NY Times “We were totally mislead…” about the cause of the Wuhan virus

Uh huh. Now they admit it. Seems not that long ago that politicians and scientists who suggested the Covid virus escaped a lab were jeered at by much of the media. Excerpt below but hit the link for the whole story

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.

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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.