Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Beyond Blaming the Victim

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CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Edward G. Luce, Financial Times, George W. Bush, global terrorism, Iraq war, lab leak, Mario del Poro, Melvyn Leffler, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, September 11, The Washington Post, weapons of mass destruction, Wuhan lab, Wuhan virus

When a line of argument appears twice in Mainstream Media publications on consecutive days, it’s hard not to conclude that a trend might be forming – or has been well underway. And when it comes to the particular line of argument I’m posting about, that’s disturbing news, since it’s an especially repugnant form of blaming the victim that could become dangerously influential. For these views can all too easily become rationales for official paralysis in the face of major threats, or excessively feeble responses, because the media organizations spreading these views are still taken so seriously by so many U.S. policymakers.

The first example of such blaming the victim comes from Edward G. Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times. Now before you go objecting that both this pundit and his newspaper are British, keep in mind that the author is based in Washington, D.C. and that the Times has long published a U.S. edition that’s must reading in high level American policy circles that are by no means confined to business and economics.

In his March 1 offering on how some revised American intelligence assessments of the CCP Virus lab leak theory might impact U.S.-China relations, Luce worries that “America’s growing tendency to demonise China — and the fact that China keeps supplying it with material — poses a threat to global health” and could poison the entire spectrum of bilateral ties because “The world’s superpower and its rising great power are both now working from home and nourishing paranoia about each other.”

It’s the first half of this analysis that especially caught my eye. According to Luce, practically the entire U.S. political system is increasingly “demonising” China – phrasing that, along with the follow-on reference to “paranoia,” can only mean that U.S. positions on the entire range of Sino-American relations have become unjustifiably harsh.

But at the same time, he notes that “China keeps supplying [Americans] with material.” That sounds like a confession that China’s record actually does warrant more confrontational stances in Washington. Luce’s contention of mutual paranoia stoking, however, indicates that this isn’t what he believes at all.

Practically identical is Luce’s observation that “Beijing’s reluctance to play global citizen on pandemic warning systems — on top of climate change and other common threats — means we are hearing far less from Washington about co-operating with China and far more about confronting it.”

Yet how is Luce advising the United States to deal with a country that he himself believes isn’t buying the argument about the need for cooperation on issues of common concern? Simply, it seems, by talking as much as ever or even more about “co-operating with China” – which appears to reflect the hope that some particularly inspiring official U.S. verbiage can bring Beijing around and of course a clear triumph over experience.

The second example of such victim blaming came in a book review published the following day in the Washington Post. Writing about American historian Melvyn Leffler’s new study of the 2003 U.S. Iraq War, French political scientist Mario del Pero describes Leffler as arguing that President George W. Bush and his top advisors

“were imbued with a ‘sense of exceptional goodness and greatness’ and believed in the superiority of ‘America’s system of democratic capitalism.’ This hubris encouraged a strategy that favored deploying America’s overwhelming power to protect the country and its way of life. The terrorist attacks fed this arrogance and blinded the administration to the moral and strategic issues it confronted.”

Leave aside the suggestion that belief in the superiority of “America’s system of democratic capitalism” is ipso facto a sign of “hubris” and “arrogance” (which strikes me as weird) and the contention that the Bush administration underestimated “the moral and strategic issues it confronted” (more persuasive IMO, especially the strategic part).

Concentrate instead on the final sentence about the September 11 attacks “feeding” the administration’s “arrogance.” This sounds just like Luce’s portrayal of over-the-top U.S. responses to Chinese provocations that he concedes in the next breath have been awfully provocative. Unless American leaders post-September 11 should have viewed that day’s strikes as a one-off?

Yet del Pero makes clear that Leffler makes no such argument. The author (in del Pero’s words) maintains that

>U.S. leaders “believed that America’s way of life was under threat”;

>”The shared assumption — within the administration as well as among allies and arms-control experts — was that Iraq still had secret weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programs. The new global landscape made the possibility of a WMD-armed Iraq all the more ominous”; and

>“No threat [Leffler’s words] worried Bush and his advisers more than the prospect of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction.”

Finally, (back to the reviewer’s words) “Intelligence was inconclusive and some of it, it was later realized, simply fabricated. But no risks could be taken.”

