Tom Cotton on media’s sudden warming to lab-leak hypothesis: ‘I’m not looking for any awards’
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., responded Wednesday to the media’s sudden warming to the lab-leak hypothesis concerning the origin of the coronavirus, telling Fox News” that “I’m not looking for any awards.”
In a near complete reversal from a year ago, mainstream media outlets have begun treating with some level of seriousness the hypothesis that the coronavirus origin lies in a lab in Wuhan, China. The openness to the hypothesis ramped up following the admittance by Dr. Anthony Fauci, ironically at a left-wing fact-checking festival, that he was “not convinced” the coronavirus developed naturally, as well as Wall Street Journal report on sick researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2019.
Cotton, a skeptic from the beginning of the Chinese government’s official account of the virus, was recognized by the Washington Post in an analysis piece Tuesday titled: “Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.”
TOM COTTON SLAMS ‘REPORTERS AND ACTIVISTS IN WHITE LAB COATS’ FOR DISMISSING LAB-LEAK THEORY
“[Cotton] from the start pointed to the lab’s location in Wuhan, pressing China for answers, so the history books will reward him if he turns out to be right,” the fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote in the piece.
Following a discussion on how money was spent by the U.S. in Wuhan labs that were allegedly conducting research on how “to make the coronavirus more contagious and dangerous,” Perino asked Cotton about Kessler’s piece.
She stated that Kessler wrote the piece because of various headlines from around the start of the pandemic criticizing Cotton, some saying he was repeating a “fringe theory” about the virus’ possible origins.
“Now that they have a little bit more information, and now that President Trump isn’t in office, and maybe with a little more clear eyes, this is now a real possibility and so it’s about time, right?” Perino asked.
“Well, Dana, I’m not looking for any awards from the mainstream media, and I’ll let history sort things out for itself,” Cotton said, chuckling. “What matters most to me is that the American people get answers.”
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“Was the Chinese government responsible for unleashing the worst pandemic in a century on the world through a combination of its negligence in these labs, and then its deceitfulness in covering it all up? Could it have stopped this pandemic much earlier if they had been open and transparent from the very beginning in late 2009 and early 2020 about what had happened in those laboratories?” he continued. “That’s why we need to demand answers. That’s why we need a credible investigation. Not another whitewash by the World Health Organization.”
