If Books Could Kill
If Books Could Kill
Bonus: The Lab Leak Goes Mainstream
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By popular demand we are releasing last month's Patreon bonus episode on the main feed! We chart the transformation of the lab leak from an unfounded theory promoted by right-wing cranks to an unfounded theory promoted by liberal journalists.
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Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
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Peter: That's you and everyone else in journalism.
Michael: What?
Peter: Little DM buddies. [laughs]
Michael: Do you not DM buddy with other journalists?
Peter: No.
Michael: What? Really?
Peter: They don't talk to me. I don't talk to them. It's called respect.
Michael: [laughs] You're not in group chats with Marc Andreessen. I thought were all in group chats with Marc Andreessen.
Peter: I don't even read journalism because that would color my opinion. [Michael laughs]
Peter: I just experience events.
Michael: Zing us, Peter. Or are we giving up on the zinger again?
Peter: Let’s give up.
Michael: What do you know about years two through five of the Lab Leak?
Peter: I'm going to be strategically looking for ways to bring back my joke about kissing the cats in the Wuhan market.
Michael: [laughs] I was just going to give you shit about that. Since I listened to the episode again and you didn't, I was going to say, “Whatever joke you make on this episode, I'm just going to silently go, “you said that last time, it's actually what you said last time.’”
Peter: I would not be surprised if my brain reproduces jokes thinking that they're original.
Michael: In Spain, they call it “lab leak[?]” [Peter laughs] because it is. That one's good. You're not laughing because of how good it is, that's the signal that I'm getting, it’s actually so good.
Peter: It is funny that two and a half years later, it's like, “I still think we can pin this on the Chinese if we try.”
Michael: [laughs] Let's go with that. Fuck It.
[If Books Could Kill theme]
Michael: So, we are once again returning to the Lab Leak theory. This episode is based on two excuses. One of them is that the White House just launched their Lab Leak website, which used to be COVID19.gov and COVID-19tests.gov are now pointing to a deranged website that has a 1990s action movie photo of Donald Trump.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: And like Lab Leak.
Peter: Its china.evil is the website.
Michael: [laughs] So that just happened. And then also we just did-- Well, we haven't actually recorded it yet, but we're about to record an episode on “In Covid’s Wake,” which is the We Got Everything About Covid Wrong book, which was featured on the Daily and PBS NewsHour and all these other respectable places.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: But, two inches underneath the surface, it's super reactionary and deranged. And they have a whole chapter about the Lab Leak that would have taken us way off track for that actual episode. So, this is a little bonus where we're going to specifically dive into their claims. And for me, it's important to talk about the ways that the Lab Leak theory has kind of evolved over the last couple years, so to speak. So, we are going to talk about their chapter and then also kind of where the Lab Leak is.
Peter: Should we summarize the last episode?
Michael: I was just going to ask you to do this again to describe the Lab Leak as you understand it, and then what are the pieces of evidence for the Lab Leak as you understand them?
Peter: Okay. I'm not going to remember the scientific details because I did not prepare for this episode by listening to our last one, which I would describe as the minimum amount of diligence that a podcaster would do.
Michael: [laughs] An hour of work to prepare for this.
Peter: But in my defense, I've been very sleepy. [Michael laughs]
Peter: So here, I think, is the basic Lab Leak thesis. The origin point for COVID-19 as we know it is in and around Wuhan, China.
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Also in Wuhan, China is a lab that studies coronaviruses.
Michael: Pretty weird, pretty weird.
Peter: As soon as that came out, a lot of people thought, “Hmm. wouldn't it make sense that they were studying a virus? A virus escaped containment.” And I think that the location of the lab has always been the starting point. It's always been the best single piece of evidence.
Michael: And it's often described as Occam's razor. The Occam's razor explanation is you have an outbreak of a coronavirus in this obscure city in China, and in the same obscure city, you also have a lab studying coronaviruses and doing kind of sketchy work where they're manipulating coronaviruses. So, you put those two things together and the obvious Bayesian explanation is that obviously it came from the lab. That is how the argument usually goes.
Peter: Yeah, this is just a tiny little city in China of 15 million people.
Michael: [laughs] I know.
Peter: Now, my memory of the basic counter arguments are this, one, you're getting the causation wrong. If you think of it as, “Oh my God, what a crazy coincidence.” The reason the lab is in Wuhan is because that is the site of a lot of coronaviruses, so they study them there.
Michael: That's actually not quite true. I actually hear this a lot online like that's why the lab was there.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: They say this is the only BSL-4 high security lab in China, but that's irrelevant to the coronavirus work because none of the coronavirus work was being done at that level of security. That's what they did with Ebola. So, it's a BSL-2, a moderate kind of medium security virus lab. And every big city in China has medium security virus labs. That's not a weird thing. Many cities in America have medium security virus labs.
Peter: Okay, that's fair enough. And I've already learned something that you forgot to tell me in the first episode.
Michael: [laughs] You're blaming me.
Peter: I do. And then you have assortment of other arguments that make it less and less plausible that there's a Lab Leak. One is that the initial cases cluster around the wet market-
Michael: Yes.
Peter: -on the other side of town.
Michael: Very far away. It's 10 kilometers away. It's like a 30-minute drive. They're not adjacent to each other. Yes.
Peter: And then the other-- And I remember this only really vaguely, so I'll have you-- I'll say something stupid and then you can fill in the blanks.
Michael: That's our whole show.
Peter: Essentially, if you look at the work that they were doing, there are various conspiracy theories that they were basically like really close to a coronavirus that's functionally identical to Covid-19 . But in reality, if you look at the viruses that they were working on, it does not make sense that Covid-19 could have come out of the lab.
Michael: Yes. I think the most important thing to realize is that we're now five years down the line. This theory has been around for five years, and we still are missing extremely important building blocks. So, we still have zero early cases to this day, there's never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting Covid in the early months of the pandemic at all, so, that isn't there.
We don't have clustering. This is a very infectious virus. If a lab worker got it, theoretically, other lab workers would get it. The neighborhood around the lab, the place where people live, we would see some sort of clustering, we don't see that. We see clustering around the market. We also see clustering within the market. We know that live animals were being sold in the southwest corner of the market that is where the early coronavirus cases are clustered.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: And we have virus swabs that find Covid in the drains, on doorknobs, in the cages of the animals. Covid is all fucking over the place at the market. Still to this day, no sign that Covid was at the lab at all.
Peter: Right.
Michael: It is true that they had something called RaTG13, which is a virus that is 96% identical to Covid. However, 96% identical in virological terms is not close at all.
Peter: Right. It's like how bananas share 98% of our DNA or something like that.
Michael: Yeah. Exactly. I was thinking like I am much more than 96% identical to Michael Phelps-
Peter: Uh-uh.
Michael: -but he can swim much faster than me. The fast swimming is not something that like sort of happens by accident.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: And we also know from genomic sequences that RaTG13 could not become Covid. It's not the grandfather of Covid it's like a distant cousin. So, there's no evidence whatsoever that they had Covid. So, to leak something you have to have it. And in five years there's no evidence that they had anything that either was Covid or could become Covid. There's no evidence of this whatsoever. And it's easy to say like, “Well, maybe they had a bunch of viruses that they didn't test us about like other lockers that hadn't been looked at.”
But there's actually a paper from 2018, from before the Covid pandemic that went through and cataloged every single virus that they had. This is actually like a project that had taken place. This paper was never published. But this was a lab that had international researchers working there. This was a lab that published in like Science and Nature. This was very much a part of the international virological community.
In five years, we've had no whistleblowers come forward and say, “Hey, I did a six-month project in Wuhan and I was really concerned about their safety protocols.” We've had no emails, any internal document of any kind indicating a safety event or a secret program. This lab has been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny over the last five years.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: And it's just turned up nothing.
Peter: And of course, all of this can be chalked up to the efficiency and secrecy of the dastardly Chinese.
Michael: Exactly. And the lack of evidence is often cast as evidence. So, kind of famously, people within the lab. When the coronavirus first started spreading at the market or wherever in Wuhan in January, people in the lab were like, “Oh shit, is this us?” like they had the same thought as everybody else.
Peter: Right.
Michael: They're like “Fuck, there's a coronavirus spreading. We do coronavirus work.” They then tested everyone in the lab for antibodies. As soon as those tests were available In March of 2020, they're like every single worker should take one of these things. If you have antibodies, that's a really big problem. That means it might have come from our lab.
Peter: Right, right.
Peter: Everybody tests negative. So according to the people who work in this lab, nobody there tested positive for antibodies. However, the conspiracy theorists are now like “Isn't that a little suspicious? Nobody had antibodies in 2020.”
Peter: Right.
Michael: And it's like, okay, so the lack of evidence is now evidence. If they had found antibodies, you'd be saying, “Ah that proves it comes from the lab.” When they don't find antibodies, you're also saying that proves it comes from the lab.
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: Do you remember, Peter, in our previous Lab Leak episode, we said there was one good piece of evidence. All the other pieces of evidence are like very circumstantial. It's like the lab is in Wuhan and Lab Leaks have happened before. But there was one piece of actual direct evidence that I characterized as the best available piece of evidence, do you remember this?
Peter: I don't.
Michael: So basically, we have a report originally in the Wall Street journal that three workers at the lab got sick in November of 2019.
Peter: Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. I've heard this come up repeatedly from the Lab Leak truthers.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: This appears to just be an internal report of a few sick people in a lab in November, like in the fall.
Michael: Yes. In a year with an infamously bad flu season.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Yes. People had symptoms that could be Covid or could be the flu. That's basically the strongest possible version of it.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This best evidence for the Lab Leak has actually become significantly weaker since we recorded that episode. Because in June of 2023, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger publish a report naming The Three Scientists Who Got Sick.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: They present this as a smoking gun. We have the names. This is, of course, based on anonymous government sources.
Peter: Chinese government?
Michael: American government.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: It's fairly weak anyway. But what's so interesting is by naming these specific people who got sick in fall of 2019, they actually ended up weakening their case. Because Science, the magazine, contacts these researchers, and two of them say “I didn't get sick at all.” So, originally, we thought, like “Oh, they got sick in November of 2019.” But like whatever, it could be anything. These people are saying, “We didn't get sick at all.” And one of them, very importantly, one of the people who is named as being like the genesis of this doesn't even work in the lab. This is a person who does computer modeling. And she's like, “Well, that doesn't even make sense. I couldn't have caught it from a live virus because I don't work on live viruses.”
I talked to another person who's done collaborations with them. And he was like, “I don't know if she's ever actually been to the lab.” Like the part where they're doing the virus manipulation. So, like the best piece of evidence is now even weaker than it was, and it was never particularly strong.
Peter: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael: The really important thing that I want to talk about in this episode is that if you actually follow the Lab Leak people, like people that are really bought into this, they're shedding credibility the way that people shed coronaviruses. But at the same time, we've had this weird recasting of the Lab Leak from people on the left, including people I genuinely really respect.
Peter: Say their names.
Michael: [laughs] We'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there. people on the left like us, really fucked up in dismissing the Lab Leak.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: So, this is from Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, which we talked about on this show, but we didn't get a chance to get to this part.
Peter: Like most of us, I don't know where the Covid-19 virus originated, but I do realize in retrospect that I was too quick to take the official story that it came from a wet market where wild animals were sold at face value. If I'm honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview. The pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten in the ass for it.
Then, as time went on, the Lab Leak theory became a key talking point from people like Naomi Wolf and Steve Bannon, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons along with plenty of anti-Asian racism. Those seem to be further reason not to take another look at the facts, even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the Lab Leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn't bother looking for months because we didn't want to be like them in the same way that I didn't want to be like her. In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our credulity. Their question, everything led to many of us not questioning enough.
Michael: So, this is becoming a very standard narrative.
Peter: We were reacting to the fact that conspiracy theorists believe this by not believing it without investigating the evidence.
Michael: We were basically writing them off because they were kooky. But we wrote off the entire theory, rather than saying. Okay, the bioweapon stuff is a little silly, but this could have been an accidental Lab Leak. This is something worth looking into. And so, in May of 2021, we had this huge explosion of articles being like, the media really fucked this up. Yglesias writes a piece called “The media's Lab Leak fiasco.” It was a fiasco the way that we treated this as a conspiracy theory when it actually deserved a lot more consideration.
Peter: Maybe that explains the fact that now the Lab Leak is the American public's leading hypothesis.
Michael: There's a poll from March 2023 that's around 65% of Americans believe that it's true. It's 35% of Democrats, which is not the majority of Democrats, but still pretty strong.
Peter: This is what's so frustrating about some of this discourse where people are like, we really messed up when we didn't consider this enough. And it's sort of like, well, if the public believes it at a 65% clip-
Michael: I know.
Peter: -that's about as close to consensus as you're going to get in modern America on something that has a sort of political valence, then what exactly is the journalistic concern? It sounds to me like if what you believe is that the Lab Leak is a likely hypothesis, then you did fine. Journalists didn't fuck up. People believe it. So, what else do you want? I just don't quite get it.
Michael: I don't want to come for Naomi Klein. Like I said, I really like her. I like that book. But I think this narrative does not hold up to the facts. If you look at the actual timeline of when the Lab Leak theory emerged and the way that it was treated in the early months, people treated it as a conspiracy theory in the early months of the pandemic because it was being pushed by conspiracy theorists, right?
Peter: Right.
Michael: It was Tom Cotton on Fox News saying that the market origin had been debunked, which was completely not true. It was also coming from the fucking Zero Hedge blog, which is a infamous conspiracy peddler. So, people were saying, “Oh, this is a conspiracy theory,” because conspiracy theorists were saying it. [laughs]
Peter: And also, by the way, even if we believed that subsequent evidence showed that Lab Leak was the most likely explanation. In early 2020 that evidence didn't exist.
Michael: No, none.
Peter: So, this is always so hard for people to process. But if you guess something correctly and insist before knowing that it's true that's not actually evidence that you're reasoning correctly. [laughs]
Michael: This is a fucked-up comparison, but I always think about the episode that me and Sarah did about the Duke Lacrosse rape case, where that did turn out to be a false accusation. But there were a ton of people who basically, the minute they heard a rape allegation, they were like, “She's lying.” And then it eventually turned out she was lying. And they're like, “I was vindicated.” But it's like, you just think all women are lying about being raped at all times.
Peter: Once again, I was correct. Of the 25 women I've accused of making up-
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: -sexual assault claims, the third has been proven correct. You don't get to do this.
Michael: I think this sort of, again, on the surface, feels like an important thing to do. Of, like, “Yes, there is groupthink on the left.” And I also think after something is proven to be true. Once we found out that Lance Armstrong was fucking using steroids, it's worth going back and being like, “Wait a minute, on what basis were people saying that they were lying?”
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Like what can we learn from the trajectory of this piece of information? And did we wait too long before accepting it? I think those kinds of mechanics are actually really important.
Peter: Right.
Michael: But the problem with the Lab Leak is that we're missing the part where it's true.
Peter: And I don't even really know what they're talking about half the time, because in the circles that I ran in, which I admit are not a particularly representative cross section of American society.
Michael: It’s like the 37th International.
Peter: When I was discussing this stuff with friends in 2020, the widespread belief was like, “Yeah, maybe-
Michael: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Peter: -it came out of the lab.” The idea that there was like this aggressive dismissal. I'm sure that in some circles you could find it, but I just didn't see it.
Michael: So, for the rest of the episode, we're going to talk about the chapter of In Covid’s Wake that talks about the Lab Leak theory itself and all of the groupthink that led to theory being dismissed.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: I guess I should say we haven't actually recorded the episode yet, but In Covid’s Wake is a book by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, who are both researchers at Princeton, basically saying that liberal groupthink is why we did all of these “ineffective” policies during the Covid pandemic. Things like lockdowns and mask mandates.
The entire premise of the book is false. They're just totally wrong on the data. They have long sections that are about like debate was suppressed. And then all of the debate is just like people who were lying or totally wrong and people on the Internet basically pointing that out. The book is just a reactionary tract.
Peter: Hell, yeah.
Michael: We will get into it in great detail in like a main feed episode, but for now, here is the first paragraph of their sort of substantive discussion of the Lab Leak.
Peter: It is widely accepted that the Covid coronavirus arose in or around Wuhan in the Hubei province of the People's Republic of China. Wuhan is home to both a live animal and seafood market, which is common in Chinese cities. And something quite uncommon, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an elite research institute that specializes in coronavirus research.
Michael: So not a great sign that the first paragraph of their substantive discussion of the Lab Leak begins with a screaming lie.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: One thing that I don't think has been communicated to the American public is that live animal markets are not common in China. In the city of Wuhan, which is around 11 million, 15 million, it's hard to measure the size of cities, but a very large city, there's only four markets that were selling live animals. China had the SARS outbreak in 2003. That was from live animals. They have attempted to crack down on the wildlife trade because they know that it's a ticking time bomb for coronaviruses. It is also very profitable, and the local authorities often look the other way, but that's a relatively narrow phenomenon. So, if we're going to talk about Occam's razor for the start of a pandemic, in a city of 11 million people, we have early cases of a virus clustered around one of only four places where animals and humans are interacting in close quarters. That's pretty strong Occam's razor for zoonotic spillover.
