Peter Laffin writes for the Washington Examiner abiut the media’s collective disinterest in a major story.
Lately, it feels as if the COVID-19 pandemic happened to somebody else — that we were just spectators who watched it all unfold only to forget what we saw. And yet the devastation of pandemic policies remains with us. But the anger and frustration the public once expressed toward the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions seem to have vanished.
Even the media seem to have finally moved on. No longer do liberal commentators wax poetic about how many Sept. 11s the pandemic had equaled in terms of the death count. That comparison, of course, was always facile, but at least it signaled a desire to get to the bottom of things and hold those responsible to account.
The problem is our media were never really interested in accountability. They refused to entertain the possibility that COVID-19 might have leaked from a Wuhan lab since any suggestion of that nature evinced anti-Asian racism, and instead channeled their frustration toward a secondary target. The real culprit, as one New York Times opinion piece breathlessly intoned, was “decades of global environmental heedlessness” along with underfunded science, for which former President Donald Trump’s knuckle-dragging mob could doubtless be thanked. It was with Trump & Co. in mind that our fearless liberal news hosts seethingly recited the updated death toll each night.
But following an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, published in May of 2021, that cast doubt over the natural origin theory and raised the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the media’s palpable anger began to fade into something like quiet resignation. The growing possibility that COVID-19 was itself the fruit of scientific research in Chinese biolabs, which involved splicing together COVID strains in order to make them more infectious in humans (i.e., “gain of function” research), left the media suddenly uninterested in the blame game. And they’ve been allergic to the topic of COVID’s origins ever since.