‘We Were Badly Misled’ About COVID Origin, Says …

Were they ‘misled’? Or did they lead the charge against anyone who dared question the consensus?

Now that the cat has come out of the bag, suddenly the New York Times feels the need to get out in front of the backlash. For years, the NYT ran story after story, scathing column after column, about anyone who dared to challenge The Science®. How dare people suggest that a novel coronavirus might have emerged from the nearby lab being run under questionable practices doing exactly the kind of research intended to produce novel coronaviruses! Those dissenters were all raaaaaacists, remember?

Now, the NYT — and not even in its own editorial voice — wants to play victim of The Science®:

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet 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 may have been terrifyingly lax.

Ahem. “Has since emerged” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting here. As early as April 2020, those “terrifyingly lax” protocols had already come to light. We also knew at that same time that the State Department had flagged the Wuhan Institute of Virology for violating safety protocols required for the kind of gain-of-function research it was conducting as far back as 2018. We also knew that The Science® still had zero evidence for a natural zoonotic leap to humans to explain the outbreak epicentered in the same town as the lab:

“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.

And yet, the New York Times went out of its way — as did the rest of the Protection Racket Media — to spend years treating anyone who questioned the “consensus” around a natural zoonotic leap as either a crank, a racist, or worse. Even when hints that the intel community had its doubts about the “consensus,” the media rushed to defend The Science® from any scrutiny whatsoever. 

And not just on the origin of COVID-19. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tried to challenge a number of the assumptions that drove public policy in the early days of the pandemic, especially around the shutdowns, masking, and other destructive moves. He and others who signed the Great Barrington Declaration got ridiculed, marginalized, and treated like plagues by both The Science® and the Protection Racket Media. Every single point that Drs. Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorf, and Sunetra Gupta wrote in October 2020 has since been vindicated by actual science — and stands as an indictment to The Science® as well as the Protection Racket Media. 

Why did the media circle the wagons around The Science®? Because The Science® helped cause the pandemic and didn’t want to get held accountable for it. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins funded gain-of-function research even after several warnings about its dangers. They funded the WIV even after all the red flags went up about their “terrifyingly lax” protocols in pursuing that research. Had the media exposed that at the time, Fauci and Collins (and others) would have been hauled in front of a jury rather than allowed to set policies to deal with the pandemic to which they greatly contributed.

And let’s not forget that they also drove the censorship efforts at State and HHS to silence anyone who might challenge The Science® on any and all of the above. The Biden administration pressured Big Tech to silence users who spread “misinformation,” and the Protection Racket Media deployed its ridiculous “fact check” squads to discredit all those who differed from the government’s talking points. 

Now the New York Times wants to pose itself as a victim of its own witch hunts. Let me say from the bottom of my heart, in the words of Della Reese in Harlem Nights: 

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