Peter: Unless someone at the lab-
Michael: Yes. [laughs]
Michael: -likes after work to go pet the animals.
Michael: You're doing it, you're doing it. Get there, get there, Peter. [laughs]
Peter: You finish up your work at the lab. You forget to wash your hands because you're really excited to go check out the wet market. You drive across town, breakneck speed. You run over there and you find your favorite bat, and you just roll around together for a couple of hours. And then you go home to your wife.
Michael: And you put your lips over its snout and you breathe in.
Peter: You breathe in its mucus and then you spit in its mouth. And it's just normal friendship with a bat sort of stuff.
Michael: So, one of the scientists I talked to for this, Eddie Holmes, has actually been to the market. He went there in 2019 and took photos of cages showing that live animals were being sold at the market. One thing he mentioned was that, again, because people don't know much About Chinese cities, what you often hear is that, “Oh, this could just be a super spreader event,” not necessarily the origin of the virus. And again, sure, it could be, however, one thing he mentioned is that the seafood market was not particularly crowded. This wasn't like some sort of like Times Square, Olive Garden packed situation. If we were going to have somebody from the lab spread it in Wuhan, there's extraordinarily crowded train stations, shopping malls. There're so many other places that are extremely plausible as super spreader events at the beginning of this pandemic.
And the kind of core argument for the Lab Leak has really always been like, “Isn't it a weird coincidence that this coronavirus emerges in the same city as a coronavirus lab?” Sure, and it is a genuinely weird coincidence. I am happy to grant that. However, for the Lab Leak theory to work, you have to believe that somebody from the lab got the virus and then happened to go to one of only four places in Wuhan where they were selling raccoon dogs. That's also a huge coincidence.
Peter: Sorry.
Michael: What?
Peter: Raccoon dogs? Is that one animal or is that raccoon, dogs?
Michael: No, you don't know about raccoon dogs?
Peter: What's a raccoon dog?
Michael: Bro. Okay, Go on Google right now and Google raccoon dog. A raccoon dog is exactly what it sounds like. It's a little dog that looks like a raccoon. They're so cute.
Peter: Oh, my God. What the fuck is this?
Michael: I know, they're so cute.
Peter: This is a dog?
Michael: I don't know exactly what they are.
Peter: Yo, I'm going to the Wuhan market and I'm getting myself a racoon dog.
Michael: It's kind of fucked up that the reason they sell live animals at these markets is for either pets or meat.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: Another thing I didn't even mention yet is in March of 2023, just after we released our Lab Leak episode, we get a study that finds, in the market, they took a bunch of swabs from the market where they found Covid. Those same swabs also found the DNA of raccoon dogs. So that doesn't prove that zoonotic spillover is real, like you don't want to overdo it.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: But it does at least show that in the place where Covid was circulating, they were selling raccoon dogs, which we know are a vector for coronaviruses. We know they can catch it, we know they can spread it. They were also selling civets, although there was less of that genetic material. And civets are also extremely cute and a vector for coronaviruses.
Peter: I didn't hear a lot of that because I've just been looking at the Wikipedia for raccoon dogs.
Michael: Aren't they cute?
Peter: Wow, really cute. Why are they in Europe and also East Asia?
Michael: And also, why are they not in my home right now? Because they're hella cute. I want like seven of them.
Peter: Yeah, I would like to go grab one. And then if it's nice, I'll keep it. And if it's not, I will eat it.
Michael: Or just put your mouth over its snout [crosstalk]
Peter: And then we'll find the new disease.
Michael: They then continue. Peter, I'm going to send you the next couple paragraphs. You're looking at the dogs, aren't you?
Peter: What? No.
Michael: Look at civets, though. Civets are hella cute too.
Peter: How do I spell that?
Michael: C-I-V-E-T. Ah, look at his little fur.
Peter: Whoa, look at this guy.
Michael: The little babies. Mine is showing little babies.
Peter: Oh, they get weird looking.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Peter: Some of them are a little weird, but the babies are cute. Gain of function research, such as that conducted at the Wuhan Institute has long been controversial. As the National Institutes of Health website explains, gain of function research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens. Although, research into dangerous pathogens may lead to advances in the control of natural outbreaks, the research itself is also clearly adjacent to biowarfare.
Michael: This is also something that has happened among the Lab Leak movement in the last two years. They're just openly promoting the bioweapon theory, which originally, they were like “Well, obviously that's fake.” The thing like conspiracy theorists were saying in March of 2020, “That's not real. That is a conspiracy theory. But the accidental Lab Leak, that's not a conspiracy theory, and you shouldn't have treated it as one,” but they're now spouting the actual fucking conspiracy theory.
Peter: This is just like lazy faux journalism. The research itself is clearly adjacent to biowarfare. I mean, you could very abstractly make the argument that any virology research is adjacent to biowarfare.
Michael: Yeah, completely.
Peter: What does that even mean?
Michael: It's also this chicken shit, reactionary centrist thing where they're like “Well, I didn't say it was a bioweapon program. I just said it was adjacent.”
Peter: Because you fucking can't. Because you can't, but you kind of want to.
Michael: So, here is the next couple paragraphs, which we're going to dig into in a bit more detail.
Peter: Eminent scientists had warned for years of the dangers of gain of function research of the sort conducted at Wuhan Institute, where biosecurity levels were inadequate. Numerous Lab Leaks of dangerous pathogens have been documented or strongly suspected over the years. In 1995 epidemic of equine encephalitis, multiple cases of SARS in Beijing in 2004, a 2007 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom, and anthrax escape that killed 60 in Russia, and a 2019 Lab Leak of Brucella that infected more than 10,000 people in China.
Michael: This is something that I really want to address because this is another piece of “Evidence” that is often cited for the Lab Leak, that Lab Leaks have happened before.
Peter: I see what they're going for here, but I don't quite get it as support for a theory because it's like “What's my evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered? Well, people have been murdered before.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Peter: I should use a different example because I do believe Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.
Michael: I was just trying to think of a different metaphor. [laughs]
Peter: You know what I'm saying.
Michael: Well, I was thinking. I mean, some of this Occam's Razor stuff, what frustrates me about it is like, if you're a detective and you find a woman who's been murdered, the Occam's Razor explanation is that her boyfriend or her husband did it.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: Like 99 times out of 100, it's her boyfriend or her husband. But then if you go and investigate the husband, “Okay, where were you last night?” And he's like, “Oh, I was at a party where hundreds of people saw me.” You can't then just say, “Well, Occam's Razor say that you killed her.”
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: No, no, no. You need evidence.
Peter: I almost think you're underselling it. The reason that you think when you find a woman who's been murdered, “Oh, let's go check out the significant other,” is because a very, very large percentage of the time that's who it is. So, the question isn't, “Have there been Lab Leaks before?” It's like, when we find a new virus, how often is it a Lab Leak?
Michael: Yeah, it's like sometimes it's as strong as you can get. But then also, it's so much worse than that because there's no reason anybody would sort of notice this. But in this paragraph where they're listing all these dangerous pathogens that have leaked from labs, all of these are existing viruses. These are viruses that can infect human hosts. We have never had a leak of a novel virus.
Peter: Oh, interesting.
Michael: The closest thing that we have is there was an outbreak of the Marburg virus in 1967, where there were monkeys that were infected with this virus in the lab. And lab workers got it from live monkeys. They were breathing in. It's basically a zoonotic spillover, but it happens to have taken place in a lab that's kind of as close as we get. This thing where you're taking an existing virus from animal, you're swapping in and out parts, you're testing how it affects mice or trying to grow it in a petri dish. This has never leaked from a lab.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: So, could it have happened? Maybe. But the fact that there have been Lab Leaks of existing viruses is actually very different from a lab creating Covid and then having it leak. Those are very distinct scenarios.
Peter: This requires the lab tech on roller skates with a tray of vials.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: That's what they are imagining here.
Michael: The other thing in this quote that I really want to zoom in on is it says “Gain of function research of the sort conducted at Wuhan Institute where biosecurity levels were inadequate.”
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: So, this is yet another argument for the Lab Leak that like we know they had safety problems. There have been concerns about safety for years.
Peter: Right.
Michael: So, there's essentially three pieces of evidence for this. One of them was, remember we talked about the ProPublica article about there was this guy who said that he could translate Chinese better than Chinese people, an American guy. And he's like, “They did a safety training in November of 2019. And the reason they did the safety training was because there had been a biosecurity incident,” that's really weak and this guy has no credibility. And it's just really weird. So, we're kind of putting that piece of evidence beside because it's so weak.
Peter: Uh-uh.
