An Opinion piece in the New York Times by Zeynep Tufekdi made a shocking admission: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”
Actually, it’s not shocking at all to anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years.
Tufekdi, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and a New York Times Opinion columnist, wrote on Sunday:
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.
She goes on to detail how scientists and public health officials went to extraordinary Orwellian lengths to cover up any information that pointed to a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the cause of the global pandemic that shut down schools, social lives, and the economies of the worlds most powerful countries, including the United States.
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.
Tufekdi describes high-ranking members of the scientific community using burner phones and making “emails disappear” to keep the bat soup narrative going. Scientists discussed on Slack how they believed the lab leak theory to be plausible even while endorsing the infected bat theory publicly. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen exclaimed in one message, “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.”
This wasn’t just a case of reporters being tricked into dismissing the lab leak theory — it was a combination of willful blindness and disinformation.
Jim Treacher wrote here at PJ Media in April 2020,
The only people who benefit from your reluctance to ask what’s happening to you are the people whose negligence, incompetence, and dishonesty are responsible for this fiasco: the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone who tries to shut you up is doing their bidding, directly or indirectly. If daring to say so means I’ll get some unpleasant tweets and emails and blog comments, go right ahead. I have absolutely nothing to lose.
That’s the problem with threatening the entire world with death: It’s a lot tougher to shame your victims into silence.
While the New York Times was shilling for the CCP, PJ Media was paying a high price for questioning the Official Narrative on the origins of COVID-19.
To summarize, fact-checkers, science journals, and NGOs like the EcoHealth Alliance (and don’t forget Dr. Fauci) have insisted from the beginning that the lab leak theory was nothing more than a wild-eyed conspiracy theory invented by that dummy Donald Trump. They’ve carried water for the CCP and covered for the Wuhan lab. Based on that, media outlets (mostly conservative) have been punished by Facebook for disseminating false or misleading information when we suggested that a lab leak was possible. And in case you’re wondering, neither [science journal] Nature nor the intrepid fact-checkers at Science Feedback have retracted or updated their articles insisting that COVID didn’t originate in a lab in Wuhan. The standards don’t apply to them.
Our Facebook traffic, then a significant part of our traffic and revenue, disappeared almost overnight. I demanded an apology for their attempts to damage our credibility, but, of course, that never came.
While it’s nice that someone at the New York Times is finally fessing up about the cover-up, the columnist doesn’t go so far as to admit that the vaunted Gray Lady was partly to blame for the disinformation and censorship. Instead,
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. [Emphasis added]
You see, dear readers? Media outlets questioning the Official Narrative were the problem, not the sycophants who worked overtime to deceive you. We’ve been acting in “terrible faith” over the last five years for questioning the origins of the COVID-19 virus. But finally, the Times admits the possibility of a lab leak after “a few dogged” REAL journalists—not the fake ones who write from a conservative perspective—looked into the matter.
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