COVID lab leak coverups, then and now
The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.
As these [COVID lab leak discussion] documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it.
I think I stopped completely trusting scientific authorities quite some time ago, and probably you did, too. And by “quite some time ago” I mean way before COVID.
But in another sense Taibbi is correct about the effect of COVID on my sense of trust, because if I really try to remember my attitude at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, I probably thought that the authorities would be at least a little more honest and forthcoming than they ended up being. However, quite early on I realized something was very amiss, and that there was a lot of panic-stoking going on, both by scientists, journalists, and government officials. It was pretty easy to see just by crunching the illness and death numbers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship – remember that? I do, because I wrote about it at length. I also reflected on those early musings in this post.
And so, because these things were relatively easy to see if a person actually looked at what was happening, I figured some sort of deception plus/or stupidity was going on in a lot of the reporting on COVID.
And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of the subject I could find on this blog is from April of 2020, which is pretty early. Here’s what I wrote back then:
You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.
But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.
Then I quoted this piece by Jonathan Turley:
When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.
Turley is not a research biologist, nor am I. But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political. One didn’t have to be a scientist to see that – plus, there were other scientists who said that the virus had a structure that made it likely it was the result of bioengineering.
So if reporters were fooled it was because they wanted to be, or were simply stupid, or both. Or perhaps not so many were actually fooled.
But back to the more recent revelations about what was going on among some scientists towards the beginning:
The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”
The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?
The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.”…
The scientists were responding to “higher-ups.” Although the identities of these “higher-ups” remain to be further investigated, the new documents and Congressional interviews suggest that the “higher ups” may be Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome trust, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, government agencies, and/or the intelligence community.
I haven’t read the source material of the original communications among the scientists, but you can find links to the fuller materials here.
I began to distrust the American Medical Association in the 1980s when I was a delegate to the convention. The AMA has two conventions 6 months apart. One is for scientific reports and papers. The other is for politics within the AMA. That one turned me off.
The origin in China was suspicious to me because China is sloppy about many things, including medicines now made only there. However, China is the source of the annual flu epidemics because of the commingling of ducks and pigs in so many peasant homes. I started to get more suspicious after the attacks on Trump and the furious denials of the lab leak.
I still wonder if this was a crude attempt at biological warfare that went awry in China.
I still wonder if this was a crude attempt at biological warfare that went awry in China
==
A dry run.
I think I stopped completely trusting scientific authorities quite some time ago
I was raised in a scientific family, saturated in the scientific method, hold an engineering degree and haven’t given up on scientific ‘authorities’. Unfortunately, there are two different sorts of those beasts. Those devoted to science and the scientific method, and those devoted to speaking for them in political circles.
The latter worship a false religion – fame or money or power or all three – and are frequently poseurs peddling their blasphemy in absolutely assured tones without a speck of the skepticism of the Method, and frequently backed by one or more ‘governing’ organizations. They appear all through the Twitter files. Unfortunately they’ve grown to dominate political ‘science’ because such vast amounts of taxpayer bakshish are available to them.
I don’t approve of lynch mobs, but some theatrical equivalent should be mounted to call them out. And they never would be missed, no they never would be missed.
I listened to the Taibbi / Kirn weekly broadcast this morning (highly recommended) and in the discussions of the internal communications between researchers that have come to light, Walter Kirn said something that I thought has not been mentioned very much, but gets right to the heart of the matter.
It’s bad enough that these research scientists knew that the lab leak theory had at least as much credibility as other theories; bad enough that many of them thought that it was potentially the most likely theory, because of the DNA sequencing and Furrin cleavage sites. It was bad enough that they decided, with mocking and arrogant disdain, to mau-mau the journalists, spread the ‘wet market’ theory as a unified front, and scorn all those who disagreed. All of these are contemptible and unprofessional behaviors, for so-called ‘scientists’.
What is unforgivable is that they censored, mocked, and silenced fellow scientists who were courageous enough to be truly scientific, as open-minded skeptics, questioning the evidence. The former group, the so-called ‘scientists’, did society a grave disservice by actively cancelling voices that they knew, or suspected, to be correct – other experts voicing theories that they, themselves had validated privately, within the group – damaging the reputations of people objective enough to be telling the truth.
