SATIRE (unless it isn't)
THE HOAX FILES · 34
From "Racist Conspiracy" to "CIA Assessment"
It went from "racist conspiracy" to a CIA assessment, with no apology in between.
Media-wide
In 2020, asking about the Wuhan lab got you labeled a bigot. By 2025, the CIA and FBI had leaned toward it.
As printed on the graphic:
COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
What they sold
2020. Suggesting COVID could have escaped from a Wuhan lab got branded a debunked conspiracy theory, and often a racist one, lumped in with Trump's "China virus" language. In May 2021, CNN looked back at its own industry with "Taking a look at the media's role in the Covid-19 lab leak theory," acknowledging that treating every lab question as a conspiracy theory had been too simple.
What the record shows
The FBI assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic most likely started with a lab incident (Vanity Fair, Reuters). The Energy Department leaned the same way with low confidence (REPORTED, 2023). In January 2025, the CIA said with low confidence that a research-related origin was more likely than a natural one (Reuters, AP). In April 2025, the White House turned the old COVID.gov site into a page promoting the lab-leak theory (Today/NBC).
Hedge: it's still unresolved. Other agencies and many scientists still favor a natural spillover. But it was never racist to ask whether a virus came from a lab that studied that kind of virus, in the city where the outbreak started.
The damage
FNN analysis: when a legitimate question gets called bigotry, you're telling the public that some questions are off-limits. Then those questions turn out to be the ones the CIA is answering. Gallup: trust fell from 40% in 2020 to 28% in 2025.
Closer
They called you a racist for asking. The CIA asked the same thing. The smear doesn't hold.