"In Chat With Musk, Kennedy Pushes Right-Wing Ideas and Misinformation," was the headline the New York Times put over a recent (June 6, 2023, print newspaper) news article about Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk. It said, in part, "On Monday, Mr. Kennedy repeated a host of false statements, among them:...He claimed, without evidence, that 'Covid was clearly a bioweapons problem.' American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case."
Now the Sunday Times of London is out with a new investigation. Its editor tweets, "We talked to experts in the US who had been tasked with investigating how the Covid-19 virus emerged in Wuhan. They were given privileged access to top secret intelligence. They described how the scientists in Wuhan had worked alongside the Chinese military when they conducted experiments fusing together the world's most deadly coronaviruses. They allege that the People's Liberation Army was running a secret project alongside the publicly declared work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This included experiments on a small number of coronaviruses with a close genetic likeness to Covid-19."
I'm quite cautious about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Certainty or clarity on the Covid origin question is indeed elusive, largely because of the Chinese government's refusal to cooperate or to allow a truly independent investigation. Even so, though, it seems excessive for the New York Times to have described Kennedy's theory of Covid's origins as flatly "false" or "misinformation." I understand the instinct and reasoning behind newspapers wanting to provide context and a reality check for claims by politicians, but, well, as Bret Stephens put it in a good column on the lab leak issue back in June of 2021: "When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it's best not to peddle it yourself."