The Covid pandemic created some of the worst science writing in our lifetimes. Major media outlets failed at providing readers with accurate and balanced news across a host of issues, including vaccines, masks, lockdowns and how the virus likely began spreading through the human population.
Looking back over the last four years of science writing claptrap, I ran across an early article by Science Magazine writer Jon Cohen that illustrates this point quite nicely.
On January 31, 2020, Cohen wrote a story alleging that "Most researchers say" the virus could not have come from a lab, an idea Cohen added, had been dismissed as a "Conspiracy theory."
"[S]ome of the features look engineered," a virologist wrote in a private email, the day after Cohen quoted him in his "Most researchers say" article for Science Magazine.
Cohen's ham-fisted, biased attempt at journalism remains a singular example of pandemic science writing gone awry.
On January 31, 2020, Science Magazine's Jon Cohen tried to shoot down such thinking in a misleading feature that ignored scientists' own opinions.
The day after Cohen published his "Most researchers say" piece to "Knock down" the "Conspiracy theory" that the virus could have come from a lab, Kristian Andersen-the same one quoted in Cohen's story!-emailed Anthony Fauci.
Mutations in the Covid virus do not appear to be natural; There was suspicion that a mutation was inserted into the virus; These suspicions were heightened because Wuhan scientists were doing dangerous gain-of-function research and the outbreak began in Wuhan.
https://brownstone.org/articles/science-writing-is-rarely-journalism/
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