Commentary
On Feb. 27, 2020, weeks before full disease panic hit the United States, the New York Times podcast started preparing the way with an interview with its lead virus reporter Donald G. McNeil. He promoted panic and lockdowns (“This is alarmist, but I think right now, it’s justified”), and reinforced the point in the next day’s print edition with an urge to “go Medieval” on the virus.
So far as I know, this was the first media source in the English-speaking world to take such a turn away from traditional public-health principles to push full lockdown.
And the same day as this podcast, the same paper ran a piece by Peter Dazsak, head of EcoHealth, an organization later discovered to have been the third-party conduit for U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab….