Biden COVID Czar Finally Admits Virus Came From Chinese Lab

Ashish Jha says it's going to "surprise some people" that he now leans toward the lab leak theory. Surprise isn't the word we'd use. For anyone who was actually paying attention back in 2020 and 2021, this is closer to a confession three years late, delivered with the mildest possible framing so nobody has to feel too bad about what came before it.

Remember what happened to the people who said this out loud when it mattered. Doctors got deplatformed. Reporters got mocked. Josh Hawley got called a conspiracy theorist on the Senate floor for raising the exact possibility Jha is now casually admitting might be true. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing gain-of-function-adjacent research a few miles from where the outbreak started, and pointing that out got you labeled a crank by the same public health class that is now, one by one, updating their priors after the political cost of admitting it has dropped to zero.

That's the pattern worth sitting with. It's not really about Jha as an individual. It's about how often "the science" turned out to mean "the politically safe position at this exact moment," and how the people enforcing that consensus never seem to pay a price when it collapses. Nobody loses a job over this. Nobody has to sit for the kind of hearing that got handed to skeptics in 2021.

We're glad Jha said it. We'd be gladder if the people who spent three years calling this racist misinformation showed up to say they were wrong, instead of letting a quiet update slide by while everyone pretends the argument never really happened.