PROFILE - Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times
Enlightened COVID Centrism's Worst Oracle
When the COVID-19 pandemic first began in 2020, the New York Times rightfully skewered the Trump Administration for a botched and highly politicized response that wildly underestimated the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The first Trump Administration prioritized the demands of Wall Street and corporate America over the safety of American families. Being an election year, this would fare poorly for Trump, and Biden (who championed the invasion & occupation of Iraq as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee based on false pretenses, which the New York Times directly aided in propagandizing) would be promoted to deal with the pandemic under the promise that he would "follow the science." This would end in needless suffering and tragedy for many American families.
In 2021, David Leonhardt's coverage of the pandemic for the NYT immediately changed it's tune, covering for the Biden Administration & COVID Czar Jeffrey Zients - a former deli owner with zero medical credentials rewarded with this position for bundling corporate donations to the Biden campaign - as they *also* prioritized corporate interests over keeping American families safe. Leonhardt was directly praised by Biden for his rose-tinted portrayal of unyielding waves of pestilence that led to a massive burden of death and disability which the Biden Administration dumped onto the backs of working Americans.
The NYTimes appears engineered to normalize and then endorse any violence that the U.S. government imposes, either domestically or internationally. It’s really remarkably consistent no matter the issue. -Eric Reinhart via Twitter
As a cohesive unit, the New York Times went all-in on granting credibility to the Biden Administration's strategy of mass infecting the population repeatedly with SARS-CoV-2, including tens of millions of unvaccinated children. This would not only kill many Americans, including thousands of children, but also disable countless millions - often losing the ability to work, only to fall into poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair. The "New Normal" that conspiracy theorists in 2020 feared had arrived, but not the one they predicted. Not a "Covidian biomedical regime" but instead, a new normal in which the virus and the devastation it caused was exploited as a disciplinary measure to lower the standards of working Americans.
Princeton sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, opinion writer for the New York Times, would play her part in the normalizing of unmitigated COVID-19 and all the devastation it has wrought. Her primary objective has been to legitimize the Biden Administration's failed COVID-19 response, which has devastated millions of Americans, and paint herself as a sort of "Long COVID whisperer," the Enlightened COVID Centrist who lends credibility to "real experts," whilst discrediting scientists whose findings indicted Biden's policies of collective abandonment. She would go on to endorse Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya as "qualified" to serve as NIH Director: a loudmouthed incompetent fraud who profited from fearmongering about vaccines and public health mitigations while downplaying the real threat posed by SARS-CoV-2.
What follows is a collection of quotes, tweets, and articles in which Zeynep Tufekci and the New York Times granted legitimacy to, and furthered the agenda, of a modern anti-vaccine movement that has exploited a horrific tragedy, with devastating consequences for far too many.
Much of what follows is taken from Zeynep’s Twitter profile “@zeynep,” unless specified otherwise.
2020
The misinformation from Zeynep Tufekci started from the very beginning:
March 28th, 2020: "Please, please don't make stuff up. Aerosol [transmission of SARS-CoV-2] isn't likely outside of very specific procedures like intubation, which isn't anything you are doing unless you are an ER person that is specializing on intubation. Too important to be using words as if they don't have meaning."
This was a common mistake, but one that a professor at Princeton, with all the resources available to her, had no excuse to make. A readily accessible 2004 study about the original SARS-CoV-1 virus documented airborne transmission of this virus. The history of coronaviruses being airborne actually goes back quite some time. Yet, because the WHO falsely declared this to be a "military term," Zeynep abandoned her obligations as a journalist to interrogate such a claim.
Keep that quote in mind when we get to 2021.
September 1st, 2020: "...we're not completely without data. We know kids are not COVID superspreaders & their mortality is lower than seasonal flu, even including teens. The risk of transmission ticks up with age. Putting teens and young adults with younger kids obscures reality."
This is pure Oster-ite filth. With public health mitigations in place such as remote schooling, the pediatric flu deaths for 2020 were almost nil - and pediatric COVID-19 deaths were over 100. Later, data would show that over 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child. (CIDRAP) Where else did we hear this myth? Ah yes, from your new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya:
Keep that in mind for when we get to 2024.
Zeynep has never apologized for this blatant misinformation, much less adjusted her perspective to account for her frequent mistakes, leading her to make only greater errors as the long hook of the pandemic tore through the nation.
