Three things from this week’s pod with Josh Rogin:
It’s not the difficulty of obtaining details, it’s corruption that has derailed any lab leak investigation.
The U.S. helped build the lab from which Covid probably leaked. And no one who helped wants to acknowledge they bear some blame for the Covid pandemic.
Former health officials Tony Fauci & Francis Collins have refused to share thousands of documents that might answer critical questions. They’re not going to be able to hide forever.
Our guest, Josh Rogin has been dogging the lab leak theory since the beginning. He’s not a conspiracist, a “denier,” a Trump groupie, a Fauci hater, or an opponent of “science” writ large. He’s just followed the evidence, and the circumstantial evidence that has piled up makes clear that the Chinese military was engaged in virus research that probably leaked from a lab funded in part by the United States, killing millions. Check out Josh’s work here.
There are a few reasons to pursue the lab leak theory.
One: Millions died. Saying that again, because, you know, MILLIONS. Not to speak of lives destroyed, businesses destroyed, childrens’ education destroyed etc.
Two: A foreign government opposed to the United States may have unleashed a deadly virus on the world. An act of war — even if inadvertent — cannot go unanswered. If this had been a nuclear “accident,” you can bet your bottom dollar that the world would insist upon knowing how it happened. And just because Communist Chinese officials don’t want you to know, doesn’t make this investigation irrelevant.
Three: We had a 9/11 commission after that attack. We need a Covid commission now for exactly the same reasons: This cannot happen again. What went wrong? Why? Who is culpable? And most importantly, how can this be avoided in the future?
The questions of Covid and the response have become hopelessly politicized. Or as Josh put it, if Donald Trump thought it was a lab leak it can’t have been, because everything Donald Trump says is a lie. But it’s time to move on, grow up, man up, and get all this information out there. Democrats and Republicans should be leaping on the Covid inquiry bandwagon because it cannot be that there is simply no answer about how it was this virus was unleashed.
HIGHLIGHTS
You’ve repeatedly said we must investigate the lab leak theory. Looks like that might finally be happening?
JR: All we've done in this three years time is get to this place that we are now really as of this week, where now I think there's a broad consensus that we should check out the lab leak theory. Not that it's been proven, not even that we want it to be proven. I don't even care if it's proven. I care about that we find out the truth of how we got into this pandemic. For the very simple reason, is that that's the only sane way to have the best chance of not going through it again. In any disaster, if you had a car crash, a plane crash, a nuclear plant meltdown, the obvious thing to do is to figure out what happened so that you can have a good chance of minimizing the risk that it'll happen again. We'd just failed to do that over the last three years in this country, in this world, because of all the corruption that was built into this issue by the people who had the conflicts of interest.
I'm glad that three years later, it's no longer cancelable to say we should check out one of the theories that seems pretty plausible. And I'm glad there's an acknowledgement that there's been a mounting, mounting level of circumstantial evidence, not proof, just circumstantial evidence that points to the lab's involvement somehow. But we're actually no closer to actually checking it out, because the World Health Organization is not doing anything. The Chinese government's certainly not doing anything. Actually, they're doing the opposite thing, which is to continue to hide what they know. And the US government is embroiled in this horrendous internal review, where the intelligence community spends all of its time digging into its own files, and not asking anyone else who has all this information to put up or shut up.
What do you mean about the “horrendous internal review”?
JR: Even the people inside the government who are engaged in this bizarre exercise, don't understand the bizarre exercise that they've engaged in. And I'll explain why I say that. If you just think about, it's so crazy that for the first year of the pandemic you had all of the administration people, all of the Trump people, and even a lot of the senior political appointees saying, "Hey, listen, this probably came from the lab." And immediately all the Democrats were like, "How dare you?" It was like, "You must be shunned. We definitely think it didn't come from the lab, because Trump said it came from the lab, so it couldn't have come from the lab, because he's always wrong."
