I'm reading "Pompeo-led effort to hunt down Covid lab theory shut down by Biden administration over concerns about quality of evidence" (CNN). It was an "effort to hunt down" a "theory."
President Joe Biden's team shut down a closely-held State Department effort launched late in the Trump administration to prove the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab over concerns about the quality of its work, according to three sources familiar with the decision.
It was just an "effort... to prove" something that they already believed, something they wanted to find. Is there a general principle that an investigation launched in the hope of finding something politically useful ought to be shut down? If the "quality" of the work was concerning, why not improve the quality? Why shut it down? There certainly needs to be a principle that you don't shut down investigations because you're afraid they might uncover what you don't want to find.
The existence of the State Department inquiry and its termination this spring by the Biden administration -- neither of which has been previously reported -- comes to light amid renewed interest in whether the virus could have leaked out of a Wuhan lab with links to the Chinese military.
So... it wasn't "previously reported"?! I presume that means, CNN already knew it, but it withheld the information from us because it reflected badly on Biden, and CNN is only revealing it now because there is other reporting on the plausibility of the lab-leak theory, and it realizes that withholding the story will hurt whatever reputation for journalism CNN might still have.
The Biden administration is also facing scrutiny of its own efforts to determine if the Chinese government was responsible for the virus. Those involved in the previously undisclosed inquiry, which was launched last fall by allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say it was an honest effort to probe what many initially dismissed: that China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic's origin in Wuhan, according to two additional sources. But the inquiry quickly became mired in internal discord amid concerns that it was part of a broader politicized effort by the Trump administration to blame China and cherry-pick facts to prove a theory.
The decision to terminate the inquiry, which was run primarily out of the State Department's arms control and verification bureau, was made after Biden officials were briefed on the team's draft findings in February and March of this year, a State Department spokesperson said. Questions were raised about the legitimacy of the findings and the project was deemed to be an ineffective use of resources, explained a source familiar with the decision....
In May 2020, Pompeo claimed there was "enormous evidence" and a "significant amount of evidence" to support the claim -- despite the US intelligence community saying there was no definitive answer as to precisely where and how the virus began transmitting....
Officials involved in the effort...
That is, the investigation.
... relied on scientific research as well as public and classified information to probe the lab leak theory, including looking into any possible connection between the virus and the Chinese government's biological weapons program, three of the sources told CNN....
"The way they did their work was suspicious as hell," said one former State Department official who was familiar with the effort. "They basically conducted it in secret, cutting out the State Department's technical experts and the Intelligence Community, and then trying to brief certain senior officials in the interagency on their 'tentative conclusions' even before they'd let the department leaders they worked for know an investigation was underway at all."
During the final weeks of the Trump administration, when senior officials in the department who had been shielded from the efforts learned about how far the inquiry had gone, they pushed for a panel of outside scientists to review the findings. When scientists looked at the data, during a 3-hour long meeting in early January, the evidence collected up until that point appeared inconclusive and misguided, two sources said.
"It smelled like they were just fishing to justify pre-determined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their 'science,' " said the former official familiar with the effort. "The reason for all this became clear when real scientists finally got a chance to see their analysis, and [the inquiry's] 'statistical' case fell apart."..
When the Biden administration took office, it did not see any significant doubts in the datapoints featured in the fact sheet Pompeo put out, according to one source familiar [sic]....
The Biden administration's effort to investigate the origins of the pandemic is primarily focused on rallying pressure and support for the WHO's investigation to be transparent and fulsome, explained a Biden administration official....
The Biden administration's effort to investigate.... I think it's hilarious that the word "investigate" is used for rallying pressure and support." By the way, CNN, the word "fulsome" means excessively flattering.
"It appears we do not understand the emergence of Covid-19 any better than we did 6-9 months ago. The world needs to learn as much as possible about the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic to better prepare our governments, our people, and our public health institutions for the next health crisis," the State Department spokesperson said.
But the investigation was shut down.
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3 comments:
Dave Begley writes: "Of course the CCP doesn’t want a serious investigation. China owes us and the rest of the world trillions of dollars. Biden will do nothing."
Peter writes: "Imagine Covid had begun in Russia, during the Obama presidency, and a similar investigation, of similar quality, had been shut down in the early months of the Trump Administration. How would CNN have reported such an action? I think it is reasonable to suppose that CNN, and most of the news media, would have made what they would have called a “cover-up” the top story on the news for days, if not weeks, passing the most sweeping and negative judgements conceivable about Trump and his conduct, and would have cited his decision as a basis for possible impeachment."
Original Mike writes: "They identified the SARS1 intermediate animal host in four months and the MERS host in nine. For this pandemic it's been 18 months and they've got bupkis. https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038"
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