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The Gray Lady’s belated pivot isn’t absolution — it’s an indictment. The experts were wrong, the Times was complicit, and the faithful who held fast to their convictions deserve not just praise but gratitude.
Zeynep Tufekci’s recent New York Times op-ed, “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” arrives like a confession whispered through gritted teeth — five years after the COVID-19 pandemic began upending our world.
“We were badly misled,” she writes, as if she and her ilk at the Times weren’t among the chief architects of the deception.
Who misled us, Zeynep? Was it not the New York Times itself, which for years trumpeted the wet-market origin story as gospel truth while branding dissenters as tinfoil-hatted heretics?
The irony here is thicker than a stack of Sunday editions.
She admits that “in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks.”
Excuse me? Ma’am, the call is coming from inside the house. Let’s review the receipts, shall we? Because even though we may forgive, we should never forget.
The truth is that the New York Times didn’t just stumble into this misleading “narrative”; it built it brick by brick.
In February 2020, when Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., dared suggest a lab origin in early 2020, the Times pounced, with an article sneering that his comments echoed fringe “conspiracy theories” — a phrase that became their cudgel against anyone who dared question the anointed experts.
This wasn’t passive misdirection. It was active suppression, a crusade to protect a fragile orthodoxy.
Tufekci’s mea culpa conveniently sidesteps this history. The Times didn’t just parrot the wet-market line — it weaponized its platform to silence dissent, amplifying the voices of “scientists” who later turned out to be more interested in covering their tracks than uncovering the truth. Her passive phrasing lets the paper off the hook, as if it were a hapless bystander rather than a megaphone for the very officials and researchers now implicated in the obfuscation.
From a conservative Christian perspective, this evasiveness smacks of the prideful refusal to repent fully, a half-hearted “my bad” that stops short of naming the sin and honestly repenting of it.
And what of the “science” the Times so zealously defended? The mandates — social distancing, mask edicts, etc. — were sold as unassailable truths, yet much of it was built on sand. Take the six-foot social-distancing rule, which Anthony Fauci himself admitted in 2024 “sort of just appeared” with no rigorous data behind it.
Now consider the mask mandates. In 2023, Tufekci herself wrote an article titled “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work,” even as studies like the 2023 Cochrane Review cast serious doubt on their efficacy against respiratory viruses, finding that “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.”
Again, I have to ask Ms. Tufekci: Who was misleading who here?
The paper also heralded lockdowns as lifesaving despite mounting evidence — then and now — that their economic and spiritual toll far outweighed their benefits. In August of 2020, the NYT’s editorial board defended the efficacy of lockdowns, arguing that the CDC should not only keep recommending them but suggest increasingly extreme measures: “In places where the virus is still rampant, that would mean much more aggressive shutdowns than have been carried out in the past.
But a 2021 meta-analysis by Johns Hopkins researchers found that lockdowns reduced COVID mortality by a mere 0.2 percent, a statistic the Times ignored while championing prolonged closures that shuttered churches and crushed livelihoods.
The record could not be more clear: The paper’s role wasn’t just to “report” during COVID, it was to enforce. Its writers churned out some of the most venomous anti-skeptic screeds of the pandemic, dripping with sanctimonious disdain. These weren’t just articles but salvos in a culture war aimed at shaming the doubters into submission. And Tufekci was at the front of the mob, holding her own torch and pitchfork in the crusade against the skeptics who have now been proven right.
Now she wants to lay down her pen and try to broker peace? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
From a conservative Christian understanding, this was more than bad journalism — it was a betrayal of truth, a sin against the command to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It was a multi-year exercise in bearing false witness, a violation of the ninth commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exodus 20:16).
The Times didn’t just peddle questionable science; it exalted it as an idol, demanding blind faith in experts while scorning those who dared question. The lockdowns kept us from our churches, the mandates tested our consciences, and the paper cheered it all on, oblivious to the spiritual, mental, and physical wreckage left behind.
For believers, the past five years weren’t just a public health crisis but a trial of faith, a time when the world’s wisdom proved foolish (1 Corinthians 1:20).
Yet amidst this fog of deception, a few brave voices shone like a lighthouse of reason. Figures like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, risked their reputations to argue for focused protection over blanket lockdowns — only to be smeared by outlets like the Times as reckless. Thankfully, Bhattacharya will get the last laugh: He was just confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the federal agency previously run by Francis Collins, who personally led an effort to censor and smear Dr. Bhattacharya during COVID.
Or consider Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who, though vilified as a conspiracy monger, pressed for answers on gain-of-function research indirectly funded by the NIH at the Chinese bioweapons lab in Wuhan when the Times wouldn’t touch it. And countless everyday Christians, guided by prayer and principle, hesitated at the COVID vaccine, not out of ignorance but out of stewardship for their bodies, temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
These weren’t the “worst motives” Tufekci now decries; they were acts of courage against a tide of coercion.
The vaccine-hesitant, in particular, deserve vindication. Progressive elites branded them as selfish or deluded, yet their wariness — about side effects, long-term unknowns, and mandates trampling liberty — has been borne out by time. Reports of myocarditis in young men, breakthrough infections, and waning efficacy all chipped away at the “safe and effective” mantra the paper parroted.
These believers and skeptics didn’t reject science. They rejected blind trust in a system that prized control over candor.
Tufekci’s admission is a start, but it came 1,826 days late and a dollar short.
The damage — shuttered businesses, broken families, eroded trust — can’t be undone with a single op-ed. The Times owes more than a passive shrug. It owes an apology to those it maligned, a reckoning for its role in propping up a house of cards. As Christians, we’re called to forgive, yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also demand justice.
Ultimately, the Gray Lady’s belated pivot isn’t absolution — it’s an indictment. The experts were wrong, the Times was complicit, and the faithful who held fast to their convictions deserve not just praise but gratitude.
For in their skepticism, they kept alive the flicker of reason when the world demanded obedience.
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