It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared<\/a> on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert<\/em> and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: \u201cOh my God! There\u2019s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? \u2018Oh, I don\u2019t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.\u2019 Or it\u2019s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called<\/a> Stewart\u2019s rhetoric \u201cdangerous and short-sighted.\u201d Washington Post<\/em> columnist Paul Waldman fumed<\/a> that \u201ccelebrities\u201d shouldn\u2019t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes<\/em> rounded up<\/a> viewers uncomfortable with Stewart\u2019s words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now here we are, five years after we began the \u201ctwo weeks to slow the spread.\u201d So-called experts are finally catching up to Stewart and the average American, who saw the plainly obvious reality that the coronavirus lab with famously lax security protocols may have something to do with the original outbreak of a coronavirus in the same city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the weekend, in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, Zeynep Tufekci informed us, \u201cWe Were Badly Misled About Covid.\u201d Who misled us? Zeynep Tufekci and the New York Times <\/em>played a key role, as it turned out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing in August 2020, Ben Smith reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn\u2019t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the <\/em>Blood Cancer Journal, couldn\u2019t believe his ears.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But he kept silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the C.D.C. had blundered by saying protective face coverings should be worn by health workers but not ordinary people.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHere I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn\u2019t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn\u2019t make sense,\u201d Dr. Rajkumar told me. \u201cEverybody should be wearing masks.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing in the Times <\/em>a year after the pandemic started, Tufekci argued<\/a> \u201cMaybe We Need Masks Indoors Just a Bit Longer.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even in her reevaluation of the failures of Covid<\/a>, driven by the paper she was writing for, Tufekci still couldn\u2019t resist taking a jab at the people who were actually right the entirety of the last five years. She wrote, \u201cSome of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren\u2019t 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Got that? We should have deferred to sainted scientists like Anthony Fauci, who changed his position on masks with no discernible scientific reasoning, after having previously downplayed their efficacy. Anthony Fauci, the same legitimate scientist who supported<\/a> the gain-of-function research at labs like the one in Wuhan, can only be questioned in what Tufekci determines to be \u201cgood faith.\u201d You\u2019re allowed to be right, but do you have to be so harsh about it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tufekci wasn\u2019t alone in reevaluating the mistakes of Covid; the NYT<\/em>\u2019s Apoorva Mandavilli did her share as well, writing<\/a> \u201cScience Amid Chaos: What Worked During the pandemic? What Failed?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 2021, Mandavilli tweeted, \u201cSomeday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n