Is it important that we find out whether SAR-CoV-2 originated from a natural source or due to human activity in a lab?
Of course it is!
The solutions you need to apply to each source are entirely different. Getting this right is important for all sorts of reasons. Not least of those reasons is that millions of lives were lost and billions of lives were upended as a consequence.
You’d think the media would be all over this story and exceptionally interested in getting to the bottom of it all. But, you’d be wrong.
Instead, the media not only ignored the lab leak angle for over a year, they demonized anybody who dared to explore that option. As a result, they gave far more credence to the natural origin story and failed to correct their many mistakes. Now the NYTimes is clearly, obviously committed to promoting the “natural origin” angle above any other possibilities. You might want to ask yourself why that is…?
To me, the data is thick and rich and increasingly and overwhelmingly points to SARS-CoV-2 having arisen as a result of human efforts in a lab.
So, what does the New York Times do in the face of all that evidence? They pounce on a couple of pre-print papers written largely by the same scientist already caught up in the Fauci-email cover-up scandal, and then completely fail to point out that massive conflict of interest to its readers. How was that left out? Again, you might ask yourself how that ‘oversight’ might have occurred…?
This was terrible journalism, worse science reporting, and the pre-prints themselves prove absolutely nothing at all. They fail to advance science in any way. All in all, a big fat “F” for all involved.
Alina Chan Map:
I'm still working through these preprints, but another problem is that their maps don't point out the location of the Wuhan CDC and the main Wuhan hospitals. One could easily argue that these were the epicenter of the outbreak as opposed to the Huanan market.
Map from my book: pic.twitter.com/bUgWNPXqZ8
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) February 27, 2022
New York Times Editors:
- dean.baquet@nytimes.com
- joe.kahn@nytimes.com
- letters@nytimes.com
