How many times am I going to write this story? Well, damfino, but if the Times won’t quit, neither will I. The latest provocation from the Gray Lady of West 35th St. or wherever the fuck the Times hangs its hat these days is David Quammen’s The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin. Here’s how Dave starts out his story:
Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree.
Okay, that’s not the most auspicious simile I’ve ever seen, but if you push past the initial fraughticity, Dave offers three “theories”: from wild animals, from a deliberate Chinese plot, or from an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab. “If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren’t the only one.”
Yeah, the whole thing kind of makes your head spin, and if it doesn’t, Dave tries his level best to make it do so, taking us “thoughtfully” through all three scenarios, earnestly laying out all the great difficulties involved in confirming any of them, and then backs out for the big picture, in an exercise of serious chin stroking—even involving, you know, poetry!
Certitude is an elusive goal and a high presumption, even for science, even for a director of national intelligence, even for the chairman of a select congressional subcommittee. Philosophers have recognized that, and so have novelists and poets. “I was of three minds,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds.” In the poem, Stevens found 13 different ways of looking at a blackbird. There are at least that many ways of viewing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and to do justice to the question, you’ll need, like him, to hold several possibilities in your mind at a time.
You can say that again, dude. But before we start counting blackbirds, I’d like to back up a little, to Dave’s previous paragraph, where he discusses the activities of that “chairman of a select congressional subcommittee” in more detail:
And then, on July 11, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Representative Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, convened a hearing at which he and colleagues interrogated two scientists, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, about their authorship of an influential 2020 paper that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine. That paper was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The tenor of the hearing was foretold by its own announced title: “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up,” and the proceedings that day consisted of accusation and defense, without shedding any new light, let alone yielding certitude about the origin of the virus.
Now, the only problem with that paragraph is that the last sentence, the “tenor of the hearing” sentence, is a motherfucking lie.1 The hearing shed a lot of light on a coverup, the coverup contained in the article in Nature Medicine, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which was an extra helping of crapola cooked up under the leadership of, yes, Dr. Anthony Fauci to conceal the fact that the “accidental lab leak” theory was quite plausible, despite all the authors’ claims to the contrary. As Nate Silver puts it in his Substack blog
Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists2 — in particular, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.
We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level). [Links are available in Silver’s original.]
At the hearing dismissively dismissed by Mr. Quammen, two of the paper’s authors, Drs. Andersen and Garry, insisted that, all their damning emails and Slack messages to the contrary notwithstanding, they certainly hadn’t, well, lied about their true beliefs, which they clearly had, as clearly presented in this story in Public by Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, and Michael Shellenberger. For example, here's what Dr. Andersen said in February, 2020, before writing the paper: “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”—language that somehow did not make it into the article, which instead concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Did Dr. Andersen misrepresent his views both in the Nature Medicine article and before the committee? I’d say it was pretty friggin’ likely.
The Times, in its coverage of the hearing, generally pictures the event as a collision between two “world-famous virologists” and, well, Republicans—“Republican members of the panel tried in vain to lecture the virologists, sometimes making outright incorrect claims.” The Times doesn’t quote the “friggin’ likely” line, or anything else, except for one statement by Dr. Rambaut, to wit:
Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes.
The Times followed up:
Asked about the comment, Dr. Rambaut said in an email on Tuesday that he had been expressing reluctance to speculate that the coronavirus had escaped from a lab because there were no signs of it ever having been in a lab.
“We had no evidence from the genome that it was anything other than a virus from nature,” he said, adding, “Don’t go accusing people of things if there is no evidence.”
The thing is, what the good doctor is saying is that “since we have no evidence to prove that it escaped from the lab, that proves that it didn’t escape from the lab,” which is simply not true. Furthermore, assuming that Quammen’s summary of Dr. Rambaut’s words in the first paragraph quoted is accurate—that “he had been expressing reluctance to speculate that the coronavirus had escaped from a lab because there were no signs of it ever having been in a lab”—he’s pretending not to know that the Wuhan lab in fact had the COVID-19 virus in its possession, that the “escape” scenario was possible but unproven, rather than “disproven”. If COVID had first appeared in the U.S., and the virus had been under study in a lab near the scene of the outbreak, media coverage in the U.S. of a possible escape would have been overwhelming. And do you know what else is overwhelming? The evidence that Fauci, Andersen et al. conspired to avoid the Wuhan shit show, and they’re still lying about it. And so is the New York Times.
It is “sad” that anti-establishment conspiratarians like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, on occasion, supply more “truth” than their establishment cousins, who have surely a hundred times the resources and clout.
Afterwords
Few things make me bluer in the face than the Times’ habit of running these “big picture” pontifications whose whole point is to confuse and conceal rather than reveal. Recent outbursts on my part include Ben Smith’s latest post for the New York Times is not a column about “misinformation”. It is a column OF “misinformation”., and The New York Times, lost in a Metaverse of Misinformation and Yo, New York Times! Want to know who started the War in Iraq? Look in the goddamn mirror!
1. And I say that with certitude.
2. [Nate Silver’s footnote] I mention these four by name because they were both co-authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper and participated in a conference call with Frances Collins, Tony Fauci and others that the documents suggest was a turning point in how scientists’ beliefs about COVID origins were portrayed to the public.
