Truth Emerging

For John, BLUF:  Mnetioned in Dispatches.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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'We Were Badly Misled' About COVID Origin, Says ...

From Hot Air, by Capotain Ed Morreissey, 17 March 2025, 9:20 AM.

Here is the lede plus one:

Were they 'misled'? Or did they lead the charge against anyone who dared question the consensus?

Now that the cat has come out of the bag, suddenly the New York Times feels the need to get out in front of the backlash. For years, the NYT ran story after story, scathing column after column, about anyone who dared to challenge The Science®. How dare people suggest that a novel coronavirus might have emerged from the nearby lab being run under questionable practices doing exactly the kind of research intended to produce novel coronaviruses! Those dissenters were all raaaaaacists, remember?

Now, the NYT -- and not even in its own editorial voice -- wants to play victim of The Science®:

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

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. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

And it goes on and gets better.  Read the whole thing.

There is little doubt in my mind that we, the Citizenry, were fed disinformation about the COVID-19 Pandemic.♠  I would like to put all the blame on Dr A Fauci, but that would not be fair.  He was aided and abetted by others in the medical community.  And, there was the Trump-despising Press, who went with Dr Fauci, because it was the easy way to place the burden on President Trump 45  Sad.  Very sad.

It is going to tqke time for experts, in and out of Government, to regain the confidence of the American People.  I hope those "experts" starat working on it soon.  I owuld like to get back to the time that Sergeant Friday and Inspector Lewis Erskine represented what was best in Government.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  An Undertaker friend of mine pointed out early on that the typical surgical mask was not suited to dealing with the COVID-19 virus.  Rather, we needed the N-95  But, I have been at hospitals that rejected the N-95 and asked me to don the ineffective mask.