The New York Times appeared to turn on Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recently published opinion essay criticizing the former NIH director’s approach to sharing information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack wrote a column titled ‘Dr. Fauci could have said so much more,’ which primarily explored the government scientist’s quashing of the COVID lab leak theory that most Americans have now come to believe.
Stack, a former China correspondent, wrote that Fauci and British zoologist Peter Daszak were the first to refute in near absolute terms the theory that the novel coronavirus arose from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Not only was that information not necessarily true, but, Stack wrote, the couple could have qualified their statements in a way that exposed Americans to a fuller picture, but they didn’t.
Stack further condemned Fauci for initially lying that the masks were ineffective, then becoming his biggest champion and repeatedly moving the needle when it would be safe to lift lockdown measures.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the NIH, who the New York Times now admits downplayed the reality of the COVID-19 lab leak theory
Fauci (right) with British zoologist Peter Daszak, who, among other things, was part of the blocked World Health Organization research in China. When he returned to the West, ‘he despised[d] lab leak as a conspiracy theory, frequently without disclosing his own professional involvement in the lab,’ according to Stack
“They could have said that the laboratories in Wuhan had been studying bat viruses, including coronaviruses.
“Bats have been kept alive in laboratories, and scientists have occasionally conducted controversial forms of research in which viral strains are manipulated in ways that can make them more dangerous to humans,” Stack wrote.
‘Both men worked for organizations that were involved in shifting funds from US taxpayers to scientists in Wuhan: Dr Daszak had been involved in Wuhan bat research for years; Emails from Dr. Fauci show that his staff had recently reminded him of NIH funding for coronavirus work that Dr. Daszak’s organization supported,” he continued.
Stack pointed to the dissimilarity between the way Fauci talked about the lab leak theory in private and in public.
‘In public, he was very prone to animal crossing; Behind the scenes, he wrote that “I don’t know how this evolved,” but warned that he was concerned about “social media distortions” about the origins of Covid,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, public speaking about the potential for a lab leak became controversial, and throughout 2020 one may have been deemed a racist or conspiracy theorist for promoting the theory.
Those who wrote about it and shared articles on various online platforms were silenced en masse. Facebook banned the theory outright for several months in 2021, and the mainstream media sneered at the mostly conservative lawmakers who pushed for answers.
Now, in 2023, Stack wrote, “we have learned that both the Department of Energy (which oversees its own network of labs and scientists) and the FBI now consider the pandemic most likely to have started in the labs.”
“And so we are left wondering how a straightforward hypothesis was first labeled a conspiracy and then a reflection of racism.
“Reviewing the coverage and public comments, I found a caveat: those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.”
Stack also pointed to Daszak’s committed involvement in the operation, as someone who had “collaborated for more than a decade with Chinese virologists studying bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and steered National Institutes of Health money toward the research through his nonprofit organization, EcoHealth. Alliance.’
Daszak was also involved in the famously blocked World Health Organization investigation in China and returned to the West to “dismiss the lab leak as a conspiracy theory, often without disclosing his own professional involvement with the lab.”
“In perhaps the most mind-boggling of these appearances, Dr. Daszak was quoted on NPR’s “All Things Considered” attesting to the independence of the WHO investigation, Stack wrote.
New York Times Columnist and Former China Correspondent Megan Stack
Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID-19 virus is believed to have originally leaked
The Times columnist goes on to argue that Fauci and Daszak’s dishonesty at worst, partial honesty at best, worked to quash ideas that had been deemed undesirable.
Attempting to “clean up disinformation” by suppressing speech “creates its own dangers,” she wrote, adding that she assumed the Chinese government would block some information, but was not prepared to witness the United States behave in a similar way.
“However, I could not have predicted that mentioning labs would become socially unacceptable in the United States… I was disconcerted to see the mainstream consensus inveighing against an idea that I took to be plausible.”
Fauci’s actions, he wrote, including deliberately promoting a false narrative around the lab leak theory and lying to the public about the early need to mask, are ways in which the government scientist at the time promoted misinformation in a theoretical effort to help.
“I have spent too many years in censored countries like Egypt, Russia and China to believe that our misinformation problem can be solved by monitoring speech and sorting out acceptable ideas from unacceptable ones. You end up in a society where nobody really believes anything.