When Republican Sen. Tom Cotton speculated that the coronavirus outbreak might have come out of a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, he was roundly pilloried, mocked, and chastised by politicians and journalists.

But it turns out that Cotton might have been correct, and the very expert the media used to attack Cotton as some kind of conspiracy theorist now admits as much.

Cotton went on Fox Business on Feb. 16 and told Maria Bartiromo that he rejected the official story that the virus originated from Wuhan’s seafood market. “The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market,” Cotton said, adding that “we don’t know where it originated.”

He said that “we have to get to the bottom of” where it came from.

That’s when Cotton brought up the Wuhan lab. “A few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level 4 superlaboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.”

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie responded on Twitter, “Tom Cotton is one of the most irresponsible and dangerous people in federal office.”

The Washington Post rolled out a piece headlined “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” The Washington Post's lead: “Sen. Tom Cotton ... repeated a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.”

Cotton had made similar comments weeks earlier, which were also greeted with mockery — as was his insistence that the coronavirus was a huge threat.

“I would note that Wuhan, the province where the ailment was first reported, has China’s only biosafety level 4 superlaboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus,” Cotton said before the committee.

“Don’t listen to Tom Cotton about coronavirus” was the HuffPost headline. Cotton’s crazy ideas, according to HuffPost senior reporter Nick Robins-Early, included calling for a massive response to battle the coronavirus, including a ban on travel from China. Cotton's other idea that needed to be ignored, according to HuffPost, was that the coronavirus could have come from a “superlaboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens."

Many of Cotton’s critics attacked him by misrepresenting what he actually said. What's striking, though, is that so many different critics misrepresented his comments in the same exact way, as if they were all reading from the same talking points.

HuffPost wrote in late January that Cotton was suggesting “that the virus is the result of some sort of bioweapon or other manufactured cause,” yet they never could quote him asserting as much — because he didn't.

A Washington Post piece two weeks after the Fox Business appearance quoted Cotton suggesting the virus could have come out of the lab and then made the same jump HuffPost did: implying Cotton was calling the virus a deliberately engineered bioweapon.

“In response to Cotton’s remarks, as well as in previous interviews with The Washington Post, numerous experts dismissed the possibility the coronavirus may be man-made,” Washington Post health columnist Paulina Firozi wrote.

Throughout the pandemic, Eric Kleefeld at Media Matters for America has tirelessly tried to blur the two theories, the bioweapon theory and the came-from-a-lab theory, into one. And it seems he has convinced a lot of the media to follow his lead.

The New York Times and the Daily Beast performed this conflation.

WaPo was hardly alone. Outlets like the New York Times and Daily Beast spread the same false claims. https://t.co/g0RHtbHbBUhttps://t.co/X1Nb21xSbh pic.twitter.com/ufeCnDGyJC — (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) April 3, 2020

CBS then helped China weaponize (so to speak) this rampant U.S. media conflation. Twitterer @AGHamilton29 collected the conflators into a thread of shame.

This should be obvious, but I suppose it needs saying: Suggesting that a virus may have entered into human communities through a lab is not at all suggesting that it was man-made. As Cotton himself has said, researchers working on bats may have become infected or improperly disposed of waste.

These circumstances are entirely plausible, they are not crazy conspiracy theories, and they are exactly the sort of thing the authoritarian, imperialist government of China would cover up.

The theory is finally overcoming the fallacies of its objectors. David Ignatius of the Washington Post makes exactly that argument in his column.

Ignatius writes: "What’s increasingly clear is that the initial 'origin story' — the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky."

Ignatius quoted the very same microbiologist, Richard Ebright, whom his colleague Firozi used to attack Cotton as a spreader of debunked conspiracy theories. Ebright had told Firozi, “There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered” — which, of course, wasn’t what Cotton was charging.

Ebright told Ignatius, “The first human infection … could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.”

Ignatius continued: “He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, ‘which provides only minimal protection,’ compared with the top BSL-4.”

With Ignatius’s column and with increasing suspicion that the virus did not come from the Wuhan seafood market, the idea that the virus accidentally came out of that lab may seamlessly move from “fringe opinion” to respectable — even to consensus.

The first question should be whether the folks who attacked that notion in February will explain why they were unwilling to consider it. I think we all know the answer to that one.

The more important question is whether we can get to the bottom of it. China is so secretive and so controlling that we may never get that answer.