How the New York Times Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: Part 1

Summary of Key Points

• In a March 17 article titled “How long Will Coronavirus Live on Surfaces or in the Air Around You?”, award-winning New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli characterized studies as having proven that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne transmissible, with the question remaining of how long virus-laden aerosols remain in the air once generated by someone coughing, sneezing, speaking, or breathing.
• Mandavilli also characterized the science as contradicting the position of the WHO, which was that airborne transmission remained unproven.
• An examination of the studies she cites, however, reveals that the WHO was correct that the question remained whether the virus is airborne.
• The Times cited an experimental study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in which viable virus was detected in aerosols for up to three hours. The only significance Mandavilli attributed to the experimental setup using aerosol-generating machinery was that it left open the question of how long viable virus would remain airborne under natural conditions.
• However, as the WHO has observed, that study left open the question of whether viable virus can be found in aerosols absent aerosol-generating procedures. It also did not contradict but reinforced the WHO’s warnings for health care workers to take extra precautions against airborne transmission when undergoing aerosol-generating medical procedures.
• The Times also characterized a study published on the preprint server bioRxiv as having shown that health care workers doffing protective gear can resuspend aerosols and thereby infect themselves.
• What Mandavilli declined to inform Times readers, however, was that the detection of viral RNA using RT-PCR assays is not necessarily indicative of the presence of infectious virus. Consequently, the study authors did not claim to have proven this risk to health care workers, but merely hypothesized that it might exist.
• The Times similarly characterized a study published in JAMA as having demonstrated the airborne transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 by detecting the virus in environmental samples.
• Once again, however, Mandavilli declined to explain to Times readers what the authors explicitly stated in their paper, which was that they did not prove airborne transmissibility of the virus since “viral culture was not done to demonstrate viability.”
• Contrary to Mandavilli’s characterization of the WHO’s position as having been contradicted by the science, the WHO was correct to maintain that further research would be required to determine whether SARS-CoV-2 is transmissible via aerosols.
• Importantly, the Times included the caveat that the ability of the virus to spread via aerosols would not mean that people could become infected by others who are not temporally or physically near them, but that the evidence indicated close contact would still be required for transmission to occur.

Introduction

In response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, governments have implemented extreme “lockdown” measures with devastating economic consequences, the costs of which must be measured not only in dollars but also in terms of worsened health and lost or shortened lives. The mainstream media have fulfilled the function of manufacturing consent for these extreme policies by reporting about the virus in an alarmist manner that has caused mass fear and panic among the public.

A key pillar of the mainstream narrative that has served to cause mass fear and submission to harmful government diktats is that the spread of the coronavirus is largely driven via the airborne route by people who don’t know they are infected because they have no symptoms. The New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record”, has been pushing this narrative for months in a series of articles by Apoorva Mandavilli, who last year was awarded the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.

A recurring theme in Mandavilli’s articles is that the World Health Organization (WHO) has been consistently behind the science when it comes to knowledge about the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The WHO, as the Times tells it, has been wrong to say that asymptomatic transmission appears to be rare and has been stubbornly resistant in acknowledging the airborne transmissibility of the virus in the community setting.

A critical examination of the Times’ reporting, however, reveals how it lies to the public by systematically mischaracterizing the science and the WHO’s positions on asymptomatic and airborne transmission.

For example, on July 16, in an article titled “Mask Rules Expand Across U.S. as Clashes Over the Mandates Intensify”, the Times reported that “Public health officials increasingly see masks as a powerful weapon against the virus, particularly after the World Health Organization acknowledged that the virus can be airborne, with tiny respiratory droplets able to linger in the air for hours.”[1]

That statement is false. In fact, the WHO rightly maintains that airborne transmission, while a theoretical possibility, remains unproven. The linked source for that claim is another Times article, which was written by Mandavilli. However, the fact that the Times falsely characterizes the WHO’s position as well as the science can be seen by examining her own primary sources.

The Times has built its deceptive narrative over a matter of months in a litany of articles by Mandavilli, with each successive article building on those that came before, and so to demonstrate how the more recent Times articles lie to readers, it is necessary to also examine the earlier reporting.

So, to begin, let’s go back to March 17, on which day the Times published an article by Mandavilli with a headline asking, “How Long Will Coronavirus Live on Surfaces or in the Air Around You?”