That is unforgivable, destroying fully credible conclusions as if they were untruths or conspiracy theories, and going after reputations as a capper – because they changed the trajectory of an artificial narrative. And as Kirn points out, what we are missing here, are the the old-fashioned notions of ‘consequence’.
“The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years… is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority.”
Its not just loss of faith in scientists, journalists, and government officials. Its complete loss of trust in the medical establishment, every major company, the western global ‘elite’ and even the ’81 million who voted’ in 2020 for the most corrupt pResident in history. Most of whom will vote to be played for fools again…
I’ve come to the conclusion that almost everyone in charge of an institution (or within the camarilla of the man in charge) is a chronic liar, at least if there are enough employees therein to be organized in more than three layers.
the wuhan lab leaks, this was a level 2 which was closest to the market, and the rail station, the level 4 was across the river, so the WHO is compromised because of its chief owed his job to Xi, the CDC apparently was totally useless, despite one director that had tried to push it to follow actual science, of course NIH was silent even though they were complicit,
Well the Japanese did subject the Chinese to biological warfare in WWII and it seems that Xi and the CCP prattle on about scores to settle from hundreds of years ago. “All your base are belong to us” …..
What bothers me most is the betrayal of science. Science cannot prosper without honesty, it is the moral core of the profession. All the papers and lab work are just expensive trash without it.
I don’t think I’ve ever completely trusted science, but the emphasis was on the word “completely.” From the time I first went to college, I saw scientists acting as sadly flawed humans, but I saw their work as only flawed, not fundamentally corrupted.
COVID19, the BLM riots, and the pervasive politicization of academia have changed my point of view. It happened slowly, then all at once. Science was once the greatest achievement of postwar America. Now, it’s a thoroughly corrupt institution with totalitarian ambitions.
Of course, there are many scientists still doing good work, but now whenever I see a research paper, my first reaction is skepticism. Of course, we’ve long been in an era of super-specialized research, so resolving my suspicions would take weeks of my own research. That’s not practical. At best, I’d be left with little more than an educated guess. That’s what happens when an institution loses trust. Without trust, the scientific enterprise is worthless.
A more aggressive approach to retracting mistaken or fraudulent research has been underway for several decades.
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-massive-database-retracted-papers-reveals-about-science-publishing-s-death-penalty
25 OCT 2018 BYJEFFREY BRAINARD, JIA YOU
However, the massive fraud of the Covid era (this cover-up is not the only instance), as well as “climate change aka anthropogenic global warming — which used to be global cooling” involves so much more than just dishonest researchers usually working independently.
They are international conspiracies, by the very definition of the term.
noun
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
Case in point to my comment in re climate change:
https://redstate.com/beccalower/2023/07/22/imf-cancels-speech-by-nobel-prize-winner-in-physics-after-he-expressed-wrongthink-on-climate-change-n780425
The goal is not to convince people but to control them.
Bonus quotes from Sagan, who passed away in 1996.
(Was it really that long ago?!)
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/07/22/watch-carl-sagan-issues-prescient-warning-of-authoritarian-science-from-the-grave-n1712907
Not that he was necessarily immune from error himself, but he understood the theoretical danger of scientists letting their ideology dominate their research.
https://www.newsweek.com/arl-sagan-quotes-death-pale-blue-dot-astronomer-25-years-1661545
… or science, sadly.
Alas for Snow on Pine, Sagan doesn’t share your optimism regarding aliens visiting Earth.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
Or maybe he does:
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
Wow. A triple entry by AesopFan. THANKS for the BREAKING Clausen NEWS.
HE adds a newly prestigious voice to the already distinguished CO2 Coalition, which welcomes and celebrates the fact that rising carbon dioxide levels are greening the globe!
Here is a debate by two science guys, from The Soho Forum and held prior to the pandemic, posed as pro and con in this “Resolution: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wBDR-5ltVI
I believe the answer turns on whether or not CO2 levels are really the “control knob” for the average global temperature?
Who informs and educates? Who relies on oleaginous rhetoric and pop cultural pegs?
“…aliens…”
Not sure we can actually refer to them as such any more.
