Why Do Mass Media Keep Propagating Unproven Speculation about Coronavirus Origins?

Could the coronavirus that caused the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic evolve naturally? Based on what is publicly known at this time, it probably could, but there is no scientific evidence that it actually has. As of today, no animal has been found to carry the coronavirus that infected Chinese individuals in Wuhan with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019. Yet the mass media and their so-called "fact-checkers" keep propagating the unproven speculation that the virus did not leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as if it were some kind of "settled science."

A Washington Post article titled "State Department releases cable that launched claims that coronavirus escaped from Chinese lab" is a recent example of this kind of sustained propaganda. It downplays the fact that, as reported by the State Department in 2018, the personnel at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were not properly trained to safely handle live samples of contagious coronaviruses. It ignores the fact that bio-safety concerns about the Institute's equipment and operations had been raised in the past by international experts (e.g., here [1]). It does not even mention that the Institute did have the capability, in terms of technology and personnel, to genetically engineer mutations of the existing coronaviruses in order to make them more contagious, and that research in that direction was actually carried on there. Above all, the said article fails to indicate that, following the first signs of the outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese authorities systematically destroyed or removed virtually all the evidence that could possibly implicate the Institute as the actual origin of the pandemic.

The burden of proof

Modern scientific knowledge is supposed to be based on publicly available, credible, and practically verifiable evidence, as opposed to pure speculation or secret knowledge alone.y.

The “official” theory of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the virus evolved naturally in certain animals from which, sometime in 2019, it became zoonotic — that is, jumped on humans. Unfortunately, at this time, no single animal has been found that carried the very virus at the time of such zoonotic event. Although scientists were able to explain, in purely theoretical and speculative terms, how similar strains of the coronavirus that were found in Chinese bats could naturally evolve outside humans to become the Wuhan coronavirus, there is zero scientific evidence that this actually did happen.

It may also be possible that some strain of coronavirus jumped on humans without causing observable symptoms that would distinguish the infection caused by it from other infections and later evolved into the strain that caused the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no evidence that such scenario took place, and no renowned scientist seems to entertain such a possibility.

An expect on Virus sequencing has said CCV was 3000
Natural mutations away from the closest Bat/Pangolin strain ever found in the wild.

There probably isn’t enough Pangolins left in the world for it to have occurred naturally, even if Horseshoe bat/Pangolin Habitats overlapped (they don’t).

Weird that Wuhan was actually researching both Bat & Pangolin Virus strains, though.

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