The Wet-Market Pangolin Hoax
One of the worst examples of bureaucratic gaslighting about the Covid-19 coronavirus concerned its origin. Remember when Senator Tom Cotton, in February 2020, became the first public official to say out loud what most ordinary Americans considered plain common sense: that this deadly new coronavirus, believed to have started with an infected bat near Wuhan, China, just maybe could have leaked from a not-so-secure biochemical laboratory, in Wuhan, that was known to be conducting dangerous experimental research by infecting bats with deadly strains of coronaviruses?
As soon as Senator Cotton suggested that possibility, federal bureaucrats responsible for secretly funding the dangerous Wuhan research—and scientists beholden to those bureaucrats for research funding—promptly shifted into overdrive to silence and ridicule not just the senator but anyone else who might deign to speak about a possible lab leak. The gaslighting followed a now-familiar pattern.
Public health officials like Francis Collins, the now-former head of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, quickly derided the lab-leak possibility as a “conspiracy theory.” They enlisted other scientists to write papers and articles assuring us that the virus probably originated with a natural, “zoonotic event” in a Wuhan “wet market” that may have involved transmission from a bat to an intermediate host, such as a pangolin, before “jumping” to a human.
Legacy media outlets and social media platforms were quick to help push the bureaucrats’ preferred narrative and silence dissent. A New York Times “news” report denounced Senator Cotton for peddling not just a “conspiracy theory,” but a “fringe theory” that “lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists.” The media campaign intensified after President Trump, and his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, came out publicly in favor of the lab-leak theory in late April 2020. For the next three years, most media outlets mocked the lab leak theory as “unproven,” “debunked,” and possibly even racist—but most of all, as an irresponsible “fringe” and “conspiracy” theory that defied a “near consensus among scientists.”
Then a funny thing happened. In August 2021, the intelligence community belatedly admitted that while “most” analysts still considered the lab-leak theory unlikely, the theory was now “plausible” after all, with one “element” of that community even assessing “with moderate confidence” that “Covid-19 most likely resulted from a laboratory-associated incident.” Then, in February 2023, the Department of Energy similarly announced, with low confidence, that the pandemic was “most likely” caused by an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab. Days later, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau also believed the pandemic “most likely” originated with “a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” By early 2025, even the intelligence community was finally climbing aboard the lab-leak train, with the CIA admitting with “low confidence” that “a research-related origin on the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin.”
Once again, what bureaucrats initially dismissed as disinformation and a fringe conspiracy theory turned out most likely to be the truth they desperately wanted to conceal from the public.
April 18, 2025