For months, anyone who said the new SARS coronavirus might have come out of a virology research lab in Wuhan, China, was dismissed as a right-wing xenophobe. When Zero Hedge — a financial news website whose comment section certainly fits the right-wing stereotype — first put out its own bombastic version of the bat-borne virus escaping a research lab, it was banned from Twitter.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson starting banging this drum last week. But on Tuesday, the narrative flipped. It’s no longer a story shared by China bears and President Trump fans. Today, Josh Rogin, who is said to be as plugged into the State Department as any Washington Post columnist, was shown documents dating back to 2015 revealing how the U.S. government was worried about safety standards at that Wuhan lab. In fact, they were worried that one day, one of these experiments — including the one on bat coronaviruses — could escape and become a global nightmare.