Lab leak journalist also said Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction
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The news is abuzz: the US government’s position has shifted on the origin of covid. The Department of Energy now has a “low confidence” opinion that covid is a lab leak. The news was first broken by a Wall Street Journal reporter named Michael Gordon.
That means that 4 government agencies think covid is natural, 2 think it’s a lab leak, and 2 are uncertain.
Very few details were given, but apparently the new evidence isn’t about the Wuhan institute of virology, the lab that everyone said was doing gain of function research. It now has something to do with the Wuhan CDC.
The Wuhan institute of virology was always an unlikely place for the pandemic to start, because all the cases were at the market or clustered around the market, and they’re far away from the lab:
It’s extremely unlikely that the virus leaked from the WIV, made its way across town, and showed up at the market, without leaving a trace anywhere else. In another article, I calculated the odds at 1 in 6 million.
The Wuhan CDC is a more likely source, because it’s right in the same neighborhood as the market:
I’ve written before that covid is almost certainly not a lab leak.
Does this new report change the conversation?
Not really. There are no details provided, the intelligence report isn’t public, so we have no way to evaluate how convincing any of it is.
There are a few things we do know about the Wuhan CDC. It moved to this location on December 2nd. That’s 9 days before the first known covid case. Genetic studies infer that covid probably started before that, some time in November. But it might be possible that covid started as late as December 2nd. Maybe there could have been an accident on the very first day the CDC opened?
No one thinks that gain of function research was happening at the Wuhan CDC. But, maybe they had some infected animals, taken from somewhere in China?
One scientist summarizes the evidence, in a Twitter thread:
In short: a scientist at the Wuhan CDC, Dr Tian, had previously sampled bat viruses around Wuhan.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a paper by Xiao et al, claiming that researchers brought bats back to Wuhan and sampled them there. This paper was later retracted because the authors couldn’t confirm that any bats were brought to the Wuhan CDC.
After the pandemic started, Dr Tian worked on a study looking for the source of covid in animals around Wuhan. That’s strange behavior for someone that leaked the virus, but I guess that could be a distraction to hide previous mistakes?
The WHO report said that one employee of the Wuhan CDC, “was confirmed SARS-CoV-2 seropositive after infection due to family cluster transmission”.
But that could be a lie to cover-up the truth, maybe that was patient zero?
I’m pretty sure this isn’t how covid started. But, let’s assume for a second that it is true. In that case, there’s one big problem:
This new theory contradicts all the previous lab leak theories
Previous lab leak theories said that covid was made at the Wuhan institute of virology, through gain of function research. Now we’re talking about a different lab, and saying that maybe the virus escaped from a naturally infected animal kept at the lab.
If this theory is true, then everyone blaming Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak was blaming the wrong people and the wrong lab. Everyone blaming Tony Fauci for funding Ecohealth Alliance was also wrong.
Previous Wall Street Journal articles were also wrong, because they blamed the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2021, the paper reported that three employees from the WIV were hospitalized in November 2019, probably with covid, right before the start of the pandemic. They cite undisclosed US intelligence, but say they aren’t sure how accurate it is:
One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.
Another person described the intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.
So many superlatives and so little information. Did Trump himself write that statement?
“I have all the best intelligence. The quality is exquisite. It’s very precise.”
So, in 2021 the WSJ reported that the virus came from the Wuhan institute of virology, based on anonymous government sources, and now they’re reporting that it came from a different lab, based on undisclosed intelligence.
Did those 3 people at the WIV actually get sick?
We’ve never seen that intelligence. The US senate report on covid doesn’t mention any such information. The house GOP report on covid mentions it, but lists the WSJ article as the source.
It’s a bit suspicious. The hospitalization rate for covid is actually fairly low, only something like 5%. For 3 people to get severely ill, you’d think that maybe 60 lab employees caught covid. Or, perhaps these 3 got an extremely high dose of the virus, somehow? But then that doesn’t sound like a small, accidental exposure.
There was one foreign scientist working at the Wuhan lab in November 2019. She says she was never sick, never had antibodies, and didn’t know of anyone else at the lab falling ill.
