Senior US journalist attacks leading scientists for ‘misleading’ him about Covid lab leak theory

Wuhan Institute of Virology – Thomas Peter/Reuters

A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “blatantly” misleading him over the theory of a Covid laboratory leak in the early days of the pandemic.

Donald McNeil Jr said he was skeptical of the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan after some top epidemiologists argued that it was not possible.

Mr McNeil Jr said the newspaper’s coverage of the theory was influenced by their efforts to throw him “off the rails” and probably contributed to the matter being “dropped” for a year.

However, experts initially thought the lab leak theory was plausible but did not want to reveal it for political reasons, according to a series of messages between them accidentally released by a US congressional committee last year.

In his book The Wisdom of Plagues, which looks back on 25 years of covering pandemics, Mr McNeil Jr said it was clear that scientists “early misled me” and that he was a “victim of deception”.

He said he was “disappointed, in them and in myself, that I was taken in so easily”.

“It’s one thing for a politician to lie to him and fail to check it. But when it comes to viral evolution, who do you go to for a second opinion?”, he wrote.

“If Albert Einstein told you that nuclear fission is harmless, who would you trust to say, ‘Is Einstein dead wrong?”

Mr. McNeil Jr. resigned from the New York Times in 2021 after the paper reprimanded him for a racial slur that a student used again while debating whether to suspend that student at his school.

Last year, private messages released by the US Oversight Committee revealed conversations between several scientists who wrote a key paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020.

The paper, The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2, argued that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover event and played a role in fueling debate about the origin of the virus.

Among the authors was the British scientist Professor Andrew Rambaut, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh, and the first author Professor Kristian Andersen, from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

The messages showed that the scientists admitted in the weeks before publication that there was a possible laboratory leak but that they were concerned about the Chinese intrusion.

Some of the messages also showed the researchers discussing how to answer inquiries from Mr McNeil Jr about the origin of the virus.

Mr McNeil Jr emailed both Professor Rambaut and Professor Andersen on 6 February 2020, because of a tip off that the government wanted to investigate whether the virus could be made in a laboratory in Wuhan.

The scientists shared their emails on the Slack messaging platform, with Professor Robert Garry writing that Mr McNeil Jr was “very credible but can be mistaken for a reporter. [sic]”.

“Don… really nailed it,” Professor Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumors were clearly “false” and 10 days later Proximal Origins was published.

Discussing his response to another email from Mr McNeil Jr nine days later, Professor Andersen told his colleagues he had used “humor to avoid the fact that I’m getting fired” and put on a smiley face ” very deliberate”.

Mr McNeil Jr said the scientists’ responses influenced how he interpreted the issue and how the newspaper covered it.

He said the debate has now reached “reality” and “fans on both sides keep throwing mud”.

“Science journalists are caught in the middle – even editors who are not committed to either side for partisan reasons demand to know the most likely explanation so they can assign analyzes that benefit political candidates”, he wrote .

“If both sides are willing to lie to journalists or mislead journalists, embarrassing errors are inevitable. And the truth never comes out.”

Professor Andersen told Mr McNeil Jr he was never at a loss and his answers were “accurate and specific”.

Last year he said the messages had been “hijacked by gritters and conspiracy theorists, and turned into a nonsensical political circus where individual scientists (ie humans) are being targeted and harassed.”

Responding to messages released in 2023, Professor Rambaut said there was no proof of an accidental release, so the team erred on the side of caution.

“We had no evidence that it was anything other than a natural virus,” he said: “Don’t go accusing people of things if there’s no evidence.”

Mr McNeil Jr said he was “surprised” to read the Slack messages released in July.

“It seems they felt it would be reckless to tell me what they suspected,” he said, adding: “I think it was a mistake. I’m a pretty careful reporter and not an alarmist. I could explain the context.

“Anyway, I think misleading reporters is generally a bad idea. In democracies, all the beans are eventually spilled.”

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