In other words, even though this second Iraq War turned out terribly, the idea that the dangers of global terrorism “fed” a Bush administration “arrogance” and “hubris” that presumably was already bloated is far too dismissive. Instead, the grievous damage already done by such terrorism, the genuinely frightful and plausible prospect of more to come – and possibly sooner rather than later – and the frustrating uncertainties policymakers always face in crises, mean that the 2003 invasion is best seen as an understandable and entirely rational response.

In fact, reviewer del Pero winds up substantially agreeing, calling Bush’s approach “coherent in theory.” Also worth keeping in mind. At least rhetorically, Bush didn’t start out as a chest-thumping foreign policy President.

In his October 11, 2000 debate with Democratic rival Al Gore during his first campaign for President, Bush stated:

“If we’re an arrogant nation [other countries will] resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. And our nation stands — stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.”

Obviously, September 11 produced a change. But how could it not have, to at least some extent?

A famous bit of French snark memorably “complains” “This animal is dangerous. When attacked, it defends itself.” That’s a good way to think about both these charges that there’s something as fundamentally diseased about the overall American body politic’s reactions to the burgeoning threats posed by China as there was about the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Of course, although some policies will always be rooted in real paranoia, and although their more reasoned counterparts can always go awry for any number of reasons, the failure of Luce, del Pero, and apparently Leffler (along with their Financial Times and Washington Post editors) to recognize a healthy sense of national self-preservation that’s vital in a dangerous world when they see it, is pretty diseased itself. Here’s hoping it doesn’t become epidemic.

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Following Up: Why the Fauci-Lied Charges Look Stronger than Ever

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, Following Up, gain-of-function research, James Comer, Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, NIAID, NIH, Obama administration, Rand Paul, science, virology, Wuhan lab

If Anthony S. Fauci hasn’t been lawyering up already to defend himself against charges that he lied to Congress in denying that he U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), for which he’s worked for so long, ever funded dangerous gain-of-function (GOF) research in a Chinese virology lab, he definitely should be now.

For unless he’s gotten a God complex from all the CCP Virus era adulation he’s received, and assumes he’ll never be held accountable for his actions by mere mortals’ systems of government, Fauci – who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical advisor – must recognize that the NIH just made clearer than ever to lawmakers not only that statements of his earlier this year to Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were false, but that he knew at the time they were false.

As a post of mine on July 22 explained, although Fauci made his denials twice this year in response to questions from Paul, facts that were undoubtedly at Fauci’s disposal stated otherwise. Principally, the public record shows that at least three research grants approved by the NIH branch headed by Fauci (the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – NIAID) sponsored research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that plainly fell under the U.S. government’s official definition of gain-of-function – which is the only definition that Fauci, a federal employee, should care about in connection with his official work.

More important, from a legal standpoint, in an article detailing its findings, one team of recipients explicitly described its work at “GOF.” Similarly, in a February, 2020 email exchange, both Fauci and a senior colleague showed that they were well aware that of this research. The concern stemming from the grant that they discussed was not whether this description was correct or not, but whether or not this research took place when it was still permitted by federal regulations.

That’s obviously important, but as I noted, it has nothing to do with the lying to Congress charge. For that’s not what Paul asked. He asked whether NIH had ever paid for such work in China at any time. And even more important, Fauci was surely aware both of these emails’ contents, and of the original grant. OK – it’s conceivable that he had forgotten all of this when first questioned by Paul. But it’s inconceivable that by the second appearances (at which he was given the chance to walk back his denial), he hadn’t done his homework.

It was against this background of legitimately indisputable facts that the NIH finally issued a statement that seeks to clear the air about its connection with the Wuhan lab. The statement, which came in the form of an October 20 letter from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak to Kentucky Republican Congressman James Comer, doesn’t explicitly comment on Fauci’s statements. But although it does insinuate that no one at NIH is to blame for any Wuhan-related confusion on the part of Members of Congress, it keeps him in hot water nonetheless.

For not only does it leave those indisputable facts completely undisputed. It makes two relevant claims that quickly dissolve under even casual scrutiny.

The first centers on Tabak’s allegation that the contractor in question, the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, violated the terms of its grant by failing to notify anyone at NIH that some of the experiments it helped conduct in Wuhan created an engineered version of a bat coronavirus that infected human cells ten times faster than the natually occuring version of that virus. According to Tabak, “EcoHealth failed to report this fining right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”

That’s on EcoHealth, of course. But if it was concealing information from NIH, then doesn’t that mean that Fauci’s denials to Paul, however inaccurate, simply stemmed from ignorance and not a desire to mislead? Unfortunately for Fauci, no. Because as NIH recently told The New York Times, EcoHealth didn’t simply fail to report these results “right away.” The organization was two years late. And since this revelation came only this past August, Fauci must have known of its tardiness this past May and July, when he expressed his flat denials to Paul. In other words, Fauci knew he lacked all the facts needed to support his statements. But he made them anyway. And the difference between such statements and a deliberate falsehood is what, exactly?

