That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.
Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year.
1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak.
2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid.
3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible.
>several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab.
Keep that in mind next time.
Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.
Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.
One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.
The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.
But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.
It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.
The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.