Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 36
- 2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Zeit, two of the most respected mainstream-left german newspaper just released back-to-back articles on the BND (german foreign intelligence) internal evidence pointing to the lab-leak theory being correct with 90%+. Not surprising, you think, and old news too boot? Well, as it turns out, they concluded this ... in 2020. And given the risk of bioweapon development this implies, they'd have been near-required to tell then-chancellor Merkel. And health ministry Jens Spahn. When the administration changed in 2021 to Scholz, he was also told with overwhelming likelihood. According to the two papers, all of them were in fact told personally by then-and-current BND president Bruno Kahl.
Similar to the US establishment, the german establishment at the time went on what can only be described as a hunt against even mentioning the possibility of a lab leak. To quote the top german establishment expert of the time, Christian Drosten: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. [...] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture."
The source here matters a lot, since both of these are consistently pro-establishment in general and especially so during the Corona crisis. There is very little reason for them to publish this spuriously, and frankly it's a surprise they're willing to publish it even now.
Whether you believe the BNDs internal evidence or not doesn't matter. Whether you personally think that the lab-leak theory is correct doesn't matter (FWIW, I think most foreign intelligence service have an obvious bias towards conspiratorial thinking, so if they say 90%+, it's probably more in the 60%+ range). What does matter, however, is that our own government secretly concluded that the lab-leak theory is correct or at the very least highly plausible, but instead of supporting what they viewed as the truth or at least the open discourse on a key question, they actively supported slander and misinformation.
Tbh, I'm still kind of reeling about what to conclude after Corona. Due to some personal experiences, but also the generally repressive climate of the time combined with the information coming out now that most mainstream talking points were wrong, it was a major step in my own worldview realignment. In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen. Nowadays I think through a smart combination of only telling people as much as they need to know while also making clear what they're supposed to think through scare tactics, slander and repression, arbitrarily large-scale conspiracies can keep going as long as enough people can be convinced it's important. A single defector isn't a problem, because it's trivial to present them as just an evil person spreading misinformation for personal gain.
Natural origin does not exclude the possibility of a lab leak.
The conspiracy in question is that the lab leak implies some kind of biological warfare work. It doesn't, by itself. Almost any work with viruses bears some risk of a leak, even a completely passive study of viral evolution in natural environment or something like that. My reading, both at the time and now, is that the establishment was aware of the widespread but not at all justified hysteria that the virus was engineered, and was trying to calm people down on that specific concern.
The other explanation is that it was a routine screw-up in a research lab. That's something the intelligence should be able to pick through its channels, and it fits very well with how the political reaction to it. Once it's clear that the leak wasn't intentional, the focus would shift to clean-up and preventing further similar accidents. Conspiracy talk is grossly counter-productive to that, especially for the government.
No, it's not. Any theory positing the possibility of any leak was deboonked by experts, deemed racist, and treated as a tinfoil-tier conspiracy theory.
More options
Context Copy link
You're neglecting another aspect of the conspiracy and motive of dismissing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, which would be ass-covering. This would be a motive even if it was all above board- lab leaks as a result of incompetence rather than malice- but particularly if not everything was above board- such as attempts to circumvent gain-of-function research prohibitions by outsourcing to a facility with known safety issues.
Some of the earliest and strongest organizers (i.e. Fauci) denouncing the lab-leak theory as a baseless conspiracy had significant professional, reputational, and personal interests in publicly denying any link between the virus and the lab due to the links between the lab and themselves. 'We just want to reassure people that this virus was not an engineered bioweapon' is not a particularly compelling motive if the root of public concern is if was engineered at all (such as gain-of-function research) as a result of misconduct.
Yes, sure, ass-covering was absolutely a major part of it. Doesn't even need to involve personal links. As long as it's clear that blaming China openly will not help with either cleanup or preventing further accidents, there's no point in doing it. If China says (through less-than-public channels) that yeah, we screwed up, we're sorry, let's stop the blame game and instead let's think how to handle the mess, it makes practical sense to play along.
However, that's not exactly my point.
The quoted guy is not dismissing the lab leak theory. He wants "to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin", he's dismissing the engineered origin. This is then transformed into the lab leak conspiracy by equating lab leak to engineered origin, but that's not what the guy is saying. And I think this is very typical, a lot of what was perceived as establishment's denial of the lab leak theory was instead the establishment denying the engineered origin theory while trying to dance around leak question for practical/political reasons.
Do want to note here that there is always one way to absolutely prevent further accidents which does absolutely require openly blaming China i.e. starting WWIII. Fucking around with pandemic pathogens in insecure ways is one of the things where that option does have to be considered; consider the death toll that would have resulted if COVID had had the case fatality rate of plague.
