Eleven days ago, the New York Times published a guest essay by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who teaches at Harvard and M.I.T. and is a co-author of "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19." Chan marshals the evidence – pretty convincingly, in my estimation – about the source of the coronavirus pandemic that roared out of central China in 2019 and 2020, killing millions of people around the world: She believes it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In his New York Times morning newsletter, David Leonhardt has a nice summary of the two reigning theories: a lab leak, or a animal-to-human transmission at a Wuhan "wet market" (which sells live animals for slaughter).
Leonhardt is a fine journalist possessing the heart, soul, and mind of a reporter. He writes that he's 50-50 on lab leak or natural transmission, and makes the case for each. That's as it should be. But here's the problem with these even-handed stories in mid-2024: They are four years too late.
When this virus began ravaging America's elderly population (but not only its elderly), such discussion was essentially shut down: The Centers for Disease Control, the broader medical establishment, the reigning pandemic experts in the federal bureaucracy and Trump administration, and eventually the Democratic Party characterized mere discussion of a lab leak as a grave danger to the health and well-being of Americans. Open discussion was framed as a national security threat. Americans were shamed and silenced. Some people lost jobs; others were canceled by social media companies.
Anyone who dared to question the official version was called a conspiracy theorist, or, worse, racist. Yes, somehow it was "racism" to even ask if this new virus escaped from a lab that was reengineering viruses. Have there been other lab leaks? Yes, many of them. Did Chinese authorities cooperate with global health investigators? No, they didn't. And authorities in Beijing floated fantastic conspiracy theories of their own. Yet for reasons that haven't really been reckoned with, the vast majority of the American media went along with the censors. In truth, some of the most intolerant and belligerent censors were in the press.
In a 2021 tweet that raised eyebrows at the time, but has aged particularly poorly, the New York Times' own COVID reporter wrote this: "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots."
The Times jeered at Sen. Tom Cotton for even mentioning "the fringe theory," which NPR and cable anchors repeatedly insisted had been "debunked." The truth was that it hadn't really even been debated, let alone debunked. Which brings me to today's quotes. The first is from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, dissenting a 1966 obscenity case, Ginzberg v. United States.
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself," Stewart wrote. "It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
In "The One Un-American Act," First Amendment lion Justice William O. Douglas made the same point:
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions," he wrote. "It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
And those are our quotes of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
