The New York Times hyped up two new preprint studies claiming COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan wet market, but the article and the papers it was about weren’t well-received by much of the scientific community.
The NYT article cites the two studies as a “significant salvo in the debate” about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, in which two major camps have emerged: those who believe the virus naturally evolved and jumped from an animal host to humans, likely at a wet market, and those who believe it was being studied by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was accidentally released from that facility due to tragic human error.
According to the NYT, multiple independent scientists said the papers offer a “compelling and rigorous” new analysis of available data about the virus and activities at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The piece immediately cites a comment from University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey, a co-author of both papers.
Worobey isn’t the only researcher involved in both studies. The two share an incestuous author list, which also includes some figures who have been loud in the debate about COVID-19 origins, such as Scripps Research’s Kristian Andersen and Tulane University’s Robert Garry.
Garry and Andersen told Dr. Anthony Fauci in early 2020 that there were genetic qualities to COVID-19 that were “inconsistent” with natural evolution and that it may have escaped from a lab. Following an internal campaign at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to downplay the lab leak theory, Garry and Andersen, who both receive funding from Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became harsh critics of the “crackpot” idea that COVID-19 could have come from a lab.
A number of other independent scientists not consulted by the NYT criticized its report, and some media critics blasted the paper for giving such prominent promotion to two studies that were not yet peer-reviewed and were written by authors with clear conflicts of interest. (RELATED: Fauci Was Warned About Possible Gain-Of-Function Creation Of COVID-19 In January 2020, Newly Transcribed Emails Show)
The @nytimes deserves to be absolute excoriated for recklessly giving known frauds front page treatment. The “study” the NYT is pushing was written by “scientists” who privately admitted to Fauci the virus came out of a lab but publicly said the opposite. https://t.co/ANTP3aGDcE
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) February 27, 2022
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, excoriated the papers and the NYT coverage of them in an email exchange with the Daily Caller: “The two Zenodo preprints are opinion pieces masquerading as scientific articles. They contain no new data and no no new analyses.”
“The preprint from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC) reports new data, reports new analyses, and reaches a conclusion diametrically ***opposite*** to the conjecture of the Zenodo preprints,” he continued. “The two Zenodo preprints were posted a day after the CCDC preprint was posted.”
“Dismayingly, major US media outlets prominently covered the two Zenodo prepints — the two opinion pieces masquerading as scientific articles — but ignored, or nearly completely ignored, the CCDC preprint posted the day before with the opposite conclusion. This can only be characterized as journalistic malpractice.”
MIT and Harvard Researcher Alina Chan pointed out a major flaw with the data used by the studies, which is that the stalls in the Huanan market were not sampled an equal number of times. “I hope it makes sense that if you sample one stall 100 times, you shouldn’t be shocked to find more positives there compared to another stall that you only sampled 10 times,” she tweeted.
“If a high school or undergraduate researcher had produced this figure for me, I would’ve asked them immediately to go back and remake it after normalizing for the number of samples taken per stall.”
If a high school or undergraduate researcher had produced this figure for me, I would’ve asked them immediately to go back and remake it after normalizing for the number of samples taken per stall.
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) February 27, 2022
She also pointed out that one of the two authors of the NYT piece, Carl Zimmer, had admitted he was updating the article throughout the day and it appeared he was adding new information as he read the studies.
It’s great that this @nytimes front-page news article is being proactively archived at different times to show its evolution as @carlzimmer appears to be reading the work and updating his article with figures and pictures from the preprints.https://t.co/9gdxH4IieT
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) February 27, 2022
It’s going to be a busy afternoon building out this story about the origin of the pandemic. Stay tuned! https://t.co/8RlfzFh8d0
— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) February 26, 2022
Chan further highlighted that the authors of the new studies admitted that they could not authenticate the Chinese CDC data their studies were based on.
The authors even write that they cannot authenticate the CCDC report which their analysis is based on. They don’t know the sampling scheme across the market. But they somehow note that their results are “robust to significant sampling biases”.
How do they know this? pic.twitter.com/Cma8fT5gHj
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) February 27, 2022
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was quoted by the NYT to say that while the theory presented by the papers could be true, the data within them isn’t good enough to say one way or another. On Twitter, he added that a new study from the Chinese CDC could not identify any specific animals at the Huanan market infected with COVID-19.
New pre-print by George Gao & Chinese CDC describing sampling of Huanan Seafood Market for #SARSCoV2: https://t.co/VFz46Dnpv4 Their topline conclusion pretty much what they’ve said before: no animals tested positive; environmental samples human- rather than animal-derived (1/n)
— Bloom Lab (@jbloom_lab) February 26, 2022
The NYT was further bashed by some non-scientists who questioned the media practice of highlighting the studies so prominently. Commentator Brahma Chellaney reminded followers that the NYT long considered the lab leak a “conspiracy theory,” only to now feature “two unpublished, not-peer-reviewed studies that have some common co-authors.”
Since 2020, @nytimes has treated the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis as a pure conspiracy theory. Now it publicizes two unpublished, not-peer-reviewed studies that have some common co-authors. Biden has admitted that a lab leak is one of “two likely scenarios.” https://t.co/Ag14XkspGg
— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) February 27, 2022
Alison Young, the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the Missouri School of Journalism, said it was “still not clear” after reading the NYT article three times why it merited a news alert.
I have read this news article three times now and it is still not clear to me why these preprints, while interesting, merited a news alert from the New York Times for a story that couches the findings with phrases like “very likely” and “might have.” https://t.co/LzP2M6jEW1
— Alison Young (@alisonannyoung) February 26, 2022
Zimmer’s eagerness to downplay the lab leak theory may be due to his previous work profiling Wuhan Institute of Virology bat researcher Shi Zhengli, in which he called the lab leak theory “baseless” and “dangerous.”
