I am so sick of what the LA Times invaluable Michael Hiltzik correctly terms the zombie apparation of the claim that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan–and that hence all our woes are down to evil science, and even worse, evil Chinese science.
That is: the Wall St. Journal reported, and then everyone else picked up, that the subset of the US intelligence community housed in the Department of Energy has shifted from no view on the possible origins of the pandemic to one that holds with low confidence (remember that pharase) that it likely (how do you have a likely outcome with low confidence?–ed.) was the result of an accidental leak of SARS-CoV 2 from the Wuhuan virology lab charged with studying coronaviruses.
Here’s Hiltzik on the core claim:
The Journal’s latest “scoop,” to cite the laudatory description offered by the newspaper’s own editorial writers, follows the pattern of all other lab leak claims reported in the news media. It reports no new evidence, only a purported change of tone in the Energy Department’s viewpoint.
The article is based on a classified document that the Journal acknowledges it hasn’t seen, the gist of which was retailed to the Journal by “people who have read the classified report.”
The Journal said the Energy Department based its ostensibly changed viewpoint on “new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government,” but didn’t describe that new intelligence, nor did it identify the academic literature or outside experts the agency supposedly used.
As Hiltzik notes, that list of bona fides does not include any actual on-the-ground new evidence. Rather, as CNN briefly reported, “the new assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information from a House Republican Intelligence Committee report released last year on the origins of the virus.” That report is a breathless set of enraged claims about Chinese bioweapons research gone wrong, a bit of China baiting that turns on negative arguments: the absence of evidence is taken as evidence of guilt. All of the major outlets that I’ve read that have followed the Journal’s story all state that the intelligence community is unanimous in denying the possiblity that COVID is the result of a weapons program (which they should, given what the virologists have been able to show about the evolution of the virus)…so it seems as if Hiltzik’s bluntness is too gentle. Absent some receipts, the Journal–and, alas, too many venues picking up the story–is selling what it hasn’t got, actual new evidence of specific events at the Wuhan lab that allowed SARS- CoV2 to slip out.
The other major GOP effort last year to revive the “they-did-it” case came from Senate Republicans, who relied on a guy–American, who claimed to understand bureaucratic Chinese as a second-language-speaker better than almost anyone else in the world, including 1.4 billion Chinese folks. This was picked up and relayed as a decisive and original investigation by ProPublica, which damn well should know better, and Vanity Fair, whose history on this topic shows that they don’t. James Fallows took that one down in meticulous, polite, and devastating fashion. (I should say–I knew and interviewd (as an 8th grader!) John Stewart (Jack) Service, a top US China hand before and after WW II, and one of the handful of best Chinese linguists American government or academe could deploy. He would have laughed this GOP stooge off the stage, while weeping (again) for the nation that threw his talents away on the manure heap of McCarthyism.)
The TL:DR of this is that there is still no new information about actual events in Wuhan that supports a claim of a laboratory accident. That’s not to say it didn’t happen–the old saw about proving a negative remains in force. But the Journal’s original story and too much of the follow up coverage is fundamentally misleading, and is in some ways the perfect assay of what’s wrong with elite journalism today. The story turns on the quote: unnamed sources at the DoE say there’s something new on COVID origins, and the fact that they say it is sufficient to drive the story–independent of any journalistic responsibility to test the underlying plausibility of the claim.
Add to that the horserace frame of much of what’s followed–how this serves a Republican narrative and may be problemattical for Democrats, and you have death of the idea of the press serving the Republic by creating an informed electorate.
At a minimum, starting with the Journal, the piece should have reflected the implications of that “low confidence” assessment. Here’s Hitzik again:
What does the term “low confidence” tell us about the quality of the Journal’s “scoop”?
Here’s how the National Intelligence Council, the umbrella organization for the nation’s intelligence community, explained the term in 2017: “Low confidence generally means that the information’s credibility and/or plausibility is uncertain, that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytical inferences, or that reliability of the sources is questionable.”
That’s some recommendation!
A last thought: since 2020, when, in March, it was genuinely unclear how the COVID outbreak got its start, there has been a steady and impressive body of research that has accumulated around the a priori more likely explanation, that this disease, like so many predecessors, was a zoonotic transfer from another animal to humans. The entire chain of cause and effect isn’t there yet–but evidence on scales from the genomic to the organismic, to epidemiological disease detection in the wet markets of Wuhan itself has accumulated to support that account. At the same time, the early claims of clues to a lab origin have fallen (recall the “smoking gun” furin cleavage site argument. Good times!). All that’s still true. And the Journal and its remoras have shown their journalistic quality by ignoring those three years of accumulated context.
I’m peeved.
Over to y’all. This is an open thread, because almost anything is better than dwelling on the seemingly endless supply of stupid in our elite institutions.
Image: Carl Reichert, Mäuse, by 1918.
Bill Arnold
From an annoyed tweet I did today, “lab leak” is a propaganda term, chosen for alliteration.
