WATCH: Sen. Cotton demands answers on the 'lab leak,' says Fauci is 'playing word games'

Senator Tom Cotton spoke to Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday to discuss the so-called "lab leak" hypothesis of the origins of COVID-19. President Donald Trump spoke about this possibility at the beginning of the pandemic, as did scientists who raised concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which received substantial funding from the US, played a role in the creation of the pandemic-causing contagion.

"It certainly is a coincidence," Cotton said, that this virus started not in some remote mountain village with caves full of bats, but rather in downtown Wuhan, a city larger than New York, just a few blocks up the road from labs that were researching bat-based coronaviruses."

"And since then," Cotton continued, "every piece of circumstantial evidence" including that which "came out in the final days of the Trump administration," he said, that showed that there's reason to believe that "employee and staff" contracted the virus prior to its being recognized at all by either Chinese officials or the global health community.

Cotton came back on Bartiromo's show more than a year after his initial request for an investigation into the relationship between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the COVID-19 coronavirus.

He demanded answers and an investigation from the Biden administration, though Bartiromo said she doubted something of that nature would be at all forthcoming. She said the Biden administration keeps giving the CCP "a break."

She detailed the "gain-of-function research" that was underway at the Wuhan Institute Virology in 2017. Cotton wants to know why the National Institute of Health was funding this research, and accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, who seems to keep changing his mind about everything from masks, to schools, to the lab leak, of "playing word games."

"I think a lot of these so-called experts and scientific bureaucrats are trying to cover their tracks, this could be a genuine scandal," he said, noting that the Obama administration also banned gain-of-function research of this kind.

He believes that much of the cover-up into the origins of the virus, and the refusal of so many on the left to even consider the notion of a lab leak, was politically motivated. "A year ago... Donald Trump was still in the White House, and people didn't want to say anything that would help him get reelected, or to confirm what people like I was saying since they don't like my politics.

"I guess since Joe Biden's in the White House," he said, "they're willing to investigate a little bit deeper. It's just an example one again of how the press has become deeply partisan in our day."

It was a year ago that  China's foreign minister denied the lab origins hypothesis of the coronavirus' origin. Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, reported Reuters, was asked if the virus was made in a lab.

Zhao said that officials from WHO "have said multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory."

Trump had a different idea. He said that he had "a high degree of confidence hat the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin for this virus." In response to the WHO's blunders, Trump signed an order to restrict US dollars from funding the World Health Organization, who he said "should be ashamed of themselves."

Cotton first bought this theory to light in on Bartiromo's show in February 2020, when he reviewed data that that the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, may have emerged earlier that Chinese and World Health Organizations initially reported. This data showed that cell phones were shut down in the area surrounding the lab, as were roads near the area.

"If it is confirmed that roads around that lab were just down for a number of days in mid-October," Cotton said in 2020, "it is highly coincidental that there was a major shut down of those roads at about the time one might have expected that this virus to first get transmitted to humans. Whatever the origins may have been, but this would be another piece of circumstantial evidence that there was some kind of accident or outbreak from those labs, not from the seafood market, or anyplace else. That's why it's so important that we get to the bottom of this data."

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal came out with an exclusive report that suddenly brought the lab-leak hypothesis into the light. It's simply too hard to suppress the Wall Street Journal. It read that "Three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report..."

"The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 'with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.'"