Facebook decided this week it’s no longer “misinformation” to wonder whether COVID-19 was manmade by Chinese scientists in a biolab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But it’s not just Facebook. The national media and President Biden have just done a similar 180.

On Wednesday, the same guy who had ordered the shutting down of the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 told the U.S. intelligence community to redouble its efforts to find out how the coronavirus got started.

So, faster than you can say “dishonest mainstream media,” the idea that a deadly manmade virus came from a biolab in Communist China flipped from being a racist Trump conspiracy theory to a credible and probable possibility.

All last year the liberal media and our top scientists told us over and over that we had to believe the Communist Chinese fairy tale that COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans.

But that story has recently fallen apart after reports that several researchers working on coronaviruses at the biolab in Wuhan got so sick in November 2019 they were hospitalized.

Everyone in the national media is now talking about the plausibility of an escaped coronavirus as if it’s something new.

That’s great.

But if you go back a year, and if you know how to connect some dots, you would have known that there’s been something sloppy and rotten in China’s biolabs for almost 20 years.

In 2004 China’s health officials reported that four suspected cases of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) – which sickened 8,000 in 29 countries and killed nearly 800 in 2003-2004 – were the result of a safety breach at a Beijing biolab studying the SARS coronavirus.

In 2017, after years of searching in caves, a team of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology found the source of SARS in the bodies of horseshoe bats.

They began studying – and manipulating -- the deadly and risky bat coronavirus in their high-containment laboratory, which in 2015 had become China’s first biolab to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4).

The trouble was, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s biolab was a pandemic waiting to get started.

In 2018 a group of U.S. diplomats and scientists who visited the lab told the Trump administration that its staff was not properly trained and was not following the protocols to safely operate a level 4 biolab.

The White House was actually warned that the Wuhan lab’s “work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”

Biden appears to be catching up to the reality of China’s third-rate biolabs now, but he’s always known better.

It was the Obama administration that in 2015 helped China get the international OK it needed to raise the Wuhan lab’s rating from level 3 to 4.

By getting a higher accreditation, the biolab was allowed to handle the deadliest, riskiest viruses from anywhere in the world.

It also gave it the ability to do the testing and manipulation of coronaviruses that gave it the potential to become a biological weapons facility.

But don’t blame Obama, Biden or Dr. Fauci for endorsing the Wuhan biolab’s upgrade. The whole world signed off on it.

Maybe that’s why no other governments are coming down hard on China.

Maybe they don’t want to jeopardize their zillion-dollar financial arrangements with China or risk their domestic companies’ access to China’s 1.4 billion potential customers.

It’s not just the NBA, Apple or Hollywood that have sold their souls to China’s Communist government for profit.

That’s actually the big story, I think. Money. If you follow the money, you usually get to the bottom of things.

In this case, when you get to the bottom of things the world population will find out that their governments approved a level 4 biolab that can produce biological weapons for China—the world’s number one enemy of freedom.

And so far, 3.4 million human beings have died because of it.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter