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WSJ EXCLUSIVE: Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report https://t.co/iWDjjtqA3Y

— Anthony DeRosa 🗽 (@Anthony) May 23, 2021

I saw this tweet and thought "Huh. So the "Wuhan lab" story has some basis in fact after all? I really don't want those conspiracy loonies to be right about any of that." But it was the WSJ, so it had to be more reliable than MTG, right? 

Nope.

I thought I was the only one scratching my head at the sourcing and caveats in that WSJ Wuhan story, but it's full of...well, if not holes, then blank spots and careful elisions that don't amount to much. https://t.co/LoVkdoTiYI

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 23, 2021

Read the thread at Pwn All Things. It's worth it. This is the NYT looking for WMD before W invaded Iraq. This is the NYT speculating darkly on what was going on in deepest, darkest Arkansas (might as well be, to the editors in NYC) during the Clinton Administration. This is, in other words, crap. As the summing up goes:

That's not to say it's impossible for the Wuhan lab theory to be right. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But this reporting is garbage, and has more red flags than a Chinese National Day parade.

— Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) May 23, 2021

And along the way there's a similar version of this story the BBC had to retract; and another similar version that was based, not on intelligence gathered by the U.S., but was actually photographs from Google maps. And most of this information seems to go back to the previous Administration:

Worth remembering also that Pompeo told Raddatz that the "best experts" believed the virus was manmade before acknowledging the consensus was otherwise. Seems like a hint of some internal jockeying at the time pic.twitter.com/PjSiUeYXYm

— swiffy (@swiffydk) May 23, 2021

Overflowing crocks of shit, IOW.  The references to Whitewater and WMD are a reminder we did this long before social media seemingly made fools of us all.  Ironically, as this report supposedly rests on "U.S. intelligence reports," it actually sounds more than anything like the kind of information contained in the "Steele dossier," which we were all supposed to discredit because it was never fully verified.  As Pwn All Things points out, nothing in the WSJ article is verified, either.  But, you know, journamalism:  it's far superior to anything on the internet not written by a "journalist."  Except that was the excuse for Whitewater, and Iraq's WMD, too.