2021
March 10th, 2021: "I increasingly see people willing to believe things are so bad because this is a superzombieantigencalifragisticexpialidocious virus, with extraordinary properties. Tragically, as [Michael Mina] says, it's a straightforward, almost textbook virus. The failure is the response."
For starters, Michael Mina would spread the falsehood that your immune system is "like a muscle," trained by viral infections, which is a patently dishonest framing. Secondly, this sort of calm-mongering by Zeynep is patently unhelpful and misleads the public. Our lack of knowledge about a virus that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans over the past year is not evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was merely "textbook." In fact, the scientific literature that would emerge in the years that follow paint a much more complicated picture.
May 3rd 2021: "Not at all clear to me we're seeing massive reinfections in either place." Another absurd rose-tinted prediction that failed to hold water - as we now have many kids who have been reinfected with COVID-19 at least half a dozen times now, often developing serious health issues as a result.
September 7th 2021: "This is nonsense ('question' being SARS-CoV-2 as airborne). Chinese scientists did not 'just know' - there had been work on this before including, crucially, from SARS. Western establishment tragically lacks - but come on. Asian scientists did not 'just know' - there had been work on this before including, crucially, from SARS...I was reading their papers on this in February of 2020."
So just mere weeks later in March 2020, Zeynep was just lying about COVID-19 aerosol transmission? Or is this sociologist lying now in 2021 about what she knows? Either way, Zeynep Tufekci of Princeton University and the New York Times has established herself to be a liar with her own words.
2022
As it became clear that COVID-19 reinfections were common, and the Biden Administration wouldn't lift a finger to prevent them, Zeynep Tufekci went all in on trying to prove these reinfections to be harmless. Tragically, a growing mountain of medical research would not uphold her narrative.
September 22, 2022: As researcher Ziyad Al-Aly began to uncover evidence of COVID-19's impacts on the brain, something that would go on to be well established in the years which follow, Zeynep immediately rushed to minimize this discovery, saying: "Example of how to be misled. First, I absolutely believe COVID (and the flu) has neurological sequelae. But this study is almost entirely pre-vaccine (99%), and the most affected are those hospitalized, not the mild cases, and it's an already old, frail male VA cohort." This is textbook COVID minimization - lazy comparisons to the flu and suggesting only the old and frail are meaningfully impacted by the virus. This myth did not hold water for long.
October 05, 2022: "Nobody is arguing Long Covid isn't important or significant - I wrote that at length. But if it's in 'One in Five' and each infection is an equal risk...the post-Omicron numbers would have had a different trajectory." First of all, plenty of cranks have argued that "Long Covid isn't important or significant," including now-NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, so this is a blatantly dishonest misrepresentation.
Secondly, the term "post-Omicron" here is a lark, as every variant since 2021 has been filed under "Omicron," and Americans have been infected multiple times since - being disabled after their third or even fifth bout with COVID-19, making statements downplaying this crisis to be wildly irresponsible and dishonest about how little Zeynep truly knows.
November 06, 2022: In what is possibly Zeynep’s worst, most unscientific statement of the entire pandemic, she tweets:
"It's not a bold statement. People with long Covid are clearly a vulnerable different subset, at risk from all viral infections probably, judging by ME. I'm unaware of 'normal healthy people' at increased risk from reinfections, especially post-vaccine."
This is probably the most offensive, thoughtless proclamation that sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has made this entire pandemic. Tufekci does not provide any evidence for this claim, much less any way to identify just who is part of this "vulnerable different subset." Totally useless and destructive misinformation.
A central plank of the modern anti-vaccine movement is to dismiss COVID-19 induced disability and harass the people suffering from it. Zeynep's frequent downplaying of the condition, implying that "normal healthy people" have nothing to fear, only seeks to further their agenda and leave patients suffering.
December 3rd, 2022: Zeynep endorses the "immunity debt / gap" nonsense via a retweet of Marc Veldhoen, a fictional concept invented in 2021 to unscientifically attack public health mitigations and mislead the public about COVID-19's negative impacts on the immune system.
Yet again, a journalist at the New York Times and Princeton academic refuses to inquire about something that can be easily debunked, by opening an Immunology 101 textbook in this case. A profound disservice to the public, in which Zeynep's Enlightened COVID Centrism does nothing but launder anti-vax fictions into the mainstream.
