Two New York Times workers have confirmed to The Spectator on Monday that a top editor of the American daily newspaper had told employees early in the year 2020 when the world was just about starting to come to terms with the global pandemic that had been unleashed on it, that they should not probe or follow up the origins of the deadly and highly contagious virus.

The NYT journalist reportedly told Dominic Green, the deputy editor of the US edition of The Spectator: “In early 2020, I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].”

When the Covid-19 pandemic was in its early stages, the US former president, Donald Trump was campaigning for re-election. He had then held China responsible for the deadly outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic by calling it the ‘China virus’. In May 2020, his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, told ABC’s This Week that he had seen “substantial” and “enormous proof” that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

New York Times labelled any criticism of WHO’s claim as ‘racists’

Yet, according to the two whistleblowers, “NYT refused to investigate the biggest story of our times”. The report by The Spectator states that the senior editors of the NYT are not only accused of suppressing efforts to investigate the virus’s origins but also of leading the charge to label any criticism of the WHO’s now-debunked claim as conspiracist or even “racist.”

Despite multiple scientists and experts saying it was not possible to rule out the theory that the coronavirus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “it was considered a conspiracy theory”, confirmed the second NYT insider, who was in a senior position on a different section at the time, to The Spectator.

The Chinese government has paid millions to outlets like the NYT since 2016

“It was untouchable everywhere. The fact that Trump embraced it, of course, also made it a no-go”, the NYT whistleblower added.

According to the NYT’s whistleblowers, the biggest factor wasn’t politics. The biggest factor was that The New York Times was being heavily funded by the Communist Chinese government and it could not dare to write anything critical about China, so they killed the story.

They claimed that the editors of the New York Times were not driven by domestic politics in an election year, nor by a strong dislike for Donald Trump that led them to prefer the WHO and the Chinese government to the Trump administration. They said that revenue from China was an important aspect of the New York Times’ business strategy in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The newspaper received millions of dollars from Chinese government-controlled media outlets, particularly China Daily, and produced “advertorials” pushing the Chinese government’s narratives since 2016.

Since the NYT was receiving hefty amounts from the Communist government in China, it discredited the lab leak hypotheses, as a ‘fringe theory’. Alexandra Stevenson, the New York Times’s Hong Kong reporter, called it ‘the kind of conspiracy once reserved for tinfoil hatters’.

According to Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, the Fox News journalist, the Chinese government, has paid million of dollars to outlets like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post since 2016. In fact, the social media giant Twitter is also believed to have received checks from the Chinese government totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars. These arrangements lasted for years until the Chinese government abruptly ended recently.

The New York Times tried to hide the evidence that it ever happened. The American newspaper is said to have deleted all propaganda pieces paid for by the Chinese Communist Party from its archives. According to the Fox News host, hundreds of NYT articles, going back nearly a decade, suddenly vanished.

Meanwhile, the spokesperson of NYT told The Spectator in it’s defence: “Any accusation that the New York Times would refuse to investigate the origins of a pandemic is ridiculous. In 2020, The New York Times Company made the decision to stop accepting and hosting branded content ads from state media, which includes China Daily. We do not discuss revenue beyond what is our quarterly earnings reports.

He added: “Lastly, where you mention Alexandra Stevenson’s article, I’d like to point out that our story — as is clear from the subheading and lead paragraph — was focused on speculation about a bioweapon manufactured by the Chinese government, an idea that was and is outside of the mainstream discussion among scientists.”