You give credit to team Biden for being willing to raise the lab leak question…
JR: To their credit, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to President Biden, decided to tell the intelligence community to go check it out again, a year later. They should have been doing it the whole time, but okay, check it out again. And sure enough, they did. But they bungled that intelligence community review, in ways that are now only being untangled. And one of the reasons that some of these intelligence agencies bungled the review, is because they turned to the scientists who were the subject of the review. We're talking about the people who were involved, and related to, and invested in the research that was going on on bat Coronaviruses, in the city where the outbreak was, Wuhan, China. And so, those people had a clear conflict of interest. And they misled the public, they misled journalists, they misled the international community, they misled the WHO, and they did it with a heavy helping hand from the Chinese Communist Party.
And what that created was this insane situation inside of our intelligence community, where the intelligence community got captured by its own sources. In the same way that journalists who spent the first year, two years, even today, reporting about the origin of the Coronavirus, and only reporting from the perspective of those scientists who have a conflict of interest, and therefore can't have the lab leak be true, because it would mean that they were connected to the outbreak, and their careers would be over, and their entire industry of virus hunting would be kaput.
So what actually is the lab leak case?
JR: What's funny about that, is that if you wanted to hear it, you could listen to the last time we did that podcast two years ago. Because the essential case hasn't changed. There was a cluster of cases at the market in the early stages of the pandemic. Now, not the first cases, mind you, but a cluster of cases. That's one thing. The other thing is that there were animals that could have been the intermediary animal, spotted at the market. Not that they ever found one animal, not that they ever had one shred of evidence that the outbreak actually happened at the market. Just that animals existed at that market, which could have been, in your mind's eye, an intermediary.
And then you'll have a bunch of these scientific papers, which will show you according to the intricacies of the DNA of the Coronavirus, that it couldn't possibly have come from the lab. Now again, I would argue, again objectively, that those papers ignore a huge obvious point, which is that it could have come from the lab, and you would never be able to tell by looking at the DNA that it had come from the lab. Just because it went through the lab, doesn't mean you would have seen signs of manipulation. And for those people who say that, "Oh, well, there was a cluster at the market early on in the outbreak," I would just point out that well, yeah, of course there was. Because it's a market, it's natural that that would be a super-spreader event.
But there's no evidence that the spillover happened at the market, not a shred of it.
So that’s the market side. What about the lab?
JR: Now on the lab side, I think again, trying to be as objective as I can, they were doing, and they published, this is public, they were doing experiments on bat Coronaviruses where they made them more lethal and transmissible, by running them through mice who were modified to have human lung characteristics. They take a bunch of mice, they give them human lung characteristics, then they take the most dangerous viruses they've ever found, and they run them through a bunch of times, and they see what kind of crazy mutations come up. And then they're like, "Oh, let's play with those." And you can call that gain of function research, or you can just call that regular bat Coronavirus research. It doesn't matter. The point is that they published it. We know where they were doing that.
All right, what else do we know? Well, we know that there were Chinese military scientists working on this research at the labs. What else do we know? Well, we also know that they were doing work that they didn't disclose. Because again, one of the canards you'll always hear is, "Well, they couldn't have released what they didn't have." And because they didn't admit to having the Coronavirus, a lot of people will say, "Oh, well that means they didn't have it." No. What we know is that they hid some of this research, and they hid some of the research they did with the Chinese military. Now, does that mean it was a bio-weapon?
Well, the bottom line is that virus research, especially this kind of virus research, has dual use applications. It's a dual use technology like lots of research. Just like we have it at our Fort Derrick, where the Chinese say the Coronavirus came from, we have bio research. Is that bio-weapons research? Well, no. But we would say it's bio-defense. But as you guys know, bio-defense and bio-offense capability, something of a distinction without a difference if we're being honest about it. What we know is that the PLA was all up in that bio research. Okay, so draw your own conclusions.