Michael: The other argument for this is that the lab was doing work at BSL-2 rather than BSL-3. So, at a lower security level, it's out of four levels, BSL-4 is the highest. BSL-1 is essentially no security precautions. BSL-2 is kind of, I've heard it described as like dental hygienist level precautions.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: So, the argument is that this lab was doing this work at BSL-2 when they should have been doing it at BSL-3.
Peter: Okay.
Michael: There's a really good episode of This Week in Virology where its actual virologists talking about this. And they say that work on measles is done at BSL-2, and work on rabies, which is 100% fatal to humans, is often done at BSL-2. And so, people at the lab were doing work at BSL-2. It appears some people in the field do this kind of work at BSL-3. Other people do it at BSL-2. There's really no evidence that this is like a rogue lab that was acting totally out of step-
Peter: Right.
Michael: -with existing practices. And there's an actual debate about what level of safety you should do this kind of work at.
Peter: Can I bring my pet raccoon dog to the lab. [Michael laughs] At level two, it's allowed.
Michael: So, the thing I really want to dive into is in this paragraph where they're talking about the poor biosafety standards at the lab. In Covid’s Wake has a citation to a Washington post article from April of 2020. This article is called “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.” It's by Josh Rogin, and I'm going to send you the first couple of paragraphs.
Peter: Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, US Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
What the US officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as sensitive but unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
Michael: So basically, this is like people from the US State Department visited this lab, and they were so concerned that they're like, “Holy shit, we're going to send a dispatch back to Washington,” being like, we really need to be worried about this.
Peter: They alerted Washington.
Michael: Yes, exactly.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: So, there's two cables in question. The author of this piece, Josh Rogin, is given access to the first cable. And he says, like, “Okay, there's very worrying stuff in there.” He doesn't get access to the second cable, but he does talk to an unnamed government source that has read it and describes the contents to him. So, here's the description of the second cable.
Peter: Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more US attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems
Michael: Fix its problems.
Peter: “The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”
Michael: This paints a very clear and worrying picture of the lab.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: I've always found this very convincing. And what I was like ready to say is that bad safety practices in general do not mean that this virus leaked from this lab on like this specific date.
Peter: This is actually-- I mean, it's a very roundabout, assuming this is correct, which I imagine you're about to tell me, it's not really, but this would be, if true like a very, very circumstantial piece of evidence.
Michael: It's not decisive, right?
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: What I didn't know until I was researching this episode is that we now have these cables. The Washington Post sued the Trump administration to get access to these cables. And we can now read them. There are two cables. One on January 19th of 2018, one on April 19th of 2018. And you are going to read the first couple paragraphs of them.
Peter: In addition to accreditation, the lab must also receive permission from the National Health and Family Planning Commission to initiate research specific highly contagious pathogens. To date, the institute has obtained permission for research on three viruses; Ebola virus, Nipah virus, and Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus. Despite this permission, however, the Chinese government has not allowed the institute to import Ebola viruses for study in the BSL-4 lab. Therefore, scientists are frustrated and have pointed out that they won't be able to conduct a research project with Ebola viruses at the new BSL-4 lab despite the permission.
Michael: Nothing. No safety concerns.
Peter: No safety concerns at this point.
Michael: It's more like they should get access to Ebola, that's something you wouldn't say if you were gravely concerned.
Peter: Give them the Ebola.
Michael: Give everybody the Ebola.
Peter: Yeah, you guys got that Ebola.
Michael: So. And then here is the only mention of safety in the entire document.
Peter: During interactions with scientists at the Wuhan Laboratory, they noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory. Okay.
Michael: So, they need staff.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Without the staff, they won't be able to operate safely.
Peter: So, I think you could characterize this as a safety concern, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: They're saying there's a lack of safety related infrastructure.
Michael: Yeah, that feels like a fair characterization. Although, I should say the summary of this cable says scientists hope the lab will contribute to the development of new antiviral drugs and vaccines, but its current productivity is limited by a shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a BSL-4 laboratory and a lack of clarity in Chinese government policies and guidelines. So, it does seem like it's less a concern about the lab operating unsafely, but rather that it can't operate at all. Because they can't get the viruses they need and they don't have the staff they need.
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: So that's essentially the only mention of safety. The document then goes on to say, like “They're working with the University of Texas and trying to get more collaborators and the US Government should help this lab and should push the government to adequately staff this lab.” That's basically the point of the cable. It then goes on to praise the lab. So, here's the next couple paragraphs.
Peter: Despite limitations WIV researchers produce SARS discoveries, the ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research despite limitations on the use of the new BSL-4 facility is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origins of SARS.
Michael: There's then a fairly long description of a study that they published in 2017, basically cataloging all of these viruses they found in this bat cave. They found that many of them do appear to have this ACE2 receptor binding domain, which indicates they could leap over to humans. And then here's the conclusion of the paragraph.
Peter: From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS like coronaviruses in bats and study of human-animal interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.
Michael: So, to return to the excerpt we read earlier, Josh Rogin's article says “The first cable warns that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS like pandemic.”
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: That is the opposite of what this section of the cable says. The cable actually says that their work could prevent a new SARS like pandemic. This paragraph is talking about the viruses that they are finding in bat caves could spill over to humans and cause a pandemic. At no point is it saying that the lab's work represents a risk of a new pandemic. The overall purpose of the cable is to try to rally support and capacity for this lab, that is not something you do when you have grave safety concerns.
Peter: No, it seems they are basically saying, yeah, this is critical work. Several people there said that they're understaffed. That's it.
Michael: That’s it.
Peter: I mean, the overarching purpose of the cable doesn't appear to be safety related. There's a brief comment that you could fairly characterize as safety related.
Michael: So, Josh Rogin, in this Washington Post article, got access to this first cable. He read this and he said, okay, the contents concern safety. This is about their work on SARS coronaviruses. But then the second, he didn't get access to the second cable. And this anonymous source within the government says, “Well, the second cable, it's really, they're talking about grave safety concerns.” The point of these cables was to sound an alarm. So, this is the only mention of the word safety in the second cable.
Peter: China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a global leader in virus research, is a key partner for the United States in protecting global health security. Its role as operator of the just launched biosafety level 4 lab, the first such lab in China, opens up even more opportunities for expert exchange, especially in light of the lab's shortage of trained staff.
Michael: This is the only place the word safety appears. They launched a biosafety level 4 lab. It's just an adjective about the lab. There's literally no concern about safety expressed in this cable. And in the first cable, there is only the most tangentially safety related concern expressed. The original article expressed this as the US State Department was so concerned about safety that they went down there, they investigated, and they sent grave alarms back to Washington.
Peter: Right.
Michael: That is a fucking lie.
Peter: In reality, they sent a cable saying functionally that we should be sending Americans over there-
Michael: Yes.
Peter: -which would be a ludicrous thing to say if you really thought that the-
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: -safety was egregiously bad.
Michael: Basically, Josh Rogin got worked by his sources-
Peter: 0which will never happen to us.
Michael: [laughs] Because we're not in DMs with any journalists. We're not talking to anybody about this.
Peter: I don't talk to journalists.
Michael: I found this in other areas too, where it's like conspiracy theorists are so worried about, like a conspiracy to cover up the Lab Leak or whatever. There was a literal conspiracy to promote the Lab Leak to journalists from within the Trump administration. So, Donald Trump, as early as May 2020 was openly promoting the Lab Leak theory. Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State at the time, is super in on Lab Leak. All he fucking does is tweet about Lab Leak now. And as early as April of 2020, he was saying, “We really need to hammer the Chinese on this because it's their fault.”
Peter: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael: And all of this information about the sick researchers, the cables, all of this stuff is coming from Donald Trump's State Department and journalists are just fucking falling for it, hook, line and sinker and basically publishing exactly what they want you to publish. These are anonymous sources who are telling you, “Oh yeah, the cables are really bad, man.” If you look at the second cable.
Peter: Oh my God, they wouldn't even show me the second cable because it was so bad.
Michael: Yeah. That's how fucking bad it was. And you're publishing this and just getting fucking worked by these people who are pretty on record as not liking China.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Are we just supposed to ignore this? This is what's so fucking weird to me about this like, “We didn't take the Lab Leak seriously enough.” We're all just going to pretend that the US Government at that time was just sticking up for scientific integrity. They just wanted to know how the virus originated. Are you fucking kidding me?
Peter: I think it's very interesting that the way that the Mea Culpa about Lab Leak shit has developed among journalists is like journalism as a whole got this wrong. We didn't take it seriously enough. But Josh Rogin publishing this specific bit of information that turns out to be untrue is something that actually should warrant correction and some self-flagellation. You actually had someone dangling some bullshit in front of you and you leapt at it.
