was saying so much else, that was just out of control, and because he was, you know, making a frankly racist appeal talking about kung-flu, and the China virus, he said flatly this came from that lab, and it was widely dismissed … but now serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.”
While on CNN, NY Times writer David Leonhardt admitted that the media made a “mistake” in discounting the Wuhan lab leak theory just because of who was floating it as a possibility for the origin of the coronavirus.
Leonhardt emphasized that the lab leak theory is still “plausible” as an explanation, though “we don’t know the answer” and the details behind the pandemic’s origin are still murky.He went to say it was a “mistake” that people on the left and in the media discarded it for that reason.
Appearing on Fox, Senator Tom Cotton who was the first in the senate to bring up the lab leak theory last year said:
"The fact I was one of the first people to say it, and then President Trump said it as well, and let's just say most folks in the media don't care for our politics, so if it's coming from us, they immediately want to discount it...
I don’t think that China’s going to reveal what happened in those labs anytime soon and they will continue to try to cover it up – and if that's the case it's reasonable for the American people to draw the conclusion that China is covering up an accident in those labs."