The Media, the Virus and the "Lab Leak" Hypothesis

[Jon Banks]

That's most definitely true as I see it too and part of the failure to fairly report on the "lab leak" theory, to dismiss it almost immediately, was caused by this. If the right wing media is so influential then why was this lab leak theory essentially dismissed for so long? But it was Senator Cotton more than Trump who was raising this question well before Trump did. It wasn't just anti-Trump thinking that led to this.

But I think as Yglesias points out it goes beyond the dislike of Trump (who was a lousy president who deserved most, not all, but most of the negative press). The question he asks is do we have a media, e.g,. the major media entities, that promote a "false consensus" on critical issues because they "talk to themselves" and live in bubbles where that consensus is re-enforced? There isn't sufficient self-examination of that "consensus" view?

I think it was certainly true on this theory. To be non-partisan, it was also true on the Iraq WMD question about 20 years ago.  And it was also true, in a different way, 55+ years ago with the media's reporting on the JFK assassination. There wasn't much criticism of the Warren Report at that time. It changed over the years; but this was a pre-Vietnam/pre-Watergate media that was much too willing to accept the government's statements.

I don't know if any of you use Twitter. I do and I follow a lot of Media personalities.

The way they talk amongst their peers on social media is part of what drives and reinforces consensus around certain Media narratives.

Declaring certain inconvenient narratives as "rightwing" almost always gets Liberal media personalities to be dismissive.

The Hunter Biden stories (shady Ukraine and China business deals) are a perfect example. Most of the Media didn't want to address the leaks from his laptop because they were afraid it could help Trump. But after the election, Hunter confirmed that the DOJ is investigating him so it was a legit news story prior to the election regardless of whether or not it hurt Joe Biden or helped Trump.

On social media, most of the Liberal Media personalities dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop leaks as "Russian disinfo" or potentially false information. 

[Jon Banks]

I can't find where it's been determined the laptop was Hunter's and that nothing was done to its contents while it was out of his possession.

The computer repair shop owner is John Paul Mac Isaac, an avid Trump supporter, who sued Twitter for $500,000,000 last December. So much for their love of free speech.

Hunter literally said recently that the Laptop “may” be his.

The DEA found a second Laptop belonging to Hunter during a drug bust of a doctor in Massachusetts.

The Delaware repair shop guy’s story is weird but so far, everything he has said checks out. No one can argue that he isn’t credible or that the FBI didn’t take the Laptop into custody. He literally has a receipt from the FBI’s Baltimore office.

Granted, people SHOULD be skeptical of the NY Post and Rudy Giuliani but the Center-Left and Liberal Media’s disinterest in even reporting on the stuff that was confirmed as accurate was a bad look in terms of proving that they’re not totally biased…

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Hunter literally said recently that the Laptop “may” be his.

The DEA found a second Laptop belonging to Hunter during a drug bust of a doctor in Massachusetts.

The Delaware repair shop guy’s story is weird but so far, everything he has said checks out. No one can argue that he isn’t credible or that the FBI didn’t take the Laptop into custody. He literally has a receipt from the FBI’s Baltimore office.

Granted, people SHOULD be skeptical of the NY Post and Rudy Giuliani but the Center-Left and Liberal Media’s disinterest in even reporting on the stuff that was confirmed as accurate was a bad look in terms of proving that they’re not totally biased…

Yep, the story was that the mainstream media - the major outlets - refused to cover the story. And social media banned people from linking to the NY Post story. And the NY Post was banned by Twitter and Facebook from linking to their story. This nonsense that it wasn't "proven" and therefore couldn't be mentioned is absurd. By that standard half of the stories we discuss wouldn't be allowed to be mentioned. JFK assassination anyone?

The Russian collusion story wasn't proven, especially the Steele Dossier part of it. The Russian bounty story wasn't proven. And yet those weren't banned. Just until two days ago Facebook banned people from mentioning the "lab leak" theory behind the pandemic.

Something seriously wrong is going on here but it appears that if the "right" people are being silenced it's okay. It's not. Today it's them, tomorrow it's you.

[Jon Banks]

That's quite a cherry-pick, for a fellow who's "on to" the media doing deceitful things.

    "Was that your laptop?" she asked.
         "For real, I don't know," Hunter replied.
    "I know. But you know that, this isn’t ..."
         "But my point is, I really don't know. The answer is, that's the truthful answer."
    "You don't know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?"
         "I don't have any idea. No idea whether or not …"
    "So, could have been yours?"
         "Of course, certainly," Hunter said.

You're talking about hindsight. Last fall, all they had to work with was the Giuliani "Four Seasons" sideshow.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News did what every other journalist could've done which was, contact people who were referenced in the emails and text massages and interview them.

They were able to independently confirm the authenticity of the data that they reported on. Although we still don't know for certain that it was from Hunter's laptop, no other explanation for how his data was obtained has been given by Biden's legal team. They never alleged that he had been Hacked or that his computer was stolen.

