The New Lab Leak Evidence
Plus: AI terrifies Trump, the irony haunting Israel, AI wargames, the ghost of Soleimani, and more!
Are you one of those people who can provide a numerical answer when asked for your opinion of the lab leak hypothesis? Like: “I think the probability that the Covid pandemic resulted from the accidental release of a genetically engineered pathogen in Wuhan is around 45 percent”?
If so, then, whatever your number, it’s time to update it in the upward direction. Last month brought new evidence that adds at least some strength to what was already the most plausible variant of the hypothesis: that a research project originally envisioned as a joint US-China endeavor, having been denied funding by the US government, then proceeded in some form or another in China and went awry.
This news is important in its own right, but what’s more important is the way it’s being processed—or, actually, not processed—by mainstream media. The media’s silence about this story reflects an ominous dynamic: Political polarization in America is impeding good governance not just within America’s borders but beyond them—notably including the kind of international governance that various technological threats, certainly including biotechnological ones, call for.
The new evidence consists of documents that reflect the planning behind a big research proposal known as DEFUSE, prepared by the EcoHealth Alliance, an American NGO, and submitted to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding arm, in 2018. The proposal prominently lists five “team members” that would aid in the research, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The proposal itself had come to light in 2021. That’s when various people noted that the DEFUSE project involved altering a bat coronavirus in ways strikingly consistent with the structure of the Covid virus (including the proposed insertion of the now notorious “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the Covid virus that one eminent biologist had deemed suggestive of genetic engineering even before the DEFUSE proposal surfaced).
The new documents—which came to light via a FOIA request by an NGO called U.S. Right to Know—add new details about the proposed bio-engineering that are also consistent with the Covid virus’s structure. In other words: Now the resemblance between the envisioned product of the DEFUSE project and the actual Covid virus seems even more striking than it did a couple of months ago.
How much more striking? Hard to say! In an ideal world, our finest media outlets—like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—would cover this development. They’d try to explain it in layperson’s terms and would quote a diversity of experts on its significance. And we’d all be able to comb through these articles and reach a well informed conclusion. But these outlets have been mainly ignoring the lab leak hypothesis—especially evidence in favor of it—all along.
In a way, that’s understandable, even laudable. Because the lab leak scenario was first embraced by Trumpists, and was deployed by some of them in a xenophobic way, mainstream media outlets reacted against it. And they’ve stuck to their guns, ignoring the story even as evidence in favor of the scenario has accumulated. So if you want help in understanding the latest development, don’t look to the New York Times.
As it happens, some help is being offered by a former New York Times science writer—in fact, the former editor of the New York Times science section: Nicholas Wade. He wrote a somewhat technical but fairly accessible piece about the new evidence in City Journal. And that’s the problem: City Journal is published by the right-wing and somewhat Chinaphobic Manhattan Institute. And if the implications of the lab leak possibility are to be constructively processed, the conversation can’t be confined to such ideological circles.
Wade’s piece illustrates the problem. It’s certainly no right-wing rant, but it does fixate on the “allocation of blame” question and conclude that “the bulk of the blame for the pandemic surely rests with Beijing.” Well, maybe, but:
(1) We don’t really know yet. (It’s not uncommon for scientists to proceed with research before they’ve gotten funding, and it’s possible that, if indeed the Wuhan lab did this research, important American actors knew about that and maybe even encouraged it.)
(2) If our big takeaway from the growing body of evidence in favor of the lab leak hypothesis is that we should force Beijing to fess up about its complicity, we’ll get nowhere. The Chinese government—like so many institutions at so many times (possibly including the EcoHealth Alliance right now)—is unlikely to admit complicity in a catastrophe even if it is complicit. Besides, we don’t need an admission of guilt to productively harness the implications of this catastrophe. Instead of trying to coerce a confession that’s never going to come, we can just say something like this:
There’s at least some evidence that Covid was human-engineered, with the best of intentions, and escaped into the population. Whether or not this actually happened, we know for sure it could have happened under the existing regulatory scheme. So the regulatory scheme needs improving—especially at the international level. Since pathogens cross borders, no national government, including the US, can keep its people safe just by controlling research within its borders. (In this case DARPA successfully controlled research within US borders—but apparently that didn’t keep Americans safe.) So international governance is essential.
This kind of governance will be hard to cultivate in an atmosphere of accusation and recrimination. And it will be even harder to cultivate amid the kind of full-blown Cold War with China that seems popular in many of the circles where the lab-leak scenario is currently taken most seriously. The more those circles dominate discussion of the scenario’s implications, the more likely such a Cold War is. —RW
PS: A shoutout to two non-mainstream but somewhat prominent media outlets that featured interviews with Emily Kopp, who did the (somewhat technical) writeup of the new evidence for the NGO that uncovered it. Notably, both outlets— Breaking Points and The Hill’s Rising—feature two co-hosts of contrasting ideologies. We could use more of that kind of thing.
A Wall Street Journal report says Iran is having trouble reining in “Iran-backed militias” and offers one reason why: The US killed the guy who was good at reining them in.
Four years ago, President Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, who, as commander of Iran’s Quds Force, was liaison to militias in various parts of the Middle East that get support from Iran and sometimes work in concert with it. NZN argued at the time that the assassination was (in addition to a violation of international law) a short-sighted move that would generate “blowback”. The Journal describes one form the blowback has taken:
“The US’s killing of Soleimani was an attempt to dislocate the chain of command running from Tehran to its armed allies operating from Syria and Iraq to Yemen, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. But it didn’t degrade their ability to upend the region; it just made them more freewheeling, disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, attacking Israel and posing a growing threat to American forces.”
As deadly US strikes against militias in Iraq and Syria fail to deter them from attacking US targets, one political scientist suggests a way to keep American troops in the region safe: Get them out of there, pronto.
Writing in Responsible Statecraft, Joshua Landis notes that the mission US troops are supposedly pursuing in Iraq and Syria—eliminating the threat from ISIS—was accomplished years ago. And, though the militias currently afflicting US soldiers are backed by Iran, Iran isn’t the only country hoping to end the American military presence. The governments of both Iraq and Syria want US troops to vacate their turf. Landis writes:
“No one wants them there, not the governments and not the people. All are sharpening their knives and devising new ways to weaken them and force them to leave. It is pointless for Washington to keep them there for a mission that has long since passed its expiration date or to escalate a war it cannot win.”
If you weren’t even aware that US troops are in Syria, you’re not alone. A recent poll commissioned by DC think tank Defense Priorities found that most Americans aren’t:
Yet most Americans, once they’re made aware of the troop presence in Syria, worry about its consequences:
Four AI updates:
Donald Trump, in what seems to be his first major pronouncement about AI of the 2024 presidential campaign, said it may be “the most dangerous thing out there.” He said he’s been victimized by a deep fake that had him endorsing a product he hasn’t endorsed—and that this kind of blurring of the line between real and fake could threaten national security. “This is a problem that they better get working on right now,” he said. But he also said that “there’s no real solution. The AI, as they call it, it is so scary.”