The Lab Leak [TEASER]

Are we doing little Peter Michael intros for the bonus episodes? I think so. Okay.
Quick question before I do mine. How much of your discussion covers weird xenophobic sort of shit? Not terribly much, to be honest.
But feel free to make a xenophobic zinger. Do you have an anti-Asian American joke ready? Is this how you're telling me? No, no, no.
Okay.

Peter.

Michael.

What do you know about the lab leak theory?

Not much, honestly, but I am very impressed with Americans because we were able to turn a pandemic a little bit racist. okay so now that the zinger's out of the way tell me what you actually know about the lab theory what i remember is that in 2020 some people pointed out that it was pretty weird that the origin of COVID was in Wuhan, where there is an institute for studying such diseases, right?

Yeah.

That's as far as I ever got into looking at this.

And I have shut my brain off to it every other time I heard anything about it. Because to me, it does not matter whether this inadvertently escaped from a lab or inadvertently was spread at some market somewhere.
Right. I just, I can't bring myself in this day and age, Michael, with so much going on with cancel culture, I can't bring myself to care about things like this.
I do think the core argument underneath this episode, and probably why it's a bonus episode and not an episode episode, is that it doesn't fucking matter. It's interesting.
This is a once-in-a-century global pandemic. We should know how it started, it makes sense that everybody would want to know

the origins of this. But ultimately, America's pandemic response had nothing to do with whether it came from China or from Spain, or whether it came from a lab or a bat or a squirrel or a market.
Yeah. So tell me what is your understanding of what is the lab leak theory? Yeah there is a an institute of some sort in wuhan

and they study uh diseases such as covid19 and i guess at some point a scientist slipped

on a banana peel while holding a giant tray full of vials juggled it across the room and everyone

was like whoa and one vial popped off everyone watched in slow motion as it fell to the ground cracked and they were like oh no and that's how COVID-19 started did you watch outbreak at the beginning of the pandemic absolutely I did it's the thing where you know it zooms in on like the HVAC system. Yes.
And then Dustin Hoffman goes, it's airborne. That's what happened in Wuhan in 2019.
Yes. So our story begins in December 2019 with the first reports of what was at that time thought of as pneumonia.
There were like these weird pneumonia cases that were showing up in hospitals in Wuhan. The initial reports, the first Lancet report, showed that 66% of the cases of this weird pneumonia were directly linked to this market in Wuhan.
It's called the Huanan Seafood Market. It's known as like a wet market.
I don't really know where that term came from. I think it just sounds, I was going to ask you where that term comes from because it always felt to me like just a way to make it sound gross.
Yeah, exactly. It sounds like there's just like pools of standing water.
You're going to go to this market and everything's just going to be fucking wet. Yeah.
But it's like it's it's a sort of a normal, I guess, like urban market. It's like the size of a couple of football fields.
It's quite large. Wuhan is a city of 11 million people.
It's like bigger than New York. Yeah, it's massive.
Yeah, exactly. I love hearing about Chinese cities where it's a it's a sprawling nation within China and it's the 25th biggest city.
And then one thing I was not aware of until I started researching this was that the lab leak theory and the bioweapon theory basically popped up like five minutes after we started getting reports of COVID. The first American coverage of this is in the Washington Times, which is like a conservative tabloid, basically, which just like fully leans into the bioweapon explanation.
So their article starts out, the deadly animal born coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China's covert biological weapons program, comma, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst. This is the thing that they do in right-wing media a lot where they're like, this random guy says this inflammatory thing, we're going to write it up as if it's like newsworthy.
It then continues, Danny Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the Institute is linked to Beijing's covert bioweapons program. Quote, certain laboratories in the Institute have probably been engaged in terms of research and development in Chinese biological weapons, at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese bioweapon alignment.
At least collaterally. So that sentence is fucking gibberish.
That's the fourth paragraph of the story. But it's just like, oh, they've probably been engaged in like, oh, bioweapon alignment.
Like it just sounds sort of technical in the way that conspiracy theories often do. Engaged collaterally in bioweapon alignment.
How could you not believe him? On right wing Internet, this starts bouncing around and like to their credit, a lot of like the arch right wing blogs and forums were like, this is going to be the next global pandemic. Which is like what they say about every fucking thing.
Right. But like stop clock.
They happen to this time oh that must have felt good i know it's happening like we've told you that like something big was gonna go down and it's going down they were so hyped also once we get the genome of this new virus there's a couple weird preprints where like essentially random researchers just say like oh oh, we think this is engineered. So there's a really weird paper that comes out from some Indian researchers saying that it has similar features to HIV.
Okay. Which like isn't really true or like it's one of those things like viruses have various features in common.
Yeah. This just ends up fueling a bunch of speculation that this is like some sort of fucking super bug that it's like a mix of like the common cold and aids right that paper is eventually retracted because like other virologists look at it and they're like this doesn't make any fucking sense like this isn't a meaningful thing to say and so the paper is withdrawn but then it's like oh i guess you can't even ask questions right that just proves that the uh the global elite is trying to suppress the truth exactly so it's like then we get we start getting this like censorship.
You should be allowed to ask questions kind of narrative forming. Yes.
The real ignition of this is there's a paper that is written by two Chinese researchers that's called The Possible Origins of 2019 Coronavirus. And this basically posits like the lab leak theory.
This is the first like official paper proposing this. And it goes through all of these reasons why the market theory doesn't make any sense.
So they point out that like this couldn't have spilled over from bats because they don't even sell bats at that market. And there was some speculation at the time that people could have gotten this from eating bats.
And they were like, people didn't even eat bats in that part of China. It's sort of written as a debunker.
Like if you haven't really been following the scientific speculation, you might think like, oh, busted, like this doesn't even check out. But like, everyone had always said that they don't sell bats at that market.
And like, this is why people were looking for an intermediate species. Right.
It's the kind of thing that if you had been half paying attention might seem like this sort of big revelation. Right.
And also the thing that people had gotten it from eating animals was like one scenario, but it was more like just scientific speculation. Like there's a finite number of ways that a virus can jump from animal to human.
And like one of them is eating. So it's like, okay, that's on the table, but there isn't really evidence for or against it this time.
Sure. So this article is also retracted.
This continues to come up in lab leak articles now. They're like, what about the original report that was pulled? It's like, was wrong which is why it was pulled why is everyone saying that our theory is stupid yeah makes you think so then the theory catches fire in late february of 2020 when it is popularized by tom cotton the senator hell yeah so we are going to watch two clips of a Fox News interview with Mr.
Cotton. I love that he has the name of a children's book character.
Yeah. All right.
I'm clicking. So Maria, here's what we do know.
This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market. Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published or studied in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market.
The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market. So we don't know where it originated, but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that.
We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question

to see what the evidence says.

And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.

So this super lab that you refer to, this super lab is the only one of its kind.

And what do they do at this super lab?

It's unclear, Maria.

We have such laboratories ourselves in the United States run

by our military and large part done for preventative purposes. We're trying to discover

vaccines or to protect our own soldiers. China is obviously very secretive about what happens

at the Wuhan laboratory. Now, the Chinese ambassador called the notion of biological

warfare, quote, absolutely crazy, accusing you of trying to spread misinformation and panic

I'm not sure what that means. called the notion of biological warfare, quote, absolutely crazy, accusing you of trying to spread misinformation and panic.
What's your response there? I mean, we don't want to create panic, but at the same time, people need to be educated in terms of what exists in this region in China. Well, the burden of proof right now is on the Chinese Communist Party and the ambassador of China and his fellow communists.
Charisma of a fucking school shooter. I can't believe he put the onus on all communists.
Unfortunately, I'm going to be asking my mutuals on Twitter to fess up about what's going on over there. But then what is interesting to me about this is you can see that he's like he's flirting with it, but he's not saying it.
Right. He lets her ask a question about a bioweapon and he doesn't really correct her.
I mean, what he's saying is, well, we know one thing. It's that it didn't come from that market.
Exactly. And then we know another thing.
There's a giant virology lab right next door. He's letting you fill in the very obvious blank there.
The very obvious blank. And also what he's doing with the market theory is something also relatively sophisticated where he's saying, well, it had to get into the market before it came out.
Right. So we know the official description of the origin isn't true.
And on some level, he's correct about this. Like it had to get from bats to something else to get to the market.
Right. But he's stating this as if it like debunks the official origin story.
But like this is the official origin story. They get a lot of mileage here out of like the Chinese Communist Party won't tell us what's going on.
This is also this is also a conspiracy theory thing, right? Is that like you immediately move to the meta discourse. Why won't they participate in our research on this? Right.
It feels really obvious what he's doing here. Yeah.
He's going right up to the line of endorsing the conspiracy theory, but also fueling it. So what he's basically doing is like, I can't say that the CIA assassinated John F.
Kennedy, but I do know that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't in that book depository. It's also hilarious when he concedes that the US has labs like this.
Yeah. And then he says like, for defensive purposes.
Right, right. We would never do anything bad in the labs.
We have various labs that are identical to this one, although we use them for friendship. So this launches like the first wave of discourse around this conspiracy theory and a year later, another round of discourse.
OK, so I'm going to send you one of the most cursed paragraphs we've ever covered on the show. This is a summary of all of the pieces that came out, basically saying that, like, how dare you suppress the lab leak for so long? Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of esteemed thinkers.
It's a real who's who of this podcast. Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote that the Trump era, quote, created expansive pressures to describe more and more things without any ambiguity and shading and judge more and more right-wing claims preemptively.

Preemptively?

Brett Stevens argued that good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence,

not narratives.

Don't do narratives.

Megan McArdle at the Washington Post wrote that science came to mean, quote,

a demand that others subordinate their judgment to an elite approved group of credentialed scientific experts, unquote. Asked some tough questions.
Matthew Iglesias. I'm going to fucking lose my mind.
I know. I know.
I had to cut a couple because there were some more. I was like, man, we can't do too many of these.
If Andrew Sullivan weighs in, I'm jumping out of the way. Matthew Iglesias on Substack assailed a, quote, genuinely catastrophic media fuck-up and a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse policing.

I hate it when people police the discourse.