Five Years Later, NY Times Op-Ed Demands “Pandemic Amnesty” for Scientists Who Attacked Covid Lab Leak Theory
Columnist Zeynep Tufekci blames those of us who endeavored to bring up the evidence related to the lab-leak origin, because she didn’t like our tone.
Five years ago, my son was poised to attend his final Junior ROTC ball, attend several award ceremonies honoring his achievements, and have a fun summer with friends before heading off the the US Air Force Academy.
Unfortunately, after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (now recognized to be most likely from a lab leak in Wuhan, China), President Donald Trump allowed “coronavirus advisors” Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx to run wild with “15 days to control the spread.” My son’s entire graduation season was canceled.
I shall neither forgive nor forget, especially as I was an early proponent of the “severe flu” approach to addressing the outbreak.
Unfortunately, these federal policies morphed into a multi-year lockdown extravaganza for many areas of the country. Those of us trapped in California endured nearly 3 years of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency powers.
Now, 5-years later, and as new information is becoming available on how much data supporting a lab leak was the likely source of the novel coronavirus, an opinion piece from The New York Times authored by Zeynep Tufekci (a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University) attempts to promote a “pandemic amnesty” for scientists who aggressively promoted the natural origin theory.
In the piece, Tufekci critiques the initial dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory by many public health officials and scientists, who instead favored the narrative of a natural zoonotic spillover from a seafood market in Wuhan, China. She highlights how this stance was strongly defended, exemplified by the support of 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies for EcoHealth Alliance, a group linked to risky bat virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite early speculation of a lab-related origin being suppressed.
But then she blames those of us who endeavored to bring up the evidence related to the lab leak origin because she didn’t like our tone.
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.
https://t.co/Qt2BrnxUep pic.twitter.com/Ic4xrY5wDL
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) March 16, 2025
Where do I even start with this inanity? “The Twitter Files” is loaded with examples of how Big Government (led by Birx and Fauci) colluded with Big Tech to drown out the voices of anyone who challenged the COVID narrative.. even well-credentialed scientists with the background and experience to do so.
The “narrative violations” on Twitter at that time included anything with the “lab leak” mention.
3.“Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway”; “natural immunity”; suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab”; even “worrisome jokes”: pic.twitter.com/CM5THKGYRu
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 17, 2023
Then, with the same sweep of the pen, she argues that the reluctance to openly consider a lab accident as a plausible cause, due in part to fears of political fallout or professional backlash, may have obscured critical examination of lab safety practices.
The information was out there, and many fine scientists staked their reputations and careers on the line, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Fortunately, one of the authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, persevered and his nomination to be the Director of the National Institutes of Health is on its way to being finalized in the Senate.
However, these scientists received little help from Big Media entities like The New York Times, who played a large role in promoting the disinformation and ignoring the facts that were being present but went against the preferred narratives.
Tufekci emphasizes that the truth about COVID’s origins remains elusive, while she fails to note Fauci’s role in crafting the “natural origin” narrative. Legal Insurrection readers may recall that Fauci both commissioned and had final approval on a scientific paper written in February 2020 designed to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab.
That paper ignored a significant smoking gun pointing to a lab leak, an email discussion that included Fauci focused on a “furin site”, unusual except in the context of a virus being genetically manipulated.
On February 2, Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert and the director of Wellcome, sent around notes, including to Fauci and Collins, summarizing what some of the scientists had said on the call.
Farzan, a Scripps professor who studied the spike protein on the 2003 SARS virus, “is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explain that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” Farrar’s note reads, referring to a spike protein feature that aids interaction with furin, a common enzyme in human lung cells. Farzan didn’t think the site was the product of “directed engineering,” but found that the changes would be “highly compatible with the idea of continued passage of the virus in tissue culture.”
And, as a reminder, if I could discern all this from my San Diego “Fortress of Solitude” in San Diego in 2020, then everyone else involved in this narrative promotion could, too.
I don’t know if she was first, but @Mutnodjmet wrote about the likelihood of a lab leak on February 16, 2020 https://t.co/79ftO2ZiT2 pic.twitter.com/9N77RwUC4t
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) March 16, 2025
There is no “misled” here… there is only manipulation.
I do not forgive. I do not forget. I demand accountability for every scientist involved in the manipulation, not amnesty.
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Comments
No…
Name, shame, and humiliate…
Prosecute to the fullest…
Especially Fauci (is it now Fau-xi, in honor of his ChiCom accomplices?), who knew better.
I wonder why Trump hasn’t rescinded the Presidential Commendation he bestowed on Fauci?
I wonder why you keep upvoting yourself?
Every doctor, professor Fauci and his associates the Biden Administration including media individual who fought to keep us locked up every company that forced jabs into individuals to keep their jobs should be held accountable. I am not nor will I ever be forced to inject myself with poison
No. No amnesty. Their lies contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and destroyed the credibility of the medical profession.
