Here's the author's mini-bio from our last visit with him in May, 2021:
About Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade is a journalist who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science and the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including three on aspects of recent human evolution.
From City Journal, March 20, 2022:
Journalists, or PR Agents?
The worldwide toll of deaths from Covid-19 has just hit 6 million, nearly 1 million of which are in the United States. Few science stories are more important than understanding where the Covid virus came from. Yet the science writers’ section of the press corps has proved strangely incapable of telling the story straight.
Two hypotheses have long been on the table. One is that the virus jumped naturally from some animal host, as many epidemics have done in the past. The other is that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, where researchers are known to have been genetically manipulating bat viruses in order to predict future epidemics. Both hypotheses are plausible but, so far, no direct evidence exists for either.
The rule for covering such a story is obvious: write about both possibilities as evenhandedly as possible until the truth emerges. But science writers have consistently trumpeted any developments favoring natural emergence while downplaying or ignoring those pointing to a lab leak.
Press reports have abounded in the last few days about new studies claiming to prove that all early cases of Covid were associated with a wet market in Wuhan and hence that the virus must have jumped to people from an animal there. “Two new papers make the case robustly,” ran the credulous headline in The Economist, typical of many articles implying that the case was closed. “The lab leak theory is dead,” declared The New Republic, with great exaggeration.
But the new papers are mere preprints, unpublished drafts that have not yet been exposed to the rigors of peer review. One, from an American group led by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute, claimed the wet market was the source of the epidemic. The second paper’s group of authors—headed by George Gao, director of the Chinese CDC—had every incentive to back the Andersen claim but did not do so. They said only, as was already well known, that “the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day”—in other words, the crowded, closed atmosphere in the market helped the virus spread from person to person, but the epidemic didn’t necessarily begin there.
“Scientists who weren’t involved in the research papers are calling the new data ‘very convincing’ and a ‘blow’ to the lab-leak theory,” asserted NPR. In fact, the data don’t detract in any way from the substantial evidence favoring a lab leak. They also offer no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 ever existed in nature, the key to proving that it emerged naturally. Not a single animal tested in the market bore the virus. That being so, it’s surely more economical to assume the many positive environmental samples from the market were contaminated by infected people, not infected animals.
Here are three flaws in the new papers that most science writers ignored.
First, even if all the early cases originated from the wet market, as the Andersen paper contends, there is no way of telling whether the virus was carried into the market by an animal or by a person whose infection came from a laboratory. That leaves the debate at square one.
Second....
....MUCH MORE
That May 2021 article was "Origin of Covid — Following the Clues".
