I was never a Covid nutter, on either side. I had my paranoid moments early on, but I never expected the government to get everything right. Anyone passingly aware of the history of plagues knows that failure is just par for the course. Misinformation? Always and everywhere, the record shows. But I did have faith in cutting-edge modern science and the expertise at the NIH. I knew NIAID’s Tony Fauci from the AIDS days and remembered him very fondly. Most of the time he was being yelled at by Larry Kramer, I was on Fauci’s side. I trusted him.
I don’t anymore. Over the last five years, we have slowly found out that, on Covid-19, we were all misled and misdirected a lot. And nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over where the virus came from. From the very start, it seemed, every authoritative figure assured us that it came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, where many bats, raccoons, and pangolins (mmm) tended to hang out in close proximity.
It was simply a hugely massive coincidence that there was also a laboratory in Wuhan ... researching coronaviruses in bats by engineering more dangerous viruses in order to make vaccines for them. In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, appearing on Stephen Colbert’s show: “Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?”
The question, in fact, had been famously and definitively answered by a scientific paper on the “Proximal Origin” of Covid published in March 2020 in Nature Medicine. It told us that the consensus of the scientific authorities was that the virus almost certainly came from nature: “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Anything else was dismissed as a meritless conspiracy story. When Trump started calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and “kung flu,” it just seemed to confirm the media’s view that the lab leak was not just rightist bonkers, but even worse: racist.
But Trump wasn’t wrong, and we know now that the “Proximal Origin” paper was an act of conscious scientific deception.
How do we know this? One clue is that, five years later, all the major intelligence services in the West believe that a lab leak is indeed the likeliest reason for an epidemic that killed seven million people. The US Energy Department and FBI came to that conclusion in 2023, with the CIA finally agreeing this January, with “low confidence.” More striking is the news from Germany, where newspapers just reported that the German spy agency, the BND, had believed Covid was a lab leak as far back as March 2020. And not just likely with “low confidence” — but 80-95 percent likely.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had asked for the assessment, and then never said a word in public about it. Ditto Boris in the UK. MI6 gave him a report in March 2020 that said: “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Not likely with “low confidence,” not even 80-95 percent, but “beyond reasonable doubt.” In his memoir, Johnson explains Covid thus: “Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.” And yet at the time, he said nothing about this in public at all.
The MI6 report homed in on the critical “Proximal Origin” of early Covid that “debunked” the lab leak theory. MI6 believed the paper was part of a disinformation project by the People’s Republic of China “to embed the natural causation narrative and, by misdirection, to conceal true origin and responsibility.” In their new, essential, and revelatory book, In Covid’s Wake, Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee also take a scathing look at the provenance of that paper.
They trace the history of the “gain-of-function” (GOF) research in viruses and remind us that lab leaks had always been a worry: “multiple cases of SARS in Beijing in 2004, a 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the [UK], an anthrax escape that killed sixty in Russia, a 2019 lab leak of Brucella that infected more than ten thousand people in China.” Such fears spiked in 2014, when two mishaps in US labs involving anthrax and bird flu spurred the Obama administration to put a moratorium on GOF research.
Tony Fauci, on the other hand, had always been a big fan of GOF. Go read his 2011 op-ed with the prescient headline: “A flu virus risk worth taking.” In that piece, Fauci reassured us that “the engineered viruses … are maintained in high-security laboratories.” (My italics.) You might imagine, then, that when he discovered that the Wuhan Institute had been experimenting with GOF research into bat coronaviruses in a very low-security lab, he’d jump to raise the alarm. But he didn’t. In fact, he helped orchestrate and read drafts of the “Proximal Origin” paper that dismissed the lab leak theory entirely.
The Wuhan Institute in particular had long been identified as a serious lab leak danger. The authors of Covid’s Wake note, “At a November 2015 joint meeting of the Royal Society and the National Academies of Science ... on [GOF], the research project that was ‘singled out as the project most likely — of all projects in the world — to trigger a pandemic’ was the research on ‘SARS-related coronaviruses then being carried out jointly by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and [UNC] at Chapel Hill.”
And there we have the US connection. In 2017, Fauci and others quietly lifted the GOF moratorium. How? The WaPo’s Josh Rogin explains:
The details are a little sketchy. I’m not saying he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal, but I’m saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea that he had turned this back on. He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns, so you could get things done if you knew how to work the system.
One of the beneficiaries was Peter Daszak’s company, EcoHealth Alliance, which then got major funds from Fauci’s NIAID for GOF research in bat coronaviruses in collaboration with, yes, the Wuhan Institute. In private emails, Daszak recognized the low safety standards at Wuhan but said they made “our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” In other words: deadly viral manipulation on the cheap. What could go wrong?
When American scientists took a first look at Covid-19, it immediately appeared man-made to them. As early as January 31, 2020, Kristian Andersen — one of the “Proximal Origin” authors — emailed Fauci that “some of the features [of Covid-19] (potentially) look engineered” and that two of his co-authors agreed with him that the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” — i.e. not from nature. (The emails cited here were FOIAed, and we owe US Right To Know for the info.)
Andersen’s other emails at the time are quite something. Here’s one on February 2, as he was wrestling with writing the paper: “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely ... the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain [without it] — it’s not some fringe theory.” Two days later: “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Nonetheless, the paper Andersen and others produced, as he acknowledged privately, focused “on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.” And so it did: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Notice the definitive nature of that sentence. (Deeper in the text, where it was unlikely to be found by rushed journalists, there is a less categorical statement.)
Fauci hailed the paper without noting that he had helped generate it and seen drafts of it. For good measure, 27 public health experts then wrote an open letter to The Lancet, backing the paper and asserting, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” One of them was — tada! — Peter Daszak, who was part of this collective statement: “We declare no competing interests.” The Lancet subsequently disclosed his competing interest, which it didn’t condemn.
Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint. Instead of helping to save millions of people, he may have inadvertently helped kill them, even though he knew the risks very well. So he let it appear that he was impartial — his schmoozing of media flunkies is legendary — while tilting everything to protect GOF.
One way of doing this was to label lab leak a national security problem, rather than a scientific one. From Covid’s Wake:
Fauci memorialized his call with Andersen in an email to [Jeremy] Farrar: “I just got off the phone with Kristian Andersen and he related to me his concern about the Furine [sic] site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV. I told him that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated.”
Fauci then upped the ante, adding that Andersen “should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5.” The implication here is that if Andersen and the other scientists agreed that “concerns” about a lab leak were “validated” (meaning what? proven? or merely valid as a matter of concern?), the matter should be reported to law enforcement and national security agencies.
The implications of a lab leak was beyond their remit, Fauci seemed to argue. I would think that was exactly their remit — because only they had the expertise to figure out if it was a lab leak in the first place. Then Fauci makes two demands: this should be done “very quickly” and only if everyone agreed. Andersen got the message — as did all the scientists on a famous February 1 conference call where Fauci and Francis Collins presided, two men with near complete control of all the research funding the scientists on the call depended on. No pressure to please the bosses there.
Were the scientists perhaps fearful that they could be deemed racist for believing in a lab leak? This was 2020, after all. Peak left insanity. For a thorough accounting of the MSM race-baiting, which helped keep the lab leak radioactive to media, check out Ashley Rindsberg in Tablet:
With Daszak leading the way, the media successfully couched lab leak as a conspiracy theory with roots in Trumpian politics, environmental denialism, and anti-Chinese sentiment. Together, these formed what we might call Daszak’s triangle, a mental model that made lab leak a social and political impossibility for anyone who did not want to be branded as an anti-science, right-wing xenophobe.
The immortal tweet of the New York Times’ Covid reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, summed up the elite view in May 2021: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”
More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential. The lab leak theory terrified them — because it could mean serious conflict. And so they downplayed it. Appeasement of China is the subtext of all of it. You see this in the scientists’ emails at the very start of the epidemic. They’re worried about “the shit show” if China were accused of deadly incompetence. Andersen’s money quote on the “Proximal Origin” paper in a contemporaneous email is pretty definitive about what happened: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
That is indeed what happened, and we have to come to terms with it far more thoroughly than we have. The MSM have never fully copped to their failure. The NYT, as late as October 2023, was publishing sentences like this: “No public evidence indicates that the institute was storing any pathogen that could have become the coronavirus. Still, President Donald J Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill amplified the concerns.” Notice that even then, the NYT was casting one view as inherently right-wing and thereby problematic. It reminds me of the way in which the MSM have ducked basic reporting on sex reassignment for children — because Republicans are against it, so of course it must be legit.
A few weeks ago, we had a podcast on Spinoza, a pioneering scientist in a tribal religious age. His record and that of thousands of other committed empiricists — who risked death to understand the world better — show that, pace Andersen, it is always possible for science to spurn political contamination — if scientists have actual integrity.
And without that integrity, science will lose public trust and simply become politics — which is why it now finds itself in such a crisis. When gender scientists refuse to release publicly-funded studies on child sex reassignment because they don’t like the results, and when virologists consciously obscure the scientific truth to protect their own asses and play global politics, we are right not to trust them.
But I want to trust them again. Science matters. We are in an epistemological crisis right now, where left and right have launched a postmodern assault on the search for objective truth to shore up Trump or to enact “social justice.” We actually need scientists right now more than ever to join those of us trying to rescue liberal democracy from its decadent collapse. We need clear, reasoned, rigorous, replicated, open, and transparent science. We need reason, not politics.
When we needed that in a plague, it just wasn’t there. People remember. And scientists have to grasp how hard it will be for some of us to forget.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my chat with the genius filmmaker Mike White; reader dissents over the Khalil case; listener dissents defending DOGE; eight notable quotes from the week in news; 18 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of talented kids; a snowy window from Cali; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
Last week’s column persuaded this reader to subscribe: “I think the Dish’s defense of free speech is incredibly admirable.” Here’s a returning paid subscriber:
I’m back. I’m sorry I’ve been rude in Substack Notes. This moment is really separating the wheat from the chaff. There is only a pass/fail grade. It’s clarifying to see who was/is just a cheap reactionary and who has principles and abides by them.
By the way, here’s a glimpse at what the Dish has to compete with on our weekly deadline:
That’s the real pressure I face every Friday as I try to put this newsletter to bed, and Truman needs a walk. The Pit-Pom is with his uncle Chris this weekend, as I’m in LA to do Bill Maher’s show tonight. Miss him already.
New On The Dishcast: Mike White
Mike White is a writer, director, and actor. Among his many films, he wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck and wrote the screenplay for School of Rock. In television, he co-created and starred in Enlightened, and he’s the brilliant auteur of The White Lotus, currently in its third season. In reality TV, he competed on Survivor: David vs. Goliath and two seasons of The Amazing Race, alongside his gay evangelical father, Mel White, whom I knew well before I came to admire his son’s work.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find three clips of our convo — on the humanism of The White Lotus, Mike finding Buddhism, and his courageous gay dad. That link also takes you to a ton of commentary on last week’s pod with Michael Lewis on the victims of DOGE; and readers continue the debate over Khalil and free speech, with my responses throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nick Denton on China’s inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a new subscriber:
So far as I’m aware, you’re among the few public intellectuals who engages with (and invites on) people from both sides of the political aisle — and has the integrity to say what you think, with little to no regard for whether it’ll please your podcast audience. Thank you.
A reader responds to my latest column, “The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill”:
I get your free-speech point on Khalil generally, but not with regards to Khalil specifically. Maybe because my very broad support for free speech ends at the incitement of violence. I will fight for someone’s right to disagree with all I hold dear, and to call me names and disparage me and my ancestry, no matter how idiotic that is. Where I draw the line is when someone says that violence is the solution — be it against person or property.
Khalil has crossed that line repeatedly, and with the righteous fever of the fundamentalist. There is a reason the Trump administration picked him as their poster child and dared people like you to disagree. Khalil is the bait, and you fell for it. You should warn against overreach, and speak up when the target isn’t valid, but in this case, IMHO, it is.
This guy has got to go. People without citizenship do not have the right to stir up violence within our borders. That right is reserved for citizens, and, unfortunately, POTUS.
It has been exhausting to argue on Substack Notes about Khalil. For a huge section of readers, Khalil is deportable because he is associated with the cause of Hamas, or has committed a crime, or has incited immediate violence against specific targets. But none of that has been proven in a court of law, and in America, you are allowed to speak your mind, even if you are a noncitizen. You are allowed to support Hamas rhetorically. You are allowed to do everything Khalil did. And remember what the White House said: “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” Read that sentence a few times, if its meaning is still not clear to you. This really is an integrity test for defenders of free speech. And the masks sure have been falling.
As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump’s continued war on the rule of law, the exodus from blue states, and Schumer’s predicament. Below is one example, followed by a few new substacks:
Colin Wright: “‘Christ Is King’ Is the Woke Right’s ‘Black Lives Matter.’”
Buttigieg joins Substack. So does Chris Mooney, an MSM veteran on climate change. Subscribe!
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a location guess from a sleuth last week:
Canada, USA?
Just kidding. Bad run of contests for me lately, but my guess is that this view comes from our neighbor to the north and (until recently) partner in a centuries-long alliance. I’m hoping I’m right, if only because it would be a fitting choice for a week defined by South Park jokes made reality:
I’m guessing there’s a clue I missed here, one that cracks the case, but failing that, “guess the peaks” contests have never been my forte. Maybe next week!
Also from last week, Doug Chini — the long-time grand champion of the VFYW — introduced a fun new feature:
Since I haven’t done the clue thing in a while, I made something a little different for our last-minute guessers: a crossword puzzle. The answers are some notable features in this week’s view, along with the name of the actual town and state we find ourselves in:
Paid subscribers can see the answers here — along with our sleuths’ weekly contributions on film, food, cocktails, history, public art, eco-tourism tips, and so much more.
