It would be helpful for the rest of us if the people asking questions could keep themselves and Fauci on the topic of lab-leak and lab-engineered.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked this morning on CNN about the redacted emails sent to him last year that mentioned the possibility of COVID-19 having leaked from a lab or being the product of human intervention, such as through gain-of-function research.
Fauci on his redacted email about a possible China lab leak: “The idea, I think, is quite far fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out, John.” pic.twitter.com/GpyIsQWMWE
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 3, 2021
This is a very slippery response. It’s not entirely his fault, as the questioning sort of leads him to say this, but by the end, Fauci’s response conflates three theories of COVID’s origins that could have overlap, but in the current debate mostly don’t. Let’s clarify the different theories.
(1) “Lab leak” — this is the theory that COVID-19 escaped from one of Wuhan’s virology laboratories. A bare lab-leak theory is consistent with the idea that COVID-19 may have developed in nature, perhaps in an animal held in the lab that subsequently infected lab workers. A lab-leak theory is also potentially consistent with . . .
(2) a “lab-engineered” theory. Most commonly, “lab-engineered” refers to the idea that the Wuhan Virology Institute was conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in order to get ahead of mother nature and see the dangers. This is where Fauci’s own potential culpability, however diminished, comes into the picture. Fauci was an advocate of loosening restrictions on American taxpayer funded gain-of-function research, and he would likely have had to personally sign off on any grant that did go to it, certifying that it was for national-security purposes. This is basically the scenario Nicholas Wade outlined as a possibility in his blockbuster essay on the topic, which has a lot of supporting circumstantial evidence. A “lab-engineered” theory however, is also consistent with . . .
(3) a “bioweapons” theory. This has largely been abandoned by the mainstream and remains a fringe theory that comes in two flavors. Some initially speculated that if COVID-19 had escaped from the lab, it could have been something in development as part of biological warfare. Those that hold this don’t imply necessarily that COVID-19 was itself a suitable weapon for war — clearly, it’s not. Fighting-age men in good shape could likely fight through infection. And a weapon that kills the most elderly is not terrifying. But, of course, a subset further suspect that COVID-19 might not have been a suitable bioweapon of traditional warfare, but maybe it could have been released by the Chinese because a pandemic is a good way to get rid of Orange Man in an election.
Now, Fauci was really only being questioned about (1) a lab-leak theory, a line of questioning that could possibly take him to (2) questions about whether it was engineered in the lab. To his credit, Fauci said he was open-minded about the possibility of a lab origin, though he believed the most likely explanation was still natural. He wasn’t always so open to this theory.
But the line of questioning turned to a ZeroHedge article that did float a version of (3). A bioweapons theory is much harder to believe or accept and strikes most people as bonkers. And frankly, that would be right — beyond the human cost in China, the shutdowns across China’s industrial heartland did have an enormous economic cost, possibly a worse one than anything experienced elsewhere.
It would be helpful for the rest of us if the people asking questions could keep themselves and Fauci on the topic of lab-leak and lab-engineered.