[Just The News] New York Times reporter's flippant dismissal of the increasingly popular "lab-leak" COVID-19 origin theory offers a revealing glimpse into the newspaper's pandemic news priorities 18 months into the health crisis that has pervaded world media coverage since early last year. Apoorva Mandavilli, a longtime science reporter who has been a full-time writer at the Times since May of last year, suggested on Wednesday that growing suspicions that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese virology lab are both misguided and bigoted.
"Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots," she wrote on Twitter. "But alas, that day is not yet here."
Mandavilli subsequently deleted that tweet. In a followup post she did not retract her earlier claim about the theory's "racist roots" but rather said that it had been "badly phrased."
"The origin of the pandemic is an important line of reporting that my colleagues are covering aggressively," she wrote.
By Thursday evening Mandavilli's Twitter account appeared to be no longer active. She did not respond to inquiries seeking more information about her opinions on the theory and the reason for her account's disappearance.
Yet her suggestion that the lab-leak theory is both "racist" and unworthy of the discussion it has provoked may shed light on the pandemic coverage priorities of one of the world's most influential papers.