Remember when you could be suspended from Twitter 1.0 for suggesting that COVID-19 leaked from a lab? It took them 18 months, but the Washington Post finally stealth-edited a headline about Sen. Tom Cotton spreading a "debunked conspiracy theory" about a lab leak (the debunked conspiracy theory became a "fringe theory that scientists have disputed"). Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler did a piece in 2021 called, "How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible."

As recently as March 2023, we were still hearing new theories about the origins of the coronavirus ... this time linked to "raccoon dogs." Yes, new research suggested the virus was passed to humans through raccoon dogs.

Now it's September 2024, and the Post is reporting on a new report suggesting the pandemic most likely originated at a wet market in Wuhan, China, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology where they were performing gain-of-function research on bats.

Joel Achenbach reports:

An international team of scientists published a peer-reviewed paper Thursday saying genetic evidence indicates the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated with a natural spillover from an animal or animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, where many of the first human cases of covid-19 were identified.

The paper, which appears in the journal Cell, does not claim to prove conclusively that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and it is unlikely to end the acrimonious and politicized debate over the coronavirus's origin.

...

"The results we see are consistent with infected animals, but we cannot prove that they were," said Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a co-author of the new paper.

We may never know.

People have been paying attention ... to Anthony Fauci and the projects he was funding. The whole reason the lab leak theory became "toxic" is because it came from someone like Cotton and not a respected scientist like Fauci.