NPR Embarrassed as COVID Lab Leak Theory Gains Ground

April 20, 2025

National Public Radio science desk correspondent Rob Stein is about five years behind on COVID origin speculation, still taking the politically correct side, that it’s beyond the pale to accuse China of letting the COVID virus leak from a government laboratory, and that the alternate theory, that COVID spread naturally from animals to humans, is unassailable: “‘Lab Leak,’ a flashy page on the virus’ origins, replaces government COVID sites.”

NPR’s previous coverage looks so embarrassing now, in its arrogant certitude, that the White House encapsulated NPR’s greatest COVID misses into a press release, in a paragraph introduced “NPR repeatedly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab — a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy.”

The White House’s first example of NPR getting COVID wrong was a headline from April 2020 that read “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence.” Oops.

A particularly arrogant NPR tweet from December 2020, which we caught at NewsBusters: “A new poll finds 40% of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China. There is zero evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.” It was “bonkers” QAnon stuff!

Still, it was the “lab leak” idea that Stein insists on calling “controversial.” (At this point, with new evidence tilting the other way, wouldn’t the original “wet market” theory, that COVID jumped to humans through eating infected wildlife, now be the “controversial” one?)

NPR ignored why Fauci would even be a conservative villain in the first place, skipping his support of gain-of-function research that may have originated the virus, and for squelching debate about the lab leak hypothesis early on during the pandemic.

The White House has taken down some government websites providing COVID-19 information and replaced them with a new boldly styled page dedicated to the controversial theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus leaking from a Chinese government laboratory.

….

The lab leak theory argues that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, China, and then spread around the world.

Federal agencies have issued conflicting reports about the origins of the pandemic and a House investigation that concluded last December found that a lab leak is the most likely scenario. But many scientists think it’s more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan.

“Many scientists” was doing a lot of work in the above paragraph.

It also singles out Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic, and President Biden’s decision to pardon him. Fauci became a hero to many during the pandemic, but was also vilified for his role in the government’s response.

NPR found some left-wing scientists contemptuous of the now-leading lab-leak theory to make it falsely appear fringe, even though several U.S. agencies have now signed on to it.

The website presents five bullet points in favor of the lab leak theory. None of them are new, noted Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

“Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis … is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way,” Rasmussen wrote in an email. ….”….This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research.”

Does Rasmussen sound like an objective scientist, or one handpicked by NPR to give the answer it needed to shore up its crumbling viewpoint?

PS: The Trump press team mocked NPR on X: