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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How a scientific ‘consensus’ covered up Covid origins. The emperor has no clothes

The Anthony Fauci-Rand Paul hearing shows why the American bureaucracy was not smearing China, but defending it.

ThePrint and its Editor Shekhar Gupta must be given credit for being among the earliest anywhere in the world to create a full-length video covering journalist Nicholas Wade’s lab-leak thesis on the origins of Covid. Let us look at the story now given the astonishing “non-testimony” of the famous, or infamous, Dr Anthony Fauci.  After all, the former top US pandemic adviser refused to answer questions 111 times at a Senate hearing last week.

As early as February 2020, The Lancet, a British journal considered one of the finest medical journals in the world, published a letter signed by 27 “reputed” scientists asserting emphatically that “scientists overwhelmingly conclude” that Covid had a wildlife origin. The letter went on to deride and condemn “conspiracy theories” that suggested a non-natural origin. In other words, those who even whispered about a possible lab leak were nut cases.

Within a month of the first Lancet letter, in March 2020, Nature Medicine, another prestigious journal, published an article on Covid origins. Since this was a proper article, Nature Medicine could not hide behind the fig leaf available to The Lancet, which had published a letter. It was duty-bound to conduct due diligence and have the article scrutinised by independent reviewers if its editors were following the basic protocols of scientific journals. The article argued that the Covid virus was not a laboratory construct and that a lab-based scenario was not plausible.

The case was “closed”. The Lancet and Nature Medicine — one with a letter signed by “eminent” scientists and the other with an article that had gone through rigorous editorial scrutiny — had pretty much closed the debate on the origins of Covid. Remember, this was in March 2020. But inconvenient facts have a way of bubbling up. After all, some centuries earlier, Galileo had conceded to the Catholic Church that the sun went around the earth, and that case too had been “closed”.

Also Read: The West’s real crisis isn’t war. It is the weakness within

A crack in the ‘consensus’

Along comes Nicholas Wade in May 2021. Now this Mr Wade had been the science editor of the New York Times for many years and was highly respected in scientific and journalistic circles. One would think that when Wade came up with a long article on the mysteries surrounding Covid, reputed magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker would give him space almost automatically. No such luck, my friends.

We all know that the doors of social media outfits like Facebook and Twitter (now X) had been closed to anyone who dared even mildly question the official line. It appears that even famed magazines with hoary traditions were now under the Gestapo regime of the US National........

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