Michael: Yeah. There's also Peter, this gets even worse. So in January of this year, we get a book by Don McNeil, who is a New York Times health reporter who's now like a big Lab Leak guy, and he has a chapter on the Lab Leak and it's really bad, but sort of in passing he mentions, “Oh, hey, I wrote an article for the New York Times saying that the Lab Leak wasn't very plausible and the New York Times killed it. And instead, they published an article that was promoting the Lab Leak.” So, here's his description of this.
Peter: Inside the Times, we had a fierce debate. Washington based national security reporters had sources insisting it was a Lab Leak. But their sources were anonymous, offered zero evidence other than take our word for it, and to me seemed clearly part of the Trump administration's campaign to blame China instead of admitting its own failures. My sources, by contrast, were respected scientists spoke on the record and laid out their arguments in exhaustive detail. They seemed more credible.
Michael: And then he talks about this eventually article coming out.
Peter: At some point, probably in early April, my Washington colleagues drafted an article quoting their anonymous sources. They were shown my draft. They reduced my detailed arguments to two short some scientists disagree paragraphs.
Michael: So again, we have a conspiracy within the Trump administration to tell journalists that it was a Lab Leak, and journalists fucking falling for it.
Peter: Right.
Michael: They killed an article about the scientific basis showing the Lab Leak was not plausible. They fucking killed that. And they ran a, “Ooh, anonymous sources say it's a Lab Leak article.” What fucking groupthink are we meant to be dissecting at this point?
Peter: Well, this is the thing, is that the mainstream media, The Times, especially in their minds’ journalism, is this very rigid thing, like officials say-
Michael: Right, right.
Peter: -that's a good source, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: Any judgment about what their agenda might be, that would be implicit editorializing. So, you can't do that. They're just a respected government official. It's a respected position. We're going to print what they say, and then if scientists disagree, they get the little caveat, and that's that.
Michael: And the fact that they lie constantly and the fact that they clearly just like have it in for China, those two things are not necessary context. [laughs]
Peter: And to take those into consideration would, again, be a form of editorializing.
Michael: One of the key characteristics of conspiracy theories is that they don't have internal coherence. They're typically just like bundles of discrepancies. And oftentimes people kind of toggle back and forth between different explanations. And I've noticed this with a Lab Leak, that the same person will cite evidence that it was gain of function research. They'll cite evidence that it was a bioweapon, and they'll cite evidence that it was a virus from bat poo that accidentally leaked in the same conversation. They'll kind of go back and forth.
Peter: This is a big, important component of conspiracy theories. Their ability to explain their own theories is much less important than their desire to demonstrate that there is a grand lie.
Michael: Exactly. And I think what really clicked in my brain when I was looking into this was just there's a really good article in the MIT Technology Review that just describes in factual terms what the lab was doing. And once you start to sort of play out how a Lab Leak would work, there is no scenario that works.
Peter: Well.
Michael: So, the first thing the lab was doing was just cataloging viruses. So, this is the famous thing where they went to these mines in 2012 and 2013, they got a bunch of swabs, they found bats. They got swabs of their saliva. They did swabs of their butt. They collected a bunch of bat poo, and then they bring it back to the lab, and then they sort of just stored all of this stuff and then they start cataloging it because they're like, “Okay, what kinds of viruses do these bats have?
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: And this is where they find this RaTG13 virus that is 96% identical to Covid. This is in this kind of database. The thing to know about this kind of work is that these viruses can't really leak. So, I was talking to Alex Crits-Christoph, who wrote the paper about the raccoon dogs, and he said that when they store and catalog these viruses, they store them in a solution, like a little test tube full of juice that breaks them apart into their constituent parts. Because what they're trying to do is get the genomic sequence, the actual DNA. And so, to do that, you break apart the virus and you isolate the DNA and then you put it in a little machine and the machine reads it and it's GT, AC, GC, blah, blah. But once the virus is in this little solution, you can't catch it. It's not meaningfully airborne. He said “You'd have to like maybe drink this solution and maybe you'd get sick.” One in a million fucking chance. But also, these are bat viruses.
Peter: That's why maybe someone thought they were safe to drink.
Michael: [laughs] Just one by one, just doing shots.
Peter: We're understaffed. No one's bringing me water. I'm just going to drink the virus liquid.
Michael: Oftentimes there's not enough virus in these tubes. You need large viral counts to catch a virus, and you need live virus. When we've had Lab Leaks before, these are typically labs that are growing large quantities of, for example, SARS. You grow huge cultures of these viruses to then use them to develop a vaccine. Use them for whatever you're doing. These were not live viruses. These were years old samples of bat poop, bat saliva, etc.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Is it possible somebody got infected from one of these? Alex is a scientist, so of course he says, “Yes, it is possible that this could happen.” You're transferring it from one test tube to the other. There's maybe a 10-second period potentially where it's airborne. You can come up with sort of theoretical scenarios for this, but a case of this has never been documented.
Peter: What if you brought your pet raccoon dog to work.
Michael: And fed it the test tube?
Peter: You're doing work. You turn around, “Oh-oh, Sparky has gotten into the test tubes,” and you're like, “Well, this is bad news for me. I know how I can get out of this. I'm going to go sell them at the wet market.”
Michael: Yeah. Damn it. I was going to debunk the Lab Leak, but now I believe in it.
Peter: Is that Lab Leak or is it zoonotic? I don't know. It's a merger that I think will make everyone happy.
Michael: So again, if you try to actually spell out these scenarios, the one where somebody catches a virus from these random sequences doesn't really work mechanically. So, then you have the gain of function work. So the other thing that the virus lab was doing was they were creating chimeric viruses, which are like they're kind of mixing and matching different elements of viruses to see whether or not they infect cells.
Peter: Sounds cool. Okay.
Michael: The other thing to know about this is that to take a sort of a dead virus, these samples in bat poop, and then turn them into a live virus, this is called isolating them. To turn them into a live virus that you can then culture and grow and see do various other forms of research is really fucking hard. So, of all of the hundreds of samples that they had from this cave, they only managed to isolate three of the samples. So, once you isolate the samples, that is where you then do get into territory where like somebody could catch an isolated virus. This is how people caught SARS in labs, etc.
So, now we're in the territory we’re like, “Okay, this could have caused a Lab Leak.” The thing to know about this work is that what they were doing when they were going through all of these samples is they were looking for viruses that were close to SARS-1 because they were trying to solve SARS-1. They were trying to respond to the previous pandemic.
Peter: Right.
Michael: So, when they found RaTG13, which was relatively close to what we now know of as Covid, they were like “Eh, that's weird.” And they put it back in the fridge. Because there's no reason before 2020 you would find anything interesting about Covid, you'd be like, “Oh, that's a weird virus.” So even if they had found Covid, there's no reason why they would think it was particularly interesting.
Peter: And so, you take the sample with Covid, you throw it into the trash can, trash guy takes it out--
Michael: [laughs] Gives it to his raccoon dog.
Peter: Local raccoon dog gets into it. Yeah, from what I know about raccoon dogs, Senator Holly, they'll eat anything.
Michael: So, basically, they were doing various experiments on these viruses that they had isolated. Some of them were bat viruses. They were also doing work on human viruses. We can get into details about this kind of stuff. It's actually kind of interesting. But also, they were interested in SARS-1. If one of these viruses had leaked, it would be something very similar to SARS-1. It would not be a leak of Covid.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: There's a finite number of scenarios by which there could have been a Lab Leak. And both of the scenarios from the Wuhan lab do not make sense.
Peter: Uh-uh.
Michael: Either it was random samples of bat poo which basically can't get out, or it was gain of function research, which was on SARS-1. SARS-1 and SARS-2 are actually very dissimilar. They're only about 75% similar.
Peter: Much less than you and Michael Phelps.
Michael: So, the only scenario you're left with is that they were doing some completely secret plan.
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: They went into bat caves, they found Covid. Somehow, they identified Covid as like, “Ooh, this could be something.” Either they found it and were able to isolate it and then were able to catch it, or they found something that was relatively similar to Covid and they manipulated it, they added a spike protein, whatever, and then that gain of function work leaked.
Peter: But this is what I think you told me in the first episode that stuck with me, which is, in order for this to have happened, it likely would have had to be a secret.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: But why would they be keeping it a secret before any leak occurred? It doesn't make sense.
Michael: It's also not accidental.
Peter: Right.
Michael: There is no reason to keep something like this secret if you're a legitimate academic. If you are proposing this theory, the only scenario for the Lab Leak that works, you're essentially saying China set out to create a bioweapon.
Peter: which they unleashed upon themselves.
