https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbr...ovid-19-wuhan-lab-origin-theory/#2a2e2db65aba
BREAKING|140,556 views|May 10, 2020,04:13pm EDT
A Timeline Of The COVID-19 Wuhan Lab Origin Theory
Jack BrewsterForbes Staff
Business
I'm a news reporter for Forbes.
Updated May 24, 2020, 10:59am EDT
The theory COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China — and not naturally in wildlife — has emerged as an explosive claim pitting scientists, who
remain skeptical of the claim, against Trump administration officials, who have rallied around the theory as the White House turns to
deflecting attention away from criticism it faltered in its handling of the outbreak and casting blame onto China; here’s a timeline laying out the progression of the theory:
January 26
The conservative
Washington Times publishes a report with the menacing headline “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets global pickup.
February 16Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., becomes the first high-profile U.S. politician to
raise the possibility that the outbreak “originated”— or, presumably, was created—in the Wuhan lab — while admitting there was no evidence to suggest there was.
February 16The
Washington Post finds experts who quickly dismiss Cotton’s suggestion, like Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, who says, “The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”
February 16
Cotton clarifies his earlier remarks in a
series of tweets—noting different possible scenarios, from a man-made virus theory to a lab accident—though concedes that the virus originating naturally is “still the most likely” theory.
A group of 27 prominent scientists outside China publishes a
statement in The Lancet to “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin“ and point out the research “overwhelmingly” concludes the “coronavirus originated in wildlife.”
March 17“
We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” five prominent scientists write in a
report published in
Nature Medicine.
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