Red Meat Of Pandemic Origin Ignited By Guess Who-Fox News
A huge difficulty in covering the Watergate scandal was that it was not a visual story and the daunting challenge was to capture and inform readers of this complex story without pictures. But much of the media were ready for the challenge and the result was President Nixon’s resignation.
And that brings parallels to covering the COVID-19 pandemic. There are no sexy pictures, only talking heads. On top of this, it is a science story where nuances and differences of opinion are difficult to parse. To be fair, many news organization are trying to report this very complicated story. But not Fox.
As usual, the goal for Fox, the entertainment company, is to give its viewers what they want and not what they need and that often means juicy conspiracies even if they are make believe. But the Fox viewers often believe they are watching news and in the COVID-19 story they are being bombarded with a steady drumbeat to stir up hostility to China, a very ominous matter as the U.S. shoots down a Chinese spy balloon, China increases aggression toward Taiwan and threatens to provide weapons to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. We don’t need Americans foaming at the mouth to go after China, unless you’re Fox, trump or other Republicans.
While president, trump famously blamed the Chinese for leaking the virus from one of its laboratories. And of course, there were no facts to back up trump.
Which brings us to today and the latest revelations that a laboratory leak in China may be source of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most American intelligence agencies still believe the virus jumped from bats to humans, perhaps at a Chinese market, and presumably after passing through a third species that had come to harbor what became known as the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Leak theorists note that the outbreak began in a city that is the world’s leading center for research on coronaviruses. The World Health Organization reported that China has had previous lab accidents, including an incident in 2004 when lab workers were inadvertently exposed to the original SARS virus, and subsequently spread the pathogen outside the lab, resulting in multiple illnesses and at least one death.
The basis of the latest story is a classified intelligence document that was shared with White House officials and some members of Congress that indicates that the the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI believe the COVID-19 pandemic might have started with an accidental or intentional leak from a Chinese laboratory. The theory that COVID-19 started with a lab accident came from findings by the Z-Division, a scientific team within the Department of Energy.
The caveat that Fox failed to report is that the Department of Energy noted that it judges its conclusion with “low confidence” to be true. A low confidence finding essentially means the evidence to support the theory is incomplete or questionable. The FBI is backing the lab theory with “moderate confidence.”
The National Intelligence Council has low confidence that the initial COVID-19 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an infected animal, while the CIA remains undecided.
Reporting the layers of details would essentially deflate the story, boring many Fox viewers and perhaps leading them to other right wing sources that aren’t bothered by a lack of specificity or facts. Translate that into fewer Fox viewers and less advertising revenues. So rather than note the “low confidence” tone and the unchanged belief of other intelligence agencies, true to its core, Fox chose to go for the drama, facts be damned and to continue a feeding frenzy of viewers who are convinced that President Joe Biden is an alien.
Very soon after Fox reported on the lab theory, the conspiracists surfaced. Conspiracists and politicians, especially on the right, are notorious for dishing out disinformation.
“Everything we were called conspiracy theorists and horrible racists for saying … was TRUE,” said Jennifer Sey, a former gymnast and author, who was an outspoken critic of school mask mandates. “Vindication is not enough. We need apologies.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a devotee of wild conspiracies, like trump having won the 2020 election, said, “The same people who shamed us, canceled us and wanted to put us in jail for saying Covid came from the Wuhan Lab … are starting to say what we said all along.”
Mike Pompeo, a possible 2014 Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Secretary of State and CIA director under trump, said, “There was always enormous evidence that the Wuhan coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab. I’m glad the Department of Energy recognizes this reality.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who has been suggesting possible cuts in the Medicare program, also jumped on the anti-China bandwagon.
“The left spent the past 2 yrs trying to censor the truth & cover up for Communist China, but the facts are undeniable,” Scott tweeted. “The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is evil. Its virus killed millions & Xi will stop at nothing to destroy the U.S. It’s time to hold this evil regime accountable.”
A “Fox News Flash” published on Feb.28, reported that the “CCP ‘intentionally released’ COVID-19 ‘all over the world,’ Chinese virologist says.”
That virologist, Dr. Li Meng Yan, gave her observations on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Carlson suggested the Chinese government unleashed COVID to destroy Western economies and elevate their own position globally. Carlson also has fed the conspiracy theory that the Biden administration has ignored the suffering over the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because the residents are mostly white, conservative, working class and Republican.
Yan’s incendiary claims were not new. More than two years ago, in September 2020, Yan told Carlson that the Chinese government intentionally manufactured and released the COVID-19 virus. Yan said the virus came from a lab rather than a natural spillover from animals. Yan’s claims were roundly rejected without factual basis. Facebook put a “false information” flag on Carlson’s interview with Yan and Twitter suspended Yan’s account.
Fox reported that Yan was “a respected doctor who specialized in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health.” She fled Hong Kong in April 2020 after she began looking into the growing number of cases coming out of mainland China that involved human-to-human transmission.
