Posted by The New York Times, shining beacon of America’s liberal and unbiased media has this whopper of a headline: “On W.H.O. Trip, China Refused to Hand Over Important Data“. In case you think it’s the headline that’s exaggerated, just read the first few paragraphs of the article.
“Chinese scientists refused to share raw data that might bring the world closer to understanding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, independent investigators for the W.H.O. said on Friday.”
“The investigators, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the Chinese city of Wuhan, said disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.”
“China’s continued resistance to revealing information about the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the scientists say, makes it difficult for them to uncover important clues that could help stop future outbreaks of such dangerous diseases.”
“If you are data focused, and if you are a professional,” said Thea Kølsen Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the team, then obtaining data is “like for a clinical doctor looking at the patient and seeing them by your own eyes…” “It was my take on the entire mission that it was highly geopolitical,” Dr. Fischer said. “Everybody knows how much pressure there is on China to be open to an investigation and also how much blame there might be associated with this.”
“Dr. Fischer said she would have expected to find many more cases of individuals who were hospitalized with such symptoms in a city the size of Wuhan. In heated discussions, Dr. Fischer recounted, the W.H.O. experts urged the Chinese scientists to conduct a more thorough search. The team also expressed concerns about the reliability of antibody tests administered so long after the infections. Testing any original nose or throat swabs would be useful, but Dr. Dwyer said there were none.”
So here the NYT is clearly trying to weave a narrative that China was blocking the WHO scientists and obstructing the investigation. The key person they quote is Dr. Thea Fischer throughout the entire article while setting the tone that basically the entire WHO team was obfuscated at every turn by the nefarious Chinese. Unfortunately, this is what Dr. Fischer and her colleagues have to say on Twitter in response to the NYT article (a screenshot that I took myself to make sure it wasn’t fake or photoshopped).
This twisted spin by the NYT is not particularly surprising given the author of the article also published another one stating, “China Scores a Public Relations Win After W.H.O. Mission to Wuhan“. “But instead of scorn, the W.H.O. experts on Tuesday delivered praise for Chinese officials and endorsed critical parts of their narrative, including some that have been contentious.” So in other words, this reject from the brain trust thinks that the WHO team would be biased and wrong unless they came out with a report excoriating China and saying that SAR-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan lab. It is sad that reporting and journalism has sunk to these new lows even in the once highly respected New York Times – it also makes it clear why self-proclaimed fact checkers on social media who then link to a “credible source” like the NYT cannot be trusted either; they are clearly too partisan and biased as well. To be clear, this is not a op-ed piece; it is news reporting – or rather a pathetic shadowy excuse for what passes for journalism in these strange times. The article does point out the key findings of the WHO study.
“All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point toward a natural reservoir,” Peter K. Ben Embarek, a food safety scientist with the W.H.O. who is leading the team of experts, said at the news conference.
Dr. Ben Embarek said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus might have leaked accidentally from a laboratory studying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. It is a notion that some skeptical scientists say is worth exploring, though it remains largely unsubstantiated.
And as to what Mr. Embarek thinks of the NYT’s attempt to pervert his views as well, this is what he has to say after the fact in an interview with Science.
“I don’t think the press conference was a PR win for China. I think the outcome of the mission is a win for the international scientific community. We managed to find a way of getting studies done that would otherwise not have been done. The politicization of events has not helped over the past year. But I think we’ve got the best out of it.”
Q: But my question is whether you learned anything new in China. Now that you’ve been there, do you have more reason to say it’s “extremely unlikely” than before?
A: Yes. We had long meetings with the staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and three other laboratories in Wuhan. They talked about these claims openly. We discussed: What did you do over the past year to dismiss this claim? What did you yourself develop in terms of argumentations? Did you do audits yourself? Did you look at your records? Did you test your staff? And they explained how they worked and what kind of audit system they had. They had retrospectively tested serum from their staff. They tested samples from early 2019 and from 2020. There were a lot of discussions that we could not have had if we had not traveled to Wuhan. We also did not have evidence provided by outsiders to support any of the claims out there. That could potentially have tipped the balance. What we saw and discussed gave us much more confidence in our assessment. The consensus was that this is an unlikely scenario.
Q: Would it have been better to project less certainty at the press conference in Wuhan? The way most journalists understood it, the way I understood it, was that this has been ruled out.
A: Let me be clear on this: The fact that we assessed this hypothesis as extremely unlikely doesn’t mean it’s ruled out. … We also state in the report that all these hypothesis assessments will be reviewed on a regular basis. We may pick that one up again if new evidence comes up to make it more likely. It’s work in progress.
This points out the simple fact that journalists are basically morons. For people who are supposed to be proficient in language for a living, their inability to interpret words and sentences accurately is inexcusable. When someone uses the phrase “unlikely”, it means exactly that. For you to then assume that it means “impossible” tells you more about your own innate bias and lack of comprehension than the authors of the quote. Scientists almost never use the word impossible (or the other favourite of the media and the left “incontrovertible”) for the simple reason that statements like that are anathema to the scientific discovery process. Nothing is impossible, just highly unlikely or vice-versa. This is why “Physicists Battle over the Meaning of “Incontrovertible” in Global Warming Fight” and they did change their wording (they no longer use the world incontrovertible) because they were sick and tired of journalists and politicians abusing their words as justification to silence any and all opposing views and thoughts.
As Steven Koonin points out in this Wall Street Journal article “Climate Science is Not Settled.” “The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.”