(restarted thread to fix title)
A good attempt to depolarize the lab leak arguments
Is to fire every worthless media Walter Duranty hack and soyentist clown.
https://archive.ph/Rc7bv https://mtracey.substack.com/p/as-new-evidence-emerges-for-covid
7 May 2021 20:43:49 UTC
As New Evidence Emerges For COVID "Lab-Leak" Theory, Journalists Who Screamed “Conspiracy” Humiliate Themselves
Michael Tracey 3 hr ago
The New York Times pulled a similar routine by parroting the “conspiracy theory” label, as though that’s the be-all-end-all and no further inquiry on the subject was required:
Unfortunately, I’ve received no reply from Alexandra Stevenson.
Ben SmithVerified account @benyt 17 May 2021
A good attempt to depolarize the lab leak arguments
Ben SmithVerified account @benyt
@nytimes media columnist. Fireworks enthusiast. Formerly @buzzfeednews. Beats working for a living. Send me scoops: ben. smith @nytimes. com.
Brooklyn, NY nytimes. com Joined October 2007
https://archive.ph/y5kC0 https:// donaldgmcneiljr1954. vmedium. com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d
17 May 2021 17:04:31 UTC
How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory*
Donald G. McNeil Jr. 6 hours ago·19 min read
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not a Lab Leak,’ Scientists Say.”
It never ran.
For two reasons.
The chief one was that inside the Times, we were sharply divided. My colleagues who cover national security were being assured by their Trump administration sources — albeit anonymously and with no hard evidence — that it was a lab leak and the Chinese were covering it up. We science reporters were hearing from virologists and zoologists — on the record and in great detail — that the odds were overwhelming that it was not a lab leak but an animal spillover.
Frankly, the scientists had more credibility.
The other reason my story never ran was that it was 4,000 words long and full of expressions like “polybasic cleavage site,” “RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene” and “O-linked glycan shields.” Editors would open it, their eyeballs would bleed, and they would close it and find something else to do.
For about a year, that was the general wisdom among science writers. The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.”
China retorting to Trump administration nonsense with nonsense of its own — such as suggesting that U.S. military officers planted the virus during a visit to Wuhan in October 2019 — did not help.
Two weeks ago, my former New York Times science news colleague Nicholas Wade wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (and on Medium) arguing that the lab-leak theory deserves a harder look.
It has since been sent to me a dozen times with notes asking “What do you think?”
\My first reaction was dismissive, even though I very much respect Nick as a journalist.** (Some of his work is controversial and he can be cranky, but who am I to criticize anyone on those grounds?) I covered the pandemic from its earliest days and I disagreed with his retelling of how the leak-vs.-spillover debate began.
Also, I was offended by some aspects, such as his attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, both of whom I have known for years; I know both are dedicated to saving lives, and they have always told me the truth — or what they honestly believed to be the truth at the time, because evidence sometimes changes. They are now both getting death threats, and that is repulsive.
And more and and more scientists feel misled.
I now agree with Nick’s central conclusion: We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.
I had been skeptical of the “lab leak” theory because animal spillover is such an obvious answer. Genetics has proven that almost every disease mankind has faced jumped from animals: bubonic plague from rodents, measles probably from cows, whooping cough maybe from dogs, and so on.
Also, the leak idea was just too conveniently conspiratorial.
During those first days in Wuhan, a major misconception circulated — that the virus did not spread easily between people. The W.H.O. repeated it, so did we. But that was not necessarily deliberate misinformation. With the market closed, the epicenter had scattered a few dozen cases across a city of 11 million. Very few PCR tests existed, and it was the height of flu season. At such times, it’s hard to know who infected whom with what.
If that lab was staffed by men, would they be this defensive?