What you mean “we”, Gray Lady?
Tiny hints from the NYTimes of the Psy War that was COVID
I apologize for the obscure title, which is too cute by half. I refer to an ancient joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and to a NYTimes headline from last week, and to the fact that when I was a boy the Times was nicknamed The Gray Lady because it was all-business and used no color.
The headline was, We were Badly Misled about the Events That Changed Our Lives, and my question is about WHO did the misleading?
Is this NYTimes’s substitute for a mea culpa? The Times is so influential that their reporting can alter election outcomes, prevent or start wars, influence public behaviors in ways that save lives or cost lives.
The most outrageous thing about this article is not that it comes 3 years too late, finally admitting a portion of what everyone knows by now. The most unforgivable thing is that the Times takes no responsibility for the prominent role that they played in purveying misinformation during the COVID deception.
Basic facts behind this column
In February, 2020, when only a handful of people had died from COVID, Tony Fauci and Peter Daszak and others who had played a facilitating role in the “research” that created the COVID virus, anticipated that they could be on the hook for the crime of the century. Before the obvious lab origin of COVID could become mainstream news, they arranged a pre-emptive strike. They solicited scientists who owed them a favor because they had received NIAID funding in the past, and asked them to write a scholarly article opining that COVID came from a naturally mutating virus rather than from an engineered bioweapon.
We have emails from the solicited authors saying that it seemed to them there was a good chance the virus came from a lab. But they did what they were hired to do, and Fauci arranged for the article to be fast-tracked in Nature Medicine. The article was amplified by a letter in The Lancet and an editorial in Science. With a touch of race-baiting, the message was about The Usual Bigots who — with no basis in fact — implied that the virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory, simply because they hate Chinese people. The MSM played their part in broadcasting the message that Science Has Spoken, and the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market.
Fauci’s sophisticated marketing strategy had two bases covered. The first line of defense: The virus jumped on its own from bats to humans. The fallback position, in case it becomes obvious that the virus was engineered: China’s only Level 4 bioweapon lab is right there in Wuhan. The virus escaped because the Chinese are sloppier than American bioweapon researchers, who are always meticulous and never make mistakes. The possibility that Americans deliberately created COVID as a bioweapon was nowhere on the table.
Dr Meryl Nass was first out of the gate, alerting us that the Nature Medicine paper was a sham. There was nothing in the body of the paper to justify the rhetorical flourishes in the abstract — which is the only part of the paper that most people read. I am proud to say that I was early on to this sham, and wrote a few weeks later, emphasizing that the virus might well be Made in America.
The pre-emptive media strategy worked for 2 years
Despite the obvious genetic features that mark the COVID virus as engineered, this meme was kept out of the mainstream for a crucial 1½ years, during which time everyone was exposed to COVID multiple times, and half the world was vaccinated. In September, 2021 Jeffrey Sachs went public with his suspicion that he had hired Peter Daszak in good faith, as his expert to investigate COVID origins, but that unbeknownst to him, Daszak had a conflict of interest. Jon Stewart went on Colbert’s late show to mock the natural origin theory, throwing the power of his wit into the limited hang-out that had always been Fauci’s fallback safety. In February, 2023, Nicholas Wade, retired 30-year veteran of the NYTimes science desk, legitimized the Lab Leak Hypothesis within his own blog column, no longer affiliated with the NYTimes. Still, the NYTimes and Science Magazine were treating the Lab Leak Hypothesis as a Republican conspiracy theory.
Why is this important
Once the virus was spreading inexorably across the planet, why was it important to know if it was a natural mutation or lab-engineered?
An honest inquiry into the origin of the COVID virus would have changed the course of history. If our FBI had done its job, they would have been able to tell us in March, 2020 who was responsible for creating the COVID bioweapon. The scientists could have been subpoenaed and they could have told us what the virus was designed to do, where in the genome the toxic payload was located, and what counter-measures they knew of. Bioweapons researchers usually are careful to ensure there are counter-measures that can stop the monsters they create; otherwise the weapon would be likely to blow back and attack friends and allies. We could have known right away that zinc, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin were powerful COVID preventives, and that vaccine developers must avoid the spike protein because that is the part of the virus that was engineered for maximum harm.
In the long run, popular appreciation that the COVID virus came from a lab
is the key to ending bioweapons production and research once and for all.
Some of the misleading that was done under the NYTimes banner
February 27, 2020
This op-ed was published on Feb 27, very early in the pandemic, at a time when nobody knew that there would even be a pandemic. There had been only a few dozen deaths in the US. The author is Peter Daszak, now infamous for being the subcontractor who sent US NIAID funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do "research" that consisted in engineering bat viruses so they could infect humans. Did anyone vet Daszak before printing his op-ed? Did anyone question how he knew that a pandemic was coming before the fact?
May 21, 2020
This news item was published uncritically, leaving the impression that 77 Nobel laureates had come together on their own, indignant at the prospect of US NIH halting funding through the EcoHealthAlliance. The research was framed at “preventing pandemics”, when in fact it was exactly this research that had created the COVID pandemic.
No countervailing opinions were quoted. Could the Times find no one who opposed bioweapons research? The article nowhere mentions the role of Richard Roberts in organizing this letter, his previous history, and his conflicts of interest.
No mention was made of an earlier petition to NIH by scientists who called for an end to bioweapon research which the Times themselves reported years earlier. And no reference was made to the origin of Lyme Disease, which was likely another pandemic that resulted from bioweapon research.
May 11, 2020
This article again cites Daszak uncritically, nowhere mentioning his blatant conflict. Trump’s reputation as being loose with the truth is being used to validate “science”, but just because Trump is often wrong doesn’t mean that these particular scientists are correct, or that they are unbiased. “On April 14, [Matt] Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed that the N.I.H. grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus — the institute may have ‘birthed a monster,’ in his words.”
What Gaetz said turned out to be absolutely true. Did the Times do any investigative reporting before they used their readers’ contempt for Gaetz to discredit a true statement?
“‘Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?’ she asked.”
A quote like this carries a strong innuendo without actually stating a falsehood.
June 1, 2020
Again, an article that is flatly misleading without ever making a false statement. Yes, these scientists were “tracing the evolution of bat viruses”, but more relevant and interesting, they were deliberately engineering these bat viruses to create human pathogens that are as contagious and as virulent as cutting edge technology allows.
April 21, 2020
Dead LINK Archive.org also seems to have erased it since yesterday!
This was a full-length magazine article, lauding Peter Daszak without reservation. He is cited as an expert in preventing epidemics without mentioning the possibility that he has a financial interest in creating pandemics. The antiviral drug Remdesivir is lauded as showing great promise, but its history of having been removed from trials in Africa because of its extreme kidney toxicity was not mentioned.
May 6, 2020
This article is based on the flawed idea that we can stop this virus by isolating ourselves. We know now that everyone in the world has been exposed to COVID, and it was just a question of when, not whether. Slowing the spread of the virus gave the virus an opportunity to evolve instead of creating population-level herd immunity quickly. Some epidemiologists have said this led to a much worse pandemic.
January 25, 2020
This one blames China for their response to COVID while offering no criticism of the US response which, in retrospect, produced a much, much worse result.
May 18-21, 2020
Three articles using Trump’s reputation to smear the drug hydroxychloroquine, which has proven to be up to 95% effective in preventing COVID hospitalization when used early.
Just because Trump doesn't understand science doesn't mean that he’s always wrong. It’s a journalist’s job to dig into the medical literature, or at least to solicit medical opinions on both sides. Suppression of hydroxychloroquine — in which the Times was complicit — was one of the worst crimes of the COVID response, and it was legally necessary for justifying the “emergency” vaccines.
June 20, 2020
Here’s another article about HCQ that quotes scientists on the “con” side but only quotes Trump on the “pro” side, leaving the impression that there were no scientists or doctors who thought HCQ could be effective against COVID.
May 29, 2020
In May, the campaign to discredit HCQ climaxed with publication of a giant study, more than 100,000 patients on 5 continents. The death rate of patients on HCQ was higher than the control group, and this result was used to shut down dozens of smaller studies worldwide.
To their credit, the Times reported on questions raised by this fraudulent study that claimed HCQ did more harm than good. There was no follow-up to tell readers that indeed the study had been found to be a fraud, based on data that was fabricated and fed to top doctors at Harvard and Stanford who took the bait and analyzed the data as though they were real.