“Visitors from the great beyond”, perhaps…
(“Space tourists”?)
In any event, what are the chances that the relatively recent uptick in “Space Tourism” (incoming, that is) reportage… is just ANOTHER crafty “Biden” distraction?
Can’t have too many of those….
File under: All this evidence that aliens exist…and YOU’RE WORRIED about Joe Biden (& son. & family. & “administration”…)? Get a grip, you Trump chumps!
Related (keeping in mind this is, at least in part, a “fish story”)….
” I’m a UFO experiencer who is visited by ‘creatures with red eyes and glowing orbs’ – my stories are so compelling NASA and the CIA are studying me;
” A North Carolina man claims he is visited by glowing orbs every night of his life
He had his first encounter in 2007 while on a fishing trip at Cape Fear
READ MORE: Three witnesses will testify to Congress with UFO knowledge”—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12316755/Im-UFO-experiencer-visited-creatures-red-eyes-glowing-orbs-stories-compelling-NASA-CIA-studying-me.html
Should one assume that NASA and the CIA are not the only ones “studying” him…?
Come on schiff and schumer and ocasio cortez aren’t among the advance party, she even looks from innsmouth
Ironically, I watched a video that was supposed to be on literature which began with the speaker talking about how you must believe the “science” on “climate change” after reading this article.
The thing is the science does not always say what people think it does. There’s a dog food called Science Diet that claims to be based on science. It’s actually crappy food. My boss got her degree in pet nutrition and she hates it. Now she studied her subject for years. The vets that recommend Science Diet get three hours of training (and possibly kick backs from Hills.) I tend to trust my boss on this.
The thing people don’t understand is that opportunists cloak themselves in science to trick people. Fauci is not a scientist (least yet “the science”). Bill Nye is an engineer not a scientist. They are both treated by the mainstream media as experts. Actually, they are treated as a kind of priesthood. That’s the era we live in.
“…a kind of priesthood…”
Indeed, with the Corrupt Media as their trusted scribes and amenuenses and the state Deep Mafiosi providing the muscle.
Exactly right, a priesthood…
Death by a thousand cults….
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Speaking of Deep Mafiosi, this is what happens when the leadership loses control (and if you think it somewhat resembles the Democratic Party, well just keep it to yerself….)
“Mob wars: Montreal gripped by reckless and dangerous violence;
“The Montreal Mafia was once the apex of organized crime. There are few clearer signs of a desperate mob than messy public fighting”—
https://nationalpost.com/feature/what-the-reckless-violence-reveals-about-the-montreal-mafia
Been busy helping a daughter move yesterday. One thing I would add from “inside the ropes” perspective: much of the problem lies in pursuing lucrative grant contracts. I would say about 40% of physical scientists are more interested in career advancement than the actual science. And the way to do that is obtaining the big grant money.
And also from observation, the percentage of such “scientists” is much higher in the bioscience, and even higher for the med and pharmaceutical research.
“…But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political….”
That is THE WHOLE THING in a nutshell.
How DID one know that it HAD TO BE false?
– Because it WAS the narrative.
– And since it WAS the narrative one HAD TO ASSUME it was serving a political interest.
– And since it was adopted lock stock and barrel, and promoted and spread GLOBALLY by the CORRUPT MEDIA, one COULD ONLY assume that it HAD TO be ENTIRELY false.
– And the kicker? The whole “natural origins” crap was a Rube Goldberg-type “scientific” contraption that the powers that be PUSHED so hard, so relentlessly and so single-mindedly—DENYING ANY OTHER POSSIBILITY—that one KNEW it HAD TO BE false.
– Throw in the absolute denial and utter rejection of any other means—e.g., HCQ+zinc, ivermectin—to treat COVID other than the vaccination (aside from a some very costly options) and ONE KNEW that we were dealing with political chicanery masquerading as science.
– Nor would one want to forget Dr. I-Am-The-Science / Follow-The-Science / THEREFORE-DO-WHAT-I-TELL-YOU Fauci. Charlatan Extraordinaire…. Greatest Grifter Of All Time!
– How much did he and his wife make on it, remind us….
How do we know? Because they’ve been—and they’re still—lying about EVERYTHING.
(Which is, no, not a great situation….)
