There’s a rather remarkable column in the New York Times from Zeynep Tufekci, undoubtedly motivated by the fifth anniversary of COVID-19. Here’s the meat of the piece:
The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. had already come to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?
I found the use of the passive voice in the title amusing, given the tenor of the column itself: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”.
And, as Dr. Tufekci makes clear in her column, it was not just a case of knowing little about the virus at the outset but that physicians, scientists, and bureaucrats actively and knowingly lied about the virus and what they knew or did not know.
The German press recently has been full of stories about how the German intelligence service believes with high certainty that the pandemic was the consequence of a “lab leak” from the Wuhan laboratory. My own view, as I have said before, is that is a step too far.
We don’t really know what produced the pandemic—naturally evolving or lab leak—and we are unlikely to know unless the Chinese government miraculously becomes forthcoming about it. The only thing I can imagine that might cause that to happen, as I have said before, would be for our judges and political leaders to allow a civil suit against the Chinese government seeking in the vicinity of $30 trillion in consequential and punitive damages over COVID to proceed.
In the meantime I hope we learn how essential it is for professionals on whom we rely for their expertise be unswervingly honest in their public pronouncements. To be otherwise undermines public trust and, indeed, the very reasons that we rely on them. Furthermore, I hope we have learned that we should not subsidize “gain of function” research outside a place where we can control the safety measures put in place or how the knowledge is used.







