The Trump administration—led by Donald himself—keeps pushing the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was engineered in a lab in Wuhan, China. But a report purporting to provide evidence for that theory is based in part on provably false claims. It’s “an illustrated guide on how not to do open source analysis,” according to one expert who analyzed the report for The Daily Beast.
The report, produced by a defense contractor and referred to as the Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment (MACE) report, is being looked at by several congressional committees. At least some are skeptical. It “doesn’t quite pass the smell test,” one aide told The Daily Beast. It’s “not based on actual intelligence,” another source said. But with Donald Trump invested in the claim that this pandemic is all China’s fault, don’t expect the Trump administration to let it go.
According to the MACE report, traffic around the Wuhan lab was blocked for a time in October, suggesting that authorities were trying to keep people away from the site of a leak so the virus wouldn’t spread. But satellite imagery shows that there were vehicles on the road at that time, though nearby highway construction may have led to some closures.
The report also claims to have found highly suspicious gaps in cell phones going in and out of the lab in October … only its authors failed to note that there was a major holiday during that time. Also, “The number of cellphones involved is extraordinarily small—in most months it is two or fewer unique devices,” analyst Jeffrey Lewis told The Daily Beast. “Note that there were no devices or pings in March and April 2019. Are we to conclude there was an accident in the spring as well? It is far more likely that the one or two phones regularly going near the laboratory took a vacation, got sick, or lost their phone. (These are all things that have happened in my family in the past year.)”
Another investigator quickly found the MACE report’s claim that a November conference at the Wuhan lab was canceled was false—a Pakistani scientist who attended the conference posted selfies on Facebook.
At the same time as the MACE report is circulating in Congress, Australian officials have had to push back on a second dossier making similar claims that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. Although the claims made a splash in a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, “It’s a dead story here—it’s not been taken seriously,” one Australian official told The Daily Beast. Unfortunately, in the U.S., Trump seems likely to continue to try to distract from his own failures by pushing the theory that the virus came from a Chinese lab.