Zeynep Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives" (NYT op-ed, Herald & Review copy)

Summary

An op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci of The New York Times Company, dated Mar 19, 2025, titled We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives. It says that since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories the world has experienced four or five pandemics, and that the 1977 Russian flu was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Tufekci writes that in 2020 people who speculated that a laboratory accident started the COVID-19 pandemic were treated like kooks and cranks, while many public health officials insisted the virus emerged from animals in a Wuhan seafood market. When EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant over planned bat-virus research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it states, no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies defended the organization.

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Op-Ed: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

- Zeynep Tufekci
The New York Times Company
- Mar 19, 2025
- Mar 19, 2025
- 0

Zeynep Tufekci

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Since scientists 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.

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