2023
January 23rd, 2023: Zeynep starts the year off by falsely equivocating scientists and doctors who are informing the public about the latest findings on COVID-19's harms to the anti-vaccine movement: "The lying/misinforming accounts on [the ZeroCOVID] side are, indeed, top-heavy, very similar to the anti-vaxxer network: a few prominent nodes, usually MDs or PhDs who've decided it's a great way to get attention/make money, and have that superficial credential."
For context, she was replying to immunologist Andrew Croxford, who previously insisted that COVID-19 does not negatively impact children's immune systems, and that "immunity debt" is a legitimate scientific concept. Again, another "actual expert" that Zeynep Tufekci handpicked to help mislead the public and downplay the impact of the virus, who gets basic facts wrong.
February 17th, 2023: Zeynep goes all in on insisting that repeated COVID-19 infections are harmless, stating, "First, why are reinfections milder? Immunity, of course." What Tufekci is really doing here is laundering one of the central premises of the Great Barrington Declaration into a more liberal mainstream: that if we had infected everyone under 70 with COVID-19 in Spring 2020, the population would have developed "robust herd immunity," rendering the virus inert and removing the need for mitigations or vaccines. Completely dishonest, ahistorical fanfiction.
February 21st, 2023: One of Zeynep's cherry-picked "real experts," Marc Veldhoen, would share Collateral Global propaganda from Great Barrington Declaration author Sunetra Gupta, who championed infections of SARS-CoV-2 in the unvaccinated as a path to reach "herd immunity" and end the pandemic in a mere 3-6 months. This was obviously always nonsense and shows precisely just how terrible Tufekci is at identifying credible scientific experts.
April 4th, 2023: Zeynep tweets that Long COVID "patients first need a better and more realistic understanding of where the rest of the (non-caring) world really is. That's the main obstacle." Ah yes, the "obstacle" that Tufekci herself has helped construct by frequently downplaying the virus and its potential for harm. This is just sadistically condescending and cruel gatekeeping.
December 31st, 2023: Further normalizing population-wide COVID infections, Zeynep declares: "Yes, there is a lot of Covid around but hospitalizations and severity have been going down, as expected, due to widespread population immunity. The data is unequivocal." Of course, a lot of Americans had to die and be disabled by the virus and are continuing to be disabled from bouts with COVID-19 in 2025.
She continues, "It's especially tragic to see patients with debilitating Long Covid targeted on this platform with these lies." Going into 2024, Zeynep's biggest priority was targeting those advocating for mitigations to prevent COVID-19 transmission and further increasing the number of Americans disabled by the virus. This meant embracing the anti-vaccine fantasy that letting viruses like SARS-CoV-2 burn through the population conferred meaningful "immunity," a technical term that has been twisted in every which way since 2020 to downplay the virus' impact.
She continues, "I wish for the new year to bring clinical trials with positive results for Long Covid patients, and for real scientific and medical advances to improve their situation, and, in the meantime, for them to be freed from the many quacks, cranks, and grifters preying on their illness." Of course, Zeynep is not talking about the modern anti-vaccine movement here, but instead independent activists advocating for COVID-19 mitigations & sharing articles about the latest science on the virus' harms.
"On Long Covid: good 2023 trend is the real scientific community has mostly accepted the illness as real and many are motivated. (Twitter posters are useless to patients). But it needs sustained funding so early career people can make a career out of post-viral illness research." This was patently untrue then and still is today:
From March 17, 2025: “…if health professionals want to effectively support patients with Long Covid, they need to make sure they feel believed.” (Journal of Health Psychology)
More senseless calmmongering only further isolates the millions of Americans suffering from Long COVID.
The next year, she would go on to endorse a grifter who defended Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 as "qualified" and "gets some things right" to lead the National Institute of Health. He is now currently destroying any funding for Long COVID research and treatments. Hell of a job, Zeynep!
2024
March 8th, 2024: In a shameless attempt to downplay the risk of COVID-19 induced disability from repeated infections, Zeynep tweets, "Forget LC for a sec. If the risk of X from a first infection is, say, A=5%, and from a second infection is B=0.0001%, the cumulative risk goes from from 5% to 5.0001% - even if B is way lower than A! 'Cumulative increases' is just saying add A to B, not that risk is going up."
