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.
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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.
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.
"It leaked from a lab where we were experimenting on it" is not a natural origin, even if it wasn't engineered.
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