I said at the time something along the lines of "I sure hope it's not an actual bioweapon use, because if it is that's casus belli". I stand by that conditional. The actual situation is not quite at that level.
I do think you're being a naïve first-order consequentialist here, though. Lies are never free. Even leaving aside RenOS's good points regarding levers (and sure, Chinese popular opinion has little effect on PRC government actions, but Western popular opinion has an effect on Western government demands which do have an effect on PRC government actions), our institutions going along with this damaged popular trust in them, which is a big deal. The WHO is trusted far less these days because it bent over backwards to play the PRC's tune. Wikipedia had a crisis over this issue which led to a near-complete purge of conservatives via Parable of Lightning, damaging its legitimacy. The US's dissident right grew, raising the likelihood of a civil war there. These are not small costs.
More options
Context Copy link
I mostly agree with Arjin that you're simply wrong on the basic point - I already was a scientist at the time and even the honest-mistake version of the lab leak theory which leaves the possibility of a technically-natural origin open was heavily frowned upon and could get you into trouble with the university administration if stated publicly. Likewise, Drosten & others were not at all ambiguous about whom they meant.
But I want to talk further about this point:
No, it makes no sense. The first problem is that, even assuming this was a mostly-natural virus spread through a honest mistake, the public needs to be informed to give them a better understanding of the risks of research in this area. If you keep it a secret, you lose one of the most important levers to prevent further accidents. I'm not in virus research, but in medical research, and I don't get the impression that we've done anything at all to prevent further accidents, on the simple and compelling logic that since no lab leak happened, there is just no need, period. Only now that the lab leak theory has gotten more traction, discussions are happening. But not much has been done, only the talk of doing something.
Second, given the unusual structure of the virus compared to its alleged progenitor, even a honest mistake lab leak does actually imply with overwhelming likelihood a non-natural origin.
Assuming we can show that the overwhelming majority of other evidence points outside the lab, the odd structure may be somewhat surprising, but it's not strictly speaking impossible, and a non-natural origin would require some weird additional twists where the virus first gets changed in the lab but then gets spread from a completely different point of origin. Occams razor implies a natural origin.
But assuming we've already established that a lab leak occurred, there are no additional twists necessary - it's already in the lab, that particular lab has already been shown in the past to have played around with precisely the structure that was changed. The structure isn't odd anymore, now it's the other way around: Assuming that the virus just-so-happened to have that structural change naturally is much less likely than that it was simply changed in the lab. Occams razor implies a non-natural origin.
If you think this is weird, think of the old adage of horse & zebra; If you hear hoofbeats in europe, you ought to think horse. If you hear hoofbeats in (specific parts of) africa, you ought to think zebra. The same evidence can point into different directions depending on the environment you're in.
I don't think this is a universal idea. It might be true, mostly, in the US, although I would doubt even that. But in places like China, no, not really. You do whatever it takes to prevent further accidents within the lab, and you do whatever it takes to control public opinion, but these are completely separate concerns.
Furthermore, if the research is dangerous but the government thinks it has to be done, I totally see the government deciding to do it anyway, in secrecy if necessary. Especially in China, but really in a lot of other places as well. Including the US.
This is a valid argument, but only if you think that the likely safety recommendations following the accident would be applicable to your facility.
It might come down to the definition of "natural origin" then. Does releasing a virus onto a population of (very much not natural) humanized mice and allowing it to naturally evolve in that population count as a natural origin to you? Especially if accidental.
For me, that's still very much natural origin. As opposed to engineering, as in deliberately adding specific sequences to the genome using genetic engineering tools. But I totally see some people classifying it as non-natural instead.
Just for reference, I think that the virus likely jumped species in the lab, but it was not the goal of the people working in the lab to make it do that.
No disagreements on China, but I don't think that's the measuring stick western politicians ought to be judged by.
Accidental or not, that's pretty clearly on the non-natural side for me, especially since it involves humanized mice. Genuinely lab-leak + natural + accidental for me would be collected in the wild where humans don't go normally, taken to the lab, and then a human gets infected directly from this sample while testing it and then spreads the disease unknowingly. Beyond that, it's mostly different degrees of non-natural. Maybe if you're just holding lots of bats for a long while and it develops unknowingly, but in a way that is plausible in the wild I'd also rule it natural.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"It leaked from a lab where we were experimenting on it" is not a natural origin, even if it wasn't engineered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ass-covering was the most likely motive for Faucci, but I think for most governments the issue was compliance of the population. Namely, if you acknowledge that China / Eco Health / Faucci were responsible, it would be a tall order to ask people to comply with lockdowns, covid passes, etc., unless you also punish the ones responsible for the leak, and no one really wanted to take on China.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link