What happened is a bunch of prominent US scientists wrote and signed a letter about lab leak hypothesis in
The Journal of Science. The amount of evidence against animal origin of covid 19 grew far too large to be ignored. Scientists literally cannot research this matter without acknowledging that evidence, there is nothing to build upon if they are not actively trying to better their understanding. While scientists are not perfect, and the whole pandemic has plenty of evidence for that, it is a
process that makes it really hard to ignore the truth in the long term. It is only self correcting given enough time, and at this point the pile of evidence is too large for anyone to ignore while still doing their jobs. That's all there really is to see here.
The journalists cannot find experts that outrank the ones that authored and signed the letter in Science. Many scientists are writing about evidence for lab leak hypthesis on personal blogs, or on medium, and being widely read. The evidence is easy to understand, like ventilation and sunlight severely limiting the spread of this virus being incompatible with animals passing it around at an outdoor market. The cat is out of the bag and journalists are fucking pissy about having to write about this now. Elites do not like this. David Frum wrote a huge butthurt screed in the
atlantic about how its all trump's fault that they ignored the lab leak hypothesis. If you cntrol+f for "trump" you can see he mentions him 29 times. He claims that since trump talked about lab leak it was his journalistic duty to ignore it. or something. ??? Either way, orange mans fault!
Near the beginning of the pandemic, Nature published info calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. It seems to have stemmed from non-scientific concerns like wanting to prevent any discrimination or violence that might come to asians, or worsening relations with china. They treated animal origin of covid-19 as the null hypothesis out of a social justice and political concern. That type of thing always falls apart, especially when everyone capable of researching covid is doing it. I think that even more than the concerns about protecting asians and WHO/china, the fact of the matter is that a lab leak makes
scientists look bad, especially virologists. And they fucked up, massively. There isn't a precedent for obtaining justice for a mistake of this magnitude.