BREAKING: We were badly misled about Covid!!
Kudos to the Grey Lady for their courage and integrity. (Where would we be without them?)
(Note to Readers: The first part of this article is satirical. I thought it necessary to mention this because dozens of readers have unsubscribed in the 24 hours since I published it.)
Earlier this week Turkish-American Sociologist and frequent opinion columnist for the NY Times Zeynep Tufekci wrote an article titled, “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives”.
Wait, what? What event was she talking about? Was it the one that kept us huddled indoors for months? The one that kept us from traveling abroad? The one that led to the insolvency of smaller businesses and mom and pop shops? The one that led to the explosion of wealth among the super billionaire class? The one that kept our children out of school and wearing masks on playgrounds when they were permitted to go outside?
The one that led to preferential treatment of people who were willing to to accept an experimental injection?
By “treatment” I don’t want to be too hyperbolic. I am only referring to the privilege to travel, work, attend college, go to restaurants and social events, attend holiday gatherings with friends and family. We had to treat people differently for the greater good. We had to discriminate.
Tufekci asks us to consider the disquieting possibility that the coronavirus, which elite virologists confirmed with utmost confidence jumped from bat to human, may have actually been the product of a bioterrorism program taking place in a lab a few miles from the “wet market”. Could such a thing even be in the realm of possibility?
We may have been misled, Tufekci boldly suggests. If only there were organizations whose mission was to hold authorities accountable by diligently examining all possibilities, giving voice to disparate opinions and examining evidence and investigating the validity of claims made by authorities. And then, reporting it to the public. You know, like a free press for example.
Thank Gd for people like Tufekci and heroic publications like the New York Times. Yes, they are late to the story, but how were they to know that there were highly credentialed researchers and academics that were trying to get the story out in the early days? Why didn’t anybody tell them?
We cannot fault Tufekci. In fact, her commitment to get to the bottom of things five years later deserves commendation. Is a Pulitzer in the offing? She could stand side by side by another Times reporter and Pulitzer prize winning author for Covid-19 reporting, Apoorva Mandavilli. Journalistic Twin Towers from the Big Apple.
And yet…
I was struck by the passive voice in the title, “We were badly misled…”
Who did the misleading?
Hat tip to my friend, Josh Mitteldorf, PhD, who put together this nice summary of, shall we say, misleading New York Times articles from the spring and summer of 2020. Commentary and links are his:
February 27, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-pandemics.html
This op-ed was published on Feb 27, very early in the pandemic, at a time when nobody knew that there would even be a pandemic. There had been only a few dozen deaths in the US. The author is Peter Daszak, now infamous for being the subcontractor who sent US NIAID funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do "research" that consisted in engineering bat viruses so they could infect humans. Did anyone vet Daszak before printing his op-ed? Did anyone question how he knew that a pandemic was coming before the fact?
May 21, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/health/wuhan-coronavirus-laboratory.html
This news item was published uncritically, leaving the impression that 77 Nobel laureates had come together on their own, indignant at the prospect of US NIH halting funding to bioweapon research. No countervailing opinions were quoted. Could the Times find no one who opposed bioweapons research? The article nowhere mentions the role of Richard Roberts in organizing this letter, his previous history, and his conflict of interests.
No mention was made of an earlier petition to NIH by scientists who called for an end to bioweapon research which the Times themselves reported years earlier:
May 11, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html
This article again cites Daszak uncritically, nowhere mentioning his blatant conflict. Trump's reputation as being loose with the truth is being used to validate "science", but just because Trump is often wrong doesn't mean that these particular scientists are correct, or that they are unbiased. "On April 14, Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed that the N.I.H. grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus — the institute may have “birthed a monster,” in his words."
What Gaetz said turned out to be absolutely true. Did the Times do any investigative reporting before they used their readers' contempt for Gaetz to discredit a true statement?
"'Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?' she asked."
A quote like this carries a strong innuendo without actually stating a falsehood.
June 1, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/science/coronavirus-bats-wuhan.html
Again, an article that is flatly misleading without ever making a false statement. Yes, these scientists were "tracing the evolution of bat viruses", but more relevant and interesting, they were deliberately engineering these bat viruses to create human pathogens that are as contagious and as virulent as cutting edge technology allows.
April 21, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/magazine/pandemic-vaccine.htm
(interestingly, this link has gone dead)
This was a full-length magazine article, lauding Peter Daszak without reservation. He is cited as an expert in preventing epidemics without mentioning the possibility that he has a financial interest in creating pandemics. The antivirual drug Remdesivir is lauded as showing great promise, but its history of having been removed from trials in Africa because of its extreme kidney toxicity was not mentioned.
May 6, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/06/opinion/coronavirus-us-reopen.html
This article is based on the flawed idea that we can stop this virus by isolating ourselves. We know now that everyone in the world has been exposed to COVID, and it was just a question of when, not whether. Slowing the spread of the virus led to giving the virus an opportunity to evolve instead of creating population-level herd immunity quickly. Some epidemiologists have said this led to a much worse pandemic.
January 25, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/asia/coronavirus-crisis-china-response.html
This one blames China for their response to COVID while offering no criticism of the US response which, in retrospect, produced a much, much worse result.
May 18-21, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/us/politics/trump-hydroxychloroquine-covid-coronavirus.html
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/article/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/politics/trump-fact-check-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-.html?searchResultPosition=4
Three articles using Trump's reputation to smear the drug hydroxychloroquine, which has proven to be up to 95% effective in preventing COVID hospitalization when used early.
Just because Trump doesn't understand science doesn't mean that he's always wrong. It's a journalist's job to dig into the medical literature, or at least to solicit medical opinions on both sides.
June 20, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/health/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-trial.html
Here's another article about HCQ that quotes scientists on the "con" side but only quotes Trump on the "pro" side, leaving the impression that there were no scientists or doctors who thought HCQ could be effective against COVID.
May 29, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html
To their credit, the Times reported on questions raised by a fraudulent study that claimed HCQ did more harm than good. There was no follow-up to tell readers that indeed the study had been found to be a fraud, based on data that was fabricated and fed to top doctors at Harvard and Stanford who took the bait and analyzed the data as though they were real.
An earlier article in which the Times lauded the fraudulent study is no longer indexable, but still on the Times website.
June 15, 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/technology/coronavirus-disinformation-russia-iowa-caucus.html
In this article and elsewhere, the Times cites uncritically the FDA's characterization of ivermectin as "dangerous", when a tiny bit of research would show how ridiculous this statement is. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been taking ivermectin for years as a preventative measure, and when the dust cleared, those people would prove to have some of the lowest rates of COVID in the world.
“WE” have been misled? Exactly who was it who was at the head of the team misleading “US”? Is this as close as the NYTimes can come to a mea culpa?
Bunch of real chicken shits at the nyt
Hilarious! Thanks for the belly laugh!!
Great set of historical headlines too. It's too rich. 🤣🤣🤣