+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: Communities & Social Networking (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-57.html)
+--- Thread: Research The NYT accepts opinion piece that seems to go against its grain? (COVID community) (/thread-17609.html)
The NYT accepts opinion piece that seems to go against its grain? (COVID community) - C C - Mar 18, 2025
We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4k4.kJud.1CxiBa8iP-dZ&smid=url-share
EXCERPT: ... 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...
[...] 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 might 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 and 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.
Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or the world.
You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that this research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose... (MORE - details)