In an astonishing turnabout earlier this week, the New York Times asserted, via an article by Zeynep Tufekci, that we have been “badly misled” about the origin of Covid — that there was strong evidence in favor of the much-maligned lab leak theory:

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… in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

“We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” March 16, 2025

Note the ambiguous title of the article

Is the pronoun “we” the editorial we, as in “we, the editors”? Or does the Times mean that “all of us” were misled?

If the latter, let me state up front that not all of us were misled. Here at Mind Matters News we had been covering evidence for a lab leak theory since 2021, without once suggesting that it was a conspiracy theory.

Most of what Tufekci goes on to reveal in the article — about, say, the role of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins — was covered in our publication and/or other non-Papers of Record.

But that’s not all… skeptics are smeared by association

Tufekci goes on to assert, without naming names,

It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy. “Badly Misled“

The strategy she employs here — smearing legitimate doubt by associating it with unnamed questionable persons and causes — serves her well so long as readers don’t know the history.

The great unravelling

Tufekci mentions the stages by which long-suppressed facts started to come out:

The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives? “Badly Misled“

The desire to delve into such matters comes a tad late, no?

From commentator Mark Steyn “The Times was not ‘badly misled’. It was one of the worst misleaders. There’s a lot of that about. Five years ago, the BND (the German foreign intelligence service) told Angela Merkel that it was eighty-to-ninety per cent certain that the Covid was engineered in a lab. Frau Merkel decided that it would not be helpful for the German public to know this.”

Steyn adds, “Anyone who attempted to counter the lies found their careers destroyed, and were occasionally driven to suicide. ”

At The Spectator, Bethany Mandel reminds us of the role the Times played in vilifying reasonable concern and doubt:

… the NYT’s Apoorva Mandavilli did her share as well, writing “Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the pandemic? What Failed?”

In May 2021, Mandavilli tweeted, “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.” …

Mandavilli would like to know what failed during the pandemic. Our institutions, science, a myriad of culprits. But the bottom line failure was that of basic common sense, and the bravery to just plainly state objective facts. The emperor had no clothes, and it took the New York Times five years to say it aloud.

“The New York Times finally comes clean about Covid,” Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Shouldn’t loss of trust in science be our big concern?

Trust in legacy media is collapsing for good reason. I find Alison Pearson’s judgment (above right) hard to dispute:

But legacy media are, after all, being replaced by broad-based social media. A bigger problem is that trust in science is also at a low ebb. And what’s the replacement for science? More to come, be sure of it.