(Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk is a great look at said game of telephone.)
What's mildly infuriating me about this is that the people who push the lab escape hypothesis seem to have political motivations, but the wet market origin hypothesis is much worse for China. Although they have officially prohibited many of the practices and animal abuse that make it easier for viruses to jump to humans from other hosts, these practices remain widespread. It's much easier to secure virology labs than tens of thousands of semi-legal and illegal wet markets.
We went from Facebook banning mention of the theory to everyone being certain it's right on the basis of "national security flack says someone who works at the lab was sick, during flu season".
The WSJ author had brought us other CIA-approved gems about WMDs in Iraq once upon a time.
You might be onto something with garden-variety liberals feeling 'free' to try and blame China now that Trump's out of sight, though.
In case other people besides myself were confused, we're apparently talking about Michael Gordon, and this WSJ article [0], not this one [1]. Michael Gordon also wrote [2], which reported on the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...