Letter to the Editor: The Nation

A counterpoint to "The New York Times is Failing its Readers Badly on Covid"

Stuart Newman and Felipe Cabello sent this letter to The Nation contesting the June 21 opinion article by Gregg Gonsalves and John P. Moore, “The New York Times is Failing its Readers Badly on Covid.” Newman is a cell and evolutionary biologist and member of the Biosafety Now! board of advisors, and Cabello is a specialist on the molecular biology of microbial pathogenicity

The article claimed that “the preponderance of the evidence implies that the virus jumped from an animal to a human host in a Wuhan ‘wet market’,” and that evidence to the contrary presented by recent Times columnists is “shoddy.” The Nation has not responded to inquiries about whether they intend to publish the letter, so we are presenting it here.

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To the Editor:

In a recent science opinion piece (The New York Times is Failing its Readers Badly on Covid, The Nation, June 21), Gregg Gonsalves and John P. Moore decry other such pieces by two women scholars who they characterize as biased and insufficiently expert on questions of virus origins and public health management. One of the commentators they single out for criticism, Dr. Zeynep Tufecki, is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who is well-recognized for her prescient, empirically based insights and policy recommendations throughout the pandemic. The other, Dr. Alina Chan, is a researcher at MIT’s Broad Institute who led the launch of an open-source website to track the genetic evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

We are medical school professors who have closely followed the emerging knowledge of COVID origins and have benefited from Alina Chan’s persistent scientific detective work on this subject. One of us, a cell and evolutionary biologist, has co-written a book on the unexpected consequences of genetic engineering. The other, a specialist on the molecular basis of infectious disease, was the chair of our university’s federally mandated Institutional Biosafety Committee for more than a decade.

Drs. Gonsalves and Moore are free to believe that our own opinions on the origins question and its general coverage in the press, which are similar to Dr. Chan’s, are also “shoddy,” and their expression here is a disservice to The Nation’s readers. We offer them, nonetheless.

Gonsalves and Moore state that “the Times’ science and politics reporters have covered all aspects of this saga objectively and fairly.” They support this by two links to the Times from more than a year ago, one of which is a report, based on flimsy evidence that raccoon dogs were the intermediate species mediating the transmission of the virus to humans. This is no longer cited by proponents of the market scenario. Raccoon dogs are not even mentioned in the January 2024 letter Gonsalves and Moore link to as “the evidence” in their statement that “the preponderance of the evidence implies that the virus jumped from an animal to a human host in a Wuhan ‘wet market’.”

The three opinion pieces they cite in support of their assertions were all organized by the authors of, and entirely dependent on, two papers published in the journal Science two years ago, which have been discredited by more recent genetic, geolocalization, statistical, and epidemiological studies. All of these are cited in Dr. Chan’s unprecedently data-rich (for a general newspaper) New York Times essay.

We wonder on what basis Drs. Gonsalves and Moore have appointed themselves arbiters of what constitute “all aspects of this saga.” They state that Dr. Chan, despite her unquestionably citing more recent studies than they have, has exhibited a “science be damned” attitude to the COVID origins question, and the Times, by having “revived” the lab leak hypothesis (which they acknowledge is a viable possibility) has done so as well. By casting doubt on the continued discussion of this important question, while giving credence to the opinion pieces of one side and ridiculing the good-faith presentation by a serious advocate of the other, Gonsalves and Moore have done a disservice to all of us.

Sincerely,

Stuart A. Newman and Felipe C. Cabello

The writers are, respectively, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, and Professor Emeritus of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology, New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York. Dr. Newman is co-author, with Tina Stevens, of Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial Bioscience (Routledge, 2019).