ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says, as Spy Agencies Remain Split/The conclusion, which was made with 'low confidence,' was based on new intelligence. The information didn’t lead other agencies to change their assessments on the origins of the coronavirus."Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023
The origin of the virus has emerged as a divisive line of intelligence reporting, and recent congressional reports have not been bipartisan. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they believe the virus could have come from one of China’s research labs in Wuhan....
Democrats have been less persuaded, with some saying they believe the natural causes explanation and others saying they are not certain that enough intelligence will emerge to make a conclusive decision.
Oddly, that doesn't make them sound far apart: could have come from a lab versus not certain we'll ever conclusively know. But of course, I believe the 2 parties are antagonistic toward each other.
Posts
89 comments:
They should be profoundly embarrassed.
Don’t you have to have a conscience to be embarrassed?
They're embarrassed because they're not scientists.
Yes, very embarrassing. They should be loudly called out and held in disgrace, never to be listened to again. And I don't mean collectively as an unnamed "cadre of scientists", but specifically as individuals and by name.
The scientists couldn't have done this in plain sight, as they did, without the eager collaboration of government, media, and Big Pharma. The bonfire of credibility was spectacular. It is still raging.
Tar and feathers. Short of that how about fucking jail for the damage dome by their malfeasance and lies?
These crooks not only damaged their own credibility they ruined the trust of billions of people everywhere. Who has any faith in what the CDC or the intelligence agencies say? Not me.
Now that Fauci has retired, many things can be revealed. Maybe even how Pfizer was behind the Project Veritas coup.
Happy to see NYT working heroically to downplay this news. Which, for anyone who cared to pay attention during the past year or three, is not news at all.
Having squandered the last shreds of credibility for their institutions and indeed for medical science generally, Fauci and Collins have skated off to enjoy their retirements. I hear you can book Fauci as a speaker for only six figures.
We were scolded by the dutiful leftwing(D) press for saying so.
Nah - the Dutiful Leftwing corrupt press(D) is never embarrassed... they all pretend it never happened.
Just like Trump and Russia.
I don't expect this to change anything.........not even Nate Silver.
Razib Kahn and other outlets who admitted they were not experts nonetheless listened to and gave platform to people who were experts who said "Well, it's at least possible. We should be able to look into this." That's the infuriating part.
It's one thing to be wrong. Anyone can be wrong, especially about some new problem on the scene. And it's not fully open-minded to ignore people who have no credentials who say "But I'm one of those special skeptical people" who say they are smart, but it's not always terrible either.
But they not only disregarded fully credentialed people who questioned, they worked hard to discredit and even destroy their reputations. That's the shining example of their perfidy. The hypocrisy was profound. "Listen to the experts and trust the science. Oh, not those experts and not that science!"
Nate pewter
I'm curious what expertise the Department of Energy has regarding virus development.
I'm not saying I doubt their conclusion; I'm just curious.
My guess is that they got info from an asset that they usually look to for info on nuclear weapons.
Something tells me that Mr. Silver will happily go along with whatever the next government issued "conventional wisdom" is without a serious thought about whether there is reason to dissent.
Blogger Old and slow said...
They should be loudly called out and held in disgrace, never to be listened to again. And I don't mean collectively as an unnamed "cadre of scientists", but specifically as individuals and by name.
who was that One guy? You know? The "highest paid employee" of the US Government? What WAS his name?
I wonder, if people still worship him?
It should be a no-brainer that a “follow the money” investigation be undertaken. But which institution should conduct it?
There were many people who profited from their suppression, as well as a good many that lost their livelihood. I’m fairly certain that shaming the oppressors would be quite insufficient.
Confidence might be low among the analysts, but you wouldn't think that based on the comments section here.
Once word started trickling out in the blogosphere that a medical research lab was located in the vicinity of the wet markets, it just seemed like common sense to suspect that experiments at the lab had more to do with the emergence of the virus then some wild bats from hundreds of miles away. Sadly, a pandemic of cynicism and distrust in "the science" was unleashed along with the virus.
The mechanism to prevent this kind of nonsense is a free and open discussion of facts, assertions, and theories. This can’t be said enough, especially to a generation that appears to feel that someone - anyone with power - should step in and govern the discussion. The question, “Do you think people should be able to assert incorrect or untrue things in the public forum?” is exactly the wrong question. “Who gets to decide what is true or untrue?” is the eternal question. And in a democracy or a democratic republic, the answer must always be “each individual person.” “Follow the science” is a slogan for falling into the ditch. Anyone with half a moment of thought will realize that the history of science is full of then-believed assertions of truths and theories which nobody believes today, not even current scientists. But the question of the origin of the virus wasn’t even a scientific question. It was a question of fact, the discovery of which they purposely suppressed under the color of “science.” Their public statements blended to a fraud all along. I hope for accountability but we seem to be short on that these days.
From a purely scientific point of view, the chances that it wasn't engineered in a laboratory is less than a tenth of percent, and I am being extremely cautious at putting it that high. The odds that it was natural have been that low since May of 2020.
The simple fact is this- this kind of research was funded by the US government, and carried out at the Wuhan Institute under a web of contracts. The only thing I don't know with any high degree of certainty is whether or our money directly funded the particular experiments and project that led to COVID-19, but by their actions and their e-mails from early 2020, the people at the NIH/CDC and some of the people they consulted on the matter clearly did believe they might have been to blame for this, and were desperate to try to find an argument, literally any argument no matter how ridiculous, to support zoonosis.
Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
Seriously, it required a major suspension of disbelief to think that the virus came from anywhere other than the virology institute. Given the known facts, the burden of proof should have been on the CCP to prove, at least by preponderance of the evidence, that the virus did not originate in and escape from the institute. Intent would be another burden of proof.
A significant minority of people won't get fooled again.
A larger segment of the population will get fooled again, because they want to be.
Confidence might be low among the analysts, but you wouldn't think that based on the comments section here.
And what comments would those be, Mark? The ones where we were right - and you were wrong - the entire fucking time? Those comments?
Embarrassed? It wasn't a mistake ( which would have engendered embarrassment). They lied in order to hide their complicity.
I am the scientist one, My lab sequenced the virus in March 2020. THE WAS NEVER A DOUBT it was man made, out of a lab. If you ran the sequence, you can tell from the DNA structure. Took us 2 days to figure it out. Not just my lab, ALL the labs in our global organization knew. What we didn't understand, was why everyone was lying about it.
On our research call, my German colleagues assumed it was because it was an Intentional Leak and no one wanted to start a conflict. However, they considered the Chinese work substandard, which it is why it didn't kill enough people. They mentioned they could have done better.
I moved on to the next agenda item, some things you just let go...
Patrick, it's a version of "Gell-Mann amnesia".
Lefty Mark,
All you need to do is to read the actual scientific papers to know why some of us have high confidence in the lab leak theory and low confidence in the natural origin theory. It really isn't a case where the scientists are in any true doubt, in my opinion- it is broken down to liars and truth-tellers at this point. The potential assignment of blame directly, rather than just a broad brush strike against virology alone, is what has inhibited the acceptance of the evidence in certain circles. That furin cleavage site, and the RNA bases encoding it, already lowered the natural origin odds to less than 1%, all by itself.
There isn't any reasonable doubt at this point, but I don't expect everyone to understand this or ever publically admit having tried for three years to deny it.
Mark, it's entirely irrelevant what the analyst's confidence level is. What matters is the massive conspiracy to denigrate and suppress "wrong" theories.
When do THESE people get cancelled?
So, how many of these asshole "experts" were paid off by the chicoms ? Joey bidet got his 10% at least. Bunch of chicom fellating shits. They covered for the deliberate execution of millions worldwide. They should all be introduced to about 38 oz.of northern white ash, to the face, repeatedly. Never forget these fascist turds and never forgive. That troll fauci should be first. This was no mistake or misunderstanding, this was a deliberate effort to subjugate the population to the will of the fascist left. They should be subject to retribution, the messier the better. They've earned every bit of it. These despicable curs should be made to be forever frightened of retribution.
Confidence might be low among the analysts, but our confidence in them is lower still.
are any details of 'old' and 'new' 'intelligence' availabel to public for independent review?
is intelligence same as information? and between old and new which is disinformation
How do the Pangolins get their reputation back?
I'm willing to ascribe it first to diplomacy and then to "in for a penny, in for a pound," rather than an actual malign conspiracy to delude the public. The politics and bureaucrats controlling the message may have figured, what difference does it make whether COVID was of natural or lab origin? Why should we rock the international boat this hard?
That difference could have been profound, of course (she says with her non-existent epidemiology credentials), in terms of treatment or cure. It wasn't, but it could have been.
The important thing about it for Us The People is that they did in fact suppress all dissent, even if for a dumb reason like "This is so embarrassing." Imagine what they'd do with better motivation.
Dumb Lefty Mark: "Confidence might be low among the analysts, but you wouldn't think that based on the comments section here."
The only origin idea for which there is zero confidence and is laughable on its face is the idea that the Wuhan bat virus emerged from some dude eating soup in the Wuhan wet market.
And that's the one idea the "elites" enforced on the rest of the nation.
Not Dumb Lefty Mark of course. Nothing our idiotic "elites" do has to be forced on him at all. He's a volunteer.
1. Feel like I have no more information now than I did before this announcement. Natural and lab leak were both plausible before, are plausible now, and this new announcement sounds like it says the same.
2. Agree with Jamie 3:17 completely
Dumb Lefty Mark, amongst others (looking at you LLR Chuck), are so incapable of disentangling themselves from their moronic, devoid of logic, completely non-commonsensical earlier "hot takes" that they even become the butt of jokes from their co-lefty amigo types that simply can no longer abide the utter stupidity of the defunct talking points.
Case in point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8
Good to see common sense setting in, even if delayed past the point of utility.
Now, go do "climate science". Because, I assure you, similar fraud is going on there.
The problem with what we've got going in the world today is that we've replaced religious faith with a bizarre form of what I can only term "Sciencism", wherein we have white lab-coated high priests assuring us of things that can only be taken on faith, with similar fraudulent motives. Science is not immutable; it is a series of hypotheses based on the best information available, and the minute you hear someone pronounce finality or "consensus" on something, that's when you know it's no longer really science. There's nothing out there that is fixed or immutable about science; it is merely a process of ongoing evaluation of best information, which is always changing because we learn more. Today's certainty is tomorrow's failed hypothesis, laughed at retrospectively that we ever believed such a ridiculous thing. Look at the whole history of the continental drift theory, along with that of what we now accept as true about the channeled scablands of Central Washington. Both theories were derided as ludicrous when proposed; today, they are solemnly accepted unquestionable truths. Hell, look at Ignace Semmelweiss, whose only crime was suggesting it might be a good idea to wash your hands after handling a corpse and before going to attend a childbirth...
Science isn't a religion, but all too many people have turned it into one. To its inevitable detriment.
Chinese virus.
Nate shouldn’t be judging anyone about anything. He’s lucky most people are innumerate…
An interesting comment from Walter Kirn: "There being no real pressure on the authorities from the press to acknowledge the truth about past "mistakes," you can be sure that when past "mistakes" are revealed there is a tactical advantage to doing so, even if we don't quite know what it is yet"
A virus that originates in wild animals that doesn’t transmit outdoors. Riiiggght…
"The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget."
But under prog rule, the tricks and suppression are soon forgotten, to be replaced by others, as the Silvers of the world stand by doing nothing. As long as he and other nice, reasonable people ignore the systemic nature of the "suppression," on any "controversial" subject, always for the sake of prog rule, nothing will change.
I'm curious what expertise the Department of Energy has regarding virus development.
I have that question as well. Why didn't the report come from HHS or DHS? And why aren't any "journalists" asking these questions?
If it were natural they would have found the source by now. Both SARS 1 and MERS were found within months.
No way, Jose. Was actually caused by people eating raw bats from open air market. It was all over the news.
Why did the US Government or the deep state try so hard to dismiss this theory for so long? Were they afraid of the citizenry demanding retribution? Were they afraid of damage to the reputation of the genetics industry? The EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci. Why did they hide it?
I've assumed since the beginning that this was the case. The Chinese learned of a new disease killing people in Wuhan, and their first thought was to investigate the lab. They discovered that the place was a complete mess, with safety protocols ignored, dangerous research being conducted, and no way to know what, if anything, might have gotten out. They panicked, and then tried to hide their response, which only made Western leaders worry more.
