The story of the alleged laboratory escape (“lab leak”) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been shopped by the Trumpies, mostly Mike Pompeo, since early in the pandemic. Its form has varied, sometimes a bioweapon, sometimes not, but there has been a concerted effort to get the story into the media. Thanks to the useful idiot bros, Pompeo and his minions, using Bannon’s tactics, may have finally succeeded.
On Twitter, John Culver (@JohnCulver689), whose bio says he is a retired intelligence officer, pointed out a Daily Beast article from June 2020, debunking a report by a Pentagon contractor. When I read it, I vaguely recalled the claims of changing car traffic around the Institute indicating that a leak had occurred. The claim was ridiculous enough that I didn’t pay much attention to it.
Peter Jacobs (@past_is_future), whose bio says he is a climate researcher, offered a longer set of analyses. He points out four attempts to shop the story this year.
That whole thread is worth reading. It covers some of the material I’ve covered recently and points out that it’s Murdoch media in the US and Australia that have helped launder the story. He also mentions David Asher, who turns up in Christopher Ford’s open letter (also here) and the Vanity Fair article that depends on him and other unreliable sources.
Ford was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation under Donald Trump. He also served in that part of the State Department under George Bush. He actually knows something about the job, which was unusual in the Trump administration. Although I disagree with his policies, I felt some relief when he was appointed in contrast to the know-nothing wreckers Trump appointed in other agencies. But it turns out that was not the whole story.
A Soviet practice that Trump picked up was to put someone in charge of an agency and then put “minders” below them. The Communist Party ideologue was often the second person in an agency. Something like that may have happened to Ford.
His open letter documents his difficulties with Tom DiNanno and David Asher in January 2021. He does not say how they arrived in his agency, although Ford says DiNanno admitted that, although Ford was nominally his boss, he was acting on instructions from another official in State, who took his instructions directly from Pompeo. Ford says he has no way of knowing whether this is true, but it is a heck of a thing for a subordinate to say to his boss.
A month or so earlier, Ford had tasked them with forming “an ‘expert vetting group or process’ that would involve real scientists and intelligence experts” to evaluate claims “before going public with dramatic steps such as having Secretary Pompeo announce that it was ‘statistically’ impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to be anything other than the product of Chinese government manipulation, sending ‘demarches’ to foreign governments with this theory, or writing up China for having violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in connection with COVID-19.” Apparently that was what DiNanno and Asher wanted to do in December, just before Trump was to leave office.
Ford wanted to know from DiNanno and Asher why the claims had not been subjected to peer review and why they were “running around the interagency spreading these allegations.” His argument to them is that of a responsible government official: Before going public with claims, one must make sure they are correct or risk deep embarrassment. DiNanno’s claims went even further – that SARS-CoV-2 was a genetically-directed bioweapon. Ford’s response to that is “uh, wow.”
DiNanno and Asher bypassed experts in Ford’s department and other parts of the Department of State, as well as the Intelligence Community. A panel of experts was convened on January 7. The “statistical” claim seems to have been a Bayesian analysis done by someone who had never done a Bayesian analysis.
Further, “this statistical analysis is crippled by the fact that we have essentially no data to support key model inputs.” The expert panel tore it apart.
Ford’s letter is intended to justify his actions in the light of accusations published in the Vanity Fair article. He claims, with documentary evidence, that DiNanno and Asher were pressing hard to get a sensational story out about SARS-CoV-2 and to follow up with diplomatic actions against China. All this took place in the earlier parts of the timeline provided by Peter Jacobs and in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Ford may also be trying to distance himself from Pompeo and the Trump administration.
Does the dishonesty of Pompeo and his minions disqualify the idea that SARS-CoV-2 might have entered the human population through laboratory escape? Of course not, but it is necessary to say this to avoid accusations from the bros. But it seriously calls into question the sources for many an article.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Chetan Murthy
Cheryl, it doesn’t *disqualify* it, but it *is* cause for good-faith observers to discount *all* so-called evidence coming from that source and allied sources. I mean, ad hominem is a perfectly good argument against a thesis, in the sense of “this guy has a history of pushing bogus theories, so over time, we’ve learned to discount anything he says, and wait for actual, y’know, evidence”.