What else do we know? Well, we know there were sick researchers in the lab. We know that they had Coronavirus-like symptoms. We know that the partners of the lab, the American partners, namely the EcoHealth Alliance run by Peter Daszak, proposed in a separate revealed proposal to DARPA, that what they wanted to do... this was their proposal, it's called the Diffuse Proposal, which leaked out because they withheld it from the world for some unexplained reason. What they wanted to do is they wanted put to put the furin cleavage sites on bat Coronaviruses to make them more dangerous. And DARPA said, "No way, I'm not going to do that." And they had proposed to do it in Wuhan. And then lo and behold, a bat Coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, the first ever in the world, started a pandemic in Wuhan. Okay, now none of that is proof, but that's a hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence.
So who in the US doesn’t want us to know this?
JR: This is the big reveal of the lab leak theory, is that it's not really about blaming China. Because if we wanted to blame China for the pandemic, we have plenty of things to hang our hat on. They covered up the science, they covered up the outbreak, they lied to the WHO and said there wasn't human to human transmissible.
The implication of the lab leak theory is that it implicates us, that it shines light back on us. Because we built, and by us I mean the United States scientific community, with its European partners, a very dangerous, unsafe bio research facility in Wuhan for the Chinese, handed it to them. And then if the lab leak theory is true, they took what we taught them, how to manipulate these viruses, and built another lab down the hall and something got out. And so, the culpability is actually ours. That's why this topic is so hot potato. That's why the Anthony Faucis and Francis Collins of the world will always say, "Well, I guess it's possible, but we'll never find out."
So what’s the Fauci angle?
JR: Two things can be true. He can be a good man who has flaws. In other words, he can have served our country and the world, valiantly, in many instances, and then done something very wrong and very inappropriate on this issue, which is what I'm alleging right now. Okay? Not that he's a bad person, but that his behavior on this issue and his actions have been intentionally counterproductive, and that he has a clear conflict of interest, which should be factored into any subjective analysis of what he's telling us.
Very early on in the pandemic, there were a group of scientists who published a couple of open letters and studies that called the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory, and said, "It must have come from the market. Okay?" Then subsequently through FOIA, legal battles, gruesome, grueling document legal battles, they pried open NGOs, pried open the vaults of the National Institutes of Health. Lo and behold, it turns out that he was involved in discussions over the crafting of those papers, and didn't tell us, didn't reveal that at the time, for whatever reason.
Then what it further reveals is that all these scientists who were talking about the lab leak theory as if it was very plausible or sometimes they even thought it was true, and then days or weeks later, they're publishing that it's a conspiracy theory, their explanation being, "Well, we learned more about it, and then a couple days later we realized it's a conspiracy theory." But, it seems pretty clear that they were intentionally trying to set the frame and steer the conversation in a certain direction to absolve themselves. That's the point. They're absolving themselves because they have a conflict of interest.
Is Fauci personally responsible?
JR: Now, Anthony Fauci, personally, and [former NIH director] Francis Collins, personally, have been withholding thousands of relevant documents from congressional investigators for three years for no reason that I can possibly imagine. These are not classified documents, this is tax payer funded research, and there's no earthly explanation for why legitimate congressional requests for them should not have been thwarted for three years. He didn't have to do that, and the Biden administration never forced them to hand them over, and now that we have a Republican-led Congress, they're going to have some subpoena power, we're going to see a lot more of those documents, and those documents that have leaked out are pretty shocking.
So, again, I'm not saying Anthony Fauci's a bad person, I'm saying he's intentionally misleading on this issue because if the lab leak theory were true, it would call into question his own actions, and we don't have unassailable public officials in this country. […] So, the question is, "Is Anthony Fauci just wrong, or is he intentionally trying to mislead us?" I think that case, like all cases, has to be based on the evidence, and the problem being that all of the internal communications that would either convict or exonerate him from that charge, he's personally holding onto and refusing to let see the light of day. So, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If he wants to be exonerated, all he has to do is adhere to the reasonable congressional requests for internal documents that have been sitting on his desk for three years.
Can’t the president fix this?
