"Yes it's fact-checked"- that doesn't speak well of the Times' fact-checking given it repeats a debunked point about "sick scientists".
Those experts made similar points in private in the BEGINNING of the pandemic before they saw new evidence and met with issue-specific experts to discuss that evidence. Then like good scientists, they changed their views accordingly.
It is really weird people use those conversations to make this sort of argument. Those same conversations literally show the evolution in their thinking and the evidence that caused that evolution. Not to mention it rather cuts against the conspiracy theory of an elaborate effort to suppress a lab leak.
The irony in this thread is Tufekci talks about double standards of evidence, but she's got the direction wrong. The zoonosis side of the debate is actually publishing papers and subjecting their evidence and analysis to scrutiny. Meanwhile here we get bald assertions taken as fact based on insinuation.