I get an email summary from the New York Times every day called The Morning. This was the lead story today.

"Good morning. The lab-leak theory is everywhere. We have an explainer."

Here is a fascinating admission contained therein.

Why all the dismissals?
It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.
Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.
In the U.S., one of the theory’s earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China — and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didn’t happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.
The media’s coverage of his argument was flawed, Substack’s Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cotton’s comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that “very unlikely.”) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something — and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it — the idea had to be wrong.
The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. It’s a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.

I have believed since the start that at the very least, China was withholding information if not outright lying like a rug. Did I think it possible that COVID escaped from the viral lab in Wuhan? Hell yes. I'm astounded the left-leaning mainstream media is finally, if begrudgingly, giving it credence.