On the menu today: The dramatic headline in The Atlantic about “the strongest evidence yet” that an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market started the pandemic is not supported by what the data actually uncover; and even Donald Trump’s most ardent critics think Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is on legally shaky ground with his expected indictment of the former president.
That Raccoon Dog Won’t Hunt
“The boss wants me to write about raccoon dogs” is not one of those sentences I ever expected to type.
Indisputably, the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, was a key location in the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. What we don’t know, and what this new report revolving around raccoon-dog DNA does not clarify, is whether the virus entered that market through an animal or through a human being.
As the Associated Press mentions in the 14th paragraph here, “WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, cautioned that the analysis did not find the virus within any animal, nor did it find any hard evidence that any animals infected humans.”
If you’re trying to prove that the virus jumped from an animal to a human being, that lack of evidence is something of a big deal. Human beings may have caught it from the raccoon dog; or the raccoon dog could have caught it from a human being.
I have a beef with the Atlantic’s headline, “The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic.” One way or another, SARS-CoV-2 traces back to a bat coronavirus. Even if you believe that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology altered the virus to make it more virulent and contagious among human beings, those researchers would have started with a bat virus. Genetically, it is more like existing bat coronaviruses than anything else on Earth, although no one has found a precise genetic match to SARS-CoV-2 in a bat.
Remember, SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t need to have been genetically altered to have emerged from a lab. That said, if it is indeed a naturally occurring virus, it is surprisingly difficult to find in nature: “More than a year after Covid-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus. That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side of the research team.” In September 2021, Chinese researchers contended that they had tested 17,000 bats from across the country and hadn’t found a single case of SARS-CoV-2 or any variation of it. (For what it’s worth, more than a few scientists outside of China doubt those results. But that would mean there is a vast and ongoing nationwide effort in China among the entire scientific community to hide the discovery of naturally occurring SARS-CoV-2 in bats, which would be potentially exculpatory evidence to dispel the lab-leak theory.)
The question is, did that virus come into the center of Wuhan . . .
- through some animal brought to the Huanan market?
- Or through a bat being brought to Wuhan Institute of Virology?
- Or through being in the lungs of a researcher returning to the lab after collecting samples in bat caves?
Or is this virus slightly different from all other previously discovered viruses because it was the subject of some sort of research within the WIV that altered it? Keep in mind, we already know that the WIV was conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronavirus genome sequences, and testing them on mice whose lungs had been genetically altered to be more like human lungs, and Chinese documents indicate that the WIV “faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019.” But hey, maybe that’s all coincidental.
Shortly after the pandemic started, Chinese authorities took swabs of “samples from various stalls and wastewater collection sites collected as early as January 2020.” Keep in mind, Covid-19 had been circulating in Wuhan since at least early December 2019, and perhaps even November 2019.
But the Chinese authorities never shared the full data from those swabs. The Atlantic article explains that, “A few weeks ago, the data appeared on an open-access genomic database called GISAID, after being quietly posted by researchers affiliated with [China’s] Center for Disease Control and Prevention. By almost pure happenstance, scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia spotted the sequences, downloaded them, and began an analysis.”
The World Health Organization summarizes the new research:
Of 1,380 samples collected from the environment and animals within the market in early 2020, 73/923 environmental samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2-specific RT-qPCR, from various stalls and sewerage systems in and around the market, but no virus was detected in 457 animal samples tested. The animal samples included animal bodies, frozen animal carcasses and animal products, as well as stray animals around the market, and covered 18 species. According to the preprint, raccoon dogs were not amongst the animals tested. However, the presence of high levels of raccoon dog mitochondrial DNA in the metagenomics data from environmental samples identified in the new analysis, suggest that raccoon dog and other animals may have been present before the market was cleaned as part of the public health intervention.
Again from the Atlantic article:
The new analysis, led by Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey — three prominent researchers who have been looking into the virus’s roots — shows that that may not be the case. Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material — much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face. Because of how the samples were gathered, and because viruses can’t persist by themselves in the environment, the scientists think that their findings could indicate the presence of a coronavirus-infected raccoon dog in the spots where the swabs were taken.
If you’ve been following the discussion and debate about the origin of the virus, the names Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey should ring a bell. For the past three years, all of them have been ardent, outspoken critics of the lab-leak theory. In March 2020, Kristian Andersen and Edward Holmes declared that, “By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes,” and contended that their research “rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2.”
