Does the Times’ Turnabout on Origins of Covid Signal a Change in the Wind of Elite Opinion?

Now they tell us.“We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.” So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci’s March 16 article in the New York Times. The event was, of course, the Covid pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now widely accepted theory that the virus originated from a leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Times article appeared one day short of five years from the publication in Nature Medicine of an article by five scientists, led by Kristian Andersen, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” “We do not believe,” the article states, “that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”This was a deliberate lie. In April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told his boss, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, that he hoped “proximal origin” would put down “the very dangerous conspiracy theory” that the virus originated from a lab leak. The next day, Dr. Fauci recommended the paper to reporters as the product of a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” without mentioning that he had commissioned it and dictated its conclusion.The paper “misled me and many others into thinking a lab leak was implausible,” science writer Matt Ridley, who was a voting member of Britain’s House of Lords in 2020, writes. Donald McNeil Jr., who was the Times’ lead science writer in 2020, said scientists “clearly misled me early on” and that their article threw him “off track” and influenced the paper’s coverage for months.Mr. Ridley later coauthored the book “Viral” with Alina Chan, arguing for the likelihood of the lab leak origin. Mr. McNeil’s Times reportage ended in February 2021 when he was pushed out for having repeated a high school student’s use of the N-word on a Times-sponsored $5,490 field trip in Peru — one of many injustices inflicted in the “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd.The tenor of Mr. McNeil’s successor as chief science writer, Apoorva Mandavilli, can be gauged by her May 2021 tweet, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”So it’s not surprising that the theory that Covid spread from a lab leak was dismissed as a “fringe theory” by the Washington Post or that the Times mocked former Trump health official Robert Redfield for believing it. Nor that such outlets have shown little interest in the fact that the lab leak theory was accepted early on by the FBI and by the Biden administration Energy Department by early 2023.Why the frantic opposition to the lab leak theory? “Orange man bad” is one explanation: President Trump seemed open to it, which was enough to convince many people and probably most journalists that it must be nonsense. Many felt obliged to defer to supposedly expert scientific opinion, which helps explain mass compliance with what were, in retrospect, idiotic restrictions, such as closing playgrounds and masking kindergarteners.In retrospect, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Dr. Fauci, who proclaimed, “I represent science,” purposefully lied and dissembled to conceal the funding of “gain of function” research — that makes viruses more deadly — at Wuhan.The publication of Mr. Tufekci’s article in the Times signals a change in the wind of elite opinion. So does the publication in the Times last October of reporter Nicholas Confessore’s deeply reported account of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the University of Michigan, aptly subtitled “What Went Wrong?”Mr. Confessore documented how the University of Michigan’s DEI programs, the largest and most generously funded at any university, increased rather than decreased racial tensions. Their premise was that systemic white racism was ineradicable and must be fought with indoctrination sessions and racial quotas and preferences. Give the Times credit for publishing Mr. Confessore’s article less than a month before the election.The commitment of major corporations to DEI proved no more sincere than former Soviet bureaucrats’ faith in Marxism-Leninism. The second Trump administration’s efforts to ban DEI in federal agencies have been matched by the abolition of DEI in large corporations.On DEI, as on Covid, it turns out that the experts and the elites were lying and that the people labeled “conspiracy theorists” by the Times were often telling the truth. “This type of thing is exactly why so many on both the left and right are content with burning it all down,” Sean Trende reflected, no fan of Mr. Trump. “‘Gosh, why don’t people trust the experts?'”One answer is that the experts and the elites have shown miserable judgment. The elites took the death of a suspected convenience store robber at Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and the death of an arrested fentanyl user at Minneapolis in May 2020 as indications that the nation, in which nearly 53 percent of voters had elected a Black man president in 2008, was infected with systemic racism in need of constant DEI chastisement.The experts’ dishonest responses and insupportable remedies to the pandemic were applauded by almost all academic and journalistic voices and imposed by government officials with no thought to their costs. This culminated in June 2020 when the experts and elites agreed that pandemic restrictions should, in view of America’s ingrained racism, not apply to massive Black Lives Matter protests.Now we hear complaints, some of them plausible, that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk are destroying institutions possessed of expert wisdom and elite credentials. It’s understandable, given recent history, that many Americans are putting little stock in those complaints.Creators.com

Does the Times’ Turnabout on Origins of Covid Signal a Change in the Wind of Elite Opinion?

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