Those of you who were readers of the HOTLINE from the beginning know that this publication was started to refute daily the epidemic of COVID lies from the public health officials and the media. We were against lockdowns on day one when even many conservatives and free market voices bought into the hysteria.

There was no louder lockdown cheerleader and  serial distorter of COVID-“science” than the Times. Now, five years too late, the Times has finally admitted that the virus likely came from the Wuhan lab and that the scientists we were ordered to blindly trust were con artists.

The headline is an instant classic:

Ironically, no one was more easily “misled” than the author of the article, Zeynep Tufekci.

We at UP didn’t get everything about COVID right, but we certainly got the most important things right, which is why we clashed with the Gray Lady on lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates.

Now the Times admits the duplicity by our own government and the top scientists who “misled’ the Times:

Perhaps we were misled on purpose… a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely…

Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci…

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied… Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

The obviously fatuous and self-serving Fauci-commissioned “Proximal Origins” paper apparently threw The New York Times off the track of the lab leak for five years, until yesterday.

Then there was the top Times COVID reporter who tagged anyone who promoted the lab leak as a “racist.”

Where’s our apology? Why are none of the fraudsters in jail?