New York Times’ Carl Zimmer Lies to You About Scientific Research and COVID Origins

Science writers report for science, not on science.

6 minute read

UPDATE: A reader just contacted me to point out the misleading study in Cell by Pekar and Worobey was funded by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health (see bottom of the article.)

It’s probably not a shock to most readers that the New York Times has morphed into a slanted media outlet that seems more concerned with promoting specific narratives than reporting facts. A year and half ago, former Times editor James Bennet described his former paper this way: “The Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

And nowhere has the Times’ reporting diverged from a reality that does not really exist than in coverage of the COVID pandemic, specifically attempts by the Times’ science writers to downplay and dismiss mounting evidence that scientists likely started the pandemic in a Wuhan lab funded by Tony Fauci. And one of the Time’s most noted fabulists is science writer Carl Zimmer.

In his latest offering, Zimmer dug up a questionable study and reported breathlessly “researchers contend in new paper that the Covid pandemic got its start, like a previous one, in the wildlife trade.”

But the paper Zimmer has trumpeted is undermined by another study already published by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In that study, WIV scientists report collecting viruses, since almost 2006, in the region Zimmer and the researchers allege the pandemic started in 2019, and bringing those viruses back to Wuhan for research.

The paper Zimmer blasted across the internet was published in the journal Cell by virologists who have made several phony claims throughout the pandemic—Jonathan Pekar at the University of California San Diego, and Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona.

What Pekar and Worobey did was analyze the genetic sequences of viruses collected from Rhinolophus bats in various parts of China and Laos. The Rhinopolus bats are the ones that carry coronaviruses, like the COVID virus called SARS-CoV-2. Pekar and Worobey then compared those virus sequences to SARS-CoV-2. Using some complex math to estimate virus evolution, the researchers then concluded: “The closest-inferred ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 likely circulated in Yunnan, China, or Northern Laos, overlapping with contiguous karst and cave landscapes extending through these regions.”

Here's a graph Pekar and Worobey provide in the paper. The ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, or the COVID virus, are in pink. You can see an arrow pointing from this region of Yunnan, China, and Northern Laos all the way to Wuhan, many hundreds of miles away.

But here’s the problem. The Pekar and Worobey paper doesn’t tell us anything, because researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper in the journal Viruses in 2021 that disclosed they had been collecting viruses from Yunnan, China, and Northern Laos and bringing them back to Wuhan to study. Or as the WIV researchers write “our archived samples collected over 10 years from 25 provinces of China and one province of Laos.”

In the paper, the WIV researchers state that their collection contains viruses collected from Rhinopholus bats, the species that carries corona viruses like SARS-CoV-2. And the viruses came from Yunnan, Guangxi, and Hainan provinces of China, and the Louang Namtha Province in Laos (which is in the north of Laos).

Here’s WIV’s figure showing where they’ve collected viruses from bats and then brought them back to Wuhan to study. I drew a blue line next to the samples of Rhinopholus bats that the WIV lists as part of their archive collection.

In short, WIV researchers have been collecting SARS viruses from Rhinopholus bats since around 2006 and bringing them back to the WIV for research. And they collected viruses from the same region that Pekar and Worobey cite as the place SARS-CoV-2, or the COVID virus came from.

But did Zimmer explain this to readers in the New York Times? No! Here’s what Zimmer wrote based off this awkward study in Cell:

Dr. Pekar and his colleagues argue, a coronavirus jumped from bats to other wild mammals in southwestern China. In a short period of time, wildlife traders took the infected animals hundreds of miles to city markets, and the virus wreaked havoc in humans.

“When you sell wildlife in the heart of cities, you’re going to have a pandemic every so often,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and an author of the new study.

Of course, this is one possibility. Another possibility is that researchers at the WIV were experimenting on a coronavirus they collected long ago from Yunnan or Northern Laos and something went wrong—something like a lab accident. We know the WIV researchers have had those viruses for many, many years in their collection, because they reported this in their 2021 paper.

“The Times was slow to break it to its readers … that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab,” former Times editor Bennet wrote in his essay for the Economist.

Unfortunately, little has changed since Bennet discussed these problems a year and a half ago. Science writers like Zimmer still remain focused on promoting narrative at the expense of facts to mislead readers and the American public.

NOTE: The Pekar and Worobey paper in Cell was funded by American taxpayers through grants provided by the National Institutes of Health. See Acknowledgements section of the paper with highlights in red.