Media Bias May Be Literally Killing Us
Politicizing the lab-leak theory could have cost lives.
All is tranquil in the mighty jungle. Monkeys chatter in the trees, birds call. Then, a crashing disruption. A growling motor and the stink of fuel exhaust. A yellow bulldozer rolls into view, matting down the lush greenery. As it topples a tree, a startled cauldron of bats screeches into the sky, carrying a deadly pathogen toward the first unsuspecting victims.
It’s a scene straight out of “Contagion,” a movie about a virulent global pandemic. Mankind, in the name of progress, resource, and industrialized animal agriculture, has been pushing his way deeper into the natural world where we’re bound to cause trouble.
And now we have Covid-19.
The Pangolin
In March 2020, a widely-circulated Vox video theorized that the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 was a Chinese wet market. As the story went, the novel coronavirus likely came from a bat, transmitted to a pangolin (a highly trafficked animal worldwide), and then, in the blood-and-guts muck of a Wuhan wet market, hitched a ride on a human. Patient zero.
It seemed a reasonable explanation.
But around the same time, early days of the pandemic, an alternative narrative was circulating.