The term of art prior to COVID-19, and opportunistic anti-China propagandists (and other propagandists) constructing the narrative(s), was “lab escape”. As can be ascertained with a google scholar time window search:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22lab+escape%22+&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_ylo=&as_yhi=2019
If you do the same with “lab leak”, you’ll find a mix of other sorts of leaks from labs, like gasses, and time-traveling commentary involving COVID-19 that hitched a ride on old academic material somehow.
Jinchi
That’s what I was wondering as well. This reads very much like a rightwinger (potentially working in the DoE) “leaking” a report that considers the evidence ‘possible’, but completely unproven.
JoyceH
I’m still baffled about why the Department of ENERGY is even offering an opinion on the matter – how is this in their lane?
Another Scott
@Jinchi: Or, the “source” could simply be lying. Worked for Bill Barr, nicht wahr??
Grr…,
Scott.
dexwood
We are a racist, fucked up, religous country at our center. We don’t shine on a hill, we merely think we do. Sorry to post & run as I so often do. Elderly parents are in our care.
MomSense
I can accept that we don’t know, may not know for a long time, or may never know precisely how it started. In a rational world it wouldn’t matter in terms of mitigating the problem but we could hopefully learn from it.
The problem is that too many of us are making this world maddeningly irrational. They use the lab leak bullshit to justify their conspiracy theories about big pharma, Gates, Soros, Fauci, the boogeyman, the new world order, lizard people, etc creating this virus so they can force us to be injected with their nefarious vaccine.
I worry about what happens to our society if about half of the population continue to devolve.
Bill Arnold
So, a Wall Stret Journal article “based on a classified document that the Journal acknowledges it hasn’t seen, the gist of which was retailed to the Journal by “people who have read the classified report.””
I’m imagining a game of telephone, with wingnut players, all with priors epoxied firmly in place, entirely unfalsifiable. With bad faith in the mix, plus possibly some lying.
Bill Arnold
@JoyceH:
The Department of Energy (DOE) runs many (17?) National Labs, some of which do biological research. Including a lot of computational biology. A lot of that research is unclassified/public and published in open literature.
ColoradoGuy
@Bill Arnold: The Wall Street Journal: the slightly more respectable print cousin of Fox News, both owned by the notorious Murdoch family.
brantl
@Bill Arnold: what the hell is “computational biology”, other than an oxymoron?
ETA: never mind, this is another thing that has been misnamed, that should be biologically related computation, and then it is clear what the hell it is. Jesus, people are murdering the language.
CarolPW
@MomSense: They are dying faster than us, so that’s something.
tobie
Leaks on a classified report that can’t be verified … hmm, disgruntled employee and likely GOPer feeding news to a known conservative outlet. How many times do we have to go through this? Wolf Blitzer kept on repeating tonight, New evidence COVID came from a lab leak. Aaargh.
Bill Arnold
@ColoradoGuy:
My typo “Stet” may have been my father’s ghost introducing a typo. He did renovations on this building and JP Morgan Co insisted that the bomb scars remain: Wall Street Bombing Scars – Manhattan, New York – Unrepaired walls from a 1920 anarchist bomb attack.
(Stet: “an instruction to ignore a marked alteration on a printed proof.”)
brantl
@MomSense: Darwin’s blade, it cuts finely.
Suzanne
Yeah.
As I noted yesterday, both of the likely explanations — an accidental lab leak or zoonotic transfer at the wet market — both of them reflect poorly on the Chinese government. As does the lack of international transparency. So if the GOP wants to get their hate on, they can do so without forcing themselves into knots to believe lies.
I want to know where the virus came from, but not to further an agenda. I think it’s part of the bearing witness to the suffering it caused.
Mike in NC
How many “Was COVID just a hoax?” hearings will Republicans waste time and taxpayer money on?
TEL
Thanks for writing about this Tom.
Once upon a time in my previous life I worked for the DOE lab that may be employing the scientist who wrote the top secret “report”. For all of you wondering how DOE and/or FBI (which wrote a similar report with higher confidence than DOE) can plausibly write these assessments it’s because these agencies (often jointly – meaning the same scientists who work at DOE are also funded by FBI money) are tasked with “bio terror” related assessments. I worked on some of these projects back in the day that anthrax was the most heard about biological threat. Do these scientists have the necessary expertise to evaluate the genetic origins of the Covid virus – probably not, but when you’re a soft-money funded scientist, you take the grant money where you can get it, and write up reports that try to bridge the gap between scientific accuracy and pleasing your funding agencies. One of the dangers of not having a strong wall between government-funded scientists and politics, with the result of releasing a report about a “low confidence” assessment as if that means it’s actually likely to have occurred. When you’ve worked in this area, you learn that “low confidence” is shorthand for “extremely unlikely”. And as politicized as some parts of the DOE are, my experience was that the FBI was even more so, as there’s a wider gap between actual science and the agency’s mission at the FBI than at the DOE.
japa21
Remember, this report was one of several requested by the Republicans in the House. Interesting that this is the only one that “leaked” to the press, and to a Murdoch publication at that.