As for the western scientific community, journalists, and political class, they lied for a noble cause: defeating Trump. If there had been an honest discussion of COVID from the beginning, rather than being censored by social media and every news outlet, then the story would have been how globalism allowed the Chinese to operate an unsafe research facility and then spread a pandemic around the world. It would have vindicated Trump's desire to decouple from China.
"Natural and lab leak were both plausible …"
Sorry, "natural" has turned out to be implausible.
I don't understand the need of the left to believe in this fiction. Why is this political?
The Chinese view us as their number one enemy, not a potential enemy like our government views them. They are building up their stocks of weapons, warships, aircraft, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons to be used against us when the time is right for them to try to assume dominance over the world, based on their declared military and economic intentions. Modifying viruses to be deadlier and more potent is one of those weapons. It should be assumed that whether this was a lab leak or an intentional test run that got out of hand in Wuhan, they were working on this gain of function work. The odds of this having jumped species is very low and I believe Fauci lied about this to cover up his complicity with funding via a 3rd party group the Wuhan lab after having his work on gain of function shut down in the US.
I am also suspicious of why the Chinese locked down their population when Covid started spreading like wildfire in late 2019 while simultaneously letting some of their citizens to travel all over the world where there was no Covid. My analysis of this is that this was a test run they to see what would happen if their people could easily spread the virus. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Their actions with how they dealt within and outside of China has to point to that this was a deliberate action on their part.
Now let's look if the Kung flu virus included a metaphorical lamb's blood so that it would pass over those with Han DNA.
Chinese death rate 4/million
US death rate 3,418/million
World death rate 872/million
From Worldometer just now.
Asking this question makes me a conspiracy theorist. At least today. Saying it was a lab leak made me a conspiracy theorist a couple years ago but apparently not any more. Let's see how long I has as a conspiracy theorist on the Han DNA.
John Henry
Now let's look if the Kung flu virus included a metaphorical lamb's blood so that it would pass over those with Han DNA.
Chinese death rate 4/million
US death rate 3,418/million
World death rate 872/million
From Worldometer just now.
Asking this question makes me a conspiracy theorist. At least today. Saying it was a lab leak made me a conspiracy theorist a couple years ago but apparently not any more. Let's see how long I has as a conspiracy theorist on the Han DNA.
John Henry
"The only thing I don't know with any high degree of certainty is whether or our money directly funded the particular experiments and project that led to COVID-19,…"
In some sense it doesn't matter. Having spent my career funding my lab off NIH grants, I know that money is fungible. You usually have more than one active grant at a time and you have a general program for the lab. You just need to keep the Specific Aims in mind when you write the progress report.
Daniel12: "1. Feel like I have no more information now than I did before this announcement. Natural and lab leak were both plausible before, are plausible now, and this new announcement sounds like it says the same."
LOL
Really? Okay, Let's test that.
Briefly outline or simply summarize the information that has been out for several years put forth by the "lab leak only" crowd that they believe proves the Wuhan Bat Virus could only have come from the Wuhan lab.
Go ahead. Should be easy, after all, according to you, with no "new information" you have been sitting on the same info for several years.
This should be fun.
"The politics and bureaucrats controlling the message may have figured, what difference does it make whether COVID was of natural or lab origin?"
It matters profoundly, because this type of research needs to stop and acknowledging what happened is required to motivate that movement. The next time could be very much worse.
Previously on Althouse.
Worldwide, there have been about 7 megadeaths due to this outbreak. That's a pretty big deal.
Thanx China! Thanx for killing us!!
Criminal intent, plausible. Criminal negligence, probable. Demos-cracy is aborted in darkness.
Tina848 said,
"On our research call, my German colleagues assumed it was because it was an Intentional Leak and no one wanted to start a conflict."
China has been at war with us for decades. Our elites are too busy raking in the graft to be bothered to respond.
It's a sure bet that Scott Adams will suffer more repercussions for a bad joke than any of these scientists for their evasions....Here in America we'll soon come to some kind of consensus that this was man made, but I don't think China will ever accept blame for this. Mao killed tens of millions with his Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and his portrait still flies above Tiananmen Square. Collectivization killed millions more than the virus and who mourns for those victims of scientific farming. Well, anyway when they start bitching about the Opium Wars we can always say what about the coronavirus.