AFAICT, the only “evidence” we have, is being pushed by these bad-faith jokers.
cmorenc
IF the Wuhan lab had, for the sake of argument, been doing some sort of genetic manipulation research on the COVID virus, wouldn’t they have also maintained an unaltered “natural” source / control sample? And if so, it would have been possible that IF a lab leak indeed did occur, it was from the “natural” source sample rather than from a manipulated batch. This is a potential alternate explanation for the source of the virus being consistent with coming from the wild rather than manipulated franken-stock, regardless of whether the purpose of the manipulation was for benign vs bioweapon research? Because under this scenario, it wasn’t a manipulated sample that leaked.
Not saying here that the actual source was the lab rather than from direct animal-to-human transmission from the wild. Just posing a plausible possibility why samples from a lab leak might be a match for a natural origin rather than a bio-manipulated origin. Of course, Pompeo and his minions were Hell-bent on pushing the genetically manipulated for sinister purposes explanation, rather than any objective evaluation of plausible possibilities.
Xavier
This is a vitally important story, especially if you’re trying to divert the conversation from why 600,000 Americans are dead and what we ought to be doing differently next time.
Cheryl Rofer
@Xavier: Exactly. It also diverts attention from the vaccine successes that Biden has brought us and that we are bringing the pandemic under control in the US. Now Biden is getting vaccines out to the world.
Baud
Thank you for all your work on this, Cheryl.
Chetan Murthy
@Cheryl Rofer: None of these jokers are actually interested in the truth. Their sole goal is to beat up the other team, get their base enraged.
Mike in NC
The Orange Clown first went to Moscow in 1987 to beg for funds. He must have instantly been tagged as a ‘useful idiot’ by the KGB and later the FSB/GRU.
Trump was eager to reward anybody willing to kiss his fat ass with a job, no matter how lacking in qualifications they were.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: You’re welcome. I had made a decision not to get involved in this, but when the bros started spreading the disinformation, I figured more was needed. Plus I had a couple of reporters asking about it, so I had to get educated.
Chris Ford’s letter sent me over the edge. It’s really newsworthy that someone in his position would publish something like this, and it’s also an account of how Pompeo’s operatives worked in the State Department.
Chetan Murthy
@Mike in NC: I remember this practice being written-about at the time. E.g., that Tex Drillerson (Rex Tillerson) had had such a minder foisted on him. Even at the time (early/early in TFG’s reign) it was described as “installing loyal commisars to keep secretaries and other leaders on the straight-and-narrow”.
I also remember at least one incident (again, early on) where an appointee got into a verbal fistfight with the minder. I forget which one it was, but ISTR it was about health care.
StringOnAStick
tRump told us it would go away in a few weeks, that China’s leader was doing a great job, and on and on. So now his minions are pushing a biological weapon angle. Whether it was a bioweapon, a lab escape, a cold that will go away in a few weeks, or the kind of animal to human transmission that was the source of many pandemics in the past, the fact remains that tRump and his band of ideological idiots totally and completely failed in their response, hence they must kick up as much chaff as possible to try to deflect criticism from the orange moron. It only works if the MSM allows themselves to be the propaganda channel that normalized it and I’m hoping they are smarter than that. It might be quite naive on my part, but I’m still hoping.
TKH
The worst really are full of passionate intensity. Luckily, in this instance the best do not lack all conviction. Thanks Cheryl!
Feathers
There is a new way of doing media literacy – instead of “looking at the facts,” you look at who is saying it. Probably need to balance the two approaches, but starting with who is saying the virus was out of a Chinese lab is probably the better option.
Another Scott
@Feathers: Something that I think is an additional useful technique:
Compare the commentary/reporting on a scientific topic with what the actual subject-matter experts are saying. If they don’t match, then the c/r is misleading and likely being pushed by someone with an agenda.
(I put in the qualifiers because c/r on economics/law/politics/non-science often matters of emphasis/opinions/starting with different priors, not necessarily an attempt to deceive. The hard sciences are (or should be) different.)
AFAIK, no experts on SARS-CoV-2 are saying that escape from the lab is as likely as via zoonosis. The lab escape idea is all being driven by non-experts.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Feathers: I remember when Pons&Fleischmann came out with cold fusion, they were given a respectful hearing, b/c they were ostensibly solid electrochemists. People tried to repro; no dice. People tried again; no dice. Eventually, it died down. Then, in 1994(-ish) they published another paper, making the same claims. A condensed-matter physicist friend walked me thru it, and observed that basically nobody was paying it any mind. The first paper
In science, your history matters. That second paper was in “Physics Letters”: my friend assured me that that wasn’t a primo journal.
LosGatosCA
A Soviet practice that Trump picked up was to put someone in charge of an agency and then put “minders” below them.
