How Wikipedia Buried the Truth About Covid
inside wikipedia’s six-year editorial battle to frame lab leak as a partisan ‘conspiracy,’ and to manufacture consensus about one of the most important scientific questions of our time.
Over the past six years, the most socially and economically significant scientific question of our lifetimes — where COVID-19 came from — has been quietly decided by a small group of editors on Wikipedia. The answer this cluster of accounts has produced is being fed into search engines, AI systems, and what passes for a public record online.
Lab origin, one of the two major competing theories concerning the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, has been cast not simply as false, but as a conspiracy theory tinged with racist undertones. This question was settled by Wikipedia editors long before science ever produced a conclusion (it still hasn’t) and far from any lab studying the issue.
For me, the topic has special significance. In early 2021, I began reporting on lab origin, starting with how the media distorted the issue from the earliest days of the pandemic. I chronicled the media’s effort to shut down the lab leak debate, uncovered a major anomaly in Chinese PPE exports that destabilizes China’s official pandemic timeline, exposed Harvard’s role in brokering a meeting between Anthony Fauci and the head of China’s then-second biggest real estate firm to “coordinate” on pandemic response, and was the first — and, to my knowledge, only — journalist to report on Fauci’s role as head of America’s biodefense command.
When you set aside the tangled mass of general confusion and highly specialized knowledge — genetic sequences, virus chimeras, dual-use treaties, track II diplomacy, biosafety ratings, and elaborate funding structures — what you get is a story about how information is controlled.
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Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”
