When news of a novel coronavirus out of Wuhan, China, first began making the headlines early last year, the theory of its origin was quickly tied to a local wet market in which exotic meats were sold. The fact that some Chinese cuisine — like bat soup — seems rather strange to Western sensibilities served to make more plausible the entirely natural origin of the virus.

That bats were quickly associated with the wet market origin theory was an easy assumption due to the fact that bats are notorious carriers of coronaviruses. Furthermore, it served Beijing to have the focus of a suddenly spreading potential pandemic — along with any culpability — directed at nature instead of the ChiCom regime. It’s almost as if it were planned that way.

Of course, once the wet market theory became orthodoxy, any questions or suggestions to the contrary were deemed as the insane conspiracy theory ramblings of the tinfoil hat club. Leftmedia outlets refused to cover the lab theory without adding supposedly discrediting qualifiers, and social media outlets suppressed and blocked all such content. It got so bad that, now, even a few members of the mainstream media are admitting that their rabid opposition to Donald Trump so clouded their judgment that they essentially stopped doing their jobs, instead reflexively rejecting any information he presented out of spite. That was deadly behavior.

The press ran from the lab leak theory in part because some people had speculated about COVID being a manufactured super-virus or bioweapon, rather than the result of the Wuhan lab studying (or conducting gain-of-function research on) a naturally occurring virus found in bats that had led to the deaths of three Chinese miners in 2013. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2016 released a report regarding its study of the virus that had killed and sickened the miners, noting that there were several variants of bat-caused coronaviruses:

We found a high frequency of infection by a diverse group of coronaviruses in different bat species in the mineshaft. … The surveillance identified two unclassified betacoronaviruses, one new strain of SARS-like coronavirus, and one potentially new betacoronavirus species. Furthermore, coronavirus co-infection was detected in all six bat species, a phenomenon that fosters recombination and promotes the emergence of novel virus strains.

The fact that a Biosafety Level Four lab, the highest level of safety and security, just happened to be studying bat-based coronaviruses in the very city from which the novel virus emerged — Wuhan — should have piqued everyone’s attention. Not only that, but it was discovered, albeit not widely reported at the time, that the Wuhan wet market did not sell bat meat.

Researchers have known for two years that there were no bats being sold or eaten in that market. The narrative that the wet market was the origin of the bat-based coronavirus is spurious.

There was also a 2018 memo from Jamison Fouss and Rick Switzer, members of the U.S. consul general in Wuhan, expressing concerns over the WIV: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

But for the Leftmedia’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, these factors may have garnered deserved focus and turned the public’s attention onto the Wuhan lab, where it should have been from the beginning. Of course, the lab leak theory still remains a theory — and one into which Beijing will do everything in its power to obstruct any serious examination. See the joke that was WHO’s “investigation.”

Yet some of us won’t be fooled. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is one of them. “It’s not close in terms of which is more credible,” he says. “The lab leak is significantly more credible than the zoonotic transmission theory at this point.”

Now that compelling circumstantial evidence has continued to point more strongly to a lab leak, G7 leaders are calling for another WHO-led investigation. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board observes, “Why does anyone think a ‘Phase 2’ probe would have any more access and do any better under the auspices of a WHO that remains heavily compromised on China?” Why indeed.