NYT journalist attacks scientists for Covid lab leak deception

Reporter says scientists who misled him over the theory influenced his newspaper’s coverage

A FORMER New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic.

Donald Mcneil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible. Mr Mcneil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.

However, the experts initially thought the lab leak theory was plausible but didn’t want to disclose so for political reasons, according to messages between them accidentally released by a US congressional committee last year.

In his book The Wisdom of Plagues, which looks back at 25 years covering pandemics, Mr Mcneil Jr said the scientists “clearly misled me early on” and he was a “victim of deception”.

Mr Mcneil Jr resigned from The New York Times in 2021 after he was reprimanded for repeating a racial slur used by a student in a discussion on whether that student should be suspended.

Last year, private messages released by the US Oversight Committee revealed conversations between several scientists who wrote a key paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. The paper, The Proximal Origin of Sars-cov-2, argued that a natural spillover event caused the pandemic and was instrumental in stifling debate into the origins of the virus.

Among the authors were Prof Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, and first author Prof Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The messages showed that in the weeks before publication the scientists had acknowledged that a laboratory leak was a possibility but were concerned about upsetting the Chinese. Messages also showed the researchers discussing how to respond to queries from Mr Mcneil Jr about the origins of the virus.

Mr Mcneil Jr emailed Prof Rambaut and Prof Andersen on Feb 6 2020 over a tip off that the US was trying to investigate the possibility the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. The scientists shared his emails on messaging platform Slack, with Professor Robert Garry writing Mr Mcneil Jr was “very credible but like any reporter can be mislead [sic]”.

“Don... pretty much nailed it,” Prof Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumours were “demonstably false” and 10 days later published their paper.

Prof Andersen told Mr Mcneil Jr that he never misled him and his answers were “accurate and specific”. Last year he said the messages had been “hijacked by grifters and conspiracy theorists”.

Responding to the release of the messages, Prof Rambaut said: “We had no evidence it was anything other than a virus from nature.”

Mr Mcneil Jr told The Telegraph: “They apparently felt it would be reckless to tell me what they suspected.”

He added: “I think that was a mistake. I’m a pretty careful reporter and not an alarmist. I could have explained the context.”