CNBC’s Joe Kernen to Tom Cotton: Trump Critics ‘Go Crazy if You Even Broach a Possibility China Might Be at Fault’

President Donald Trump’s critics “go crazy” over any discussion of how the coronavirus originated in China, CNBC host Joe Kernen said in a Tuesday interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, because it “ruins their whole narrative.”

“I can’t believe the type of hoopla I see even when we discuss it. To a certain contingency, they claim that it’s a try to, I guess, cast blame aside from the Trump administration,” Kernen told the Arkansas Republican. “They go crazy … if you even broach a possibility that China might be at fault in some way. They go nuts. It ruins their whole narrative.”

Cotton told Kernen earlier in the interview that he believed the coronavirus pandemic originated in a biological research laboratory in Wuhan rather than in the city’s notorious seafood market, especially because the kind of bats the virus likely originated in were not sold at the market.

“The circumstantial evidence all points to the laboratories,” Cotton said. “Nothing points to the seafood market in Wuhan. On intelligence questions, it’s rare to have direct evidence, conclusive proof. You have to use your common sense and weigh all of the evidence. When you do that here, at least for the time being, until the Chinese Communist Party can produce evidence to the contrary, the most plausible explanation is that this virus originated in a lab.”

In response to widespread speculation, the U.S. intelligence community released an April 30 statement denying that Covid-19 had been genetically engineered but failed to weigh in on the likelihood that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — China’s top biological research laboratory — and gained traction in Wuhan’s loosely-regulated food market.

Cotton said there may have been multiple pathways for the virus to escape the lab. “They were researching the coronaviruses that come from those bats. There were legitimate purposes to do that, whether you’re looking for testing or therapeutic drugs or vaccines. That does not eliminate the possibility, though, of an accidental breach — of air filtration systems not working or someone being infected in the lab and walking out and starting to infect others in Wuhan. So that’s a different question, a logically distinct question, from whether the virus was genetically engineered and modified in any way.”

Cotton has been widely praised by conservatives for warning of the threat posed by coronavirus as early as January, while the left has sought to criticize him over the issue for nearly as long. The New York Times on Feb. 17 published a news article critical of Cotton for speculating the virus originated in the Wuhan laboratory, calling it a “fringe conspiracy theory.”