New York Times columnist admits scientists ‘badly misled’ public on COVID-19: ‘Five years too late’
The New York Times finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was “badly misled” about the origins of COVID-19 — triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.
In an opinion piece published Sunday, Zeynep Tufecki, a sociology professor at Princeton University, argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.
It has emerged that safety precautions at the Wuhan lab in question “might have been terrifyingly lax,” Tufecki wrote in her column, titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”
Social media users were quick to accuse the Gray Lady of hypocrisy, circulating photos of a now-deleted 2021 post from Times journalist Apoorva Mandavilli that claimed the “lab leak theory” had “racist roots.”
“Five years too late,” one user wrote about Tufecki’s article in a post that garnered 10,000 likes.
“Remember when the NYT would call you a misinformation spreader, and social media platforms would ban you for believing COVID-19 originated in a lab?”
Another user wrote: “Any so-called COVID reckoning from the Times that fails to confront its own relentless lies isn’t a reckoning at all.”
Meanwhile, some loyal left-leaning Times subscribers slammed the broadsheet for backtracking on its earlier COVID-19 articles.
“The New York Times has intensely pursued every theory and lead on the origins of Covid-19, documented the political debate, funding, influence, and shifts in thinking among the scientific community, and reported on China’s censorship campaign that has stifled the search for truth,” a New York Times spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
“The Times has helped readers navigate the coronavirus pandemic through independent, verified reporting, and any insinuation that we have not thoroughly pursued leads is false,” they added.
For years, the CIA claimed it had insufficient evidence to determine whether the pandemic that shut down the country stemmed from a wet market in Wuhan or a research lab there.
But the agency recently updated its assessment to favor the lab leak theory, albeit with “low confidence,” meaning it has incomplete evidence.
The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the FBI had moved to back the theory in 2023.
Tufecki acknowledged that “perhaps we were misled on purpose” about the virus’s origins.
She took aim at a 2020 research paper in the journal Nature Medicine written by five prominent journalists — Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes and Robert Garry.
The paper boldly declared there was no plausibility to the lab leak theory — but many of its authors, in Slack messages behind the scenes, shared concerns that the Wuhan leak was not only possible but likely.
“The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen wrote in a message at the time.
The authors contacted Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization, for advice.
In his book, Farrar said he used a burner phone to set up meetings for the distressed scientists to speak with Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
After reviewing a draft of the paper, Farrar pushed the scientists to rule out the possibility of a lab leak even more directly, which they did, Tufecki wrote.
The paper’s lead authors also schemed to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on COVID-19 for the Times, to throw him off the scent of a possible lab leak, according to chat logs.
Tufecki also placed blame on an influential letter published in medical journal the Lancet in early 2020 that appeared to be written by a group of independent scientists.
But the paper was actually drafted by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, a nonprofit that researches bat coronaviruses in China and failed to sound the alarm when COVID-19 began to spread, according to Tufecki.
David Morens, one of Fauci’s senior advisers at the time, wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make emails about the pandemic’s origins “disappear.”
“We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.