Michael: Right. And also, in all of the years of this premeditated massive project-- I mean, the virologist that I talked to said this would be a years’ long thing. No one ever talks about it. There's no documents about it.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: No one ever says, like “Oh, hey, I'm doing this project in Wuhan that I can't really talk about it.” There's nothing. And also, the other thing that the scientists mentioned to me was that the idea-- If you were trying to bioengineer a virus, you would take something existing and you'd make one tweak to it. It's very difficult to manipulate viruses and do this kind of gain of function work. You wouldn't just get a random virus from a cave and be like, “Let's start fucking with it.”
Peter: Right.
Michael: That doesn't make any sense. Researchers want to publish things. Researchers want to advance in their careers. If you were doing this accidentally, like, I'm just going to manipulate a random virus that makes no fucking sense, Covid wouldn't have stuck out to you even if you had found it in the cave. There's no fucking evidence they found in the cave. If you were making a bioweapon, you wouldn't use a random virus that you found in a cave. You'd take something that we already knew caused harm and make small tweaks to it. So, the whole theory makes no sense.
Peter: I don't understand the implication is like, yeah, this was a lab with subpar safety, but also within this lab, but like lacks safety standards, they are conducting an incredibly secretive biowarfare initiative-
Michael: Yes.
Peter: -and no information about it has ever leaked. [Michael laughs] Nothing verifiable has ever gotten out.
Michael: Oh, the other thing I love. We talked about RaTG13 earlier, this 96% similar virus. The only reason we know about this is because the Wuhan lab, in February of 2020 published it. When the virus was spreading around, Covid was spreading around, they said, “Hey, we've got a lot of bat viruses. Here's what we have in case this helps with anything.”
Peter: [laughs] Right.
Michael: So, the conspiracy goes so deep. There's this massive cover up. They're doing all this manipulation and also voluntarily, they said, “Hey, guys, we've got this virus that's pretty close to Covid.”
Peter: Again, it just feels like there's only one version of the Lab Leak that ends up making sense. And it's the vast dark conspiracy.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: That just can't be a valid reason to believe that it happened. The idea that perhaps there is an incredibly well covered up conspiracy on behalf of the Chinese government, it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Michael: I really think this is a journalism story. I mean, to the extent there's journalistic failures here, I think that there's so much commentary and so little reporting. I read dozens of articles about the Lab Leak. It was literally only this one article from the MIT Technology Review that just described what the lab was doing and talked to people in the lab. Just a clear description, like that's when it really clicked in my brain, because, I also thought like, “Yeah, maybe there's like, something got dropped or some airborne stuff.”
Peter: Right.
Michael: It's only once you understand the actual logistics of the lab, what they were trying to do, what they were actually doing. It's like, “Oh, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense.” And it's the fact that I don't know how a fucking virus lab works-
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: -that made me think it was much more plausible than it was, but we don't have very many journalists who know this stuff are interested. We have all this commentary, but we don't have journalists that are like, “Hey, I'm just going to talk to some virologists about how these labs work day to day.” And the minute you get to the basic fact, it's like so implausible, absurdly implausible.
Peter: Or maybe a simpler way to think of it is just like there's no particular reason to believe that this happened.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Peter: I think that we're basically at a point where the only real evidence is circumstantial shit, right?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: There are various very tangible and specific reasons to believe that this did not happen or that it was very unlikely. And yet we have a journalistic apparatus all talking about how we think this happened now. And not only that, but we need to reflect on why we didn't think it happened five years ago. And 65% of the American public believes it happened.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: I mean, just a catastrophic fuck up of journalism and they think they fucked it up in the other direction.
Michael: What you often find from Lab Leak people is this retreat to like well, it could have happened, it could have happened. And as a responsible person, especially if you're an actual scientist, you have to admit, yeah, it could have happened.
Peter: Yeah, yeah.
Michael: But the problem with that is there's essentially an infinite number of scenarios that could have happened.
Peter: Right, right.
Michael: So, the Chinese theory of course is that it is a Lab Leak, but it's a Lab Leak from the US, well, that also could have happened. There's no evidence whatsoever that it leaked from Fort Detrick.
Peter: We don't really have raccoon dogs.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: So, my theory goes away. My unfalsifiable and also unassailable theory.
Michael: But I could say that like “Oh, it was P. Diddy flew to Wuhan and spread it to distract from the allegations against him.” That also could have happened. You can name any scenario. I can't rule that out. There's no proof that P. Diddy didn't do it.
Peter: I do think it was suspicious that Diddy had his last freak off in the Wuhan wet market.
Michael: [laughs] Okay, Peter, that was like the lab kind of stuff on the merits. Are you ready to talk about the coverup?
Peter: Let's talk about the coverup.
Michael: We have to talk about the coverup. So, we now are going to turn to the creation of a paper called The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is the description from In Covid’s Wake.
Peter: The record is clear that the NIH and the NIAID funded gain of function research that was performed in part at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had known biosecurity deficiencies. After the Covid pandemic began, scientists with complex and mixed motives engaged in an extensive and unacknowledged effort to deflect attention from the Chinese lab to the city's wet market and thereby shape public perceptions of Covid's origins.
Michael: Scientists with complex and mixed motives.
Peter: I was just about to circle back to that complex and mixed motives, even in your telling of the conspiracy, your retrospective telling of the conspiracy, you can't explain why they did this because you're making it up.
Michael: And then this is a more detailed description. This is from an op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times op-ed section in March.
Peter: A March 2020 paper in the Journal of Nature Medicine written by five prominent scientists declared that no “laboratory-based scenario for the pandemic virus was plausible.” But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible, but likely. One of the authors of that paper, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “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.”
Michael: So, scientists wrote a paper saying this wasn't a Lab Leak, but in their private Slack communications they are caught in 4k saying this was a Lab Leak.
Peter: I remember the Slack leaks when they happened. Big deal for the Lab Leak folks.
Michael: This proximal origins like subplot is central to the Lab Leakers now. So, if you read the House subcommittee report on Covid origins, which is 600 pages long, the number one finding of the report is SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 , likely emerged because of a laboratory or research-related accident. That's four pages long. That's finding one, we know it's a Lab Leak. Finding two, the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 was prompted by Dr. Anthony Fauci to disprove the Lab Leak theory. And then they spend 51 pages on the creation of this report.
Peter: My God, this screams to me we have no scientists on our side because they realize that the more prominent scientists side against them. So, what they have to do is create a story where secretly they agree with us, secretly they know we're right, but they're covering it up.
Michael: So, one thing you really notice if you read antivax literature is if you're like, “Oh, okay, so you say that vaccines cause autism. Why do you think that?” And they'll be like, “In 1991, a whistleblower report was suppressed.”
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: And you're like, “Da, da, da. Sorry. Tell me the primary evidence for your central claim.” Every conspiracy theory eventually becomes the Silmarillion. It's like a bunch of fucking footnotes. It's a bunch of weird subplots. In Covid’s Wake, the chapter they have in the Lab Leak is 30 pages long. 15 of those pages are dedicated to a description of how the Proximal Origins paper came about.
Peter: Oh my god.
Michael: Another 10 pages are dedicated to how Fauci suppressed debate about the Lab Leak. Only five pages of a 30-page chapter are dedicated to actual evidence for and against the Lab Leak. And it's the last five pages.
Peter: It's also a way of like fighting off laypeople.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: It's like they have a hundred disparate isolated pieces of evidence and they can just throw them at you in any order at any time and put you in a position where you're like explaining context, which always looks like losing a debate, whether it actually is or not.
Michael: To describe the sort of more complete timeline of what actually happened with putting together this paper, we need to rewind to January 29th of 2020, where there is a biologist named Kristian Andersen. He is looking at the reports coming out of Wuhan. There's this coronavirus spreading around. We get the genome and he sees two things that worry him in the genome. The first thing is a furin cleavage site, which is very rare in bat coronaviruses and is something that labs are able to engineer. And then the second thing he sees is a receptor binding domain, which is typically characteristic of a virus that is very well adapted to humans. So, he sees these two things in the genome of Covid and he basically is like, “Oh shit, this could be engineered.”
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: So, he emails Eddie Holmes, who's another virologist, and he says-- All these emails of course have been FOIA'd. He says, “Eddie, can we talk? I need to be pulled off a ledge.” And then Eddie Holmes looks at the genome and says, “Fuck, this is bad.”
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Michael: So, they then reach out to Jeremy Farrar, who at the time is at the Wellcome Trust, but will eventually be at the WHO. So, he then loops in Anthony Fauci.
Peter: Fauci says, “Cover it up.”
[laughter]
Michael: He has a raccoon dog in his lap that he's lightly stroking.
Peter: He's stroking it like fucking Dr. Evil and his cat.
Michael: So, they then sort of have some calls back and forth and then Fauci sends, Peter, the smoking gun email.