Follow the science. The four great scientific prophets of our era were Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. Freud and Marx were outright frauds. Freud fudged his casebooks and when Marx was confronted with data in the English Blue Books that conflicted with his theories, he simply changed the data. Freud intensified the sufferings of neurotics and Marx caused many in the working class to starve.... Darwin was an honest scientist but perhaps some responsibility for Social Darwinism should be pinned on him. The worst of the imperialists and Hitler himself were influenced by Social Darwinism. Einstein was another legit scientist, but the practical application of his theories was the atomic bomb. If the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, it will be due to Einstein's groundbreaking theories.....They say follow the science like that will lead us to some sunny, upland meadow but it's just as likely to lead us to a barren wasteland where rats will gnaw on our dying bodies...
But Nate Silver has been part of the political cover up in so many regards. He thinks the lab leak theory is the only one that’s real and that it’s innocent mistake - it’s not. No one who lied will be embarrassed. In fact, it they’re proud they concealed the truth because the pandemic was all about control. That’s the part it would be great for Nate Silver to wake up to. He’s been studying American politics as if these are good people asking within the lines of the law. And it’s no where close.
Remember when Trump was a racist because early on he called it "Shi-nah" flu with that characteristic smirk? Yeah, that was awesome. Just another one of many of Trump's 'lies' that were too close to the truth.
Nate Dross.
As soon as the lie is no longer needed, the corrupt left just ditch it and pretend it never happened. They got their power.
@ Fred (Fred Said)
Mark, it's entirely irrelevant what the analyst's confidence level is. What matters is the massive conspiracy to denigrate and suppress "wrong" theories.
Worth a nice bold.
So Mark - do you buy the Wet Market / Pangolin BS? We suppose you do.
Seems like everyone has retreated to their tribes and will not budge, as to the origin of the Chinese Flu.
But the big story is how the govt shut down the examination of facts. The suppression of discussion. Scientists supporting the lab leak were destroyed by the mob. Their evidence was not discredited, instead their reputations were shredded. Their abilities demeaned.
Look. Democrats have marched through all the institutions and all the agencies of govt. For a couple of decades, Dems have been pushing for governance by experts. Supplanting a self governing populace.
Covid was a huge laboratory to test out the theory, that decree by expert was a faster, better method of governance.
In a week he'll forget all about it and put trust in them again.
The life of a gnat.
Isn't it surprising how accurate common sense can turn out to be, in a crisis?
I think that this is really just Modern Political Theory in action. When you make a public policy mistake -or- when you decide, as a public leader, to do something dishonest that has a negative impact on your electorate, the trick is to just ignore it and stonewall. The important thing is, you have to ensure that at least a couple of years passes before the full-picture truth is allowed to be presented, drip-by-drip, to the enraged populace. By then they'll have cooled down, and you'd have provided the next crisis to worry about. They'll put up with it and you'll ooze right by to new glories, trust me - just as long as you slow roll it.
Now: Tar and feather a few offenders, hogtie'em up and draw a little blood, raise a few welts on a personal basis and the gambit will be obsolete overnight. Having the press in their pocket has made them arrogant.
>>I'm curious what expertise the Department of Energy has regarding virus development.
Yeah, I sorta wondered about that as well. Why is this coming from the DoE?
--gpm
>>I'm curious what expertise the Department of Energy has regarding virus development.
Yeah, I sorta wondered about that as well. Why is this coming from the DoE?
--gpm
China owes us $14 trillion for their gross negligence.
Is Joe Biden going to collect it for us?
Now let's look if the Kung flu virus included a metaphorical lamb's blood so that it would pass over those with Han DNA.
Go read Rainbow Six and get back to me.
I am still waiting to hear any evidence of the wet market theory.
Drago, I don't know understand what you're talking about
William said...
"Scott Adams will suffer more repercussions for a bad joke"
That's not remotely what happened. It was two days ago, come on.
But the science is settled!
BTW, did Senator Cotton get his apology yet? Just askin…..
