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from https://nypost.com/2025/03/17/media/scientists-badly-misled-public-on-covid-19-origins-new-york-times-columnist/


New York Times columnist admits scientists ‘badly misled’ public on COVID-19: ‘Five years too late’
By Taylor Herzlich
Published March 17, 2025, 2:16 p.m. ET

99 Comments
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The New York Times finally ran a column by a scientist who said the
public was “badly misled” about the origins of COVID-19 — triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.

In an opinion piece published Sunday, Zeynep Tufecki, a sociology
professor at Princeton University, argued that officials and scientists
hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury
the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.

It has emerged that safety precautions at the Wuhan lab in question
“might have been terrifyingly lax,” Tufecki wrote in her column, titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

Zeynep Tufecki at a media trade fair in Bavaria, Munich on Oct. 23, 2019.
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Zeynep Tufecki argued in a new opinion piece for the New York Times that scientists “badly misled” the public on the origins of COVID-19. dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Social media users were quick to accuse the Gray Lady of hypocrisy,
circulating photos of a now-deleted 2021 post from Times journalist
Apoorva Mandavilli that claimed the “lab leak theory” had “racist roots.”

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“Five years too late,” one user wrote about Tufecki’s article in a post that garnered 10,000 likes.

“Remember when the NYT would call you a misinformation spreader, and
social media platforms would ban you for believing COVID-19 originated
in a lab?”

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Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., warned Monday that his party needs to change
course and stop alienating allies with far-left ideological litmus tests.
Dem rep calls out own party for being 'out of touch' and alienating allies Another user wrote: “Any so-called COVID reckoning from the Times that
fails to confront its own relentless lies isn’t a reckoning at all.”

Meanwhile, some loyal left-leaning Times subscribers slammed the
broadsheet for backtracking on its earlier COVID-19 articles.

“The New York Times has intensely pursued every theory and lead on the origins of Covid-19, documented the political debate, funding,
influence, and shifts in thinking among the scientific community, and
reported on China’s censorship campaign that has stifled the search for truth,” a New York Times spokesperson told The Post in a statement.

“The Times has helped readers navigate the coronavirus pandemic through independent, verified reporting, and any insinuation that we have not thoroughly pursued leads is false,” they added.

For years, the CIA claimed it had insufficient evidence to determine
whether the pandemic that shut down the country stemmed from a wet
market in Wuhan or a research lab there.

The New York Times logo above a doorway of their corporate headquarters
on April 29, 2023.
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Social media users were quick to accuse the New York Times of hypocrisy.
Getty Images
But the agency recently updated its assessment to favor the lab leak
theory, albeit with “low confidence,” meaning it has incomplete evidence.

The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the FBI had
moved to back the theory in 2023.

Tufecki acknowledged that “perhaps we were misled on purpose” about the virus’s origins.

She took aim at a 2020 research paper in the journal Nature Medicine
written by five prominent journalists — Kristian Andersen, Andrew
Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes and Robert Garry.

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