Back on November 18, 2021, the New York Times ran a front-page story that quite a few lab-leak skeptics interpreted as the final answer on the origin of the virus:
Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.
“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”
You may recall that “a significant portion, although not all, of the first Covid cases could be traced back to the Huanan Seafood Market — 27 of 41 patients, according to a key early assessment published in the medical journal The Lancet. A later, larger study of the first 99 people diagnosed with COVID found that only 49 could be traced back to the Huanan Seafood Market.”
The Worobey contention is that individuals who were not linked to the market in those studies were in fact linked to the market, it’s just that neither the patients nor the researchers realized it at the time:
One of the key findings of our study is that “unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, i.e., those who did not work at the market, did not know someone who did, and had not recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to it. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against the Huanan market being the epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at or near the Huanan market.
Worobey’s study noted that the cases with no evidence of a direct link to the Huanan Seafood Market resided a median distance of four kilometers (2.48 miles) away, with some more than 15 kilometers away. If you redefine “linked to the market” to mean living within 15 kilometers or nine miles of the market, then it becomes much easier to contend that all of the early patients were “linked to the market. “
You probably noticed that the November 2021 New York Times front-page story did not end the debate about whether the virus emerged from the market or from a lab leak. This Atlantic article isn’t likely to end the debate, either.
Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, sees a recurring pattern in the often-breathless coverage of Andersen, Holmes, and Worobey:
The episode reinforces a bizarre trend in which a small group of western virologists with ready access to the media, who are desperate not to concede that the pandemic might have begun in a virology laboratory, are far more certain that the pandemic began in animals in that market than [George Gao, the head of the Centers for Disease Control in Beijing] or the Chinese authorities now are.
The Long-Shot Criminal Case against Trump
Local attorneys rarely prosecute presidential candidates for violations of state or federal campaign-finance law, particularly over misreporting expenditures. On those rare occasions when the violation over misreporting spending is severe enough — like, say, the Clinton campaign hiring Perkins Coie law firm to put together what became known as the Steele Dossier, and listing it as “legal advice and services” — the campaign usually pays a fine.
If Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicts former president Trump over a payment to his alleged mistress Stormy Daniels in 2016, Bragg will be seeking a felony conviction over falsifying business records, which is usually, but not always, a misdemeanor. In New York, the statute of limitations for a felony charge of falsifying business records is five years, which would have passed in 2021.
The case will rely heavily on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who in 2018 pled guilty to five counts of willful tax evasion; one count of making false statements to a bank; one count of causing an unlawful campaign contribution; and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution. To put it mildly, Michael Cohen is a less-than-ideal witness.
And of course, no former president has ever been indicted for a crime.
Forget what Trump’s defenders are saying about the expected indictment; let’s look at what some of Trump’s most ardent critics are saying.
Of course we all have to wait and see the evidence, but based on the publicly-available information, I’m skeptical of the Manhattan DA’s case, as outlined below. “Untested” legal theories should not be used to prosecute anyone, including former presidents.
It’s very surprising to me that New York State prosecutors would pursue a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump on the Stormy Daniels matter. What’s especially worrying about the reportedly pending indictment of Trump is the risk that prosecutors may think: Edwards was only acquitted [hung jury] because he faced a friendly jury in North Carolina — but Trump can be convicted because may face an unfriendly jury in New York. New York prosecutors prosecuted and won a case of criminal tax fraud against the Trump organization. They told the jury that those corporate frauds were personally directed by Trump himself. Why not pursue THAT line of investigation? This one instead . . . . is a bad mistake.
And that’s just the responses from Trump critics whose names begin with “David Fr.”
If you come at the king, you had best not miss. If you’re going to indict a former president and presidential candidate on a felony, you had better have an airtight, slam-dunk, get-the-opposing-counsel-to-beg-for-a-plea-bargain case that will not only convince a jury but hold up on appeal. Based upon what we know so far, Alvin Bragg doesn’t have anything close to that threshold.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Fox News’ Howard Kurtz for having me on his MediaBuzz program yesterday to discuss media coverage of Ron DeSantis’s remarks on Russia and Ukraine, and a potential TikTok ban.
For the viewer who contended it was a “crock” for me to say President Trump was singing the praises of Xi Jinping during the pandemic . . . never, ever, ever doubt me.