We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

March 16, 2025

Since scientists first 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 may 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 or 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 beyond it, the world.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test potential 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 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.

Editors’ Picks

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 once 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 which 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 co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own 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 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 N.I.H., 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 may 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 may 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 banned EcoHealth from all 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. had already come 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 super-transmissible 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 already 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 or 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 away 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.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753085)

-Medical officials were unable to determine the source of the pandemic

-Cons insisted that COVID came from a lab leak

-Medical officials tried to remind people that the evidence of origin was inconclusive and to wait for further information before blaming a foreign country

-Cons got extremely mad that officials weren't jumping the gun on blaming China and fell into conspiracy theories

-Medical officials were finally able to confirm that COVID *MAY* have come from a lab

-Cons declare victory despite still not having conclusive evidence it came from a lab

It was just xenophobia. I don't know why the author is apologizing for doing due diligence, but I guess everyone else has moved on from this except for Cons so she was likely pressured into writing this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753115)

>> Plenty of "shitlibs" were open to the idea that it may have come from a lab.

Yes, some *were*. They stopped immediately once the right took a position.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753145)

Straw man bullshit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753155)

people were literally being driven out of public life, losing jobs for 'entertaining' the lab theory for like 2 years. it was de facto a criminal act.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753234)

CR, no one was cancelled for that.

Also, if people were cancelled, it was ackkkkshually by Trump!

PS: On the off chance that anyone was cancelled for that by Biden, here's why that was a GOOD thing.

(Whew -- I think we covered all the bases!)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753494)

-Chinaman who let out a virus that killed millions

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753315)

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=jon+stewart+lab+leak+theory+wujan&mid=3EA2B7DE87BD58EA098F3EA2B7DE87BD58EA098F&FORM=VIRE

colbert starts out 'well, if there was any evidence' with the complete bullshit lib defense and stewart let him have it

also

6/1/2021 this

The Washington Post has issued a correction on its 2020 report on Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the lab-leak theory he had discussed in the media.

The newspaper revised a February 2020 story with the original headline “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” as top public health experts have begun taking a more serious look at the origins of the coronavirus.

“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus,” reads the Post’s correction.

The new headline of the story reads “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”

libs have shit for brains

libs have scum for brains

libs are evil

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753773)

There were some former libs like Bret Weinstein and Rogan who talked about it and they were summarily exiled from the ranks of card carrying shitlibs immediately and relegated to ranks of nazis, as per libs.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753271)

But actually I believe you actually believe that and it’s amazing to see your people’s brains work like this. This is why you’re losing btw.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753329)

The flame or mental illness is real for you.

"few, if any, other drugs can rival ivermectin for its beneficial impact on human health and welfare."

https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711

By the way, antibiotics in general are "vet drugs." After all, 70% in the US are sold to agricultural users.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753360)

There are multiples studies showing it’s positive effects on human health:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043740/

https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043740/#:~:text=Ivermectin%20proved%20to%20be%20even,Onchocerciasis%20in%20humans%20in%201988

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S022352342300805X

https://www.cureus.com/articles/223832-ivermectin-a-multifaceted-drug-with-a-potential-beyond-anti-parasitic-therapy

And there were multiple studies showing it’s effectiveness against COVID in particular:

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32506-6/fulltext

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8088823/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7709596/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753405)

Libs: "Uh, IDK... how about we just let actual trained doctors decide whether to proscribe medications for the individual patient that they're treating, guys? Why is this concept so hard for you stupid Trumpkins to understand?!"

*smugly pushes up glasses and adjusts buttplug*

CRAZY TWIST: The Biden Administration used the FDA to pressure physicians across the board not to proscribe Ivermectin as a COVID treatment throughout the pandemic, even when individual physicians did in fact want to proscribe it for individual patients in their care... oh, huh, wow... odd case very interesting, but of course that's "totally OK" for "reasons" hehe.... https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/health/fda-ivermectin-lawsuit/index.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753489)

I 100% knew that COVID came from a lie, but when he went on Joe Rogan and said "Yeah this virus obviously looks engineered" - i thought it was total bullshit.

The circumstances of the COVID made it obvious it came from the lab - but how could Weinstein, who wasn't a virologist, just contradict very virologist who clinged to this idea that there was nothing suspicious about it. It seemed like Weinstein just sayig something in order to stay relevant.

--And then it turned out, all the virologists WERE looking at it and saying "this is obviously engineered" - and emailing that shit to Fauci - they were just lying through their teeth to the public.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753695)

March 2020 - COVID hits

April 2020 - pockets of Reddit and XOXO realize that the virus conclusively came from the lab backed with evidence, job descriptions, and evidence the Chinese were hiding their tracks

9 MONTHS later, a journalist finally publishes smoething in NY Magazine -

10 MORE months later - so effectively 1.5 years after XOXO conclusively proved lab leak theory - the NYT finally reports that some poeple think it might be plausible

Keep in mind, xoxo in April 2020 had evidence that the closest known variant to COVID 19 was being manipulated at teh Wuhan, the the Wuhan sequenced it, that China lied about sequencing it, that China had hid items related to their COVID manipulatio in their filing system, that the Wuhan was 200 yars from the outbreak, that members of the Wuhan lab were sick in fall of 2019, that Wuhan had job descriptions in 2019 for to hire scientists to manipulate coronaviruses.

--Now the question becomes, how did xoxo know all these facts, wrapped up in a bow to deliver the biggest bombshell of all time - yet the NYT wasn't even interested in reporting it for 18 months - despite publishig probably literally 20,000 other articles on COVID?

Why did the media not publish something that was seemingly the Pullitzer Prize wrapped up in a bow for them?

Why was there no investigation about the 1 in a million chance that there are millions of cities i teh world, and this happened in one of the 2 cities that were conducting gain of function research on coronaviruses?

The reason this is a big story is because it drives home the point that we do not have any journalism in this country. If they're not asking questions about a coronavirus outbreak, which occurred 200 yards from a lab studying coronaviruses, and all they have to do is google it and see the evidence laid out from them on fucking Reddit, then why even have a media?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753687)

All the articles are basically about him talking about precautions and shit. They don't referenced him getting emails that the virus was engineered and then putting out papers to the contrary.

I think the OP is the first time I've ever seen a major publication bring up Fauci getting emails and then coordinating the paper lying.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753795)

You conveniently left out people getting deplatformed , called racist and even losing jobs for suggesting a lab leak was possible. Not to mention the coordinated “fact checks” immediately debunking the lab leak theory.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753833)

this is why democracy is gay.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753201)

I guess so.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753540)

the nyt was the leading rag on suppressing any "COVID misinformation" but now they're trying to cop out with "we were mislead." you're the institution that's supposed to be questioning the narrative and being an outlet for a free exchange of ideas!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753452)

CTRL-F pardon

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753614)

Like wtf are we talking about here?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753719)

wahhhhhh january 6!!!!!!!!!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753784)

And lol at 99-1.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753999)

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

https://archive.ph/5CGFM

eventually the author gets around to the fraud about the lab leak theory. between this article and the recent book about COVID fraud you have to wonder if the mainstream is ready to admit the truth, at least in some ways.

====

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

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.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753805)

I realize this overlaps a lot with the “lab leak bad! reeeeee!” group but ultimately where it came from seems a lot less important than the shit that was forced on us over a mild cold/flu imo

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753859)

shut down churches

schools

businesses

except liquor stores and mega stores

mandatory vax for jobs and soldiers

all after establishing that covid was not an existential threat, but

if it saves just one life

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5695042&forum_id=2:#48753891)