The New York Times appeared to turn on Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recently published opinion essay that criticized the former NIH director’s approach to information sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack wrote a column titled ‘Dr. Fauci Could Have Said a Lot More,’ that primarily explored the government scientist’s stifling 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 early to refute in near absolute terms the theory that the novel coronavirus sprung out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Not only was that information not necessarily true, but, wrote Stack, the pair could have qualified their statements in ways that exposed Americans to more of the full picture, but they did not.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 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 was among other things, famously a part of the stymied World Health Organization investigation in China. When he returned to the West, he 'disparage[d] lab leak as a conspiracy theory - frequently without disclosing his own professional stake in the laboratory,' according to Stack](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/03/29/00/69227043-11913099-image-a-9_1680047123640.jpg)
Fauci (right) with British zoologist Peter Daszak, who was among other things, famously a part of the stymied World Health Organization investigation in China. When he returned to the West, he ‘disparage[d] lab leak as a conspiracy theory – frequently without disclosing his own professional stake in the laboratory,’ according to Stack
‘They could have said that laboratories in Wuhan had indeed been studying bat viruses, including coronaviruses.
‘Live bats were kept in the laboratories, and scientists occasionally carried out controversial forms of research in which viral strains are manipulated in ways that can make them more dangerous to humans,’ wrote Stack.
‘Both men worked for organizations that had a hand in moving U.S. taxpayer funds to the scientists in Wuhan – Dr. Daszak had been involved with Wuhan bat research for years; Dr. Fauci’s emails show his staff had recently reminded him of NIH funding for the coronavirus work Dr. Daszak’s organization supported,’ she continued.
Stack pointed out the dissimilarity between the way Fauci talked about the lab leak theory in private and in public.
‘In public, he leaned hard into animal crossover; 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,’ she wrote.
All the while, speaking in public about the potential of a lab leak became controversial, and throughout 2020, one may have been considered a racist or conspiracy theorist for touting 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 mostly conservative lawmakers who pushed for answers were regarded with disdain by the mainstream media.
Now, in 2023, Stack wrote, ‘we’ve we’ve learned that both the Department of Energy (which oversees its own network of laboratories and scientists) and the F.B.I. now consider it most likely that the pandemic started in the laboratories.’
‘And so we are left to wonder how a straightforward hypothesis got labeled first as a conspiracy and later as a reflection of racism.
‘Retracing coverage and public comments, I found a cautionary tale: Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.’
Stack also pointed out Daszak’s compromised stake in the operation, as someone who had ‘been collaborating for more than a decade with Chinese virologists studying bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and directed National Institutes of Health money toward the research through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance.’
Daszak also famously participated in the stymied World Health Organization investigation in China, and returned to the West to ‘disparage lab leak as a conspiracy theory – frequently without disclosing his own professional stake in the laboratory.’
‘In perhaps the most mind-bending of these appearances, Dr. Daszak, was quoted on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” vouching for the independence of the W.H.O. investigation,’ wrote Stack.
New York Times columnist and former China correspondent Megan Stack
Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is believed the COVID-19 virus may have originally leaked from
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 discourse ‘creates its own dangers,’ she wrote, adding that she assumed the Chinese government would lockdown certain pieces of information, but was not prepared to witness the US behaving similarly.
‘I could not have predicted, however, that mentioning the laboratories would become socially unacceptable back in the United States…I was unnerved to see mainstream consensus lashing out in opposition to an idea that I understood to be plausible.’
Fauci’s actions, she wrote, including knowingly promoting a false narrative around the lab leak theory and lying to the public about the early necessity of masking are ways in which the then-top government scientist promoted disinformation in a theoretical effort to help.
‘I’ve spent too many years in censored countries like Egypt, Russia and China to believe that our disinformation problem can be solved by monitoring speech and sorting out acceptable from unacceptable ideas. You end up in a society where nobody really believes anything.’