Bush/Cheney followed the same practice. Colin Powell even had real time minders that felt empowered to commandeer interview sessions to cut his camera time.
nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna4992866
IIRC, Powell also restricted his own travel (beyond his wife’s needs) because he was concerned about what would happen at State while he was not around.
Chetan Murthy
@LosGatosCA: Another timely reminder that everything we hate about TFG’s admin, the Bushies did first.
Xavier
@Cheryl Rofer: The vaccines are a miracle, but we need to be prepared for no miracle next time, which means test, isolate, and treat.
debbie
@Mike in NC:
This gives Trump more credit than he deserves for strategic thinking. I think Putin instructed him on this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin knew who should be the minders.
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
Absolutely this. People have to be taught about many of the common fallacies because they actually form good mental shortcuts when someone isn’t trying to pull one over on you. Judging people’s credibility is absolutely a worthwhile way of weighing evidence when you don’t know enough about a question to judge it directly. If all the people pushing a theory are well-known liars, it really does call the theory into question.
Feathers
@Another Scott: Yes, that would be the second step, not just who’s saying X, but what would be Y, and who is backing that side of the story?
It is difficult, because There are are so many areas in which the subject-matter experts are wrong. But you do have to take what the subject-matter experts say and refute them when you are going against them.
Roger Moore
@Feathers:
The problem is knowing what the facts are when different people disagree. Ideally, the reporter would understand the issue well enough to judge who was telling the truth, but our media seems to lack competent reporters, so they’ve devolved into repeating what different people are saying without trying to figure out if they know what they’re talking about. Judging who is more likely to be telling the truth based on their track record would be a big improvement.
Feathers
@Chetan Murthy: I knew a professor who went full cold-fusion in the 1990s. We were kind of polite about it, being non-scientists. But you could see that he was not taking not being taken seriously well.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
That’s about the nicest possible way of saying this. Non-experts? Most of them have less than zero knowledge anywhere near expert. Most of them have as much knowledge of this as Bullwinkle has of rocket science.
Bill Arnold
@cmorenc:
If a tiger escapes from a zoo, it is called a tiger leak?
(“escape” is the term of the art. “leak” is a term of the propaganda arts, in this case. Probably.)
Bill Arnold
@cmorenc:
Answering the question more directly, the risk of transmission from an animal reservoir (which, since its China, could be tightly packed animals in a large farm) to one or more humans taking zero biosafety precautions (mask up! wouldn’t want to catch a cold from the raccoon dogs! HaHa!), is probably orders of magnitude higher than transmission to a human from samples (or even infected animals) in a lab that has biosafety precautions at even mid level. Also, there were fresh-enough memories of SARS (v1) to boost peoples’ seriousness.
Has anybody published an attempted quantitative comparison of of the risks?
Parfigliano
@Ruckus: Bullwinkel was associated with Rocket Squirrel. I would defer to The Moose
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus:
Mooseberry bush!?
JCJ
@Parfigliano: Excellent point.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: Physics Letters isn’t a vanity journal, it’s legit, but the primo one for big breaking papers is Physical Review Letters.
Just Chuck
@Chetan Murthy: Ad Hominem is a formal fallacy of relevance. Even when the allegation is true, if it has no relation to the logical proposition, the argument is unsound. If one’s argument however is that their opponent ‘s motives should be viewed with suspicion, an argument attacking one’s opponent is perfectly valid and relevant.
Philosophy minor, logic was my favorite subject.
Bill Arnold
That Peter Jacobs thread is delightfully savage. (The linkages to the loathsome Mike Pompeo are a treat.)
Some links for the guy: Peter Jacobs, George Mason University
scholar.google.com/citations?user=rvXLyXUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
past-is-future.weebly.com/
(Thanks for the excellent top post, Cheryl.)
Fancycwabs
I’m continually disappointed that one of those useful idiots is Nate Silver.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@StringOnAStick: judy miller just got damp.
steve g
The talk about the actual escape from the lab, and the fact that the lab usually did not work with live virus because that is hard to capture and work with, made me realize that we are talking about the first case of a human catching COVID-19. So all the things that all of us now know about how the virus gets around would apply. It is transmitted by moisture in the air, in breaths or sneezes or coughs, more than on surfaces or fomites. A basic mask can stop it. It would be easier to catch from an animal than from a lab bench. We are all a bit expert now that there have been 175 million cases world wide. Catching it in a lab is not very likely.