Pingback:Instapundit » Blog Archive » NEO: COVID lab leak coverups, then and now. And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of t
It’s disturbing how much fraud there is in scientific papers. Perhaps 50%.
https://reason.com/2021/07/09/how-much-scientific-research-is-actually-fraudulent/
@AesopFan:Bonus quotes from Sagan, who passed away in 1996.
The comment you quoted is not wrong, but in regard to subordinating science to politics Sagan was one of the worst offenders. Like Neil de Grasse Tyson, he was a celebrity more than a scientist, without much in the way of research credibility.
The tell was the vociferousness with which those suspecting a Wuhan lab leak were attacked. It wasn’t simply, “Nah, I don’t think so,” it was a spittle-flecked torrent of outrage.
Same thing with global warming, now known as “climate change.”
Those doing the ad hominem attacking of those suggesting the lab leak conjecture, and those skeptical of “climate change” are clearly emotionally invested, and hence not rational.
Ray SoCa
Note the heavy preponderance on biomedical research in the article you cited. Yes, probably some fraud. But more likely heavy reliance on statistical correlation. As far as I can see, the biomedical research keeps stumbling over the “correlation is not causation ” logical fallacy. Biomedical research tries to tease out cause and effect in an extremely complex system.
My previous comment comes into play though…..tons of grant money available even for questionable statistical studies. Get a grant, publish a paper with the “correct ” correlation, get more money for follow up studies before a peer shows first study not reproducible. And on it goes.
High energy physics has some similar issues as well as fusion research.
I began to be seriously unhappy in the early 90s when I figured out how many people in my PhD Program were cheating on their comprehensive exams. If they’d do that, I assumed they’d do it in research when the rewards were higher.
Then I got involved studying “nutrition science” and realized that essentially all of the ‘science’ that were supposedly basing our guidelines for what people should be eating was statistical crap.
But even earlier than that, in the 1980 period the scare over using aspartame occurred, and I found that to get the same amount per body weight that the cancer-prone mouse strain got, a 150 pound human would need to drink 50,000 cans of diet soda per day for 10 years. And that was supposed to be ‘science’.
yes, as an astronomer he was ok but when veered ex cathedra, like with the nuclear winter fraud, his endorsement of atheism, he lost the point,
AesopFan, having a soft spot for Sagan’s Cosmos as I do – it was one of my big formative influences when I was in grade school – I appreciate your contribution of his commentary on the role of science in a scientifically illiterate society. As much as I’ve come to disagree with his attitude toward religion in general terms, he had some wise things to say. I think back to Vern Ehlers, who was from my neck of the woods, as being one of the few scientifically literate people in Congress. He probably would have appreciated Sagan’s point.
Sagan was a super charming guy, a fine popularizer of science, but more of a propagandist than a scientist, as miguel cervantes points to.
John Lilly, a notorious scientist with great credentials who went fringe with dolphins and LSD, was friends with Sagan, but expressed concern with Sagan’s consumption of marijuana.
Which is in the ballpark with Keith Richard’s concern for Gram Parson’s heroin usage.
As far as I’m concerned, and I recall expressing it here in an early Covid topic, China is a very big place, but Covid just happened to emerge from the only Chinese city with a BSL-4 lab and one where research on such viruses was being conducted.
It’s like finding a murder weapon in someone’s backyard then wondering where in the rest of the country could the murderer be found.
It’s like the White House cocaine. I guess we’ll never know.
They don’t have to lie when deception will do the trick – and from the Lancet, no less.
https://www.samizdata.net/2023/07/the-sheer-dishonesty-of-it-all/
How many high school graduates – or college students, for that matter, could pick up on the sleight of hand.
>Actually, they are treated as a kind of priesthood.
This is a problem. The Left has turned “science” into a cult that has little or nothing to do with actual science, but wears its skin and speaks its language. This is what happens when you reject religion: You recreate it… poorly.
I’ve been a science nerd since I was old enough to read and I feel like we are living in a society which is extremely illiterate in science, but which has been conditioned to think it is actually very knowledgeable. It’s another aspect of Dunning-Kruger, and the politicians, and many of the scientists themselves use science merely as a hammer with which to beat their politics into our heads.
