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Badly Mislead !!
"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, --- "
But even then many scientist were sure it was a experiment and
a leak from the laboratory.


from
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html

Opinion
Zeynep Tufekci

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
March 16, 2025

By Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion Columnist

Since scientists 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 might have been
terrifyingly lax.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think
of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety —
and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move
on to new crises, like measles and the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an
accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious
scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and
experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a
pandemic risk.

Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to
Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists
did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient
for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one
lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no
telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or the world.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that this research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us
safe without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we
were misled on purpose.


Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a
novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon
noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the
EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into
bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far
and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling
similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab
and what was spreading through the city.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that
quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.


The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which
was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack
conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be
not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages,
“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.”

Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the
chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar
reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of
the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents
obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to
Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a
paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested
to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not
plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead
authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was
reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.


The second influential publication to dismiss the possibility of a lab
leak was a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter,
which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work
of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to
public document requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned
that behind the scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, had drafted
and circulated the letter while strategizing on how to hide his tracks
and telling the signatories that it “will not be identifiable as coming
from any one organization or person.” The Lancet later published an
addendum disclosing Daszak’s conflict of interest as a collaborator of
the Wuhan lab, but the journal did not retract the letter.

And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, wrote
to Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if
we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.

It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate
might have started. 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.

That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials or the
organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes
they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they
might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public.
Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated
child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out
by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort
like this didn’t just fail; it backfired. These half-truths and
strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to
appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.

After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought
these issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the
Biden administration finally barred EcoHealth from receiving federal
grants for five years.

That’s a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the
Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit
with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated
labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are
certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the
world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to
learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed
a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still
being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all
of our lives?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab
leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that
seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a
small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with
the potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with
dangerous, potentially supertransmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The
goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don’t
have to be frozen in place until one appears. Leading journals could
refuse to publish research that doesn’t conform to safety standards, the
way they reject research that doesn’t conform to ethical standards.
Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public
agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses and computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest safety conditions and conducted far from cities.

We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or
five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make
a third.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the
editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our
articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram,
TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a professor of sociology and public affairs
at Princeton University, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power
and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a New York Times Opinion
columnist. @zeynep • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2025, Section A,
Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: We Still Don’t Know
the Truth About Covid. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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