by Paula Bolyard, PJ Media:
An Opinion piece in the New York Times by Zeynep Tufekdi made a shocking admission: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”
Actually, it’s not shocking at all to anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years.
Tufekdi, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and a New York Times Opinion columnist, wrote on Sunday:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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.
She goes on to detail how scientists and public health officials went to extraordinary Orwellian lengths to cover up any information that pointed to a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the cause of the global pandemic that shut down schools, social lives, and the economies of the worlds most powerful countries, including the United States.
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.
Tufekdi describes high-ranking members of the scientific community using burner phones and making “emails disappear” to keep the bat soup narrative going. Scientists discussed on Slack how they believed the lab leak theory to be plausible even while endorsing the infected bat theory publicly. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen exclaimed in one message, “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.”
This wasn’t just a case of reporters being tricked into dismissing the lab leak theory — it was a combination of willful blindness and disinformation.
Here’s discredited Washington Post “fact” checker Glenn Kessler in 2020 smugly deriding Sen. Ted Cruz for suggesting the virus may have escaped the Wuhan lab:
I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves. https://t.co/TprMnaHSZL
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 1, 2020
Jim Treacher wrote here at PJ Media in April 2020,
The only people who benefit from your reluctance to ask what’s happening to you are the people whose negligence, incompetence, and dishonesty are responsible for this fiasco: the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone who tries to shut you up is doing their bidding, directly or indirectly. If daring to say so means I’ll get some unpleasant tweets and emails and blog comments, go right ahead. I have absolutely nothing to lose.
That’s the problem with threatening the entire world with death: It’s a lot tougher to shame your victims into silence.
While the New York Times was shilling for the CCP, PJ Media was paying a high price for questioning the Official Narrative on the origins of COVID-19.
