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Government Corruption
NYT: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
2025-03-17
Part III in the series on the Modified Limited Hangouts re: the modern Aktion T4 by the American and other mainstream press organizations and politicians...
Oh, and... this link might work.

By Zeynep Tufekci
If they want to play around with genes they should start with the gene's 3DC has been wanting modified with standard available mods for generating firefly glow flashes and some of the MIT logic genes to make Christmas trees naturally flash around solstice. That would remove the dangerous activity of outside tree decoration. Not stuff that puts the lives of billions in check. Hell if it goes bad you can always turn the trees into 2x4s.
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.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk....
They aren't looking at the Defuse proposal or the similar evidence from Alina Chan's _Viral_ yet. Which means this is Yet Another Modified Limited Hangout, and they're not interested in following the breadcrumbs to all the other lies. Damn.
Posted by:Thing From Snowy Mountain

#18  This work started in Ralph Baric's lab in North Carolina in 2015, with input from SHI Sheng-li (Wuhan) and was continued in Wuhan (with funding through Daszak) after gain-of-function work was shut down (temporarily) in the US.

Origin of COVID (2021)
Posted by: KBK   2025-03-17 20:08  

#17  A supposedly investigative reporting media saying "Ooopsie Doopsie we just printed what we were told, totes sorry but we are right anyways so nah nah nah." is not a good look.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2025-03-17 19:19  

#16  NYT: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

...No. You. Weren't.

Mike
Posted by: MikeKozlowski   2025-03-17 17:44  

#15  You were willingly misled.
I, however, assumed you were full of $hit as usual.
The only ones misinformed were those that trusted you.
Posted by: ed in texas   2025-03-17 14:59  

#14  Reality is moving at Trump speed.

It's that OODA Loop thingie. Trump is generating events faster than the opposition can react to them. The Usual Suspects are busy whinging on CNN while Trump is already two outrages ahead of them.
Posted by: SteveS   2025-03-17 12:52  

#13  Reality is moving at Trump speed. The NYT needs to get its readers mostly caught up so they don’t look ignorant at cocktail party discussions about the new investigations.
Posted by: trailing wife   2025-03-17 11:20  

#12  Dr. Leanna Wen (CNN/WaPo) same thing. She was a shutdown nazi who said people who didn't obey should be jailed
Posted by: Frank G   2025-03-17 11:20  

#11  NYT trying to salvage some credibility. Don't buy it. The only thing they are sorry about is getting caught.
Posted by: Angstrom   2025-03-17 11:13  

#10  CDC whistleblower on MMR vaccine-autism study gains new attention after Weldon nomination pulled
Posted by: Skidmark   2025-03-17 10:43  

#9  I think I posted that Saturday or Sunday.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2025-03-17 10:36  

#8  UK Gov't Told in 2020 That COVID-19 Was 'Engineered' in Wuhan Lab
Posted by: Skidmark   2025-03-17 10:30  

#7  This is Julius Streicher saying the Daily Sturmer was misled about the Nazis....
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2025-03-17 08:24  

#6  The genome of the covid virus was discovered by Indonesians and exposed early in the pandemic. Articles describing the discovery were posted on this site.
Posted by: Itsoktobewhite   2025-03-17 08:16  

#5  'We'? What do you mean 'we' commie.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2025-03-17 07:58  

#4  
The Covid-19 virus release, cost the US Economy an estimated $16 trillion.

Given, the CCP only holds about $1 Trillion of the USA Debt. Cancel that debt as part payment. Then except Hong Kong and a few other outlaying areas to cover the rest of the debt.
Posted by: NN2N1   2025-03-17 05:52  

#3  Tag close fixed.

I replaced the cut-off headline with the original NYT headline. If you originally had written something else more clever, please post it in a comment below, and I’ll fix that, too. From my moderator notes, here is Fred’s explanation about that:

A quote (") in an article's headline will chop the text there. If a headline begins with a quote, no headline. Quotes are used in the code, which tries to execute what follows.

Workarounds: Use single quotes or two single quotes to make a double ('').

Other workarounds: Backslash quote (\ ". without the space.)

& lquo; and & rquo; (no spaces)

< q> and < /q> (no spaces)

So now you (and whoever else is reading this comment thread) understand why that happened and what to do, no doubt considerably better than I do. Thank you, Fred, for explaining that to me back in 2019! :-)
Posted by: trailing wife   2025-03-17 01:50  

#2  Thank you.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2025-03-17 01:47  

#1  Uh, I think I might have mangled a closing bracket for a span statement right after "this link might work."
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2025-03-17 01:05  

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