Now they tell us.
“We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.” So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci’s March 16 article in the New York Times. The event was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now-widely accepted theory that the virus originated from a leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the New York Times article appeared one day short of five years from the publication in Nature Medicine of an article by five scientists, led by Kristian Andersen, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” “We do not believe,” the article states, “that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
This was a deliberate lie. In April 2020, Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, that he hoped “Proximal Origin” would put down “the very dangerous conspiracy theory” that the virus originated from a lab leak. The next day, Fauci recommended the paper to reporters as the product of a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” without mentioning that he had commissioned it and dictated its conclusion.
The paper “misled me and many others into thinking a lab leak was implausible,” writes science writer Matt Ridley, who was a voting member of Britain’s House of Lords in 2020. Donald McNeil Jr., who was the New York Times’s lead science writer in 2020, said scientists “clearly misled me early on” and that their article threw him “off track” and influenced the paper’s coverage for months.
Ridley later co-authored with Alina Chan Viral, arguing for the likelihood of the lab leak origin. McNeil’s New York Times reportage ended in February 2021 when he was pushed out for having repeated a high school student’s use of the N-word on a New York Times-sponsored $5,490 field trip in Peru — one of many injustices inflicted in the “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd.
The tenor of McNeil’s successor as chief science writer, Apoorva Mandavilli, can be gauged by her May 2021 tweet, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not here yet.”
So, it’s not surprising that the theory that COVID spread from a lab leak was dismissed as a “fringe theory” by the Washington Post or that the New York Times mocked former Trump health official Robert Redfield for believing it. Nor that such outlets have shown little interest in the fact that the lab leak theory was accepted early on by the FBI and by the Biden administration Energy Department by early 2023.
Why the frantic opposition to the lab leak theory? “Orange man bad” is one explanation: President Donald Trump seemed open to it, which was enough to convince many people and probably most journalists that it must be nonsense. Many felt obliged to defer to supposedly expert scientific opinion, which helps explain mass compliance with what were, in retrospect, idiotic restrictions, such as closing playgrounds and masking kindergarteners.
In retrospect, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Fauci, who proclaimed, “I represent science,” purposefully lied and dissembled to conceal the funding of gain-of-function research (that makes viruses more deadly) at Wuhan.
The publication of Tufekci’s article in the New York Times signals a change in the wind of elite opinion. So does the publication in the New York Times last October of reporter Nicholas Confessore’s deeply reported account of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the University of Michigan, aptly subtitled, “What Went Wrong?”
Confessore documented how Michigan’s DEI programs, the largest and most generously funded at any university, increased rather than decreased racial tensions. Their premise was that systemic white racism was ineradicable and must be fought with indoctrination sessions and racial quotas and preferences. Give the New York Times credit for publishing Confessore’s article a month before the election.
The commitment of major corporations to DEI proved no more sincere than former Soviet bureaucrats’ faith in Marxism-Leninism. The second Trump administration’s efforts to ban DEI in federal agencies have been matched by the abolition of DEI in large corporations.
On DEI, as on COVID, it turns out that the experts and the elites were lying and that the people labeled “conspiracy theorists” by the New York Times were, often, telling the truth. “This type of thing is exactly why many on the right and left are content with burning all of it down,” reflected Sean Trende, no Trump fan, on Tufekci’s article. “Gosh, why don’t people trust the experts?”
One answer is that the experts and the elites have shown miserable judgment. The elites took the death of a convenience store robber in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and the death of an arrested fentanyl user in Minneapolis in May 2020 as indications that the nation, in which 53% of voters had just elected a black man president, was infected with systemic racism in need of constant DEI chastisement.
SUPREME COURT MUST REIN IN ACTIVIST JUDGES
The experts’ dishonest responses and insupportable remedies to the pandemic were applauded by almost all academic and journalistic voices and imposed by government officials with no thought to their costs. This culminated in June 2020 when the experts and elites agreed that pandemic restrictions should, in view of America’s ingrained racism, not apply to massive Black Lives Matter protests.
Now, we hear complaints, some of them plausible, that Trump and Elon Musk are destroying institutions possessed of expert wisdom and elite credentials. It’s understandable, given recent history, that many Americans are putting little stock in those complaints.