The New York Times published an opinion column claiming the scientific community "badly misled" the public in an effort to suppress the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, even after the paper's own science writer called the theory "racist." 

The March 16 piece, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," by Times columnist and Princeton Sociology Professor Zeynep Tufekci, argued that the scientific community long suspected COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, but purposefully "hid or understated crucial facts," to mislead the public about the lab's "terrifyingly lax" safety precautions. 

"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," Tufekci wrote.

The New York Times has not always been as welcoming to lab leak theory. In 2021, the Gray Lady's science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli posted on X that the lab leak theory had "racist roots" and she yearned for a time when the public would stop talking about it. 

The Sunday Times column detailed how when a group of scientists who were set to publish an article denouncing the lab leak theory privately expressed that they actually considered the theory likely to be true, World Health Organization official Jeremy Farrar acquired a burner phone to arrange meetings with them, Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-National Institute of Health Director Francis Collins. 

The group leaned on the scientists to move forward with the anti-lab leak paper, and Farrar even pressed them to denounce lab leak theory in stronger terms after reviewing an early draft of the paper, which was ultimately published as The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2 in 2020. 

Tufekci then detailed how unearthed chat logs exposed that the scientists conspired to mislead former NY Times science reporter Donald J. McNeil, Jr. when he was researching a tip that the government was investigating a lab leak as a possible origin of COVID. 

"[McNeil is] very credible but like any reporter can be mislead [sic]," paper co-author Professor Robert Garry wrote. 

"Don... pretty much nailed it, let's not tell him," co-author professor Kristian Andersen said.

Tufekci further detailed how a highly influential letter denouncing the lab leak theory published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, purportedly signed by a group of independent researchers, was in fact organized by EcoHealth President Peter Daszak. Research firm EcoHealth Alliance was accused of using taxpayer funds to conduct gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Top Fauci advisor David Morens wrote to Daszak that the organization had ways of making "emails disappear," according to the column.

"We're all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn't put them in emails and if we found them we'd delete them," Morens wrote.