Peter: My raccoon dog must eat. [Michael laughs]
Michael: This is In Covid’s Wake. This full screen grab is shown in the Senate report.
Peter: Jeremy, I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the furin site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019nCov COVID-19.
Michael: Yeah, they don't have a name for it yet.
Peter: I told him that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with his concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities.
I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be the MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology.
In the meantime, I will alert my US government official colleagues of my conversation with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend. Let us stay in touch. Best regards, Tony.
Michael: So, Tony caught red handed
Peter: Right away they're cutting out evolutionary psychologists. [Michael laughs]
Peter: Evolutionary psychologists is like, “Yes, men have been making coronaviruses to impress women for many years.”
Michael: So, what do you make of this?
Peter: I mean it seems extremely obvious what's happening here, if you just look at this in a vacuum, which I'll try to do, a couple of these guys look at COVID-19 , they see a couple of initial indications that it could be lab created. They escalate it. Fauci says, “Get some scientists on this, we will alert the authorities if the need be.”
Michael: So, this is those boring fucking email I've ever seen in my life. It's like “Yeah, you guys should look into it and if it's a big deal, we should probably talk to government agencies about it.”
Peter: I actually think what's impressive about this email is how clear it is and what's happening. It's very obvious that they're just like “Let's look into this and potentially alert authorities.”
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Because isn't his job as sort of like a point of contact between the scientific communities and the government apparatus.
Michael: He's the head of a government agency. Of course, he's going to bring the fucking government into it.
Peter: Right. So of course he's like, “Let's get the science down and then we'll talk to the government.”
Michael: Also, I don't know how it is in corporate world, but in human rights world, when I did international development, it's every fucking email is like this, You're like “Oh, let's loop in Jeff over at this agency. Let's make sure to tell this person.”
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: Like that's what bosses do essentially is bring people together and say like, “Let's get all our ducks in a row diplomatically with who needs to know about this.” Thus begins the most boring series of Slack chats I've ever fucking read.
Peter: That's a high bar.
Michael: So, there's four scientists that then join these Slack chats which have then been now released. It's 140 pages PDF of their fucking Slack chats.
Peter: I will read them all to you.
Michael: Oh my God. Luckily, there’s a lot of graphics and stuff they're sharing so it's like relatively quick to get through. But, what's weird about this as a smoking gun is they actually prove the opposite of what the Lab Leakers think they prove. Because the New York Times article quotes Kristian Andersen as saying “A Lab Leak is so friggin likely that we need to look into this.”
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: So, these are scientists who are like, “Okay, this might be a Lab Leak. Let's investigate the possibility.”
Peter: So that was the first thing I thought when you sent the quote from the book that sort of is like they published this thing saying it's not a Lab Leak. But here's a quote from him saying that it was. My first thought was, well, when was that quote-
Michael: Yeah. No exactly.
Peter: Was that from way earlier? Because that's substantially different.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: I think the most damning thing in the Slacks was when they published the chart where the X axis is lies we're telling the public and the Y axis is conspiracies we're doing. [Michael laughs]
Peter: And the line is just going up and to the right.
Michael: It is really striking in the Slack chats. This quote where Kristian Anderson says “It's so friggin likely,” is February 2nd and the paper does not come out until March 17th. So, there's a six-week period in between him saying this is really likely and then gathering data.
Peter: Boo.
Michael: And then eventually saying this is not likely.
Peter: That's not what science is science about taking your first impression and then running with that forever.
Michael: It's also so weird that Kristian Andersen has become almost as big as Fauci, a huge target of these like deranged Lab Leakers. But in the documents, he's the most pro Lab Leak person. At one point he says “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely. It's not some fringe theory. I absolutely agree that we can't prove one way or another, but we'll never be able to. However, that doesn't mean by default the data is currently much more suggestive of natural origin.” So, this guy should be the friend of the Lab Leakers. This is actually evidence. People within the scientific establishment took this very seriously.
Peter: Right, right. [Michael laughs] That's the real takeaway when I see this email is like that they were not being dismissive of this theory, but were in fact looking into it, taking it seriously.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: The fact that something was once the leading theory and then eventually faded does not-- [crosstalk]
Michael: Doesn't mean anything.
Peter: -conspiracy. It's just like normal science shit.
Michael: This is also such a sign of where the Lab Leaks people have gone because this is really like DVD extra stuff. You're like looking into Slack chats of people who wrote a paper and you're like they initially believed something and then eventually their paper didn't agree with them. It's like the only way to see this as a scandal is basically to lie about what the behind-the-scenes emails contain.
Peter: If there was a top-down cover up, you'd see some trickling into the Slack.
Michael: Yeah, completely.
Peter: There would have to be some indication that that's what was happening.
Michael: So much of this stuff is just very boldly taken out of context. So here is another excerpt from In Covid’s Wake.
Peter: Anderson described the group's work in an email on February 8th to Christian Drosten at the German Center for Infection Research this way, “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory. But we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”
Michael: And then unquote. This is then the interpretation by the In Covid’s Wake authors.
Peter: Inconclusive scientific evidence one way or the other had to be manipulated using an inapt legal standard, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to prevent “The shit show.”
Michael: That's a reference to. They said this would be a shit show politically if this turned out to be a Lab Leak. That's just kind of a statement of fact. Like, “Yeah, this would be a really big deal. Therefore, we need to, like get all our ducks in a row.”
Peter: Right. So, I guess they're just nitpicking the way that he's phrasing this. They’re trying--
Michael: Yeah, they don't like to disprove.
Peter: Yeah, we're trying to disprove it. It’s like that's not real science, which is true, but yeah, [crosstalk]
Michael: That's not true. You formulate a hypothesis and then you aim to disprove it. This is like how scientists talk about their work.
Peter: I guess that's right. I guess that's right. Yeah, but I guess that you could frame it in a more neutral way, theoretically, where, like the end goal is not to disprove the Lab Leak theory. The end goal is to find out what happened. But right, he's speaking more narrowly about the immediate work where you work to disprove something and that's how you rule something out and that's how the sort of science works.
Michael: It would be a genuine scandal if we found these scientists saying, like, “This is true, but we shouldn't publish it because it will be not politically expedient.”
Peter: Of course.
Michael: Or if they sent something to Fauci where they're like, “Oh, we found this.” And Fauci was like, “No, no. Say the opposite.” If there was any indication of that, you know it would be all over the Senate report, it would be everywhere, if they could find that. The only thing they have is you use the word disprove to another virologist.
Peter: Right.
Michael: You could argue maybe, maybe don't use a word like that, but are we really nitpicking about the fucking use of one word?
Peter: Maybe don't use a word like that if you think that your fucking emails are going to get subpoenaed by Congress.
Michael: Bad faith actors who will twist this shit in any way.
Peter: Right. And so, you have to speak like a politician even though you're a scientist. It's just embarrassing.
Michael: God, I have 10 more examples of this, Peter. But there’s no-- People make a lot of hay about the fact that Kristian Anderson, in one of his emails, he said, like, this is to one of the editors of Nature. The paper is eventually rejected by Nature. And when he sort of-- I believe this is when he resubmits it to Nature Medicine, he says, like, “A bunch of evolutionary biologists prompted by Fauci looked into this. da, da, da.” And people are like, “Oh, you were prompted by Fauci? Oh, so Fauci was the puppet master. Fauci prompted a bunch of scientists to create--”
Peter: Unbelievable dude.
Michael: And it's like again, have you had a job? This is how people talk.
Peter: Have you ever had a job?
Michael: Or maybe he was kind of name dropping the name Fauci to be like this is something with a little bit of institutional imprimatur, who fucking cares? The term prompted does not mean forced.
Peter: For the record, when there's an elaborate top-down conspiracy to hide what would be career-destroying fraud.
Michael: A literal conspiracy, yes.
Peter: you probably wouldn't just talk about the conspiracy like that.
Michael: Yeah, exactly.
Peter: There would be a cover story. There would be something else.
Michael: But then what's amazing. So, for this I talked to both Kristian Anderson and Eddie Holmes, two of the people who were in the Slack chats. This is extremely useful just to get the kind of basic human parameters of this. Both of them are completely fucking baffled by this whole thing. It's so weird to be-- Like poor Kristian Anderson has hauled in front of congress numerous times. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on his own money, on legal defense. He's getting death threats.
These people are at the center of essentially like a right-wing conspiracy and have been completely abandoned by the entire left. The fact that we have New York times columns saying that “We were misled about the origins of the pandemic and all this stuff, no one is sticking up for these guys.” And it's like a very obvious witch hunt. The republicans wanted to link Fauci to the Lab Leak. They wanted to link Fauci to fucking anything they could blame him for.