I’ve been saying for decades that I’ll take the global warming scaremongering seriously when the proposed solutions for it no longer inevitably boil down to more socialism. So far, this has failed to occur.
As far as COVID was concerned, I was never going to get a vaccine that was developed, “tested” and deployed in less than a year, and that opinion was absolutely cemented shortly after it was released. Thanks to the pandemic, I went from little trust in government and industry to absolutely no trust. I am now convinced that every single institution in our society is hopelessly corrupt, perhaps irrevocably so.
My distrust has increased so much that I would not be shocked to learn that SARS-CoV-2 was released on purpose and with the blessing of the U.S. Government. After all, Event 201 was a thing.
Its release was an accident; but once it WAS out there, it was ingeniously (er, make that “diabolically”) transformed into an OPPORTUNITY not to be squandered…and then exploited to the max.
(Never, as they say, look a gift horse in the mouth….or should that be, “Gotta make hay while the sun is shining”…?)
actually the lab closest to the market was a bsl 2, but all things being equal,
I never even considered getting the ‘experimental’ jab.
What Can The Smallpox Vaccine Disaster Teach Us About Spike Protein Injuries?
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/what-can-the-smallpox-vaccine-disaster
Insufficiently Sensitive,
1) all science and academia is broken. There is no quality process. At all. In any of the sciences. Science is a quest for grants and there are no grants for replication. Thus, no quality in science anymore.
2) I do believe in “lynch mobs”. The American Revolution was a lynch mob. When killers and oppressors walk free and the people have exhausted all peaceful means of redress, move on to the next tactic on the checklist.
@stan: Science is a quest for grants and there are no grants for replication. Thus, no quality in science anymore.
In the days before grants, science was carried on by academics on stipends and gentlemen of leisure, sometimes funded from the pockets of wealthy and/or noble enthusiasts. What, in your opinion, was responsible for quality of science in those days?
Since it is a given that stan knows “all.” It must follow that everything stan says is and in all ways true. Before stan there was only falsity and ignorance.
Stan, to say ALL science is broken is an extreme exaggeration. As I indicated before, some is, but there’s a lot of good work going on.
there are many fields where rigorous scientific investigation has been abandoned, is that good enough, could a norman borlaugh arise today,
The comment you quoted is not wrong, but in regard to subordinating science to politics Sagan was one of the worst offenders. Like Neil de Grasse Tyson, he was a celebrity more than a scientist, without much in the way of research credibility.
==
Sagan was, for the most part, a conventional research university academic. He was in the media at the time when a discrete appearance was seen by a much larger audience than it is today. He made an average of three television appearances a year between 1966 and 1996 and was a writer or director in about 18 television productions (mostly Cosmos, broadcast in 1980 in 13 episodes). His histrionic aspect no doubt embarrassed other professors, but he continued publishing in academic and professional journals and kept up his teaching schedule.
==
Tyson is a planetarium director in his mundane life. He has some research publications to his credit, but not many. He has since 1996 made about 20 appearances a year.
==
Sagan was known much more for a cultural stance than explicitly political ones. You could say the same about Tyson, though I think he’s less voluble on such topics.
Stan, to say ALL science is broken is an extreme exaggeration. As I indicated before, some is, but there’s a lot of good work going on.
==
The problem is who among the scientists holds positions in administrations and guilds.
I get the feeling that a lot of people aren’t actually reading the slack messages or email chains. I’ve gone through all 300 pages of it (140 + 163) and I don’t think they support Taibbi’s claims. I am generally sympathetic to a basic research lab leak possibility, but…
1) The notion that the Andersen et al. authors don’t believe their own paper is silly, and completely contradicted by the slack messages. One of the reasons that the Proximal Origins paper was suspicious to begin with was that the authors were concerned about the possibility of engineering, and then a couple weeks later wrote a paper dismissing that possibility. How could the scientists go from being so concerned to being convinced otherwise so quickly? Well, read the slack – it tells you. Taibbi and others are hypying early quotes where Andersen et al. are concerned and open-minded like we want them to be (and one later comment by Andersen post publication), but then burying their later conclusions after they evaluated more data. For example, EH – “I’m now very strongly in favor of a natural origin. The component bits of the virus are more or less there in a tiny sample of wildlife. Plus there is more to come… I don’t see why we need a lab origin on these data. 2/25, p 67. On top of plenty of comments that indicate they are very happy with the science underlying their paper, the authors continue to publish articles furthering the conclusions from the Proximal Origins paper.
