Why can't anyone at The New York Times ever tell the whole truth about Covid?

Maybe the most infuriating example yet came Sunday - in an opinion piece that called out lies about the lab leak theory without admitting the Times had pushed them for years.

Beware the passive voice.

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives, The New York Times headline read yesterday.

The event was Covid. The misleading… well, that’s another story.

(For the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about how the Times misled its readers, subscribe now. Or wait 72 hours.)

The article came from Zeynep Tufekci.

Covid was very, very good to Tufekci, a sociologist who got famous in 2020 for telling Americans they needed to wear masks.

At the time, she was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science. Now she’s the “Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs” at Princeton University and a Times columnist.

Certain Times writers specialize in fake hard truths, poking at the Times liberal/progressive/woke reader base without ever actually challenging it. Tufekci falls in that camp. Naturally, she supported the mRNAs and Covid-mitigation ventilation projects, the sort beloved by teachers unions because they were a pleasant-sounding way to keep schools closed forever.

But when it came to Covid origin stories, Tufekci wasn’t quite so credulous.

I don’t know what she thought in 2020. But in June 2021, she wrote a long column for the Times that explained the evidence for the lab leak in detail.

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In this piece, she noted previous work done by Shi Zhengli, the infamous “Bat Woman” and other researchers in Wuhan — as well as Peter Daszak, the British zoologist at the center of the research and efforts to cover it up, and Ralph Baric, an American coronavirus researcher who worked hand-in-latex-glove with China:

The 2013 paper by Dr. Shi, Dr. Daszak and others demonstrated that a live bat coronavirus… could bind to human lung cell receptors, showing that “intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection.” [A] controversial 2015 experiment co-authored by a group of researchers that included Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi was carried out after they had found another bat coronavirus… [and] showed that it, too, could infect human airway cells directly.

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In other words, Tufekci has known for years of the overwhelming evidence that coronavirus came out of a Chinese lab.

This Sunday, Tufekci returned to the issue - and went further. She attacked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, as well as Daszak, a particularly oily mid-level federal scientist and Fauci advisor named David Morens, and Kristian Andersen, an immunologist who publicly downplayed the chance of a lab leak while privately admitting his fears of one. Tufekci wrote:

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.

In other words: You were badly misled about the event that changed your life.

All good. Blame where blame is due.

So what’s wrong?

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Sadly, Tufekci conspicuously forgot one group of people who also desperately “hid or understated crucial facts” to “promote the appearance of consensus.”

That would be her fellow scriveners. Particularly those at the New York Times, and very particularly Apoorva Mandavilli, who was among the Times’s top Covid reporters in 2020 and 2021. Mandavilli distinguished herself in her eagerness to carry water for the People’s Republic of China as it worked to pretend that Covid might have been the accidental spawn of a bat-pangolin-raccoon dog menage a trois. (I will leave it to one of you to ask for an AI representation.)

To with, this now-deleted post:

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(I’ll take Tweets I Really, Really, Really Wish I Could Have Back for $1,000)

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Keep in mind, this was May 2021 - not early 2020. Anyone paying even the slightest attention knew that the evidence of a lab leak was close to overwhelming (hence Tufekci’s piece the next month).

But Mandavilli was not alone.

Again and again and again, the Times relied on the same handful of scientists pushing the same dubious geographic data to claim the theory that Covid had somehow come out of a market made sense, without questioning their claims or obvious conflicts of interest.

So why didn’t Tufekci apply the same critical eye to Mandavilli, other Times reporters, and the rest of the media?

Gee, I have no idea.

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(To steal a line from Spy magazine, icon of my youth: Logrolling in our time!)

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Yes, Tufekci knows exactly where her bread is buttered. And how the sausage is made. (Sorry, I missed lunch.)

That squelch you hear is The Media (TM) throwing The Science (TM) under the bus (not TM).

As an added bonus, Britain’s Daily Mail just followed last week’s scoop from two German newspapers and published yet more evidence that Western intelligence agencies and senior scientists believed Covid had come out of a lab in early 2020 — when pressure on China to come clean might actually have mattered.

So let me fix the headline on Tufekci’s article from Sunday:

We (and a Bunch of Scientists We Should Have Realized Were Compromised) Badly Misled You in 2020, and We’ve Spent the Five Years Since Hiding The Truth.

Okay, it’s a little long, but you get the idea.

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Added bonus: If you missed the German piece from last week: