Liberal NY Times columnist admits media, public health were 'too dismissive' on lab leak theory
A liberal New York Times columnist admitted Tuesday that those in the media and public health sphere were initially "too dismissive" of the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof commented on an X post by Alina Chan, a scientific advisor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She offered further commentary on her recent Times guest piece, in which she suggested COVID-19 was likely caused by a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
"My hope since 2020 has been for leaders, especially scientists, to lead the charge in investigating a plausible lab #OriginOfCovid - as opposed to shutting it down as a conspiracy theory or standing by while conflicted parties do so," she wrote in her X post. "That hope has been revived repeatedly in the past four years by courageous scientists, journalists and individuals who took on considerable risks to do the right thing and push for a fair investigation."
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Kristof, responding to Chan's online comment, said he doesn't know what caused COVID-19, but believes she made a "strong case" for the lab leak theory.
"In retrospect, many of us in the journalistic and public health worlds were too dismissive of that possibility when she and others were making the argument in 2020," he added.
Kristof's comments follow Monday's statements by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
In his opening statement, Fauci addressed the COVID-19 lab leak theory, stressing to the committee that he never sought to suppress that idea.
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He testified that on Jan. 31, 2020, he "was informed through phone calls with Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK, and then with Kristian Anderson, a highly regarded scientist at Scripps Research Institute, that they and Eddie Holmes, a world-class evolutionary biologist from Australia, were concerned that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus could have been manipulated in a lab."
The next day, Fauci said, he participated in a conference call "with about a dozen international virologists to discuss this possibility versus a spillover from an animal reservoir." Fauci described the conference call discussion as "lively with arguments for both possibilities," and said two participants have testified before the House subcommittee that he "did not try to steer the discussion in any direction."
The Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation's response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong, while missing an important opportunity to prepare for the next outbreak.
Many prominent media outlets downplayed or outright rebuked the COVID-19 lab leak theory during the early days of the pandemic. Some claimed it was a racist conspiracy theory. Over time, many outlets have slowly begun to accept the theory as a legitimate possibility.
The Times did not immediately return Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Fox News' Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.