Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been

 Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been

The truth is we’ll just never know

The Department of Energy is not the first agency that comes to mind when most people think about America’s Intelligence Community. But as many an Energy Secretary has discovered to their chagrin, the DOE generally plays second fiddle to the Interior Department in terms of what most people think of as “energy policy.” Interior controls the vast federal lands of the American West that are the site of so much of our oil and gas drilling. These same broad vistas are also some of the best locations for utility-scale wind and solar projects and where, with appropriate regulatory changes, we could potentially unlock vast stores of geothermal energy.

Where DOE is truly the undisputed king is the realm of nuclear weapons and related research and science.

And because nuclear weapons are very much the kind of thing that spies are interested in, the DOE has a small but robust Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, whose “distinctive contribution to national security is the ability to leverage the Energy Department’s unmatched scientific and technological expertise in support of policymakers as well as national security missions in defense, homeland security, cyber security, intelligence, and energy security.”

The federal org chart is messy, and the United States doesn’t have a Science Ministry. Because Energy oversees a network of labs and generally does a lot of science and research, it tends to be where “science stuff” that doesn’t fit comfortably under the NIH umbrella ends up.

And that is how the DOE came to make headlines over the weekend with their conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably leaked from a lab in China. The frustrating thing about intelligence agencies is they don’t come out and tell you explicitly what their information is, so it’s always hard to tell whether they are totally full of shit. Does this mean the virus did, in fact, leak from a lab? I don’t know, and it seems very unlikely that we will ever know.

But the headlines here represent another opportunity to try to reboot the conversation around a story where the gap between reality and the discourse has been extraordinarily wide.

Lab leak has always been taken seriously by the U.S. government

I tweeted this back in January and got a lot of people in my mentions yelling at me. But then White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted it, so I think I was basically right.

Biden has always taken the lab leak theory seriously.

Trump, on the other hand, was flaky and weird around Covid-19. He would alternate between his racist “China virus” routine and insisting the virus was no big deal. Some factions of his administration were very seriously pursuing a lab leak theory while others were pursuing crank cures. Before deciding the virus was no problem at all, Trump had a brief period as a serious Covid hawk who implemented a short-lived nationwide economic shutdown. But before that, he was insisting that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government:

2/7 Tweet: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”

2/7 remarks: “I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”

2/10 Fox Business interview: “I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control.”

2/10 campaign rally: “I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”

2/13 Fox News: “I think they've handled it professionally and I think they're extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it's going to be resolved.”

Biden, who is better than Trump at not being totally chaotic, was saying back in February of 2020 what he’s consistently said all along: “What I would do were I president now, I would not be taking China’s word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is. Because that is not happening now.”

China has never provided that kind of access to American scientists, and they never will. To be clear, the fact that the PRC has not allowed this level of American access is weak evidence of a cover-up; the Chinese government has many other compelling reasons not to let American officials snoop around their biolabs. But it means that there is a huge cloud of uncertainty hanging over this whole affair. But Biden was curious about this angle as a candidate and he was curious as president, ordering an Intelligence Community review during his first year in office, only to have them come to the boring conclusion that we don’t really know and probably never will.

There’s a very clear political story here, which is that Trump was skeptical of China on Covid-19 in his very chaotic Trump-like way and Biden is skeptical in his low-key way. The American government, meanwhile, is also skeptical. In that prior review, four IC agencies concluded with “low confidence” that it was zoonotic, while one agency (now known to be the FBI) said with “medium confidence” that it was a lab leak. The FBI is now joined by DOE (with only “low confidence”) in believing it’s a lab leak. But there are 17 component agencies to the IC, so by far the majority verdict here is “it’s hard to say.”

The parallel reality of discourse

Unfortunately, that story is not the version that’s told in the discourse. As I detailed in “The Media’s Lab Leak Fiasco,” many people writing articles on the internet back in the heady days of February 2020 convinced themselves that there were only two theories of Covid-19’s origins:

It was a crossover from animals.

It was an engineered Chinese bioweapon.

They then insisted that because those were the only options, anyone saying not-1 was saying 2, and 2 was a fringe conspiracy theory. Because this was back before Covid polarization set in, New York Times articles accusing Senator Tom Cotton of baselessly spreading the second theory debunked it in terms that sound today like a conservative arguing that Covid-19 is no big deal:

Although much remains unknown about the coronavirus, experts generally dismiss the idea that it was created by human hands. Scientists who have studied the coronavirus say it resembles SARS and other viruses that come from bats. While contagious, so far it appears to largely threaten the lives of older people with chronic health issues, making it a less-than-effective bioweapon.

The third theory, the one the Intelligence Community takes seriously and that Cotton actually floated, isn’t that SARS-CoV-2 was designed as a weapon (it’s true that it wouldn’t be a very good weapon) but that it is something researchers were studying in the lab — either a natural bat virus brought to Wuhan by Chinese virus hunters or something cooked up for research purposes.

But on the plane of discourse, everyone kind of missed this possibility for a few months back in 2020, and it became hardened conventional wisdom in certain circles that the view of Joe Biden, the FBI, and a healthy minority of the Intelligence Community was a right-wing conspiracy theory. To be clear, though, “some lab guys fucked up” is not a conspiracy. And the idea that the PRC government was squirrelly and non-transparent about Covid-19’s origin isn’t a theory — it’s clearly what happened.

Is it kind of crazy to allege that Chinese scientists might be scouring the country trying to dig up deadly viruses and even make new ones in labs? It does sound like a crazy thing to do. But this is what virologists around the world think they should be doing with their time. And that, I think, is the actual crux of the issue here.

We need to scrutinize dual-use virus research

Lab leak theory has always been of interest to two communities: China hawks and critics of “gain of function” virology research.

The China hawks have basically swept the field in American politics these days, so they hardly need the Covid origins issue. This means we’re left with the critics of risky virus research.

I’ve been saying for years that I thought the strong critics here were putting too much emphasis on lab leak theory. Realistically, they aren’t going to change their minds about the policy question, even in light of incredibly persuasive evidence for the zoonotic origin of Covid-19. It’s true that definitive proof of a lab leak would be a useful cudgel for cracking down on dangerous research. But to quote myself, people have known since long before Covid-19 that dangerous viruses leak from labs:

Lab leaks are just not that rare. Martin Furmanski, writing for the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in 2014, recounted that “at least 80 cases and three deaths were the result of three separate escapes of the smallpox virus from two different accredited smallpox laboratories” over a 15-year period during the global eradication campaign.

Furmanski also documents leaks of foot and mouth disease, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and H1N1 influenza. In the 1970s, a significant anthrax outbreak was caused by leaks from a Soviet lab. He was writing not in the context of the Covid pandemic but of the near-miss with SARS, observing that “there have been six separate ‘escapes’ from virology labs studying it: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and in four distinct events at the same laboratory in Beijing.”

This information should give us a reasonably high Bayesian prior that Covid-19 was a lab leak. But we should also be clear that even if Covid-19 was not a lab leak, the policy concern is that containing viruses in labs seems to be hard. Outside of the particular house of mirrors created by Covid polarization, this is a point you’d think would be almost conventional wisdom among progressives. If you can see why people might worry that freight train companies underinvest in safety relative to what the public interest requires, the exact same kind of worries apply to virus research. Except the downside risk of virus lab accidents is even larger than the downside risk of train derailments (unless the train happens to be carrying dangerous virus samples).

Back in January, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity wrote a long series of recommendations for applying a stricter and more uniform set of safety rules to biolabs. We should take their recommendations.

There’s no point in getting into the weeds on this or pretending I know how to manage virology labs, but there are two high-level points that I think people need to understand. First is that with any regulatory proposal, you need to consider not just benefits but costs. And an important consideration here is that while the downside of virus lab accidents is almost unbounded, the benefits of this kind of research seem pretty minimal. It would be really good to have more scientific research into virus countermeasures. But the big stumbling blocks are the rules around clinical trials. We don’t need to do dual-use work cooking up deadly pathogens in order to speed vaccine research — we need to prioritize speedier vaccine research.

Second is that when you see a loud chorus on virology Twitter telling you that this whole lab leak thing is a debunked conspiracy theory, yes, these are subject-matter experts you are listening to. But as is often the case in regulatory disputes, the people with the subject-matter knowledge are also interested parties — they don’t want more regulatory scrutiny. This is certainly their right, but it seems awfully unpersuasive to me, just like their effort to convince the world that the lab leak question has been settled.

The main divide right now is between the kind of China hawks who think support for Ukraine is helpful to a China containment policy and those who think it’s counterproductive. Nobody is arguing for a return to Bush/Obama engagement-style policymaking, not least because the main opponents of the New Cold War consensus also didn’t like the Bush/Obama approach to trade with China.