Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a piece by columnist Zeynep Tufekci with the stunning revelation that, yes, we were all lied to about the origins of Covid-19. Shocking, I know. The article, titled—ever so delicately—"We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," dances around the obvious: Covid did not emerge from a Wuhan wet market via some unlucky pangolin but, in all likelihood, from the conveniently located, high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology researching, of all things, coronaviruses.
This was not a bold new discovery. It was, in fact, the most common-sense conclusion from the very beginning—one that anyone with a functioning brain and a basic understanding of probability reached back in early 2020. The real story here is not that the lab-leak theory was correct. The real story is that the American scientific establishment, from Dr. Anthony Fauci down to dozens of virologists and epidemiologists, actively worked to suppress this information, gaslighting the public for years.
The “Scientific Consensus” That Wasn’t
Back in 2020, one of America’s most esteemed scientific journals, Nature Medicine, rushed to publish a paper dismissing the lab-leak theory as impossible. The authors—virologists who suddenly became very interested in ensuring China faced no scrutiny—concluded that Covid had definitely emerged naturally. The problem? We now have their internal emails, and they didn’t actually believe what they wrote.
In private, many of these same scientists admitted that a lab leak was, in fact, the most likely origin of the virus. But thanks to the gentle “guidance” of Anthony Fauci and WHO’s Jeremy Farrar, they were persuaded (read: pressured) to declare the idea “lacking plausibility.” And so, with a few strategically placed papers and some strong-arm consensus-building, an inconvenient truth was buried.
Anyone who dared to question this was labeled a conspiracy theorist or—worse—a racist. Because suggesting that Chinese scientists might have been careless while handling a virus in a lab was somehow the same as hating Chinese people. The media ran with it, Big Tech censored dissent, and the intellectual class sneered at anyone who didn’t fall in line.
And Now, Five Years Later…
Now that it’s all over—now that public outrage has cooled, pandemic policies have faded into the rearview mirror, and no institutional heads are at risk of rolling—it’s finally safe to admit the truth. And we’re supposed to be grateful?
Tufekci’s piece is not the problem. She’s actually one of the better reporters on Covid. The problem is the broader intellectual climate that made it impossible for her—or anyone else in mainstream journalism—to write this article when it actually mattered.
I can’t help but think of the wave of “shocking” revelations about Joe Biden’s mental decline that miraculously emerged only after Kamala Harris lost the election. For years, Washington reporters and the media elite whispered among themselves about Biden’s cognitive struggles. Yet, they kept it quiet. They didn’t say a word while Biden was running in 2020. They didn’t say a word while Harris was campaigning in 2024, lest her own complicity in the cover-up be exposed. Only after the election was safely lost did they generously let the public in on the open secret: Biden had been senile for years, and they had all worked together to keep it hidden.
This is not journalism. This is gatekeeping. This is a media and political class that sees itself as the rightful steward of public knowledge, doling out information only when it is strategically convenient.
News That Comes Too Late to Matter Isn’t News—It’s History
Here’s the lesson from all this: the institutions that claim to safeguard democracy—our scientific journals, our public health officials, our esteemed newspapers—do not see themselves as beholden to the truth. They see themselves as managers of public perception. They will not tell you what they know when they know it. They will tell you when it is safe for you to know.
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