Rusty:
I’ll have to disagree with you. It’s my opinion that they should be given full amnesty from the death penalty. Instead, we’ll do to THEM what they did to us. We can offer them a choice between life in prison in solitary confinement (much as how most of them offered to confine us in solitary or to toss us in jail if we ignored them), or suicide.
That might not be a legal solution, but it would be JUSTICE.
In general, justice is served when the injured party is made whole or, in extreme cases, when the perpetrator is diminished in proportion to the injury suffered by the victim.
Given the number of lives ended or ruined and the amount of damages caused by these so-called “scientists”, justice is not an option.
Retribution, on the other hand…
“For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.”
“Dissent” is part of political discourse, not science. “Vilification” is an inappropriate response for scientists. The proper response is better science, in which theories are supported by facts (ascertainable by researchers other than those initially propounding them, that is they are verifiable or the experiments from which they result are reproducible).
Her language practically admits that the “zoonotic” faction’s reaction was political, not scientific.
Also note that a “zoonotic” origin for the virus does not mean the virus didn’t escape from a lab, or that it wasn’t further engineered before escaping. A “zoonotic” origin and “lab leak accident” and/or “a result of GOF experimentation” are not mutually exclusive.
Crimes against humanity should never be pardoned.
Covid was a great test. If any person in the sciences supported the vaccine, then they shouldn’t be listened to. Same with masking or shutdowns. Being so colosally and obviously wrong, especially with the education/training to know better, is professionally unforgivable.
Nobody should listen to them about anything, ever.
Well now hang on, lets be clear hear.
Supporting them during the initial development of the so-called ‘vaccine’ isn’t a deal breaker. It was still in development, and it wasn’t unreasonable to support its development.
Supporting it AFTER it was finished and Fauci changed the very definition of a ‘vaccine’ in order to label it one, yeah, we are in agreement. There was ZERO evidence that it prevented transmission, and very little evidence that it did anything to actually mitigate the symptoms, and there was a mountain of evidence that it was very, VERY harmful to wide ranges of people, particularly pregnant women.
“Covid was a great test.”
Yes, it was. But the test originally posed a different question. We have an opportunity to change the question by turning the test against those who originally posed the COVID question. If we fail to turn the test against those who first posed it, we’re doomed. We are unlikely to get another chance.
Nope!
Where do the doctors and other professionals get their lives and practices back who were mercilessly attacked and punished for even just questioning the “science”? The there is the REAL damage from the injections pushed by these ideologues. They created a one way street of misery and now want bygones to be bygones. Money doesn’t mean a thing to someone whose life has been damaged. The only way to stop this from happening again is to punish those that did wrong and ostracizing their useful idiots.
When do ordinary people who were fired for refusing the jab or lost their businesses because they were shut down by government edict get their life back?
Hard pass. This knucklehead didn’t accept responsibility, they seek to evade accountability by shifting blame. The only people deceived were those with the impulse to obey others or the impulse to control others.
Many of us realized the official narratives re Covid origin were BS from jump. When they refused to recognize natural immunity or that a virus would mutate faster than any ‘vax’ could be deployed, abandoned the control group of the testing, vastly overstated risk of death, refused to acknowledge that those at true risk were the obese/co-morbid or frail elderly, forced masks….everyone with any sense and even HS level knowledge who chose to see could understand the response was not gonna be effective b/c it simply couldn’t be.
The response imposed liberty denying mandates, closed schools, demanded useless masks in public, devastated small businesses, halted religious liberty to attend worship services or.funerals for the frail elderly they condemned to die alone in nursing homes. Eff these people. The Covid Karens are not just a sad joke but are dangerous. They were empowered to harass the non compliant. These people are the same sort of authoritarian a-holes who would use temporary power to send you to a gulag if given the opportunity.
“…everyone with any sense (or) even HS level knowledge who chose to see could understand the response was not gonna be effective b/c it simply couldn’t be.”
The kicker is the pushers of the authoritarianism had PhDs in multiple disciplines that would have given them far more knowledge and judgment ability than those with a diploma from a good high school, or the equivalent of Biology, Immunology, Virology, and/or Evolution 101.
Yet at every turn, the “experts” were wrong about literally everything. An imbecile guessing at “what to do next” would have scored better. The experts can’t possibly have gotten everything wrong by mistake. They were lying. It’s the only possible way they could have been as wrong as they were. They can’t expect forgiveness without first admitting they lied and second accepting their punishment for lying. Then we can talk forgiveness, not before. (And even then I’ll still be disinclined to provide it to them.)
The other key takeaway of th disastrous Covid response is the way they ignored everything other than ‘public health’. The folks who designed and implemented the response just brushed aside all other aspects to to try and achieve their goal. Its very similar to multiple Science Fiction writers depicting how ‘thinking machines’ aka AI might misuse power. These authoritarian lockdown, mandatory masks and ‘jab’ that forcibly closed down our society, essentially sending Citizens to their room as if the authoritarians were our Parents ain’t much different than predictions of AI/Robots putting humans into a ‘people zoo’ to keep us safe for our own good.