JR: My argument is that President Biden should snap his fingers and force all those documents into the public right now, and in fact, the Senate voted unanimously on a resolution calling on that very thing to happen. But, I think what we're looking at is that these Republican-led committees are going to have to use their subpoenas to pry these documents out of the hands of NIH and the NIAID, now that Fauci and Collins no longer work there.
So there’s a cover-up going on?
JR: Yeah. I'm alleging that based on a series of specific facts. One being that they're withholding all of these documents. Two being that the things that they were saying in public were different than the things that they were saying in private, based on what we know from the documents. Three, that every time that a piece of evidence comes up, they immediately run to the Hill to tell us that why it's irrelevant, we should stop looking. "That's so crazy. Stop looking. Everybody, just stop looking. Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter."
Again, I don't think Fauci is the only one, I think Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance has done a lot to mislead the public. I mean, he was, again, a person with a conflict of interest who was on the WHO investigative team, which exonerated the lab without even really checking into it. He was fired from the Lancet Commission because he wouldn't even give them the documents
So where does this go?
JR: We're entering a new period. I'm going to preview for your podcast audience what's going to play out over the next few months, okay? Because what's happening now is that the congressional investigations are about to move forward on this issue of this IC review. And we're going to see this. It's crazy to think that, oh, well, you'll see a lot of people this week said, "Well, four agencies said this and two said that and four said this." As if it's like a horse race. As if they get to vote on it and whoever wins the vote wins. But that's insane because one of them is a 100% right and one of them is a 100% wrong.
[…]The Biden White House has been very careful, okay? They've never said one what they think one way or the other. Again, because they don't have this... It wasn't on their watch. They know it could be the lab or it could be something else, and they have no stake in it really, coming out one way or the other. Now, they don't have any political upside into really focusing on it. It has a diplomatic complication for them. It has a domestic sort of progressive, a faction complication for them. So they're not pushing it really, but they're making sure that they don't get caught on the wrong side. And I think that's savvy, if not a little bit cynical of them.
And so I don't think Biden himself will have a price to pay. Now, Trump, again, he will rightfully be able to claim credit for have called this, if it does turn out to be the lab leak or the preponderance of evidence does tend to point that way.At the same time, his overall approach to China was, let's say a mixed bag.
And honestly, I think Republicans are more active on it and Democrats are figuring out that their constituents want a tougher China policy. Not because it's being driven by Washington, by the dangerous group think, some nonsense like that. But because the actions of the Chinese Communist Party are affecting Americans in their lives and in their businesses and in their schools and in their investments and in their culture and in their sports and in their movies. And in their public health. So every American now knows that what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Congressional memo: Virologists drafted article against the lab leak theory on behalf of Wellcome Trust, NIH (US Right to Know, March 5 2023)
House Republican says FBI, Energy officials may testify on COVID lab leak conclusions (The Hill, March 5 2023)
Matt Hancock WhatsApp Leak Exposes the Need for Covid Justice (Washington Post, March 6 2023)
China continues to block efforts to determine Covid's origins, lawmakers say (Politico, March 5 2023)
FBI director says COVID pandemic 'most likely' originated from Chinese lab (Fox News, March 1 2023)
Intelligence Community Assessments of COVID-19 Origins (ODNI, October 29 2021)
Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says (WSJ, February 26 2023)
Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin (WSJ, May 23 2021)
House GOP to require Biden to declassify info on Wuhan lab, COVID origins (Fox, March 3 2023)
COVID Lab Leak 'Conspiracy Theorists' Demand Apologies After Revelations (Newsweek, February 27 2023)
Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on covid-19 origins (Washington Post, February 28, 2023)
THE SARS EPIDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH IN CHINA: A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE (National Library of Medicine, 2004)
USA Today 2004 report (USA Today 30, April 2004)
The investigations into covid’s origins must continue (Washington Post, March 3 2023)
State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses (Washington Post, April 14 2020)
In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened. (Politico, March 8 2021)
Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor (nature.com, October 2013)