Tabak’s second Fauci-relevant claim is even more easily dispensed with. It raises the question of defining gain-of-function research once again, and emphasizes that EcoHealth’s work “did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential” – and therefore wasn’t prohibited under the prevailing regulations governing GOF research – because the bat coronaviruses being used “had not been shown to affect humans.”

Yet this argument still leaves Fauci with several big problems. First, as I wrote above, recipients for one of the NIH grants for Wuhan work stated explicitly that they were engaged in GOF research. Their results were published in November, 2015 – which means that at least part of the research was performed after October, 2014, when the Obama administration ordered a three-year pause in such work.

Plainly this evidence flatly contradicts Fauci’s insistence that NIH-funded GOF research took place in Wuhan. So does a comparison of the grantees’ description of their project and the Obama administration’s definition of the kind of work that was not to be supported:

“[R]esearch projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”

Moreover, “The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.”

The pause was lifted at the end of 2017, and replaced with a review process that would allow funding gain-of-function research under certain conditions. As you can see, there are lots of them. Indeed, there are so many that Fauci (who was doubtless involved in the drafting) could be forgiven strictly speaking if he concluded that he’d gotten pretty close to a green light for resuming NIH funding for all manner of GOF work.

But it’s crucial to remember that Paul never asked Fauci whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China that was legal at the time. He asked him whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China – period. And nothing in the post-pause GOF funding guidelines changed the 2014 official definition of GOF – the definition that was controlling for Fauci and other federal employees. All the new guidelines did was stipulate when GOF research anywhere could be legally funded.

Nor did Tabak’s letter do anything to help Fauci on this score. Although he’s correct in noting that the new guidelines don’t proscribe research with pathogens with no record of infecting humans, this qualification is contained nowhere in the still-operative official U.S. government definition of GOF – which covers enhanced infectiousness and transmissibility in all mammals.

There’s a third claim made by Tabak that actually doesn’t directly bear on Fauci’s guilt or innocence, but very nicely illustrates why the NIH deserves absolutely zero credibility on CCP Virus origins issues. That’s the claim that EcoHealth didn’t mislead anyone, either, however late it was in keeping the agency informed. That’s because the organization supposedly didn’t expect the results it got.

As Tabak wrote (though, as with the rest of his letter, he oddly he didn’t specifically link this point to th e Fauc-lied controversy), “As sometimes occurs in science, [the much greater infectivity etc of the engineered viruses] was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

Yet it’s obvious that the researchers – and the NIH itself – expected that they might display some enhanced capability. Why else would the agency have instructed EcoHealth to “report immediately” a ten-fold-or greater increase in its infectiousness – or any increase in its infectivity?

Tabak also apparently left on the table another suggestion that EcoHealth and NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off the hook on substantive grounds (in terms of conducting and supporting gain-of-function research) in addition to NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off procedurally (because of EcoHealth’s failure to report its results promptly: It’s the suggestion that because the gain-of-function results were unexpected, that the relevant experiments weren’t about gain-of-function in the first place.

What, however, could be more absurd? For example, scientists began trying to develop a polio vaccine in the 1930s. They didn’t succeed until 1953. Can anyone seriously believe that the failed efforts don’t qualify as polio vaccine research? Ditto for the long string of failures to develop an AIDS vaccine. Or a U.S. rocket that could lift a satellite into space. Or the story of practically every scientific discovery or progress in engineering, or for that matter in the social sciences.

It’s true that Fauci could have easily and truthfully answered Paul’s questions with a statement along the lines of the following in speaking about the post-gain-of-function pause experiments: “At the time of this work, government guidelines permitted NIH to support GOF research in China and everywhere else if its review process determined that such work was justified, and that determination was in fact made.”

That’s not, however, what he said – evidently because his top priority wasn’t factual accuracy, but ensuring that neither he nor NIH could be tainted by association with supporting potentially dangerous research in China – which would have further exposed he and NIH to charges of dreadful judgment (considering their lax attitude toward reporting deadlines and the underlying decision to work with a foreign regime with a long history of keeping secrets and spreading information.

More important from the Fauci-lied standpoint, though, is that there’s no way he could have answered the questions about the pre-pause research truthfully without admitting that NIH had indeed funded some GOF work at the Wuhan lab.

And there’s a final point that needs to be mentioned:  Is the Tabak letter the best that NIH can do to exculpate Fauci of the lying charges and all concerned of  allegations of whopping misjudgement? If so, I’m doubly convinced that Fauci specifically should be seeking legal aid. If you’re still a fan, feel free to send your suggestions to:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci

Director

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

5601 Fishers Lanes, MSC 9806

Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9806

Im-Politic: A Pandemic of Coverups?

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, censorship, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Facebook, Fauci, Fauci emails, Google, Im-Politic, lab leak, Mark Zuckerberg, National Institutes of Health, NationalPulse.com, natural origin, NIH, Peter Daszak, social media, The New York Times, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan University, Wuhan virus, Zeynep Tufekci

What a June it’s been so far for anyone who’s always been skeptical of claims that anyone linking the CCP Virus’ emergence to virology facilities in Wuhan was trafficking in fringe-y conspiracy theories. Many crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. But June’s developments should make it harder than ever to dismiss not only the possibility that a natural or engineered version of the virus escaped from the lab, but that U.S. public health authorities ignored official prohibitions on funding so-called gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that they and other powerful American institutions even acted to suppress news of their Wuhan connections.

After all, it’s already been a month in which no less than Anthony S. Fauci appeared to emphasize that the virus featured characteristics not normally found in the wild. The longtime head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief science advisor told a New York Times interviewer that

“This is an unusual virus because about a third to 40 percent of the people get no symptoms at all. Yet it’s capable of killing 600,000 Americans. We’ve never had a situation like that where a virus that would be benign or almost half the people or 40 percent of the people and yet kill so many people.”

And this after declaring that

“I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to. But we don’t have that extra link that’s come in, but there’s nothing they see in there that makes you think it was something that came from a lab.”

Clear as mud, right?

It was also a week in which another New York Times contributor made an observation indicating that even if the the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose research Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overall helped finance wasn’t engaged in federally prohibited gain-of-function experiments, it still might have created the pathogen in question where none existed before. According to Zeynep Tufekci,

“Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, [Stanford University neurobiologist and bioengineer Michael Lin] told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected.”

In other words, creating the specific SARS-CoV-2 virus that has swept over the world might not have been the goal of the Chinese scientists in question. But this virus might have resulted from their efforts to simulate natural processes. If you or loved ones have suffered from the virus medically, or from the economic and other public health damage it’s caused, this is likely to look like a distinction without a difference. It’s also likely to raise further questions about why U.S. public health agencies funded clearly risky research in a facility they’ve acknowledged they couldn’t monitor adequately.

It’s also been a month in which, thanks in part to that New York Times Fauci interview, more reasons emerged to wonder whether Fauci and social media giants Facebook and Google conspired (yes, the word would be justified in these instances) to suppress reporting on the lab leak theory – in Google’s case because it, too, had helped pay for the Wuhan lab’s work at various times recently.

In January, 2020 – when the CCP Virus was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) – Facebook began a campaign to “keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps” and direct customers “to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more.” Throughout the pandemic period, WHO of course has been a major actor trying to debunk any version of the lab leak theory.

Given Fauci’s own clear interest in drawing public attention away from the possibility that his agency helped create the virus, it’s more than a little interesting that in March of that year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent Fauci an email that the recipient told Times interviewer Kara Swisher, who covers Big Tech, “hey, is there anything that we can do to help out to get the messages out, the right public health messages? I have a very important medium here in Facebook. Can I help? And as a matter of fact, if you guys don’t have enough resources and money to do some of the things you want, just let us know.”

Fauci took Zuckerberg up on his offer but nothing is known about the details of this arrangement because although this email exchange has been made public (with redactions that are odd to say the least since it’s hard to imagine any national security secrets changed hands), the content of follow-up communications (which surely included not only emails but phone conversations) remain under wraps.

Can we all agree that all of this material should be released ASAP, so that we won’t have to accept Fauci’s word that “any thought” that his dealings with Zuckerberg had to do with censoring inconvenient virus-related truths “is total conspiracy theory and total flight of fantasy”? Especially since Facebook didn’t announce until May 26 of this year that “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” (The company has said nothing about the possibility that the virus escaped a Chinese lab in natural form.)

As for Google, news of its own dodgy CCP Virus-related practices came out on June 9. Shortly thereafter, the company’s own virus and China connection was revealed. A website called TheNationalpulse.com produced proof that Google “funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology” on that controversial bat virus research.

Google insists that “The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID,” and that ‘We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab.” But as the National Pulse post showed, one of the studies co-sponsored by Google – from 2018 – described itself “conducted in Guangdong Province, China, to characterize behaviors and perceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal-human interface….” So it’s easy to conclude that Google also wanted to draw attention away from and discredit the idea that the Institute had anything to do with the pandemic’s outbreak.

Finally, June has been a month when the news came out that in June, 2020, a group of Wuhan University scientists asked the NIH to delete from a key medical genomics database data CCP Virus genome sequences they gathered from patients in that city in January and February.

The scientists claimed their reasons for the request were technical, and no evidence of deceitful intent has appeared. For its part, the NIH says that it receives such requests all the time, and typically complies. Fair enough. But given the importance of such very early pandemic stage information in determining the virus’ origins, and given China’s extensive efforts to keep data from this crucial early pandemic period secret, why on earth didn’t the NIH at least report the request and its response right away? Could it be because of its own funding of virus research in Wuhan?

As I said above, many major pieces of these puzzles remain missing.  But many are now in place also, and if ever there was a subject that screamed out for a comprehensive official investigation of the relevant actions and relationships at least of the U.S. players, with broad subpoena power, you’d think a pandemic that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans and sickened and disrupted or flat-out ruined the lives of tens of millions more amply fits the bill.  

 

Im-Politic: Another CCP Virus Failure by “The Science”

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Alison Young, Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Daily Mail, Dany Shoham, Francis Collins, Glenn Kessler, Im-Politic, Kristian Anderson, Marcia McNutt, National Academy of Science, National Institutes of Health, Peter Daszak, The Lancet, The Washington Times, Tom Cotton, USAToday, virologists, Washington Post, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan virus

America’s official scientific establishment is in a huff over the CCP Virus origins theory controversy. “There’s sniping going on in all directions,” groused National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt to a Washington Post reporter. “Her message to everyone,” correspondent Joel Achenbach continued, “cool it.”

Added McNutt:

“If anyone is going to come out strongly on one hypothesis or another, the scientific method says that there should be evidence to back it. I worry when some people are very willing to be firm about one origin or the other but fail to either have the evidence or the expertise to back it up.”

All of which I strongly endorse. But a recent statement of hers, co-signed by her counterparts at the National Academies of Engineering and Medicine, let off the hook the main culprits in turning this debate over whether the pandemic came directly from nature or escaped from a Chinese lab into a brawl. For the record clearly shows that the mudslingers who have sown “public confusion” and risk “undermining the public’s trust in science and scientists, including those still leading efforts to bring the pandemic under control,” first came from the national and global scientific establishments themselves.

Possibly worse, even if you ignore compelling evidence of their powerful self-interest in brushing off the lab leak theory (see, e.g., here) Washington’s own science leaders apparently put up no resistance.

Let’s use for documentation a recent lab leak-related timeline compiled by the Washington Post, which – as compiler Glenn Kessler shows – was one of many mainstream media outlets that portrayed this view as a wild and crazy notion.

According to Kessler, two of the first four presentations of lab leak claims and potentially related views (in January, 2020) came from an apparent Hong Kong democracy supporter on Twitter, and from a study by Chinese researchers published in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet and actually funded by Chinese government agencies.

This study found that, in Kessler’s words, “13 of the 41 cases [of the CCP Virus], including the first documented case, had no link to the seafood marketplace that originally was considered the origin of the outbreak.” In other words, at this admittedly early stage, the natural origin supporters had some major explaining to do.

The other two reports that linked the Chinese facility in question – the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) came in the British newspaper Daily Mail and the American newspaper The Washington Times.

The former simply noted that a 2017 article in the (also prestigious) science publication nature reported that “A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens” and that “Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping….”

The latter, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program,” was based on an interview with a former Israeli intelligence officer with a biowarfare specialty and a microbiology Ph.D. who contended that “Certain laboratories in the [WIV] have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally….”

He turned out to be right – as even the Biden administration has acknowledged.

Yet this specialist, Dany Shoham, also said that “In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.”

So no conspiracy-mongering there, either.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, as Kessler noted, has been widely accused of “repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.” But as already made clear, many non-fringe-y types had been making similar statements, too, by the time he spoke out in late January.

Moreover, all Cotton said at various time then and in mid-February was:

>”…Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

>”…super-lab is just a few miles from that [Wuhan seafood] market. Where did it start? We don’t know.” He did add more provocatively that “China lied about virus starting in Wuhan food market.”

But he also argued that “burden of proof is on you & fellow communists” – a claim that was eminently unreasonable given the secrecy with which China had been handling virus-related issues and its outright intimidation of a Chinese researcher who had posted a paper charging that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan” and who (in Kessler’s words) “pointed to the previous safety mishaps and the kind of research undertaken at the lab. He withdrew the paper a few weeks later after Chinese authorities insisted no accident had taken place.”

>And on February 9, after Beijing called his remarks “absolutely crazy,” Cotton tweeted the following description of four possible virus origin scenarios:

“1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (e.g., they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are ‘theories’ and certainly not ‘conspiracy theories.’ They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence.”

Sorry, but there’s no fear-mongering here, either.

But how did the scientific community respond? Twenty-seven of its members published a statement in The Lancet declaring: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” Scientists, they continued “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”

This statement, however, suffered fatal conflict of interest flaws in that, as Kessler writes, “it was drafted and organized by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which funded [coronavirus] research at WIV with U.S. government grants.” That is, the statement was the product of someone who had everything to lose either if a naturally occurring virus leaked from a lab in a country whose dodgy safety procedures were no secret, or if this lab had – and possibly in cooperation with the Chinese military – created this pathogen and lost control of it (or, as indeed currently seems less likely, at least to me, let it loose).

And although the 27 signers of Daszak’s statement certainly didn’t represent the entire U.S. or global virology or bio-sciences communities, evidently no one in these larger communities’ ranks thought to point out Daszak’s thoroughly compromised position. (Unless – improbably – none of them knew anything about his relationship with the lab?). Even more damningly, neither National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins or U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony S. Fauci (who approved these grants) called out Daszak, either.

Nor were Daszak and the other signers (three of whom have now endorsed investigating the lab leak theory) the only scientists smearing all lab leakers. Last week, a USAToday probe of Fauci’s role in the early stages of the virus origins debate showed that Kristian Anderson, an infectious disease expert at California’s Scripps Research Translational Institute belongs on the list, too. And again, Fauci himself maintained a conspicuous silence.

It was Anderson who first alerted Fauci at the end of January, 2020 to the possibility that the virus might have been a human creation. He subsequently changed his mind – which is perfectly fine, except that his own explanation for the switch contains some contradictions – but for some reason, Anderson wasn’t content to set forth his own views. Just a few days later, in very early February, according to USAToday author Alison Young, he was “telling another group of scientists” that “suggestions of engineering [were] ‘fringe’ and ‘crackpot’ theories.”

Indeed, Anderson went so far as to suggest to the top career U.S. government science officials drafting a letter on the virus (including its origins) that they “be more firm on the question of engineering. The main crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case. Engineering can mean many things and could be done for either basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done…”

Anderson continued, “If one of the main purposes of this document is to counter those fringe theories, I think it’s very important that we do so strongly and in plain language….”

To the credit of the government scientists (and possibly Fauci, who was involved in the drafting) Anderson’s proposals were rejected. But as the controversy over the virus’ origins continued, and scornful dismissals of the lab leak theory hardened into conventional wisdom, instances of the scientific community, especially inside U.S. government, warning “Not so fast” simply can’t be found. In fact, as detailed in Kessler’s timeline, the only such examples from the professionals that appeared in public during this time came to the in the form of research outside the federal government explaining why the lab leak theory retained varying degrees of plausibility. 

As I’ve previously written, I’m fine with “following the science” when dealing with crises like the pandemic – though not with leaving policy decisions with far-reaching and gigantic ramifications outside science to this particular group of specialists.  But if “the science,” or at least the current group of government officials and advisers, wants continued major input, a much better job will need to be done in carrying out what should a priority responsibility – recognizing and encouraging legitimate scientific debates.  That is, they’ll need to “follow the science” and the actual evidence themselves, instead of simply parroting conventional wisdoms and especially narratives whose origins require thorough investigations themselves.