An extensive Vanity Fair report on efforts to investigate COVID’s potential lab-leak origin includes some interesting revelations about the debates within the State Department. As Jim Geraghty pointed out, certain officials feared that highlighting Chinese gain-of-function research would “bring unwelcome attention” to the U.S. government’s own involvement in such activities, and that investigating the lab-leak theory would “open a can of worms.”

The piece also details the concerns of Chris Ford, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, who described himself as a China hawk. He told Vanity Fair that he was merely trying to protect the credibility of a COVID-origins investigation by steering the team away from ill-founded conclusions and the “creepy freelancing” of a few of his colleagues.

But my reporting on the Biden administration’s decision to shutter a Trump-era State Department investigation into COVID’s origins casts some doubt on this: Ford seemed to worry about antagonizing China, and the investigation was sanctioned by the secretary of state, not the work of renegade staffers within the department.

Former senior State Department officials told me last week that Ford was upset after learning he was cut out of an inquiry led by the department’s bureau of arms control, verification, and compliance (AVC). Something that illustrates Ford’s standing (or lack thereof) within the department is Pompeo’s appointment of special envoys to steer the portfolios that the person in Ford’s role would normally lead. What is described in the Vanity Fair piece as Ford’s concerns about a “secretive inquiry” sound like protests about the way in which he was sidelined.

Another official said that the Pompeo-approved AVC effort bypassed Ford’s team because he is “married to” treaties and arms-control agreements and feared that China would break off arms-control treaties “if we pissed them off,” even though Beijing “won’t cooperate with us anyway.”

The AVC component of the broader origins investigation would go on to form the basis of a key January 15 fact sheet about the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose findings the Biden administration has endorsed. This almost didn’t take place at all, as the AVC investigation faced resistance within the department (though Ford told Vanity Fair he was “pleased” the document was published).

Just how much of the resistance to U.S. government COVID-origin investigation efforts was motivated, at least in part, by fear of antagonizing China? That’s a question a Congressional inquiry ought to address.