This is pretty pathetic, completely abstract back-of-the-napkin math that furthers the fantasy that repeated COVID-19 infections don't have negative impacts population health. Yet again, this academic sociologist attempts to be a master of all knowledge regarding COVID-19, and produces utterly worthless analysis as a result of their lack of knowledge.
March 28th, 2024: Zeynep's "real immunologist," Marc Veldhoen, publicly threatens to assault a woman, saying: "Come and say that to my face. You will not walk away. Sad excuse for a human being" - this is the content of the character of the "real experts" that Tufekci publicly endorses.
That same day, Zeynep tweets: "For those with debilitating Long Covid, this is difficult: risks to others have gone down so much while they suffer - and while research and support is so lacking. But the indicators are clear and not just from public health data. High quality labor market data show the same."
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Hmm. Let’s check with Federal Reserve Economic Data.
Oh no. It looks like Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times was wrong again? Zeynep is insisting that unmitigated COVID-19 infections in the population have conferred a meaningful shield of protection from COVID-19's worse impacts, while people are being disabled by their third or even fifth bout with the virus. Zeynep is doing her best to strangle the canary in the coal mine and legitimizing the anti-vaccine fantasy that viral infections confer meaningful protection from viruses.
She doubles down: "There is no controversy that as immunity goes up, infections have become less risky - including for severity and also Long Covid. All the risks are going down on average - anecdotes and exceptions may be true, of course. Risks are going down, not up." I would just like to remind everyone that a sociologist works in the study of “the development, structure, and functioning of human society;” not the medical or scientific fields. What did medical researchers actually find?
Zeynep is engaged in more sadistic calm-mongering. The science is in, (it has been in for a while by now) and this statement is completely misleading. Letting a SARS-CoV virus "burn" through the population repeatedly does not magically render it harmless. Dr. Mona Nemer, Canada's Chief Science Officer, states:
"Even mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection are at risk of becoming Long Covid and these results suggest the threat increases with multiple infections."
April 30th, 2024: Zeynep's "real expert," Marc Veldhoen, smugly declares that "SARS-CoV-2 infections do not stop. Deaths will continue to occur...This cannot be prevented, except with drastic measures that minimise human contact and care." This is a nihilistic lie and morally depraved.
November 27th, 2024: Zeynep publishes an opinion editorial in the NYT titled "Trump's Pick to Lead the N.I.H. Gets Some Things Right." She's talking about economist Jay Bhattacharya, who has gotten absolutely nothing right about the COVID-19 pandemic from day 1 - a well-documented fact that any serious journalist would acknowledge. Zeynep says he is "actually qualified" to lead the NIH, which has never been led by an economist - and for good reason. While Zeynep acknowledges criticisms of Bhattacharya in the article, she falsely frames this as some sort of "debate" instead of an overwhelming history of being irresponsibly wrong about SARS-CoV-2, claiming that Jay’s nomination is a “welcome sign.”
She later expands with further falsehoods:
"...[The Great Barrington Declaration's] dismissal as 'fringe' by public health authorities, and even censorship on social media, was unjustified and wrong. Not every point was completely wrong...the public has a stake in such major decisions." How a journalist can be so illiterate that they don't even understand the term "censorship," well, perhaps that's just a pre-requisite for writing opinion pieces in the annals of the New York Times.
As a handpicked lackey of anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. you would have to be a gullible fool to think Bhattacharya "gets some things right." From the comfort of his university office, Jay fantasized that letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the population, killing and disabling many, would evolve the virus into a harmless and benevolent friend. Zeynep and the New York Times laundered the tired old ideas of the anti-vaccine movement into the mainstream, doing a grave disservice to those who have worked so hard to save lives - sacrificing much in the process.
2025
March 16th, 2025: Zeynep debuts a new Opinion editorial in the New York Times, titled "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives" in which she goes all-in on the hotly debated premise that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a medical research laboratory in China, and that there was an extensive cover-up concocted by leaders like Jeremy Farrar, because he suggested a one-word change in messaging over e-mail. Dishonestly, Zeynep does not introduce any new evidence, but instead rehashes old tropes of what is largely circumstantial evidence that not only contradicts the actual history of pandemics but also legitimizes numerous anti-vax tropes in the process.
This "lab leak" theory has been used as justification for the destruction of the National Institute of Health and other public health institutions that is happening now. Heck of a job, Zeynep!