An earlier article in which the Times originally lauded the fraudulent study is no longer indexable, but still on the Times website.
June 15, 2020
In this article and elsewhere, the Times cites uncritically the FDA’s characterization of ivermectin as “dangerous”, when a tiny bit of research would show how ridiculous this statement is. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been taking ivermectin for years as a preventative measure, and when the dust cleared, those people would prove to have some of the lowest rates of COVID in the world.
Boosting an experimental gene therapy product labeled “vaccine”
But the most egregious COVID propaganda from the Times was their contribution to the world-wide campaign to get people to accept a “vaccine” that had been hastily tested — and even so, required fraud to make it through FDA “emergency” authorization. There were hundreds of Times articles promoting use of the vaccines. Here are a few. One, two, three, four, five.
People who were reluctant to vaccinate for their own sake were manipulated with the lie that the vaccine would prevent them from passing the virus to others. In fact, the vaccines were never tested to see if they affect transmission, and studies including my own suggest that vaccination may actually increase the spread of COVID. The Times participated shamelessly in this manipulation (one, two, three, …)
The Times is still gaslighting us
Fact: In the first year of the mRNA shots, they racked up more reported deaths on the vaccine adverse events website than all vaccines combined for 30 years previous.
After years of broadcasting the Orwellian “safe and effective” mantra, the Times was finally forced to acknowledge there are “rare” side effects, with no quantification of “rare”.
This recent NYTimes video says that there is “no evidence” the mRNA vaccines can cause harm, because once they admit that there is evidence, they will be obligated to report on it and the floodgates will open.
The truth is getting out there, and the Times has been
dragged into acknowledging some small portion of it.
Incidentally,
I have it from the Horse’s Mouth that the content of this op-ed, like other columns by Zeynep Tupekci, was cribbed from research by her wasband of 20 years past. The wasband is a courageous journalist, now ousted from the mainstream, who speaks truth to power and has paid a price. Tupekci repackages his research with a spin that makes it an appropriate limited hang-out for what is left of the Liberal Press. This is a window into the state of our controlled media.
This article was developed in collaboration with Dr Madhava Setty, who published an earlier version on his Substack yesterday.
 | A guest post by
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Excellent work! My background is in newspaper journalism (though I left the field in my late 20s over 20 years ago), so I appreciate articles like this that gather the evidence to show just how complicit major outlets such as the NYT were in creating the conditions for the unnecessary, ineffective, and damaging policies supposedly meant to “keep us safe” by “stopping the spread” and by, of course, “following the Science” (the capital S means I’m referring to the cult-like actions of the new religion of scientism, not actual science).
I remember being distinctly frustrated in spring 2020 when such media mouthpieces made Trump himself the spokesperson for the skeptics when there were already a fair number of courageous scientists and doctors who were expressing skepticism, and when it didn’t take too much of my “doing my own research” to find the conflicts of interest of the Faucis and Daszeks who were being lauded as trustworthy despite not revealing such conflicts.
It was the sort of “journalism” that my J-school professors would have rejected with a loud, red pen scribbling irritated questions all over their first draft.
Having said all of that, while the global breadth and depth of the psyops surprised me, having watched media misbehavior for decades and understood that the mainstream press functions as a sort of propaganda arm rather than as a distiller of truth, I can’t say I was too surprised by its COVID-19 era behavior.
And while there are still those who remain loyal to such outlets, the good news is that the past several years has ripped the scales off many peoples’ eyes.
Anyway, great piece and thank you for working with Madhava, who I have increasingly deep respect for, because that gave credibility to your work from the get-go and, maybe more importantly, it was through his page that I found this gem!
Thank you for this once again solid, awesome piece. The NYT, et al, should be discredited forever. I was working on a Substack about the conditioning to allergically turn away from information because the media associates what's most true and most important with what they've trained us to react negatively to. When I read your analogy of "cooties" ( https://mitteldorf.substack.com/p/when-the-cult-is-the-majority?utm_source=publication-search ), it was so succinct and perfect, I borrowed it, with credit.
This is the first article, Part Two coming soon with a focus on measles / denial of treatment.
( https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/information-permaculture-and-cooties ).
Thank you for your thorough, inspiring work!!