Trump was the boy.
Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:
"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "
There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.
How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?
It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.
You gotta remember they had time to "debunk" this theory. So apparently they had time to do something, except critical thinking.
This is in fact how the media has always behaved. It did this about more or less every major event in US history. Only when the tide has turned sufficiently within the culture as a whole does the media as a whole manage to embrace non-status-quo positions. There are always outliers, visible/audible from the start, who tell contrary stories, just as there have been for COVID19.