And if you talk to Kristian Anderson, what he says is like, at first, he was like, “Yeah, this receptor binding domain, this furin cleavage site, they both look really suspicious to me.” He then looks into it and they find a similar receptor binding domain in the wild in pangolins. So, he's like, “Oh, okay. So, it can occur in the wild.” And then they look into the furin cleavage site of Covid and they're like, “This is a really shit furin cleavage site. It just sort of sucks. The letters are not lined up. It's not very efficient and it doesn't fit the genome of the kind of furin cleavage sites that they do when they're doing gain of function research,” which just indicates evolution. This just looks the messy process of evolution.
And the other big thing is they look into the genome of Covid and they don't find any backbone of any existing virus. So, it's not SARS-1, it's not anything that's ever been seen in a virus lab before. And if you were going to design something in a lab, you would use a backbone and you would make a sort of a series of three, four, whatever discrete changes.
Peter: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael: They find no evidence of this whatsoever. Then they eventually publish this. Then they publish it first kind of as a preprint in February 20th, and they publish a better, more finalized version March 17th. The thing that I cannot get over 51 pages of the fucking Senate report are dedicated to this paper, nothing in this paper has been disproven. It's not like “Oh, they put out this paper, a hastily shoddily constructed paper.” Fauci's like, “Just print lies to suppress debate.” They published an article that was true. So, what exactly is the scandal here?
Peter: I think when you're talking about the Lab Leak itself, I try to retain some humility because I don't know what you're talking about.
[laughter]
Michael: Just make raccoon dog jokes, Peter. It's fine.
Peter: The information that you are providing me is a huge percentage of the information I have. You know what I mean?
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter: And so, I try to retain that part of my brain that sort of like, “You could very well be wrong about this. You could very well be wrong about this. This is not your field of expertise.” But then you see this stuff and it makes me feel more confident in the science stuff that I don't know about inherently, because surely if their scientific evidence was clear, all of these books would be about all the various talented scientists who have spectacular reasons for believing that the Lab Leak happened, rather than this absolutely God awful baby brained conspiracy bullshit.
Michael: Okay, so we're going to end by you and I going over the Trump administration Lab Leak website. Here's this. We're going to go to whitehouse.gov/lableak or whatever.
Peter: Dude, I wish that we could adequately explain what the fucking website banner like. [Michael laughs] It's Lab Leak in like fucking word art.
Michael: And it pops onto the screen. It's like a little flash animation. Yeah.
Peter: In the middle of it is just Donald Trump walking towards the camera.
Michael: [laughs] Looking stern. I know.
Peter: And then in the corner it says the true origins of COVID-19. But it says the true origins of and then COVID-19 for some reason is in a scripted font.
Michael: Like a wedding invitation. Like we COVID-19 invite you. [laughs]
Peter: This is definitely-- It's such a graphic design is my passion situation.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: Some fucking, one of those DOGE interns was like “I’ll do it.”
Michael: Also, okay, read the first paragraph here. This is the number one message on like lableak.gov.
Peter: Oh my God. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 publication, which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the Lab Leak theory, was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally.
Michael: The first thing they mention is this fucking paper.
Peter: And this is again such a classic indicator of a conspiracy theory.
Michael: It's so fucking nuts.
Peter: The first thing is not evidence for a Lab Leak. It's conspiratorial rambling about a coverup.
Michael: About suppressing debate. The other thing that Eddie Holmes mentioned to me was that it's so fucking bizarre to be accused of suppressing debate when the paper is debate. We said, we don't think it's a Lab Leak that's picking a position in a debate.
Peter: Yeah, publish your own bitch.
Michael: Yeah, if I say the minimum wage should be higher, that's debate. That's not me suppressing debate.
Peter: Right, but I could then publish a piece saying that in private correspondence, [Michael laughs] you have consistently told me that you think the minimum wage should be low.
Michael: You would fucking do that if I published anything like that?
Peter: Tell the truth. Yes. [laughter]
Michael: This was a paper published in Nature Medicine. If somebody wanted to publish a response or a fucking op-ed or something, they could have published it. There's no suppression.
Peter: What about the numbers after that on the Lab Leak website? It says the virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Michael: I know. I love that the first thing is just a bald-faced lie. I love it. It's just so fucking muah, perfect. There's never been a furin cleavage site found in nature except for all the times it was found in nature.
Peter: This just reads like conspiratorial rambling, so--
Michael: It's really bleak.
Peter: There's just like a little paragraph for gain of function research. There's a little paragraph that says “NIH failures.”
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Peter: There's a part that says the social distancing, the six feet apart social distancing recommendation which shut down schools and small businesses across the country was arbitrary and not based on science. Dude, Trump was in office.
Michael: [laughs] I know.
Peter: It's crazy how much that gets memory hold such that. Even when we're talking about it has to be brought up repeatedly because it is just-
Michael: Nuts.
Peter: -incongruent with the public's understanding of it. And also, the story that Republicans tell about this.
Michael: There's also, we didn't even have time to get into it, but there's also this eco health obstruction. There was a proposal for the Wuhan lab and a guy in North Carolina to do some gain of function work. This was not funded. This didn't happen. But it's like this is now seen as evidence that they were doing gain of function work. But we already know they were doing gain of function work in the lab. That's not secret. They were publishing it. And this eco health proposal wasn't funded. And the only gain of function research was going to take place in North Carolina. So even if it had been funded, it would be irrelevant. And also, it was on the SARS-1 backbone. So, if it had leaked, it would be in fucking North Carolina and it would be SARS-1 that leaked.
Peter: Uh-uh.
Michael: But again, it’s just like the document wasn't public and they were able to find it in some archive of some random-- Somewhere online that people didn't want to get to it. And anything that is secret people tell themselves is important.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: Oh, the defuse proposal wasn't made public. It's like why would a fucking failed funding proposal be public? I've worked on a million funding proposals that didn't go anywhere and they're just on my hard drive at my human rights institution. It's not like a cover up, it's just like this isn't that fucking interesting. And also, even if it had been funded, it wouldn't mean anything for Covid.
Peter: God, what a bunch of absolute Jesus fucking dipshits.
Michael: So, I just want to end by talking about two sort of common talking points about the Lab Leak. And I think a lot of people haven't really followed this all that closely. And honestly, if you're someone who's kind of picked up by osmosis, the Lab Leak theory, you see it around, you're like, “Yeah, there's probably some good evidence for that.” I don't really begrudge anybody. I think this is really a media failure.
One thing you find a lot when you talk to kind of normal people about this is that people will say, “Well, neither theory is proven. We haven't proven the market. We haven't proved the lab.” That's true in the abstract, but that also implies that there's a 50/50 chance.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: There is no evidence for a Lab Leak. There's evidence against it. There're tons of evidence for zoonosis. There's better evidence for zoonosis than for a lot of origins of viruses, Ebola, HIV, both very murky, how they actually originated. The other thing that you hear a lot about the Lab Leak thing is like what does it matter?
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: I even said a version of this on our previous Lab Leak episode, which I now regret saying. And you can say one hand it doesn't matter for America's pandemic response, which is true. Even if this was a Chinese bioweapon, if this was a random thing that happened. Either way, America's response was garbage. So, on some level, fine, it doesn't matter. But also, this is, I think, a really core part of the right-wing assault on science. Trump signed an executive order right after he came into office banning gain of function research.
Peter: Oh my God.
Michael: It's not that I really give that much of a shit about gain of function research, but the people pushing the Lab Leak theory have a specific set of policies that they want to pass. And if we give in to the Lab Leakers and if we sort of allow this to gain purchase, they're going to pass policies that are going to make it harder to develop vaccines and treatments and they're going to ignore the wildlife trade, which is a fucking huge problem, and probably will start the next pandemic because it started the last like three.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This matters as far as the actual outcomes and policies that people are pushing for.
Peter: You know you can't have this sort of anti-science conspiracy-minded movement let loose without negative repercussions.
Michael: Exactly. Yeah.
Peter: Even if you think they're right about Lab Leak, their solutions to these problems will be anti-scientific, anti-intellectual nonsense.
Michael: Yeah. These people are fucking lying in the first bullet point of their fucking congressional report.
Peter: Right.
Michael: There's a weird thing where like in this rush to condemn groupthink, it's like we're now engaging in a kind of groupthink.
Michael: Yeah. I don't know why this has caught the imagination of lefties. All I'll say is that in like 2023, there was a media panic about organized retail crime. And then I put out a bonus episode debunking it and the panic faded away.
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: Whereas you put out an episode about the Lab Leak-
Michael: [laughs] Fuck you, fuck you.
Peter: -and it got worse. [Michael laughs] People want to argue with you so much that they started believing in the Lab Leak conspiracy. [Michael laughs]
[music]
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