My blood is boiling over this new piece from The New York Times claiming “we were badly misled” about the origins of the COVID pandemic.
Unbelievably, the Times published an op-ed by columnist Zeynep Tukekci titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives” on Sunday. Somebody online changes it to “We Badly Misled You About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” which is a much more accurate headline for The New York Times.
This is so infuriating to me because this entire article is about stuff that independent thinkers have known since 2021, but here they are in 2025 with an ‘aha moment’ on the lab leak as the origin of COVID and how those in charge misled us.
The Admission
Just to give you a couple of highlights, Tukekci starts by pointing out: “In 2020, when people started speculating about a lab accident being the spark behind the pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks.” By whom, again, Zeynep? Who was treating them like kooks and cranks? Could it have been The New York Times? Anyway, she writes:
“…Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting 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.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story…”
The reason she wants us to know that it was probably a lab leak and that we were so grossly misled is because people need convincing that the next pandemic is basically only an accident away now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), so she really, really wants us to trust our public health entities again – not him but, like, the scientists, and the Nobel laureates, and the Dr. Faucis of the world.
You see, they must have credibility in the wake of all these online influencers and bad faith actors, whom she later refers to as follows: “Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention.”
She goes on to say “these half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.”
Tukekci concludes “only an honest conversation will lead us forward.” She is right. So, you need to get honest, New York Times, about your role in all of this and this piece doesn’t even come close. At no point does it acknowledge any of its own bad reporting or mistakes.
The Media Fail
Of course, it wasn’t just The New York Times. It was CNN. It was MSNBC, who called the lab leak “a debunked conspiracy theory.” It was NPR, which falsely asserted “scientists debunk lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.” Social media companies outright censored lab leak claims.
It is unbelievable how we were gaslit and The New York Times wants to pretend that it was just the experts, that the media had no role, that they were not complicit. But they were fully complicit. Now, they are desperate to try to cleanse their own hands because they need to have credibility going into the Trump years – especially under the awful, evil RFKJ – to tell you when our leaders are misleading us.
That is what is happening here, but they have no credibility. No one believes them anymore. I believe public health and the trust in it will resurrect slowly under RFKJ at HHS, under Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and under Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But it is going to take some time. And by the way, the election of Donald Trump was a middle finger to all these institutions.
Our Reporting
The New York Times has to try to whitewash what it did, so you will believe it when it tells you that Kennedy is evil. And yet it has taken the paper of record until March 2025 to tell you something that The Megyn Kelly Show was reporting in 2021 (episode 175) when we had Josh Rogin on to talk about his reporting that raised questions about whether COVID was from a lab and so on.
It was one year into the pandemic. We are now four years past that and The New York Times is like, ‘Ah, we think it was from a lab. We were being misled. How did that happen? How did all these experts mislead us?’ At best, it was willful blindness on their part. But more than likely, it was an active cover up because they had a vested interest in the messages that were being handed down.
And we kept on it. After House Republicans got their hands on emails from Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others that showed they actively suppressed any mention of a lab leak in early 2022, I did a Talking Points Memo laying out exactly how they did it.
That was three years ago. New York Times, where was your piece and why did you spend the next three years doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on natural origin? They are so dishonest, and now Tukekci wants credit for being the one to speak truth to power.
What Comes Next
Look, this isn’t some long infomercial for independent media. It is just the facts of why nobody trusts The New York Times, or CNN, or MSNBC any more. They failed us at one of the most consequential moments in U.S. history. And instead of doing a true mea culpa, they just want to say “we were misled.”
There can be redemption after massive failures, including in journalism. But there must first be an acknowledgement of the sin. Without that, it’s a no. Apology not accepted. You have made no progress with us whatsoever. We distrust you more than ever when you do things like this.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,028 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.