You could assume the gov't is wrong or lying about everything and most of the time you'd be correct.
Jonathan Turley is also expressing disgust at the way this has been handled.
He is (or was) a Prog sort of guy. I think; but not a nut. In fact I think he us (was) a liberal guy who believed in reason. Which fact must grind his guts today, having trusted these con artists.
iowan2 @ 7:04: “… But the big story is how the govt shut down the examination of facts. The suppression of discussion. Scientists supporting the lab leak were destroyed by the mob. Their evidence was not discredited, instead their reputations were shredded. Their abilities demeaned.”
We see this tactic used again and again. It is exactly what Bill Clinton pretended to deplore, “the politics of personal destruction.” Play the man, not the ball, and soon enough at the cost if a few red cards (soon forgotten) you will have crippled their stars and cowed the survivors, and everyone who cares about the game will swallow hard and go along.
Embarrassed??? How many people lost livelihoods and careers when they were cancelled.
Joe Biden called Trump "the most racist President in American history" during the debates. I assume that comment was based on the mainstream press calling Trump racist and xenophobic for calling it "the Chinese virus".
Remember. When it is about denigrating Trump, there are no lies.
As a sideline comment, a smarter politician would have called it "the Chinese Communist Party virus".
is it so very hard to obtain samples of this virus occurring in bats in nature?
and to provide sequencing for comparison with Covid?
any flaw in that view?
I will say that is the bottom line in this discussion/debate/controversy?
There are two separate questions. One can be addressed by outside experts, but the otherr cannot be.
1. Was a natural virus modified before it escaped from a lab? Experts can study the virus to answer this. I can't evaluate the answers, and I'll defer to expert opinion.
2. Did COVID escape from the lab in Wuhan? There is no way for anyone who was not there at the time to know. There is no expert outside China who knows if the virus was in the la or if it escaped. Whatever the ultimate origin of the virus, we cannot answer that question by relying on the PRC government.
We know they collected and researched coronaviruses in Wuhan. The US funded some of the research.
The PRC put millions in concentration camps-- in the last five years. They tried to hide it. There's no reason to think they are morally above lying about anything.
There is a strong circumstantial case for a leak. No proof, but it's foolish to discount an accident and a coverup,
I remember the USSR denying Chernobyl.The PRC easily could have made a mistake and lied about it afterward.
If there were an outbreak near Ft. Detrick, MD, we'd suspect the Biosecurity lab there, no matter what our government said. We'd be stupid not to.
Finally, the 1977 H1N1 pandemic was probably caused by a lab leak, probably in China. We know this because it was the 1950 flu without 27 years of evolution. It reappeared to infect people who were too young to have contracted the earlier flu.
So, I don't know what happened, and neither do you.
"is it so very hard to obtain samples of this virus occurring in bats in nature?"
The bats no longer trust the WHO or the CCP, and won't go in for testing.
gpm said...
>>I'm curious what expertise the Department of Energy has regarding virus development.
Yeah, I sorta wondered about that as well. Why is this coming from the DoE?
--gpm
I think the people writing the headlines are doing that deliberately. It's actually coming from a specialized division of Lawrence Livermore National Labs which has branched out from nuclear science to studying just about every kind of WMD proliferation, included biological.
Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt this AM dealt with the history of why LLNL would be taking the lead on this.
Note also that 'low confidence' means the available evidence supports the conclusion but does not prove it.
It's pretty easy to suss out why the US government did its best to oppose the lab leak theory: China was doing gain of function research and being paid for it by the US government (through the EcoHealth Allicance).
1. So the US government (via Fauci) was evading the ban on gain of function research by washing the money through the EcoHealth contracts to Wuhan Institute;
2. IOW, the US effectively paid for COVID.
When there is a criminal conspiracy, the entities paying the bills are liable as well as the perpetrators.
So the US and China - together - created the pandemic. And both are probably liable.
How long before other countries figure out that the US is culpable and start banding together to get us to pay compensation?
The US has to deny the lab leak or tacitly admit culpability.
Fortunately for the US, lying is a standard tactic in international relations.
(Remember when China was saying the virus came from the US? They were signaling, very coyly, they knew where the money came from.)
Post a Comment