There's no good excuse for the rest of the Media to have ignored the story. Probably the worst example of their bias in the Trump era.

[Jon Banks]

The former NY Times Covid reporter explains why he didn't address the Lab Leak theories until recently:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory

"The experts all agreed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not a deliberate weaponization of a previously known virus and that it had no obvious signs of lab manipulation (more details below). They noted that blood sampling showed that brief “spillovers” of animal viruses into humans happen often without causing large outbreaks. Therefore, they argued, the odds were that this was another virus that got lucky, like SARS and MERS and the 2009 pandemic flu: it had dwelled long enough inside a civet or camel or pig or something to infect human-like cells, and then had hit the big city.

For about a year, that was the general wisdom among science writers. The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.”

https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The former NY Times Covid reporter explains why he didn't address the Lab Leak theories until recently:


https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d

I think that's called an "admission against interest."

There were all kinds of flags indicating that the investigations - including the one by WHO - were shams. Even the head of WHO, not known for challenging Beijing, said it was not sufficient. And that was months ago. It was never, as I now see it, a far fetched theory only held by Qanon crackpots.

A side story to this is that we thought that opening up China to the rest of the world, to the west, would change its internal policies. That economic liberalization would create political liberalization. That hasn't worked. Instead of changing them, it's changed us. The government - the Party really - is using this opening up to push its interests and make, force really, changes in us instead.

[Jon Banks]

I think that's called an "admission against interest."

There were all kinds of flags indicating that the investigations - including the one by WHO - were shams. Even the head of WHO, not known for challenging Beijing, said it was not sufficient. And that was months ago. It was never, as I now see it, a far fetched theory only held by Qanon crackpots.

A side story to this is that we thought that opening up China to the rest of the world, to the west, would change its internal policies. That economic liberalization would create political liberalization. That hasn't worked. Instead of changing them, it's changed us. The government - the Party really - is using this opening up to push its interest and make changes in us instead.

The Lab Leak theory can't be ruled out until we know more about how or when the virus jumped from animals to humans. However, there's not a shred of solid evidence so far supporting that theory.

The circumstantial evidence is obvious. A lab that studies coronaviruses happens to be located where the first major outbreak happened. But despite a year and a half of Intelligence agencies and scientists looking into the virus' origins, there's no solid evidence that it escaped from a Lab. Also, history shows that where a new virus happens to be discovered isn't always where the virus originated. For example, the Spanish Flu was discovered by Spain but originated in either Kansas or Mexico. It seems plausible that Covid originated somewhere else in China before finding it's way to a major city like Wuhan. There's genetic evidence and circumstantial evidence backing the view that Wuhan isn't the first place where Covid existed. It's more a question of, was the virus brought to Wuhan and released accidentally by Virus researchers? Or did it get there via the Wet Markets where exotic wild animals are sold?

The CIA in 2020 told the Trump administration that they had no evidence that the Chinese believe it leaked from a lab. By that, I assume they mean, Chinese officials aren't saying anything privately that contradicts their claim that it didn't leak from one of their Bio-research Labs:
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Anthony Ruggiero, the head of the National Security Council’s bureau tracking weapons of mass destruction, expressed frustration during one videoconference in January that the C.I.A. was unable to get behind any theory of the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts responded that they simply did not have the evidence to support any one theory with high confidence at the time, according to people familiar with the conversation.

The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from a lab while pushing disinformation on its origins, including suggesting that the American military created it…

In a statement released earlier on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Intelligence agencies, the statement said, concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html

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The Intelligence community's assessments haven't changed. Biden's ODNI says they don't know when or how Covid first transmitted to humans.

There have been Lab Leaks in China in the recent past but we know about them and they all were contained (as far as we know). There's no evidence that the previous Lab Leaks of SARS led to a pandemic.

The Chinese government is very secretive most of the time so their secrecy alone shouldn't be reason to assume they know more about the origins of Covid than they've said publicly. And I agree that the Chinese government doesn't help matters by spreading their own theories about how the virus may have originated in the US. 

We can't ignore the fact that tensions between the US and China are as high as they've been since the 1970s. The Chinese likely don't believe the US is acting in good faith in the calls for more investigations.

It took 15 years or so for the Chinese to identify the source of the 2002 SARS outbreak and that outbreak had a connection to China's Wet Markets too. It could take as long or longer to find the source of the Covid-19 outbreak. Much of the research on that stuff happens in caves around remote parts of China. So while I find the Lab Leak theory to be plausible, it doesn't strike me as weird that the Chinese still don't know where the virus came from.

It's perfectly fine to speculate on the Lab Leak theory based on the circumstantial evidence. Lab leaks happen all over the world, including in the US and China. I agree that the mainstream media shouldn't have dismissed it entirely as a wacky conspiracy theory. Hopefully journalists and news editors learn lessons from this but I doubt they will...