I speak more from a scientific than journalistic perspective, but if a hypothesis is going to have consequences on the life of ordinary people without much in the way of evidence to back it, as a scientist I absolutely think it's my duty to shut up about it till more evidence emerges.

And that is what happened. Last year, the lab leak theory was significantly less persuasive, because a few months into the pandemic, we had not dug in enough to be anywhere close to sure that a natural origin was impossible. We still can't discard that hypothesis, but this many months in, the absence of evidence on that front tilts the balance towards making the lab leak theory a lot more plausible.

I'm certain that distaste for Trump and Cotton and their racial motivations drove part of journalistic coverage on this, but the overwhelming scientific evidence did as well, and I'm less persuaded that was primarily about Trump.

One part of this definitely does seem to be that Shi Zhengli's collaborators and funders in the US were covering their ass. That thread has been unraveled quite well, and deserves all the opprobrium self-preservation in the face of a global pandemic deserves.

Another part of the scientific community's dismissal of lab leak comes down to other virologists around the world not wanting anything harming their funding for gain of function research. That also deserves condemnation.

Neither of those have anything to do with Trump or the Republican party. But they materially contributed to the media's playing down the lab leak hypothesis. Calling the virus the China Flu does nothing to combat the old fashioned self-interest that contributed to this situation, but it certainly harms it, because you now create an environment where racist backlash against ordinary Chinese citizens and diaspora becomes a factor in how scientists and journalists cover the issue.

If Trump and Cotton truly wanted the truth, they should have insisted on a commission/intelligence effort to look into the whole thing in detail without pre-biasing the outcome that was politically convenient to them, and packaged in racist terms to boot. That scientists and journalists responded with redoubled caution because of the racism of these guys isn't the fault of anyone but Trump and Cotton.