In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece, when the virus had already been spreading for more than a month in China and the US already had confirmed cases:

In the last week or so, new cases of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus have soared … so have news articles scolding us for worrying about it. “Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued. The flu “poses the bigger and more pressing peril,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?” an epidemiologist argued in the LA Times. Other outlets have agreed. An ex-White House health adviser has told Americans to “stop panicking and being hysterical.”

My article made the case that maybe it was slightly reasonable to worry about the coronavirus. But of course, I got some crucial stuff wrong, too. I wrote:

Similarly, there’s a conspiracy theory circulating that the virus escaped from a Wuhan research lab. (Not true.) And there’s a different conspiracy theory that it was engineered by Bill Gates (who funds a research group that has done pandemic-control exercises about a hypothetical deadly coronavirus). (Also not true.) Internet trolls have spread false claims that drinking bleach protects against coronavirus. (Please don’t do this.)

Two of those conspiracy theories were in fact absurd, but one was correct: the virus absolutely may have escaped from a Wuhan research lab. We’ll probably never know, but we know for sure that many of the scientists publicly asserting that this was a wild conspiracy theory

© Vox