The New York Times finally comes clean about Covid

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.”

At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

And now here we are, five years after we began the “two weeks to slow the spread.” So-called experts are finally catching up to Stewart and the average American, who saw the plainly obvious reality that the coronavirus lab with famously lax security protocols may have something to do with the original outbreak of a coronavirus in the same city. 

Over the weekend, in the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci informed us, “We Were Badly Misled About Covid.” Who misled us? Zeynep Tufekci and the New York Times played a key role, as it turned out. 

Writing in August 2020, Ben Smith reported:

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.

But he kept silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the C.D.C. had blundered by saying protective face coverings should be worn by health workers but not ordinary people.

“Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”

Writing in the Times a year after the pandemic started, Tufekci argued “Maybe We Need Masks Indoors Just a Bit Longer.” 

Even in her reevaluation of the failures of Covid, driven by the paper she was writing for, Tufekci still couldn’t resist taking a jab at the people who were actually right the entirety of the last five years. She wrote, “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.” 

Got that? We should have deferred to sainted scientists like Anthony Fauci, who changed his position on masks with no discernible scientific reasoning, after having previously downplayed their efficacy. Anthony Fauci, the same legitimate scientist who supported the gain-of-function research at labs like the one in Wuhan, can only be questioned in what Tufekci determines to be “good faith.” You’re allowed to be right, but do you have to be so harsh about it? 

Tufekci wasn’t alone in reevaluating the mistakes of Covid; 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.” 

Now we know that intelligence services in the UK and the United States are of the belief that the virus originated in the lab in Wuhan instead of in the wet market nearby. It turns out the lab that was experimenting with the viruses unsafely may be the more likely culprit instead of bats flying thousands of miles, only to be eaten in that particular market in Wuhan, China. As my friends in the South say, “Well, blow me over with a feather.” It took five years for these experts to get 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.