>The media repeatedly mocked even a lab escape scenario

Do you have any links?

How many do you want? If I post one link, you'll likely say it's not enough. Same with two links, etc. I'm hesitant to engage with this kind of request, but I did.

In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".

Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:

"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"

Article:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...

And here is a handful of links, of many:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/could-covid-19...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intellig...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavi...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...

I still remember this article which seemed to conflate lab escape with bioengineering:

"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

"After the story published, Cotton as part of a series of tweets made a distinction between the possibility the coronavirus is a man-made result of biological weapons research – which experts say should be dismissed – and other possibilities such as a lab accident. He also continued to list the engineered virus as a “hypothesis.”

So doesn't this imply it was Tom Cotton himself who was initially conflating an engineered origin with a lab leak (which could be wild type or engineered virus)?

Clarifying something he said previously doesn't imply retraction, disavowal, or even modification of the prior statement.

It shows that he was previously conflating two distinct concepts (genetically engineered virus and lab escape) and then got called out on it. One is wrong and one could be correct.

That is not true.

He suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab.

NYT slammed him for this "fringe theory" in February 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...

You are conflating multiple theories to maximize outrage. The article is clear that the origin theory described as ‘fringe’ is that the virus was a manufactured bio weapon and intentionally released. It even mentions that Cotton had to ‘walk back’ his support for this theory.

While unlikely, it's also premature to call the genetically-engineered scenario "wrong". I agree it appears improbable at this point, but when the most likely scenario appears to be a lab escape, I'm hesitate to categorically rule out that the virus had been genetically altered at all.