A group of scientists is now opening themselves up to discussing the possibility the Coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan after either being tight-lipped over the last year or outright refuting the theory. However, now that Trump is out of the White House more media pundits and scientists are ready to embrace the origin theory.

Alina Chan, one of the 18 scientists that signed a letter backing an investigation into the origin of Covid-19 says that she and colleagues stayed quiet on the legitimacy of the theory over fears they would be associated with former President Trump.

The Daily Wire reports:

The report noted that numerous experts in the field have said that little-to-no evidence has emerged over the last year or so and that the only thing that has changed is the “context and circumstances” around the debate of the pandemic’s origins.

Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged. Trump fueled accusations that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab in the city where the first Covid-19 cases were reported, was connected to the outbreak…

“At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,” Chan claimed in the interview.

Scientists rushed to downplay the possibility that the pandemic could have originated in the lab by publishing a letter in The Lancet that cast it “as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism,” Vanity Fair reported. “The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began.”

Trump has called out scientists for backtracking on the theory that Coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute in China.