The lab leakers are back, baby
Have they got the goods this time?
Back in February, the Wall Street Journal kicked off a round of debate over the origins of COVID-19. The Department of Energy’s intelligence wing had told the paper it was now leaning toward a lab origin with “low confidence.” (Until then DOE had joined two other spy agencies in not being able to decide. Five of nine are on record favoring a natural origin; just one other, the FBI, favors a lab.) The new wrinkle, borne out in further reporting, was that the lab DOE suspected did not seem to be the famous (or infamous) Wuhan Institute of Virology, but rather the Chinese CDC.
As I pointed out at the time:
If you have been reading anything about the lab leak for the last three years, or even just looking at the pictures, you will no doubt recognize the name Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Well, it may interest you to know that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is, in fact, an entirely different institution — nine miles away, on the other side of Wuhan, across the Yangzi River. To put it in American terms: If the CCDC was near the White House, the WIV would be somewhere in Falls Church, Virginia.
These sort of details are important when talking about the introduction of a disease.
It now seems the lab leakers have changed their minds — and sides of the river — again. Yesterday, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag published a report on the Substack blog Public headlined: “First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources.”
The story was quickly amplified by the Murdoch media empire, with summaries appearing in Fox News, New York Post, the Australian, and so on, thus sparking a wave of follow-on coverage by other right-wing blogs. (Completing the circle, the Public post briefly cites a separate but complementary piece by the Murdoch-owned Times of London. French scientist Florence Débarre said the Times piece “repackages old (debunked) stories as new, and spreads wild unverified rumours,” and has called it “the most scientifically inept and journalistically shameful article on Covid origins I have read so far.” So take that for what you will.)
Taibbi trumpeted his own story as “explosive” on his blog (which, just to confuse everyone further, jocks the name of mine). He further declared: “The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side).”
Quite the claim! So how strong is this “explosive” evidence? At first blush, not very. The Public post seems to be incrementally advancing an earlier, still-otherwise-uncorroborated Wall Street Journal story — and one apparently contradicted by the paper’s DOE interlude in February — that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were treated for flu-like symptoms in November 2019. The big get are the specifics: Citing anonymous “sources within the US government,” Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag offer the names of researchers Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
So far little information has emerged about the second two individuals. But Ben Hu (or Hu Ben, as a House GOP report called him) is a big name in lab-leak world. He has been a co-author on papers with Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV and a focal point of many conspiracy theories. Hu was further identified in 2021 by Australian reporter Sharri Markson as having received a small grant (just over $2,000 according to the book) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China to do research on coronaviruses in genetically-modified mice. According to Markson, the removal of that—and all other—project titles related to the WIV from the foundation’s website during the pandemic is evidence of a coverup. (Markson, it should be noted, is employed by the Murdochs twice over, as an editor at the Australian and an on-air personality at Sky News Australia. Her book was published by Murdoch-owned HarperCollins; it was accompanied by a Sky News documentary that featured on-camera interviews with Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump.)
Hu is such a red-letter name for the lab-leakers that Taibbi simply forgot about the other two in his summary of the post, saying only that the story named “Ben Hu, who was in charge of ‘gain-of-function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the ‘patient zero’ of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Let’s set aside for a second the fact that “patient zeroes” aren’t a real thing. (The term came from a comical misreading of a 1984 CDC report on AIDS in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which identified one individual — who wasn’t even the index case in the outbreak in question — as “Patient O,” with O standing for “Out of California.”) Let’s just stipulate that Taibbi was simply looking for a fancy (and sinister) way of saying the “earliest known case.”
But even the underlying Public post doesn’t commit to that idea. In the text itself, the authors say that “three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2” were the WIV researchers. In other words that they were among the first, not the first.
Then they backtrack even further. Here are the paragraphs that follow, with my emphases: