In a shocking twist, The New York Times published a guest essay slamming the left’s favorite scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci and others who actively suppressed the COVID-19 lab leak theory and branded it as disinformation.
Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack took a blowtorch to the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director and other disinformation virtue-signalers in a piece headlined: “Calling the Lab-Leak Theory ‘Disinformation’ Created Disinformation.” Stack didn’t mince words about the public officials, Big Tech giants and media talking heads who arbitrarily tried to make the Wuhan lab leak idea out to be some sort of nutty conspiracy theory: “Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.”
Stack highlighted a February 2020 interview Fauci did with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich prodded Fauci about COVID-19 leaking from a possible “‘biological warfare center’” in Wuhan, China, Fauci dismissed the notion as being from the realm of “conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” British zoologist Peter Daszak, who was also on the podcast, claimed “‘all the evidence’” screams a zoonotic origin for the virus. But Fauci and Daszak, said Stack, “could have told Mr. Gingrich a lot more.”
The fact that The Times published such scathing criticism of Fauci’s downplaying of the lab leak theory is a complete turnaround from the publication’s own history dismissing the notion. The Times characterized the lab leak theory as “unsubstantiated” in an April 2020 news piece attacking Trump administration officials for allegedly pressuring spy agencies to “hunt” for evidence. The newspaper tied the theory to former President Donald Trump’s alleged “public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.” Another July 2021 Times piece was headlined: “A Group of Scientists Presses a Case Against the Lab Leak Theory of Covid.” The Times must have been skittish about Stack’s blistering headline, because it was changed just hours after the essay’s publication.
Stack ripped Fauci and Daszak apart. They “could have said that laboratories in Wuhan had indeed been studying bat viruses, including coronaviruses.” In addition, Stack said the two men could have acknowledged that “accidental leaks are a known lab hazard and couldn’t yet be ruled” out. But instead, Fauci and Daszak “dissembled.”
Stack took particular issue with Fauci’s two-faced approach to the COVID-19 origins:
The near-certainty with which Dr. Fauci spoke publicly of zoonotic crossover is somewhat incongruous with his private communications from that time. He knew there was real debate — he was in the thick of it. In public, he leaned hard into animal crossover [origin]; behind the scenes, he wrote that ‘I do not know how this evolved’ but warned that he was concerned about ‘distortions on social media’ of Covid’s origins.
Because Fauci was affixed to the “public imagination as a figure of reassurance and reliability,” Stack admitted that leftist Big Tech platforms went to work to silence opinions that suggested the lab leak theory’s viability. “Twitter added warning labels to posts that argued for lab leak; Facebook banned such posts altogether for several months in 2021 before reversing the decision,” Stack said.
Stack noted that Fauci was one of the senior scientists who encouraged colleagues to “write a paper asserting that the new coronavirus had a natural origin. ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,’ published by Nature Medicine in March 2020, concluded ‘we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is possible.’”
Fauci presented the paper to White House reporters “as compelling evidence of zoonotic crossover — without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval,” Stack argued.
Conservatives are under attack. Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report the truth about Fauci’s role in suppressing the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
