"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)?