2) The claim that Andersen et al were trying to deceive NYT’s McNeil is very bizzare. Scientific collaborators should always collaborate on media interactions. Scientists are usually wary of the media because journalists are notorious for misunderstanding or misrepresenting scientistific explanations. All the other authors just want to ignore media requests until after the publication. Andersen wanted to reply to McNeil because they have a prior positive relationship. Taibbi seems to be suggesting “using humor to deflect the fact [Andersen] is dismissing” McNeil is some sort of dangerous deception. It is ridiculous to suggest that declining a media request in a way that tries to preserve a working relationship is some sort of meaningful deception. Taibbi might be trying to suggest that the misleading claim is “the data is consistent with a natural scenario and inconsistent with a scenario involving any type of deliberate genetic engineering, including a bioweapon.” That claim is exactly what Andersen thinks, and it seems to be true. I can’t see what McNeil actually asked Andersen, but it doesn’t seem to be about the science, and biologists shouldn’t be speculating in the media about politics or intelligence agencies.
Taibbi seems to be motivated by the use of this paper to quash dissent of politically inconvenient hypotheses (and it was used for that purpose). I would argue that flawed “scientific” papers have repeatedly been published with the primary intended use as a marker for political arguments (like Elizabeth Warren’s 50% medical bankrupcy papers from a while back). Politicians like Fauci definitely wanted something to cite. Andersen et al. all have an evident baseline bias for how they want the paper to turn out. Based on the slack, though, it looks like they were trying to handle things as neutrally as possible.
Hey Neo, I’ve been reading your blog for a long time, but never commented before my previous one. I’ve always enjoyed your writing, so thanks for your efforts.
There are some interesting side notes in the slack:
1) Do you guys recognize the journalist Don McNeil? He’s the guy who the NYT fired for using the n-word on the rich kid journalist boondoggle a couple years ago.
2) The whole back story for this originated when an anonymous scientist contacted a journalist and told them that Andersen and Garry were convinced covid was engineered and then magically produced a paper a couple weeks later claiming the opposite. However, the email (included in the pdfs) seemed to be attempting to accuse Andersen et al of academic misconduct. Andersen’s paper had a huge scientific impact, but the anonymous scientist claimed that the real credit belonged to two coronavirus specialists who were in the big Fauci meeting in early February, and explained to the Andersen group that their lab leak theories were nonsense. The anonymous scientist claimed that Andersen simply adopted the coronavirologists arguments and wrote the paper. Either the anonymous scientist or a different collaborator of the coronavirologists was responsible for quashing the first version of the Andersen paper in peer review, in part because the paper might be used to bolster the lab leak interpretation. Andersen, for his part, claimed immediately after the Fauci + coronavirologists meeting that the coronavirologists were (deliberately?) misinterpreting his opinions, and that the coronavirologists were categorically unwilling to consider a lab leak possibility (partly out of self interest in protecting their field of study). Academic disputes are notoriously petty, but it is pretty funny to think that the coronavirus specialists who were so focused on minimizing the lab leak interpretation have inadvertantly provided everyone a reason to doubt the paper that is being used by politicians to minimize the lab leak possibility.
3) The “natural origins” hypothesis is based purely in an evolutionary biology perspective. Some very similar viruses have been found in bats, the weird receptor binding domain is in a pangolin coronavirus in the wild, and a partial furin cleavage site is in some coronaviruses. All of the pieces of the virus are present in nature (and we still have pretty limited wild virus samples), so the simplest explanation is that the virus originated naturally. The “lab origins” hypothesis is largely based on assumption, interpretation, and intelligence reports. China was freaking out like it was their fault, our government/research complex was overtly trying to control the narrative, WIV was doing some research that was in the same ballpark, and of course the intelligence reports that claim Wuhan corona researchers got suspiciously ill in November ’19. A big part of the disagreement is from people using different sets of data to draw their conclusions.