Tom Cotton must be thinking, Where do I go to get my reputation back?

Cotton, you’ll recall, is the Arkansas Republican senator who had the COVID-19 lab-leak theory sussed out in February 2020. For his perspicacity, he was assailed by Democrats, hard leftists, China apologists, and The New York Times — but we repeat ourselves — as purveying a “fringe theory.”

At the time, Cotton declared:

We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level-4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.

Of course, asking the question became difficult when the Communist Chinese began doing what commies do: hiding evidence and denying access to the crime scene. And how dare Cotton impugn the integrity of our friends the ChiComs anyway. As the Wall Street Journal’s editors note, “The U.S. intelligence and healthcare bureaucracies resisted [Cotton’s] conclusion, perhaps in part because U.S. grants may have financed the ‘gain of function’ research that allowed the virus to jump to human hosts.”

Yet now, we learn from The New York Times that after five years of dogged dithering, the super sleuths at our Central Intelligence Agency now believe that Cotton may have been right those many years ago — that the ChiCom Virus pandemic just maybe might possibly have perhaps leaked out of a virology lab in Wuhan rather than emanating more innocently from a bat.

Better late than never, I suppose. Still, I wonder what new chocolatey goodness evidence has wafted out of the Hershey plant the Wuhan Institute of Virology so as to budge the CIA off its mark of believing that the virus originated naturally — you know, like from a pangolin in a Chinese wet market — and toward the notoriously sloppy Wuhan Institute of Virology that was studying coronaviruses a stone’s throw away from ground zero.

Here, it’s worth a brief and hilarious trip down memory lane.

As it turns out, though, the CIA hasn’t uncovered any new info. From the Times article: “There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.”

Accordingly, the agency is still hedging its bets, still unwilling to point a finger of guilt at our nation’s foremost geopolitical foe. As the Times adds, “The agency made its new assessment with ‘low confidence,’ which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.”

This makes sense. I mean, it’s not like the virus killed a million Americans and wrecked our economy and destroyed countless livelihoods and put our nation far deeper into debt or anything.

We’ve long believed that COVID-19 came from that infamous lab in Wuhan. Recall that in March 2023, even then-FBI Director Chris Wray came around, acknowledging that a lab leak was most likely the source.

As for the timing of the CIA’s admission, it’s interesting, to say the least. After all, Donald Trump’s new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, was just confirmed by the Senate and had barely begun to measure the drapes when he released a Biden-era assessment — an assessment that the Biden administration had buried — that favored the lab-leak theory.

“I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration,” said Ratcliffe this weekend, “so it can’t be accused of being political. And the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan, so we’ll continue to investigate that moving forward.”

What we had here, then, was failure to communicate. This is, again, understandable because, as the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin reminded us recently, the Big Guy and his crime family made a lot of money from the ChiComs.

“A distrust in leadership.” That’s perhaps the ultimate consequence of all this, according to a 520-page final report released recently by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “Trust is earned,” said Republican Chairman Brad Wenstrup. “Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. … We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must.”

Someday soon, we expect Donald Trump to sign an executive order seeking to block the dangerous gain-of-function research that got so catastrophically out of hand in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But just because we’ve banned the research here doesn’t mean our crack CIA investigators should cease their, ahem, tireless efforts to pin down the culprits of this global calamity.