Wired’s Scicomm Writer Emily Mullin Attacks Independent Research, Because of Course

Recycling the Same Tired COVID “Dial-a-Quote” Experts, Media Resistance Warriors Continue Attempts to Silence

7 minute read

Shortly after I broke news last week about the new science journal born out of pandemic censorship, Wired Magazine’s scicomm writer Emily Mullin dashed out an attack piece to bash the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health.” Mullin’s hit piece contains factual errors and several misleading claims, but her article serves as an interesting case study in science writing, a journalism adjacent media profession.

Because Trump is now President and science writers have gone full TDS, I’m going to walk you through the details of how Mullin constructs her scicomm narrative to help you spot future examples. You will definitely run across some.

I’m going to ignore much of the rhetoric that infuses her piece—because Mullin says so, the journal is “controversial” and might “politicize science”—and jump to something that might not be obvious at first: Wired Magazine is in the business of servicing liberal pieties, not informing readers. How do we know this?

Mullin’s Wired piece is getting little traction on X, where users span the ideological spectrum, but it’s being gobbled up on Bluesky the social media app for liberal activists. Liberals love to complain that X is “right-wing” but that’s simply nonsense—Fact check wrong! After Trump won the election with Musk’s support, millions of liberals fled X in protest to join Bluesky. CNN reported weeks later that X was finally ideologically balanced.

According to CNN, when Musk bought X in 2022 it was very partisan, 65% of users were Democrats and only 31% were Republicans. By late 2024, X had become more ideologically diverse with 48% Democrats and 47% Republicans. Here’s CNN’s report.

Right after Mullin published her hit piece, she posted it simultaneously on X and BlueSky. After a few hours, hardly anybody read it on X, but it took off on Bluesky with dozens of shares and likes.

Around 18 hours later, very little had changed on X for Mullin’s article. A few more people shared and a few more liked it, but on Bluesky, over 100 liberal activists promoted the article to their followers.

What excites liberals is news they find at places like Wired that confirms their own priors. That’s why they left X after Musk stopped the censoring and joined Bluesky. What they don’t care about is journalism, and they are not bothered by obvious errors in Mullin’s piece that tickle them in their political privates.

Mullin constructs a fake allegation to make the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” appear “controversial” by claiming Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta published a paper that concluded 50% of Brits were infected by the COVID virus in early 2020. Mullin also claims Gupta’s paper was proved “later to be incorrect.”

This is simply false, as I will explain in a bit. But Mullin tries to make Gupta’s study seem even more scary and “controversial” by highlighting that Gupta’s “paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journal.” This is a Mullin lie by omission. Mullin doesn’t explain to readers that, at the time Gupta published in early 2020, pretty much every COVID “paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.”

Anyways, here’s Mullin’s false and misleading passage in Wired:

In reality, Gupta’s preprint was a theoretical model to determine how fast the virus was spreading. Gupta published this paper to show that other theoretical models might be inaccurate, and she and her co-authors argued that Britain needed to invest in tests and assays to determine how many people had already been infected “to determine how many people will require hospitalisation (and possibly die) in the coming weeks.”

Does this sound like a scary, “controversial” paper to you?

And despite Mullin’s misleading claim in Wired, Gupta’s paper did not argue that “half the UK population may have already been infected.” That claim is not found anywhere in Gupta’s writing. You can read the preprint paper here yourself: “Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.”

And as for Mullin’s claim that Gupta’s paper was proved “later to be incorrect” … It was a theoretical paper based on models, and here’s the concluding paragraph.

Is anyone going to argue that we didn’t need tests to see how many people got COVID to create real data that helps assess policies to slow cases of COVID? So how was Gupta’ paper proven “later to be incorrect”?

It wasn’t. Mullin just made it up.

But it gets a bit better. One of the tricks science writers deploy to enforce narratives, is to quote from narrative enforcers. It doesn’t matter whether a narrative enforcer is actually a subject matter expert; what matters is that they give a point of view that aligns with the science writer’s own narrative.

If you want to write an article that says, “John is a terrible person,” then you just dial up all of John’s known enemies for a quote. It’s a very common practice.

There’s actually a term for this: “dial-a-quote”. That’s when a journalist calls someone for an “independent” opinion, even though the reporter already knows what the source is going to say. That’s why Mullin quotes University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom claiming the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around “established scientific consensus.” Mullin doesn’t require Bergstrom to point to any “established scientific consensus” that the journal has questioned, because that’s not the point. Mullin just needs Bergstrom to say something bad that she can copy and paste into her news story.

And Mullin knows Bergstrom is the guy to call, because there’s a “science writer consensus” that Bergstrom is the guy to call when you need a quote like this. How do we know this?

In a similar takedown piece of the journal that appeared hours after Mullin quoted Bergstrom in Wired, Science Magazine also called on Bergstrom for “dial-a-quote” expertise. In this second example, Science Magazine allowed Bergstrom to allege that the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” might spread “misinformation” without explaining what that “misinformation” might be.

It’s not that Bergstrom is a bad guy. He’s just one of the many COVID narrative professors grateful for science writers at Wired and Science Magazine to pass him around like an eager freshman cheerleader who sneaks in to the varsity football locker room.

Finally, I want to point out that Mullin also quotes Johns Hopkins researcher Gigi Gronvall, a professor well-known for dismissing the dangers of virus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the institute the CIA now suspects released the COVID virus.

Here’s how Mullin quotes Gronvall:

“This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,” says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Gronvall dismisses the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” as a “club newsletter”. But what makes this so silly is that Gronvall publishes fairly often in her own university’s “club newsletter”, a journal called “Health Security.”

The journal “Health Security” is run by Thomas V. Inglesby, who is Gigi Gronvall’s boss at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The journal “Health Security” is rarely if ever cited by other scientific journals and has a dismal impact factor of 2.1—approximately 0.

Every working associate editor who helps run “Health Security” is a colleague of Gronvall’s at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and they have published 1/3 of Gronvall’s papers in the last decade.

It’s quite a club.

Despite such a dismal academic record, Mullin still ran to Gronvall for “dial-a-quote” because she knows exactly what Gronvall will say, and history finds that Gronvall will say things without fear of shame. In an incident two years ago, Gronvall embarrassed and humiliated herself when she tried to knock down the evidence that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.

Gronvall’s public shaming happened during a televised debate hosted by reporters Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinky, where MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt humbled Gronvall as she tried to defend virologists and Anthony Fauci’s funding for research in Wuhan.

I would not dare ask you to watch all 21:00 minutes of this debate, in part because Gronvall rarely made sense as she attempted to deny that the pandemic could have started in a Wuhan lab, and made up all sorts of reasons why taxpayers should continue to pay for dangerous gain-of-function virus research that may have led to the creation of the COVID virus.

(Brief aside: one of the people on the editorial board of Gronvalls’ “Health Security” club newsletter is Anthony Fauci, who Biden pardoned, in part, for lying under oath to Congress about funding for gain-of-function research he provided to the Wuhan lab; Biden’s pardon covers all Fauci activity back to 2016, the year Fauci started funding the Wuhan lab.)

Gronvall embarrassed herself so much during the debate, that both reporters burst into laughter at the end when Ryan Grim noted, “I think Gigi made the best case she could, but … I think this was pretty clear.”