The New York Times, which has badly misled the American public about COVID, has now run an op-ed with the headline, “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

The op-ed’s author, Zeynep Tufekci, is hardly one of the Times’s token conservatives. She was apparently hired by the paper, in part, because she had been an early mask advocate—“of course masks work,” she wrote—and had reportedly helped convince high-level public health officials to embrace masks despite the fact that the best available scientific evidence suggested that they don’t work. She has also expressed enthusiasm for COVID vaccine mandates. Yet, on the matter of COVID’s origins, Tufekci departs from the Times’s longstanding party line, writing that “safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—and that when it comes to such recklessness, “perhaps we were misled on purpose.”

Tufekci writes, “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.” She adds, “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.”

Indeed, they were. When Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) raised the possibility early on that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan lab, the Times claimed that he was advancing “a fringe theory,” adding, “Although much remains unknown about the coronavirus, experts generally dismiss the idea that it was created by human hands.” More than a year later, Times science writer Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.” (She later deleted that tweet.)

When President Trump asked U.S. intelligence agencies to examine whether the virus might have emerged from the Wuhan lab, the Times accused Trump of pursuing “an unsubstantiated theory” that was part of his “public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.” It added that “scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting.” The Times further opined, “Mr. Trump’s aids and Republicans in Congress have sought to blame China for the pandemic in part to deflect criticism of the administration’s mismanagement of the crisis in the United States.”

In contrast to such dismissals of the lab-leak possibility, Tufekci writes that “the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses.” She observes that in 2020 the German “Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability.” In an earlier article, she noted that the Wuhan lab had experimented on “a live bat coronavirus that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab—a biosafety level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s office.” She also highlighted “the location of the outbreak, a thousand miles from the closest known viral relatives yet close to a leading research institution,” and asked, “Did the spread of a disease from bats just happen to start in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology?”

Such commonsense questions evoke Jon Stewart’s appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show, during which Stewart surprised Colbert by saying, “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic—which was more than likely caused by science.” Stewart then asked, “Is the novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China? What do we do? Oh, you know, we can ask the novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab!” He added that if there was “an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania,” we could probably figure out where it came from. In response, Colbert suggested that Stewart must be working for Republican Senator Ron Johnson.

Tufekci notes that Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, arranged meetings with National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins and his attention-hogging subordinate, Anthony Fauci. Collins recently pulled out his guitar at a “Stand Up for Science” rally on the National Mall and painfully sang, “This is a song for all the good people. We’re joined together by this noble dream.” Fauci, meanwhile, seems quite relieved to have been pardoned by Joe Biden “[f]or any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in … arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases” over the past 11 years, saying on the day he received his pardon, “I really truly appreciate the action President Biden has taken today on my behalf.”

Tufecki writes that this trio covertly “decided to move ahead with a paper” attempting to dismiss the notion of a lab leak. The journal Nature Medicine published the paper, “written by five prominent scientists,” in March 2020. Tufecki writes that these five “declared that no ‘laboratory-based scenario’ for the pandemic virus was plausible,” but “privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely.”

She adds that Farrar had reviewed a draft of the paper and suggested a more direct refutation of the lab-leak notion, which the authors included. Tufecki then notes that the authors discussed “how to mislead” Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr., “so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.” If only the Times’s science reporter had had as much sense as Stewart, he might not have been so easily duped.

Tufekci then details how Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance—which was conducting coronavirus research in Wuhan and which Tufekci notes elsewhere “has been granted tens of millions” of American taxpayers’ dollars over the past decade—covertly “drafted and circulated” a letter denying the possibility of a lab leak. The letter, subsequently published in early 2020 in The Lancet, “appeared to be the work of a group of independent scientists,” Tufekci writes, but “was anything but.” It’s as if Exxon’s CEO had written a letter, signed by myriad “independent” scientists, exonerating Exxon the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

One doubts that the Times would have been fooled by such an effort, but it was all too eager to buy what Daszak, Farrar, Collins, and Fauci were selling. Whether the Times and other legacy outlets wanted to believe in rule by experts and couldn’t bear the thought that research scientists could have caused the worst pandemic in a century, or whether they wanted to keep anyone other than Trump from being blamed for COVID-related hardships in the U.S.—or whether they had other ideological or pecuniary motives—their determination to ignore the seemingly obvious was remarkable.

Tufekci deserves some credit for breaking ranks on this question. Maybe she’ll eventually start consulting the evidence on masks as well.