Except Public Health wasn’t their goal, it was an excuse. Their goal was totalitarianism and they very well accomplished that
The most charitable motivation is public health. Even granting that the motives were ‘good’ the means and the results were so out of proportion to the problem as to negate it. FWIW I agree that the Covid response transformed very quickly into an adventure in totalitarianism. It empowered the authoritarian impulses of not just neighbourhood Karens but the Karens in Gov’t who had the power and force of the State to enforce compliance. Viewing first hand just how many people demanded compliance and how many meekly submitted was a window into how easily our society can crumble. Freedom requires require eternal vigilance to ward off those who would suppress or eliminate liberty.
Yes; precisely. The apparatchiks callously exploited a national/global tragedy caused by the Chinese communist regime, to brazenly grab and expand their power, via diktats right out of the darkest Orwellian dystopia.
Exactly.
Lockdowns were not a response to “covid;” “covid” was introduced as a reason to implement lockdowns.
You cannot forgive the unrepentant.
Only because they’re horrible people, who are utterly opposed to the basic values of a free society and the principles of free scientific inquiry. And they should be treated as such.
“We were only following orders, Herr General …”
Trump’s kindness overwhelms me. He wasn’t even bitter that some minor Judge overruled his legal deportation order of dangerous gang members.
He was so magnanimous in defeat that he sent them to Camp Bukele for vocational retraining and counselling. I hear El Salvador is gorgeous in the Spring. And he is even paying for it. They are so blessed they avoided deportation to oppressive Caracas. They must be so relieved.
They can have their amnesty AFTER they die in a fire.
I remember hearing about the lab leak/wet market theory in mid January 2020 on coast to coast am.
And not much later a report claiming Taiwanese intelligence services monitoring a mysterious contagion outbreak in October 2019 and then informing their western counterparts.
——————
November 1911 – Canton – Joseph Stilwell’s journal:
No mercy! If they can’t be jailed or sued, they should be shunned. My daughter has a PhD in microbiology and last worked in the field about 25 years ago. Yet, when she read the very first data about the genome of the virus she agreed that it had a structure that would not occur in nature. That is how obvious it was. IMO this was a play by Fauci, his allies and the Democrats to avoid responsibility for the US financing the gain of function research, beat Trump, and gain power.
No one did more to mislead, misinform, and lie than the NYT did, unless maybe the WaPo.
Yeah, not even maybe. You all tried to destroy anyone who was, in retrospect, absolutely correct about the situation. You all can go to hell
Throw this execrable exercise in self-serving absolution in the same trash bin as Jake Tapper’s book on dotard/crime boss, Biden’s senility.
There are no mea culpas or sincere contrition to be found, in these stunts. Certainly, the authors are incapable of owing up to their own, prominent roles in the propaganda and deceit that they describe. Thus, they pointedly and dishonestly omit any mention of their own roles (and, the roles of myriad Dhimmi-crat affiliated media shills and organs) in the charades at issue.
What we’re left with are self-serving attempts at historical revisionism and turning the page, but, without true contrition expressed by the actors most responsible for peddling lies and propaganda to the American citizenry.
It makes perfect sense that this obnoxious and dishonest essay is penned by a Professor of Sociology and “Public Affairs,” and not a medical doctor or a biologist. More prevaricating and self-serving Dhimmi-crat propaganda.
No. She didn’t like the tone? I don’t like her name. She is in a soft and mostly useless field. She look about 15.
Screw them. They ruined millions of lives all because (a) they lacked the self -awareness to realize they were not the smartest people in the room, or (b) they saw an opportunity to accrete power to themselves.
Either way, they do not merit future public trust until they do a mea culpa and then apologize.
How can they seek forgiveness when they still don’t think that they were wrong to act the way they did.
The lab link hypothesis still falls in the realm of a false narrative. We, the U.S., developed the virus and “leaked” it as a bioweapon in China and the second early epicenter of the outbreak, Iran. Ron Unz, the Unz Review, makes a convincing case for this third alternative as being the most credible.
With all due respect, screw that–they did a lot of damage to the country and people’s lives, all in the name of progressivism–they didn’t care who they hurt; it is time for some accountability or it will simply happen over and over–they all loved the power it gave them
Let us not forget that the COVID origin determination is not just some abstract idea that politicians can then use to place blame. The COVID origin has public health policy implications with respect to expectations regarding the virus’ virulence and communicability. So those “experts” that vociferously argued against the Lab Leak Theory actively damaged opponents careers but also endangered the public health response.
Before anyone calls out for amnesty, we should have some confessions.
Posted this in another blog.
From the article:
“”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. …”
No names named. Gee, I wonder why.
Actually, I don’t. I know why. And so does everyone here. The libel judgement against both her and the NY Times would bankrupt them both.
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