Veteran science journalist Wendy Orent responded via Bluesky:
"More BS from Tufekci, who appears not to realize that, despite all the lab leaks that have actually happened in the past (many of which I explored in Open Mind Magazine) NOT A SINGLE One involved the origins and release of a novel pathogen. Evolution, Zeynep. Pathogens EVOLVE."
While it's not completely implausible that COVID-19 emerged from a lab, the much more likely scenario, in line with the history of pandemics, is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from nature. As climate change begins to intensify, the threat of future pandemics like COVID-19 will increase, requiring further surveillance and other solutions to identify and combat future viruses. The long-term negative impacts of COVID-19 on population health only highlights the further need for mitigations and prevention of outbreaks, something that Zeynep’s “welcome sign,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, is virulently against in any form.
Michael Hobbes, journalist and podcast host of Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill, responded as well, stating “She has lost her mind” and continuing,
“The entire column is just a collection of conspiracy tropes. Rather than defend the lab leak theory on the merits, she goes into excruciating detail about how it was suppressed in the early months of the pandemic…classic conspiratorial thinking. When you have evidence for a claim you present the evidence, you don’t stall for time by hinting at an even vaster conspiracy to hide the truth…Scientists have always stressed that we don’t know anything for sure and should investigate all possibilities…COVID is the most studied virus in human history. If it showed signs of being engineered, the entire field of virology would be sounding alarm bells.”
One of these narratives make for exciting sensationalist headlines that portray the pandemic like something out of a cheap airport paperback. The other is far less romanticized and exciting, painting Bhattacharya and his defenders in a rather negative light: exploiting this horrific tragedy, responsible for widespread death and devastation, to promote themselves and mislead the public whilst sabotaging the work of public health to prevent and treat future threats. Science journalism, especially when it comes to the topic of public health, isn't meant to be cheap entertainment. Zeynep Tufekci has done a serious disservice to readers of The New York Times.
Conclusion
What Zeynep has done is truly indefensible: laundering many of the unscientific arguments of the anti-vaccine movement into the mainstream liberal discourse in the pages of one of America's leading newspapers. She falsely presented Jay Bhattacharya and the larger roster of associated viral sycophants as legitimate voices worth entertaining, instead of accurately reporting on them as the dishonest fraudsters they are. She's cherrypicked experts that align with a narrative that repeated COVID-19 infections are harmless and benign. This isn't "science journalism" as much as it is viral propaganda, frequently downplaying the threat of the virus and overshadowing the serious impacts it's had on Americans' health.
Lending credibility to the arguments of anti-vaccine quacks regarding the lab leak hypothesis did not earn Zeynep any respect from that crowd, neither. This is the folly of Enlightened COVID Centrism, in which you only manage to piss everyone off whilst furthering the agenda of right-wing cranks, who are now gleefully destroying America's institutions of scientific research and public health. Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times contributed to this disaster and owes the public a serious apology for laundering anti-vaccine myths such as "immunity debt" into the mainstream while misrepresenting quacks like Jay Bhattacharya, who is in the process of taking a flamethrower to the National Institute of Health.
The rise of independent organizations and media to keep the public informed about COVID-19, running contrary to institutions such as medical universities, government officials, and establishment media such as the New York Times was always going to be seen as a challenge to their legitimacy and supposed expertise. Finding herself woefully out of her depth, Zeynep developed a habit of making foolish comments about topics that she knew rather little about, while engaging in snide, unprofessional attacks against her critics.
A truly unremarkable addition to the thoughtless bedbugs & other faux-intellectual pests of the New York Times opinion-editorial roster.
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Great history of Tufekci and the rogue's gallery of deniers and calm mongers.
The problem is - this is the story people want to be fed. Demand to be told. No amount of correction, however well told and documented, seems to sway them.
A further even bigger problem is this approach is spreading to other diseases. Measles is getting the treatment right now, tuberculosis is being teed up, avian influenza will no doubt get minimized as well if it starts spreading among humans.
Unfortunately, the propaganda will create a terrible ongoing burden of death and disability. And should H5N1 prove to be as fatal in humans as in other mammals the initial minimization will be catastrophic.
Thanks for writing, the story is important and needs to be documented. Whatever happened to the precautionary principle, or the idea that preventable infectious diseases should be, well, prevented?