Wednesday was the first day for some very special hearings to be conducted in the brand new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In this hearing, the subcommittee is expected to look into the origins of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. The New York Times reports that this hearing “promises politics mixed with substance.” The New York Times is wrong. There won’t be any substance.
There are only three witnesses scheduled to appear: Dr. Robert Redfield, who was appointed by Donald Trump as head of the CDC; commentator Jamie Metzl, whose expertise on the virus consists of an Asian history degree; and disgraced writer Nicholas Wade, who is best known for a book pushing “scientific racism” that was rightfully pounded into dust on every possible basis. Oh, and Wade also used to be the science editor for, no surprise here, The New York Times. Wade’s book doesn’t get a mention in the Times article.
Why these three witnesses? Because every one of them is a proponent of the “lab leak” hypothesis. Which is the only hypothesis you should expect to hear between the screaming of committee members Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and former Trump physician Rep. Ronny Jackson. And to make sure everyone is on the same page, they got started on the hate for Dr. Anthony Fauci before the hearing began. None of the witnesses are going to give any evidence, because none of them have evidence.
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The tweet above illustrates the quality of the witnesses Republicans have called on day one.
New York Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis showed her willingness to dig in to the assault with an opening statement alleging that, “Dr. Fauci lied about tax dollars funding research in Wuhan, repeatedly denied the lab-leak theory. Now we know he commissioned a paper to disprove it and push his narrative.”
That claim references a tangled web assembled by Republicans in which Fauci was on a phone call with other scientists, some of whom wrote a paper on the virus’ origin, another of whom complained about the paper in an email, and which Fauci then mentioned in a single statement during a single appearance during the daily news conferences held near the beginning of the pandemic. Republicans have turned Fauci’s presence on this phone call, a group call with a dozen scientists, into a claim that he “prompted” not just the paper on the origin of the virus, but pressured the scientists involved to find anything other than a lab origin.
In the past two weeks, sources leaked a classified intelligence report from the Department of Energy, which issued a statement stating that the Sars-CoV-2 virus “likely” leaked from a laboratory source. However, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “The Energy Department made its judgment with ‘low confidence,’ according to people who have read the classified report.”
What do you get when you combine “likely” with “low confidence?” A big shrug. One that is singularly lacking in anything that looks like evidence. It’s worth noting that the Energy Department does have control over several national laboratories, some of which include microbiology. However, since absolutely none of the reasoning behind this “low confidence” analysis was provided, it’s impossible to say if any of those labs were involved in the evaluation.
In the same week, FBI Director Christopher Wray also jumped in to say that his agency believed that the lab at Wuhan, China was “probably” the origin of the virus. Wray also failed to provide any evidence, indicate how the agency had reached this conclusion, or express any level of confidence behind that “probably.”
For what it’s worth, the National Intelligence Council continues to assess with the same “low confidence” that the Energy Department employs that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal. Meanwhile, the CIA reportedly “remains undecided.”
Why are intelligence agencies looking into this at all? Because President Joe Biden asked them to. Back in May 2021, the journal Science published a letter calling for an investigation into the origins of the virus. President Biden responded by asking intelligence agencies to look at “all possible origins” pf the pandemic. As The Washington Post reported last July, this was the result of that multiagency appeal.
The review concluded that the virus was not an engineered bioweapon, but otherwise failed to reach a conclusion about where it came from.
The reports that are coming out now about the conclusions of the Energy Department and the FBI are not new information. They are the result of a review conducted by many agencies that was finished last summer and which “failed to reach a conclusion.”
In highlighting these “lab origin” statements now, Republicans and the media are playing up a part of that review and playing down the rest.
What it’s worth, what all of this is worth, is nothing. Unless the FBI has testimony that someone was aware of a lab leak, there is absolutely no reason to assess their analysis as having any value. Ditto the Energy Department. And the CIA. And the NSA. And every cookbook author who steps up to tell Greene how much she agrees with her that Fauci needs to be drawn, quartered, and sauteed with butter. The fact that none of these agencies was able to come up with a conclusive, high-confidence answer that was convincing to even their fellows in the intelligence community shows that the value of their analysis was exactly squat.
What does have value at this moment are three separate papers. One of those papers uses geographic clustering of early cases to determine the source and pointed to the Wuhan “wet market.”
Despite strong epidemiological links and the documented presence of SARS-CoV-2 susceptible animals, the role of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the COVID-19 pandemic remains controversial. Using spatial analyses we show that the earliest known COVID-19 cases diagnosed in December 2019 were geographically distributed near to, and centered on this market.
Another looks deeply into the genetics of Sars-CoV-2 in the earliest incidents and determined that to create the virus that began infecting people rapidly at the end of the year actually took two distinct exchanges of virus between people and animals that came weeks apart.
We show that … these two lineages were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans. The first zoonotic transmission likely involved lineage B viruses and occurred in late-November/early-December 2019 and no earlier than the beginning of November 2019, while the introduction of lineage A likely occurred within weeks of the first event.
The third report, published in the October Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, looked at every incident of known pandemic origin back to the 1960s, examining both instances in which virus had escaped from labs (it happens) and transmissions from both livestock and wild animals, and put it all together with everything we know about COVID-19.
Substantial evidence has amassed over the last 2 1/2 y suggesting that COVID-19 originated via a similar pathway to SARS involving a spillover from bats to intermediate hosts in wildlife farms or markets, and then to people within the wildlife trade, leading to the first known cluster in the Huanan Seafood Market (HSM) in Wuhan in December 2019. Evidence includes analysis of SARSr-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 genomes, spatial and epidemiological data of the early cases, live animal market sales in Wuhan, and characterization of related wildlife CoVs.
Did the Chinese government attempt to cover-up the outbreak at the beginning? It did. Has it engaged in hiding information in a way that suggests it has been doing research in ways that may be unsafe? Absolutely. Is any of this evidence that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory? It is not.
In fact, the information that has been gained so far, both in the initial spread of the disease and especially in the genetic makeup, make it extremely unlikely that the virus escaped as the result of a single lab incident. And you can put as many underlines beneath extremely as you like.
It’s possible that the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will also come to this conclusion, but it’s just about as unlikely, since that committee has no real purpose other than allowing Republicans to barbecue Fauci for the sin of working in public health over five decades rather than cashing in long ago and going to work for an insurance company or pharmaceutical manufacturer. Oh, and giving new air time to racist authors who failed at the most basic principles of science.
But whatever the committee concludes, it won’t really matter. Not unless it comes with evidence.
What do Americans really think about the issues? It turns out they are a surprisingly liberal bunch, as Rachael Russell of Navigator Research tells us on this week's episode of The Downballot. Russell explains how Navigator conducts in-depth research to fill in gaps in policy debates with hard data instead of pundit speculation. The challenge for Democrats is that many voters say they hold progressive beliefs but still pull the lever for Republicans. That imbalance, however, presents an opportunity—Democrats just have to seize it.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap the first round of voting in the race for Chicago mayor, which saw a progressive apocalypse averted; the resolution to the long-running uncertainty over the speakership in the Pennsylvania state House that saw Joanna McClinton make history; Rep. Elissa Slotkin's entry into Michigan's open Senate race, which makes her the first prominent candidate to run; and the inexplicable decision by conservatives to go dark on the airwaves for a full week following last week's primary in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.