A brief Wikipedia search told a different story. The report said that the 39-year-old Yan is “a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community.”
The flaws were noted by scientific reviewers for the Biological and Chemical Sciences, Rapid Reviews: COVID-19, MIT Press and by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security found that Yan’s paper was not peer reviewed and offered “contradictory and inaccurate information that does not support their argument,” while reviewers from Rapid Reviews: COVID-19, said the papers did not demonstrate “sufficient scientific evidence to support [their] claims.”
“However, other scientists disputed the validity of the papers, pointing to poor methods, undisclosed funding from politically-motivated sources, the use of pseudonyms for the papers’ co-authors, and the papers having never been submitted to a journal for review,” Wikipedia reported.
The papers were described by virologists as “non-scientific,” “junk science,” and written to spread “political propaganda.”
Rapid Reviews noted that “there was a general consensus that the study’s claims were better explained by potential political motivations rather than scientific integrity.”
Yan’s claims were promoted in November 2020, by the Rule of Law Society, a political organization affiliated with Steve Bannon, former far right wing, trump strategist, and Guo Wengui, an expatriate Chinese billionaire. Yan also previously appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.
In November 2020, The New York Times reported that Yan’s “trajectory was carefully crafted” by Bannon and Wengui, who played to rising anti-Chinese sentiments, with the goal of bringing down China’s government and distracting from the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As far as the muddy waters, the Director of National Intelligence website defines three tiers of confidence as part of an intelligence guide for first responders. A low confidence assessment, the level assigned to the COVID-19 origin,“means the information is scant, questionable, or very fragmented, so it is difficult to make solid analytic inferences; it could also mean that the (intelligence community) has significant concerns about or problems with the sources.”
The FBI said it has “moderate confidence” that the virus began in a Chinese laboratory. Moderate confidence usually means the information could be interpreted differently and that the intelligence community has alternative views. It could also mean that the information is credible but needs more corroboration.
A group of scientists and public health leaders, convened by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, launched a task force in Sept. 2022 on responsible high-risk pathogen research.The bulletin noted that in coming years, human encounters with deadly pathogens will likely rise. It also said that encroachment on the natural environment and climate change provides increasing potential for viruses to jump across species, including to humans.
“At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the field collection and experimental manipulation of potential pandemic viruses — while scientifically informative — carry the risk of accidentally seeding a pandemic,” the bulletin said.
The task force will host a public meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on April 19–21.
House Republicans also have begun hearings to probe the virus’s origins and decisions by U.S. leaders. It was not clear if the panel will look into trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The panel chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said the goal is “to produce a product, hopefully bipartisan, based on knowledge and lessons learned.”
But the three professors invited to participate in the panel are hardly objective and have histories of believing in the lab spill theory. They include Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Johns Hopkins’ Marty Makary.
“It’s a no-brainer that it came from the lab,” Makary said, suggesting that Chinese leaders and other scientists had been involved in a coverup. Makary, a surgeon, professor, author and medical commentator, has been an outspoken opponent of broad vaccine mandates and some COVID restrictions at schools.
Bhattacharya, 55, is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya opposed lockdowns and mask mandates and joined with Kulldorff and Gupta, in 2020 to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through infection, while promoting the false promise that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus.
Bhattacharya also questioned the severity of the virus. In defense of his theory about developing herd immunity, Bhattacharya wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on March 24, 2020. He referred to his study which suggested that by April that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, Calif., might have already been infected with COVID-19 and had potentially developed anti-bodies to the virus and may not need the vaccine. The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism for statistical and methodological errors and apparent lack of disclosure of conflicts. It was later revealed that the study was funded by JetBlue founder David Neeleman, whose company was suffering because of restricted travel during the pandemic.
“I think people who wear masks outside when they’re social distanced are complete morons,” Neeleman said.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said in October 2020 that pursuing herd immunity before vaccination would be “scientifically and ethically problematic”, and “allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical.”
Kulldorff, 60, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital who develops epidemiological and statistical models to detect infectious disease outbreaks.
During the pandemic, Kulldorff opposed disease control measures such as vaccination of children, lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates.In December 2021 Kulldorff published an essay for the Brownstone Institute in which he falsely claimed that influenza was more hazardous to children than COVID-19, and on that basis illogically argued against children receiving COVID-19 vaccination.
In reality, influenza had been responsible for one child death in the 2020/21 season, while public health mitigation of COVID-19 was in place. COVID-19 had, in contrast, killed more than 1,000, according to a story in Sciencebasedmagazine.org.
“While this is a very dangerous disease for the elderly, for children it’s much less dangerous than the annual flu,” Kulldorff said in an August interview with Contagion Live. “And for people in their 20s and 30s, it’s not a dangerous disease at all.”
In December, Kulldorff, Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas, helped found a program called Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts school.Atlas also was a proponent for the debunked theory of herd immunity and was an advisor to trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force.