For the past year, you’ve been lied to repeatedly about a matter of great consequence: Where did the COVID-19 plague come from? Were its origins natural or man-made?

But during the past two weeks, and in particular the past 48 hours, we’ve seen the roof cave in on the Left’s sneering, antiscientific, increasingly improbable Trump-deranged insistence that it occurred naturally — that it came straight from a bat cave.

Yet we know the truth: COVID-19, the killer of nearly 3.5 million people worldwide, came from a Chinese lab.

Why is this important? First, because learning the truth helps us prevent it from happening again; second, because it exposes the evils of Chinese communism; and third, because it gives the world permission to hold Xi Jinping’s murderous regime accountable.

The evidence just keeps piling up. As the Wall Street Journal reports:

In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering [an abandoned copper] mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.

Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses.

Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019.

Indeed, that “conspiracy theory” is fast becoming fact. We most recently covered this just over two weeks ago when we quoted Nicholas Wade, who for 30 years reported on science for the New York Times. As Wade put it, “It’s very hard on the natural emergence scenario to imagine how the virus broke out someplace else, built itself up into a real good human pathogen, and, without infecting anyone else, the guy who was infected jumped on a train to Wuhan, didn’t infect anyone on the train, and it was only when he got to Wuhan that he started spreading. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Others in the scientific community were also taking notice. As the Journal reported on May 13, “In a letter published … in the journal Science, an international group of 18 biologists, immunologists and other scientists criticized the findings of a report released in March by a World Health Organization-led team into the pandemic’s origin and called for a more extensive evaluation of the two leading hypotheses: that the pandemic virus entered the human population and began spreading after escaping from a lab or after jumping to humans from infected animals.”

Even the always-wrong and increasingly unpopular Tony Fauci is finally coming around.

But the most troubling question is this: What took everyone so long? We already know the answer. Leftists and their media enablers couldn’t bring themselves to admit that then-President Donald Trump might be right.

Trump regularly called COVID-19 “the China Virus,” and he said more than a year ago that he had a “high degree of confidence” that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was also suspicious, and so was brave and lonely Senator Tom Cotton, who was roundly mocked for sharing his spot-on instincts about the ChiComs as early as January 2020.

Trump’s certitude on the origins of the virus thus put his haters in a bind. After all, they couldn’t be seen to support him. On anything. Especially not on a matter of substance regarding the most consequential news story since 9/11. And certainly not in an election year. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, in fact, blamed Trump for the media’s failure to cover the lab-origin theory.

“I do think it’s important to remember that … both [Trump and Pompeo] suggested they had seen evidence that this was formed in a lab … but they refused to release the evidence showing what it was,” Haberman told CNN’s “New Day” on Monday. “And so because of that, that made this instantly political.”

Actually, Pompeo launched an investigation to follow the evidence. Team Biden shut it down. Well, before Biden called for another one today.

And Haberman and The Paper of Record simply moved along. Nothing to see there.

Haberman wasn’t alone, of course. As PJ Media’s Victoria Taft writes, “The self-described ‘fact-checker’ of The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, admits in a splashy article that because Leftist legacy media reporters (my words, not his) didn’t like President Donald Trump, they ignored his warnings that the ‘China virus’ possibly escaped from a Wuhan, China, lab. They denounced it as a ‘thoroughly debunked theory.’ And they ignored him and his legitimate warnings because they believed the usage of the term was racist.”

Clearly, then, these other terms are “racist”: SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Spanish Flu, Lyme Disease, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

So, without evidence, the mainstream media slammed the lab-leak theory again and again and again.

As for the pathology of this deception, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke puts forth a powerful analogy:

Of all the grotesque political reactions that follow the news that there has been a mass shooting, perhaps the ugliest comes from those who hope aloud that the crime has been carried out by a certain sort of person.

We’ve all seen this phenomenon. First comes the initial report. Next come the initial reactions. And, then, the moment there is space to be filled, certain players within our media ecosystem begin crossing their fingers, bowing their heads in mock prayer, and saying, in effect, “Please let the killer have whatever collection of immutable characteristics and political beliefs is likely to allow me to advance my worldview online.”

And the Left, including the “media ecosystem” mentioned by Cooke, subordinated its integrity to its Trump-hating narrative.

If Trump espouses X, then we must reflexively and collectively denounce X regardless of the evidence. One need only consider Trump’s support of hydroxychloroquine to see this scenario at work.

As our Mark Alexander writes, “Beyond the growing conclusion that the ChiCom Virus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute’s P4 lab, the next logical question is this: Did they release the virus intentionally?” Venerable journalist Brit Hume cautiously teased that question this week: “[The Wuhan lab source] becomes undeniable, and more clear than ever, but this is a rogue state. This is an outlaw state. This is not a ‘member of the international community.’ … This is a nation which will suppress the truth, maybe wipe out people in their own ranks who try to tell the truth. … So far as we know the Chinese did not [deliberately release the virus] but it hasn’t been disproven, and given the way China acts, I don’t believe you can completely rule it out.”

Again, we — all of us — have been lied to repeatedly. But sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the truth about COVID-19 is finally seeing the light of day.

(Updated.)