StringOnAStick
@TEL: Thanks for that enlightening explanation; your assessment makes sense.
Fear makes people stupid, and that’s how the GOP and their fellow travellers like ’em.
Cameron
Why don’t we economize and wrap up all the stupid war-mongering nonsense from The Leader Of The Free World in one meme? How about a COVID-weaponized balloon that the Chinese have developed to give to the Russians to use in Ukraine? Have I left anything out here?
Yutsano
Ah enough of this bullshit.
How is magnificent Tikka and mischievous Champ? Those are much more important questions.
gratuitous
NBC Evening News had a segment on this, with a big emphasis on the “likely” aspect, then a quick skip over the anonymous sources that leaked the report, and finally, just before ending the story, a grudging acknowledgment of the “low confidence” conclusion. It was a jolting glimpse of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party posing as hard news.
Matt McIrvin
@MomSense: There’s a useful concept with a bad name, the “motte-and-bailey argument” (the name comes from the design of medieval castles)– you have an excessively broad but flimsy argument (the bailey) and when challenged you retreat to a narrower but more defensible version (the motte).
The “lab leak” story is really one of these. The motte is “we can’t prove COVID didn’t start with a lab accident”. The bailey is “COVID is a Chinese bioweapon bankrolled by Anthony Fauci and the traitorous liberals at NIH”. The big media discuss the one in neutral terms as if the rocket fuel driving it didn’t come from the other. It is maddening.
Dan B
@JoyceH: DOE does a good bit of biology research according to people who have done biological research for the DOE. They also have many supercomputers. The biological research started as radiation research and expanded according to some accounts.
trollhattan
I don’t know if “lab leak by sciency fuckups” is any worse than “transmitted from caged live bats or pangolins or whatevs to shopkeepers and their customers” in terms of putting the PRC in a bad light WRT SARS-CoV-2. That they were overly obtuse and defensive at the outset, and that we responded months late, having tossed the Obama admin handbook on “How to handle a damn viral pandemic, yo” because Obama, can be applied to both nations with equal zeal.
Honestly do not know what is gained by relaunching the lab scenario every few months.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: They don’t actually care about the Chinese government at all; they’re trying to find a way to pin blame for COVID on Anthony Fauci, so that he goes from hero of the pandemic to its central villain. There are always the mutterings about NIH funding Chinese “gain of function” research. That’s what this is mostly about.
SpaceUnit
Why the fuck would any government agency feel the need to go public with “low confidence” speculation? Goddamn.
trollhattan
In other science news, because recycling plastic materials remains a far-off dream, while we drown ourselves and the planet in plastic materials, turning it into fuels has its attractions. But, might there be downsides?
Superfund action level for environmental response is 1 additional cancer death per 1,000,000 population, so 1 in 4 is horrifying and kind of, well, not legal. But Mississippi, am I right?
oatler
@Suzanne:
zoonotic transfer at the wet market
Now I’ve seen everything!
NotMax
First crack at making a soufflé?
;)
NotMax
@oatler
Dibs on naming an imaginary band Zoonotic Transfer.
:)
Jackie
@Mike in NC: Is that a rhetorical question?
Because the obvious answer is until the twelfth of never.
JoyceH
@Bill Arnold:
Huh. I did not know that. Nuclear research yes, but biology surprises me.
steve g
An example of “high confidence” information would be an interview with an institute employee who described how he spilled the virus and then high-tailed it over to the wet market so it would spread from there and not get the institute in trouble. Once verified it would be high confidence because it definitively established what happened and other reports are not likely to replace it as the explanation.
So low confidence means they don’t have one of those. The information they have gotten is compatible with zoonotic origin, but also with a lab leak. None of it is definitive, so all assessments are low confidence. “It’s A, unless a new report comes out showing that it is B, in which case it is B.”
I suspect someone with connections wanted a report that it was a lab leak, and since it is all low confidence status anyway, somebody at DOE obliged them.
VOR
@Matt McIrvin: I maintain that Fauci’s real sin was taking away press attention from the Great Orange Leader.
Ruckus
@ColoradoGuy:
he slightly more respectable print cousin of Fox News
So slightly that it is basically unmeasurable. As others have said, both owned by the same ass.
SWMBO
I love Beau of the Fifty Column. He explains so much so easily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8jxjNKvxrI
MrKite
@Bill Arnold: DOE does not have oversight of ANY BSL-4 facilities.
J R in WV
Plus, no matter how the virus first comes into the human population, it was while Trump and his RWNJs were in charge. So how can any report cast shade on Democratic politicians?
Last again? I’m OK with that!
YY_Sima Qian
Great write up Tom! Alas, lies have gone around the world before truth has tied its shoelaces.
The “lab leak” will be laundered again & again, until a future GOP president & Congress uses it as part of the justification to fight a hot war with China.
& Chinese propaganda will continue to troll about “Fort Dietrich”.