Trending
Now they tell us.
"We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives." So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci's March 16 article in The New York Times. The event was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now widely accepted theory that the virus originated from a leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Times article appeared one day short of five years from the publication in Nature Medicine of an article by five scientists, led by Kristian Andersen, titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." "We do not believe," the article states, "that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
This was a deliberate lie. In April 2020, Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told his boss, then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, that he hoped "proximal origin" would put down "the very dangerous conspiracy theory" that the virus originated from a lab leak. The next day, Fauci recommended the paper to reporters as the product of a "group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists" without mentioning that he had commissioned it and dictated its conclusion.
The paper "misled me and many others into thinking a lab leak was implausible," writes science writer Matt Ridley, who was a voting member of Britain's House of Lords in 2020. Donald McNeil Jr., who was the Times' lead science writer in 2020, said scientists "clearly misled me early on" and that their article threw him "off track" and influenced the paper's coverage for months.
Ridley later coauthored the book "Viral" with Alina Chan, arguing for the likelihood of the lab leak origin. McNeil's Times reportage ended in February 2021 when he was pushed out for having repeated a high school student's use of the N-word on a Times-sponsored $5,490 field trip in Peru – one of many injustices inflicted in the "racial reckoning" following the death of George Floyd.
The tenor of McNeil's successor as chief science writer, Apoorva Mandavilli, can be gauged by her May 2021 tweet, "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here."
So it's not surprising that the theory that COVID-19 spread from a lab leak was dismissed as a "fringe theory" by The Washington Post or that the Times mocked former Trump health official Robert Redfield for believing it. Nor that such outlets have shown little interest in the fact that the lab leak theory was accepted early on by the FBI and by the Biden administration Energy Department by early 2023.
Why the frantic opposition to the lab leak theory? "Orange man bad" is one explanation: President Donald Trump seemed open to it, which was enough to convince many people and probably most journalists that it must be nonsense. Many felt obliged to defer to supposedly expert scientific opinion, which helps explain mass compliance with what were, in retrospect, idiotic restrictions, such as closing playgrounds and masking kindergarteners.