Then, in December, some of the Wuhan scientists travelled to a foreign conference (on Nipah virus) like nothing was wrong:
In January, the Wuhan lab scientists were still acting like life was normal. Here they are, on January 15th, sitting at a restaurant in Wuhan:
That’s a month after the first case at the Huanan market, and two weeks after the market got shut down. So, we’re supposed to think they created a dangerous virus, 3 of them already went to the hospital, they now know for sure the virus was loose in Wuhan, and now they’re all just going out to dinner without concern?
All the Wuhan lab employees later tested negative for covid antibodies, or at least China says they did.
The other US government reports on covid have just as many inconsistencies. The House GOP report claims that covid leaked from the WIV in September 2019, then spread around the world in October through the Wuhan military games. Robert Redfield also says the virus leaked in September. The US senate GOP report says that covid started sometime between October and November. The Wall Street Journal article claims the that 3 employees got sick in November. And now we’re hearing that maybe the virus leaked from the Wuhan CDC, instead of the WIV, in December.
There’s something else interesting. That WSJ article about the 3 sick lab workers? It was written by Michael Gordon, the same author as the new WSJ article.
Who is Michael Gordon?
He’s the journalist that first announced that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
You might remember that. We invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam.
Then Iraq devolved into a conflict between Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish factions that fought for years.
Thousands of American soldiers died. Many more than that came back injured, with amputated limbs, or brain damage from roadside explosives.
A lot more Iraqis died. Estimates are all in the hundreds of thousands, some go as high as a million people killed.
The instability helped create ISIS.
8 years and 1 trillion dollars later, we gave up.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found.
Michael Gordon went further than just saying Iraq had them. He actively supported the war. From an article in FAIR:
A few days into the U.S. bombing (3/25/13), Gordon appeared on CNN to endorse the bombing of Iraqi TV’s offices, calling it “an appropriate target,” since “we’re trying to send the exact opposite message.”
When U.S. politicians began to seriously consider a withdrawal of U.S. troops, Gordon criticized that policy, especially in one article (11/15/06) headlined, “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” (FAIR Media Advisory, 12/4/06). He went on the Charlie Rose show (1/18/07) to endorse a troop surge. (Even the Washington Post admits that the idea that the surge succeeded is a “myth” — 3/15/13.) And in early 2007, Gordon wrote articles, relying heavily on anonymous U.S. sources, alleging that the Iranian government was sending weapons into Iraq (Action Alert, 2/16/07).
Now, the same government propagandist is telling you that covid is a lab leak. For sure. It definitely came from the Wuhan institute of virology in November. No, wait, it came from the Wuhan CDC in December. Just trust him, the intelligence quality is exquisite. It’s very precise.
Why would the US government lie about this?
In the best case, they’re just not certain and they’re putting in a good faith effort to resolve the question of covid’s origins. They’re not sure, and they admit they’re not sure. The news reports it because it gets a lot of clicks.
But it’s also possible this is a distraction from something else. An attempt to set a narrative.
It could be a distraction from how bad the US covid response was. Over a million Americans died from covid. Tens of millions are still suffering from long covid. We’re all going to get infected with a new variant every 6 months. The vaccines, even the updated ones, don’t seem able to keep up with Omicron’s mutations.
And Biden has announced that the pandemic is over.
I remember hearing that line before:
So it always helps to have someone to blame. Our pandemic response was bad, but it’s all China’s fault for creating the virus.
That said, why would they announce the news now? Our pandemic response has been bad for a long time.
The lies about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction were an excuse to go to war.
I don’t think we’re going to war with China.
We could someday come into conflict over Taiwan. The US is now completely dependent on computer chips made in Taiwan. You could say that these chips are now more important to the US economy than oil was 20 years ago, when we invaded Iraq. China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, and might even be willing to use force to take it.
But nothing like that seems imminent.
What else is in the news?
China is pushing for peace in Ukraine. And they might be considering sending weapons to Russia.
No one gets in the way of the US war machine. So… maybe they foment some lab leak discussion, put pressure on China, maybe China backs off the Ukraine peace plan?
An article in 2013 described Micheal Gordon’s support for the Iraq war and concluded:
If there is ever another moment that requires reporters to faithfully record the views of anonymous U.S. officials as they make their case for war, it’s a safe bet that Michael Gordon will be there to do that job.
Whatever the reason for this latest lab leak report, we know the US government likes to set the narrative by anonymously sending stories to certain journalists. The rest of the news repeats these talking points, after one paper does, and before long we’re all repeating them.
