The lab leak

Well now that both Yglesias and Leonhardt have written on the matter somehow it feels I should say something here.  I’m actually pretty sure this is the first time I’ve written about it.  Yes, it may have “leaked” from a lab, but the idea that it was actually engineered and is part of some Chinese plot has always been and remains, extremely unlikely.  And, I’ve always been far more interested in the virus, the disease, and how we’re dealing with it than how it got here.  As Yglesias put it:

A separate question that’s less clear to me is what follows from this in terms of policy. You can break this down into three questions:

• Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point back in February 2020 — what would we have done differently?

• Suppose definitive evidence arises this Friday that the virus in some sense came from the Chinese lab — what would we do differently going forward?

• Or suppose definitive vindication of the zoonotic origin theory emerges — what difference would that make?

I think in all three of these cases, the answer is basically that nothing would be different.

That struck me as about right when I read it yesterday.  Today, Leonhardt nicely summarizes Yglesias and also addresses what would be different:

Why does it matter?

The virus’s origin does not affect many parts of the fight against Covid. The best mitigation strategies — travel restrictions, testing, contact tracing, social distancing, ventilation and masking — are still the best mitigation strategies.

But there are at least three concrete ways, in addition to the inherent value of truth, in which the origin matters.

First, if the virus really did come from a lab, an immediate airing of the details might have led to even faster vaccine development and more effective treatments. Second, a leak that caused millions of deaths could lead to widespread change in laboratories’ safety precautions. Third, confirmation of a leak would affect the world’s view of China — and would put pressure on China to bear the burden of vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.

Even here, I think the best you can come with is, “ehhh, a little different.”  Yeah, no, basically hardly any faster on the vaccines.  Likewise, pretty skeptical that we’d have China leading the charge to vaccinate the world.  Also, even if this is what happened, what is the scenario where China admits this and we can have 100% confidence it happened?  Better lab security?  Sounds great, but, I’d like to think even an uncertain, but plausible case for a lab leak would lead labs to re-think their safety protocols.

What’s actually most interesting about this is what a massive failure of the media this is.  Leonhardt’s summary:

Why all the dismissals?

It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.

Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.

In the U.S., one of the theory’s earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China — and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didn’t happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.

The media’s coverage of his argument was flawed, Substack’s Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cotton’s comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that “very unlikely.”) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something — and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it — the idea had to be wrong.

The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. It’s a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.

And more from Yglesias:

What happened is that Tom Cotton raised this idea in February in his capacity as a China hawk, and then again in March as part of a nonsensical attack on Joe Biden. He got shouted down pretty hard by scientists on Twitter, by formal institutions, and by the media. Then this kind of pachinkoed down into being a politics story where writers and fact-checkers who didn’t cover science at all “knew” that this was a debunked story that right-wingers were pushing for their nefarious ends. I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation…

The situation in January 2020

Looking back on the media fiasco side of this, it seems to trace back to statements Cotton made at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on January 30. This appears to have been a hearing with senior military commanders from U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Southern Command. I think talking about a virus outbreak in China probably sounded like a bit of a crank thing to do, but Senators say weird stuff at hearings all the time.

Cotton said that the Chinese government had been lying about the severity of the outbreak all month and that their story linking the outbreak to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market was dubious…

February 2020, inventing a “conspiracy”

Cotton’s statements did not get any immediate coverage, but several days later David Choi at Business Insider wrote them up with the headline “Republican senator suggests ‘worse than Chernobyl’ coronavirus could’ve come from Chinese ‘superlaboratory.’”

Choi’s piece is one of those things that happens on the internet when the story is totally accurate but also doing a lot of sensationalization for clicks. What Cotton said at the hearing is that the Chinese government’s official story about the seafood market was wrong, which was something that was at the time also being floated in Vox and The New York Times and Science and the Lancet. Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.

But that was the actual parameter of the debate; Fisher thought this illustrated a point about the abstract functioning of systems while Cotton thought it illustrated a point about the malign intent of a foreign adversary. Belluz, a science journalist rather than a foreign policy writer, entertained both interpretations as consistent with the facts. And it seemed like a fairly classic foreign policy sort of argument. Throughout history, hawks see malice and threat behind everything that happens, while more dovish people tend to see misunderstanding and confusion. You can imagine the Tom Cotton of 1914 talking somewhere in Vienna about the Serbian government’s obvious complicity in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand while the Max Fisher of the time says the difficulty controlling the Black Hand and its operations reveals the fundamental weakness of the Serbian state.

What Choi did was not exactly accusing Cotton of spreading a conspiracy theory about Chinese bioweapons, but just sort of locating his remarks as adjacent to other people’s conspiracy theories and misinformation:

Cotton was referring to China’s first Biosafety Level 4 lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which investigates “the most dangerous pathogens,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While Cotton qualified his remarks by saying “we still don’t know where” the virus originated, his comments come amid numerous conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins — including one that says the virus “originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.”

The amount of false information spreading across social-media platforms has prompted several companies, including Facebook, to limit the reach of such posts. In a statement, Facebook said it would display “accurate information” and notify users if they are suspected of sharing false or misleading information.

So now we have leaped from “everyone agrees the Chinese government’s claims were wrong but Cotton is an outlier in claiming they were deliberately wrong” to “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying. Then things blew up, thanks not so much to a Sunday show interview as to tweets about an interview…

A similar piece by Alexandra Stevenson in the New York Times is headlined “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.”

But again, the article is overwhelmingly about people who are not Tom Cotton saying something different from what Tom Cotton said. Stevenson’s piece is also a reminder that this was a different era of Covid politics, because one of the reasons she gives for doubting that it’s a deliberately engineered bioweapon (which again, is not what Cotton said) is that the virus isn’t really that big of a deal because younger and healthier people don’t have much to fear from it.

Okay, I’ll stop, lots more detail at Yglesias.  Tom Cotton is a bad man.  And almost surely too quick to blame China for all sorts of not-great ideological reasons.  But that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong or that questions about the lab leak are a “conspiracy theory.”  The media got this really wrong.

All sorts of fun discussion of this on twitter and I’m still leaning towards zoonotic origin, but, in the end, sure it would be nice to know, but, in the great scheme of the Covid-19 pandemic it just doesn’t matter that much because we do know that pandemics have arisen zoonotically in the past, they will again in the future, and we damn sure need to be better prepared next time.