Tony Brasunas

I first drafted this article a month ago, and I planned to use this first paragraph as an apology for delving into one of the media’s taboo subject areas, a “debunked conspiracy theory.” Cue the scary music.

How quickly tides turn. The past month has been stunning. Rarely does such a monolithic media narrative disintegrate so quickly. We are in a “Weapons of Mass Destruction” moment. A sacrosanct pillar of a narrative justifying government power is crumbling before our eyes.

If you’re already certain about the origin of the virus, or just don’t have time to read this full investigation and timeline, you can scroll down to “The Takeaways,” where I explain what I think this news means.

As recently as the first week of May, very few people in establishment media or mainstream politics were talking about the origin of the virus. It was a forbidden topic as it had been for the entirety of 2020. The mainstream media called it a “fringe” “conspiracy theory.” Vaunted “fact-checkers” called it a pants-on-fire lie. Just asking basic questions about the origin of sars-cov-2 got journalists, doctors, and entire independent media sources deplatformed, censored, demonetized, or “fact-checked” as liars and kooks.

Things have changed in a splendid hurry. It’s fascinating, and I think it’s essential to understand what this means for our understanding of the world today.

THE TWO THEORIES

The two theories for the origin of this virus are the “lab leak hypothesis” and the “natural zoonotic hypothesis.” We could compare the evidence for the two, but at this point there is so much evidence for the former and so little for the latter, it’s not a fair fight. What I’ve decided instead is to write up and share a timeline that demonstrates how I and many others arrived at what I believe is about 90% certainty on the origin of this virus.

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