America – and the media – needs a Covid reckoning

The trouble with this I think can be covered by two key issues:

1. I did a Control-F "exponential" and found no hits in TFA. I know I struggled trying to come to grips mentally with the real world impacts of an exponential growth curve. Sure, zero cases today, ok 1 case next week, ... the human brain can comprehend linear growth, but exponential growth was very hard for me to understand.

2. Navel-gazing is par for the course for the types of people who typically become journalists (I'm stereotyping here). However in the current legal environment I can imagine it can be dangerous to admit that you've made mistakes in the past. It could easily be weaponized against you as proof that you intentionally defrauded or misled people. To be clear, this is a horrible scenario and an anti-pattern. But when you have about 48% of the voting populace who have been pre-programmed to hate you - not mincing words here - then any admittance of fault or nuance will be lost, and will lead to even more vitriol and distrust.

> Two of those conspiracy theories were in fact absurd, but one was correct: the virus absolutely may have escaped from a Wuhan research lab.

That's a weird use of the word "correct".

Like the phrase "conspiracy theory" is slippery, and it's used to describe a spectrum of things from those that definitely did happen to things that are logically impossible.

But a possibility that has been thoroughly investigated and found wanting is still different from "correct" even if the people who promoted it as true with no evidence are doing victory laps because all the people who don't believe in vaccines are on their side.

Does she have a list of the scientists who were calling it a wild conspiracy theory in public while also privately worrying it could be true (with timestamps for each comment since people are allowed to change their mind, and references because people aren't allowed to just make stuff up).

Relevant Fauci testimony on that point:

> Actually, I've also been very, very clear and said multiple times that I don't think the 'concept' of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory," Fauci responded. "What is conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject, like it was a lab leak and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak