If Books Could Kill - January 31, 2023


The Lab Leak [TEASER]

Topics
lab leak theory
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus The End of History

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

170.97

Word count

2,502

Sentence count

138

Harmful content

Toxicity

22

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Are we doing little Peter Michael intros for the bonus episodes?
00:00:03.940 I think so.
00:00:04.740 Okay.
00:00:05.220 Quick question before I do mine. 0.99
00:00:08.540 How much of your discussion covers weird xenophobic sort of shit? 0.99
00:00:13.700 Not terribly much, to be honest. 0.99
00:00:15.000 But feel free to make a xenophobic zinger.
00:00:17.500 Do you have an anti-Asian American joke ready?
00:00:20.180 Is this how you're telling me?
00:00:23.400 No, no, no.
00:00:24.200 Okay.
00:00:25.400 Peter.
00:00:26.160 Michael.
00:00:26.620 What do you know about the lab leak theory?
00:00:29.200 Not much, honestly, but I am very impressed with Americans because we were able to turn a pandemic a little bit racist.
00:00:53.900 Okay, so now that the zinger's out of the way, tell me what you actually know about the lab leak theory.
00:00:57.920 What I remember is that in 2020, some people pointed out that it was pretty weird that the origin of COVID was in Wuhan, where there is an institute for studying such diseases, right?
00:01:14.620 That's as far as I ever got into looking at this.
00:01:17.920 And I have shut my brain off to it every other time I heard anything about it, because to me, it does not matter whether this inadvertently escaped from a lab or inadvertently was spread at some market somewhere.
00:01:36.540 Right.
00:01:36.640 I just I can't bring myself in this day and age, Michael, with so much going on with cancel culture, I can't bring myself to care about things like this. 0.94
00:01:47.920 I do think the core argument underneath this episode, and probably why it's like a bonus episode and not like an episode episode, is that it doesn't fucking matter.
00:01:56.800 It's interesting. 0.67
00:01:58.180 Like, this is a once-in-a-century global pandemic.
00:02:00.540 We should know how it started.
00:02:02.560 Like, it makes sense that everybody would want to know the origins of this.
00:02:05.940 But ultimately, America's pandemic response had nothing to do with whether it came from China or from Spain or whether it came from a lab or a bat or a squirrel or a market.
00:02:16.940 yeah so tell me what is your like understanding of like what is the lab leak theory yeah there
00:02:22.800 there is a an institute of some sort in wuhan yes and they study uh diseases such as covid 19
00:02:30.340 and i guess at some point a scientist slipped on a banana peel while holding a giant tray full of
00:02:38.220 vials juggled it across the room and everyone was like whoa and one vial popped off everyone
00:02:47.060 watched in slow motion as it fell to the ground cracked and they were like oh no and that's how
00:02:54.380 COVID-19 started did you watch Outbreak at the beginning of the pandemic absolutely I did it's
00:02:59.720 the thing where you know it zooms in on like the HVAC system yes and then Dustin Hoffman goes it's
00:03:04.800 airborne. That's what happened in Wuhan in 2019. Yes. So our story begins in December 2019 with
00:03:16.320 the first reports of what was at that time thought of as pneumonia. There were like these weird
00:03:21.000 pneumonia cases that were showing up in hospitals in Wuhan. The initial reports, the first Lancet
00:03:27.220 report showed that 66% of the cases of this weird pneumonia were directly linked to this market in
00:03:34.080 wuhan it's called the huanan seafood market it's known as like a wet market i don't really know
00:03:38.480 where that term came from i think it just said i was gonna ask you where that term comes from
00:03:42.360 because it always felt to me like just a way to make that it sound gross yeah exactly it sounds
00:03:47.400 like there's just like pools of standing water you're gonna go to this market and everything's
00:03:51.440 just gonna be fucking wet yeah but it's like it's it's a sort of a normal i guess like urban market
00:03:58.800 it's like the size of a couple football fields it's quite large wuhan is a city of 11 million 0.97
00:04:02.620 people. It's like bigger than New York. Yeah, it's massive. Yeah, exactly. I love hearing about
00:04:08.260 Chinese cities where it's a sprawling nation state within China and it's the 25th biggest city.
00:04:15.640 And then one thing I was not aware of until I started researching this was that the lab leak
00:04:20.100 theory and the bioweapon theory basically popped up like five minutes after we started getting
00:04:25.960 reports of COVID. The first American coverage of this is in the Washington Times, which is like a
00:04:31.940 conservative tabloid basically which just like fully leans into the bioweapon explanation so
00:04:38.880 their article starts out the deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated 0.87
00:04:45.420 in a laboratory in the city of wuhan linked to china's covert biological weapons program 0.88
00:04:51.220 comma said an israeli biological warfare analyst this is the thing that they do in right we need
00:04:57.180 a lot where they're like, this random guy says this inflammatory thing, we're going to write
00:05:02.600 it up as if it's like newsworthy. It then continues, Danny Shoham, a former Israeli
00:05:08.780 military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute
00:05:14.780 is linked to Beijing's covert bioweapons program. Quote, certain laboratories in the institute have
00:05:20.820 probably been engaged in terms of research and development in Chinese biological weapons,
00:05:25.720 at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese bioweapon alignment.
00:05:31.840 At least collaterally. 0.99
00:05:33.160 So that sentence is fucking gibberish. 0.99
00:05:34.620 That's the fourth paragraph of the story. 0.99
00:05:36.440 But it's just like, oh, they've probably been engaged in like, oh, bioweapon alignment.
00:05:40.020 Like it just sounds sort of technical in the way that conspiracy theories often do.
00:05:44.940 Engaged collaterally in bioweapon alignment.
00:05:48.180 Oh, wow.
00:05:48.700 How could you not believe him?
00:05:49.820 On right wing internet, this starts bouncing around. 0.98
00:05:53.480 And like, to their credit, a lot of like the arch right wing blogs and forums were like, this is going to be the next global pandemic, which is like what they say about every fucking thing. 0.97
00:06:03.300 Right. But like stop clock, they happen to have been right this time. 0.79
00:06:07.100 Oh, that must have felt good.
00:06:08.200 I know.
00:06:08.820 It's happening. Like we've told you that like something big was going to go down and it's going down.
00:06:16.040 They were so hyped.
00:06:16.800 Also, once we get the genome of this new virus, there's a couple of weird preprints where like essentially random researchers just say like, oh, we think this is engineered.
00:06:26.920 So there's a really weird paper that comes out from some Indian researchers saying that it has similar features to HIV.
00:06:34.140 OK.
00:06:34.760 Which like isn't really true or like it's one of those things like viruses have various features in common. 0.94
00:06:40.160 this just ends up fueling a bunch of speculation that this is like some sort of fucking super bug
00:06:44.480 that it's like a mix of like the common cold and aids right that paper is eventually retracted 0.88
00:06:50.020 because like other virologists look at it and they're like this doesn't make any fucking sense
00:06:53.140 like this isn't a meaningful thing to say and so the paper is withdrawn but then it's like oh
00:06:58.140 i guess you can't even ask questions right that just proves that the uh the global elite is trying
00:07:03.960 to suppress the truth exactly so it's like then we get we start getting this like censorship you
00:07:08.400 should be allowed to ask questions kind of narrative forming yes the real ignition of this
00:07:13.540 is there's a paper that is written by two chinese researchers that's called the possible origins of
00:07:20.260 2019 coronavirus and this basically posits like the lab leak theory this is the first like official
00:07:27.780 paper proposing this and it goes through all of these reasons why the market theory doesn't make
00:07:34.380 any sense. So they point out that like this couldn't have spilled over from bats because
00:07:39.020 they don't even sell bats at that market. And there was some speculation at the time
00:07:43.840 that people could have gotten this from eating bats. And they were like, people didn't even
00:07:48.040 eat bats in that part of China. It's sort of written as a debunker. Like if you haven't
00:07:53.520 really been following the scientific speculation, you might think like, oh, busted, like this
00:07:59.900 doesn't even check out but like everyone had always said that they don't sell bats at that
00:08:05.800 market and like this is why people were looking for an intermediate species right it's the kind
00:08:10.480 of thing that if you had been half paying attention might seem like this sort of big revelation right
00:08:16.900 and also the the thing that people had gotten it from eating animals was like one scenario but right
00:08:23.020 it was more like just scientific speculation like there's a finite number of ways that a virus can
00:08:27.860 jump from animal to human right and like one of them is eating so it's like okay that's on the
00:08:31.960 table but there isn't really evidence for or against it this time sure so this article is
00:08:36.480 also retracted this continues to come up in lab leak articles now they're like what about the
00:08:41.920 original report that was pulled it's like well it was wrong which is why it was pulled why is
00:08:48.980 everyone saying that our theory is stupid yeah makes you think so then the theory catches fire
00:08:54.960 in late February of 2020, when it is popularized by Tom Cotton, the senator. 0.99
00:09:01.600 Hell yeah.
00:09:01.860 So we are going to watch two clips of a Fox News interview with Mr. Cotton.
00:09:08.640 I love that he has the name of a children's book character.
00:09:13.760 Yeah.
00:09:15.100 All right. I'm clicking.
00:09:18.400 So Maria, here's what we do know. This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market.
00:09:24.500 But epidemiologists who are widely respected from China, who have published or studied in the international journal The Lancet,
00:09:31.280 have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market.
00:09:37.260 The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market.
00:09:40.800 So we don't know where it originated, but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that.
00:09:44.820 We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.
00:09:55.440 Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there. 0.93
00:09:59.120 But because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says. 0.97
00:10:07.520 And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all. 0.93
00:10:11.360 So this super lab that you refer to, this super lab is the only one of its kind.
00:10:18.600 And what do they do at this super lab?
00:10:21.000 It's unclear, Maria.
00:10:22.980 We have such laboratories ourselves in the United States run by our military,
00:10:27.200 in large part done for preventative purposes.
00:10:29.900 We're trying to discover vaccines or to protect our own soldiers.
00:10:33.980 China is obviously very secretive about what happens at the Wuhan laboratory.
00:10:37.760 Now, the Chinese ambassador called the notion of biological warfare, quote, absolutely crazy,
00:10:46.020 accusing you of trying to spread misinformation and panic.
00:10:49.980 What's your response there?
00:10:51.620 I mean, we don't want to create panic, but at the same time, people need to be educated
00:10:55.780 in terms of what exists in this region in China.
00:10:59.200 Well, the burden of proof right now is on the Chinese Communist Party and the ambassador 0.64
00:11:04.480 of China and his fellow communists. 0.99
00:11:07.760 charisma of a fucking school shooter um i i can't believe he put the onus on all communists 0.99
00:11:17.520 unfortunately i'm gonna be asking my mutuals on twitter to fess up about what's going on over 0.99
00:11:23.800 there but then what is interesting to me about this is you can see that he's like he's flirting
00:11:29.100 with it but he's not saying it right he lets her ask a question about a bioweapon and he doesn't
00:11:34.840 really correct her. I mean, what he's saying is, well, we know one thing. It's that it didn't come
00:11:40.420 from that market. Exactly. And then we know another thing. There's a giant virology lab
00:11:45.720 right next door. He's letting you fill in the very obvious blank there. The very obvious blank.
00:11:52.480 And also what he's doing with the market theory is something also relatively sophisticated where
00:11:58.040 he's saying, well, it had to get into the market before it came out. Right. So we know the official
00:12:02.760 description of the origin isn't true and on some level he's correct about this like it had to get
00:12:08.400 from bats to something else to get to the market right but he's stating this as if it like debunks
00:12:14.140 the official origin story but like this is the official origin story they they get a lot of
00:12:19.120 mileage here out of like the chinese communist party won't tell us what's going on this is also
00:12:26.020 this is also a conspiracy theory thing right is that like you immediately move to the meta discourse
00:12:30.540 Why won't they participate in our research on this?
00:12:33.520 Right.
00:12:33.840 It feels really obvious what he's doing here.
00:12:36.980 Yeah.
00:12:37.260 He's going right up to the line of endorsing the conspiracy theory, but also fueling it.
00:12:43.180 So what he's basically doing is like, I can't say that the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy,
00:12:49.200 but I do know that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't in that book depository.
00:12:53.520 It's also hilarious when he concedes that the U.S. has labs like this.
00:12:57.980 Yeah.
00:12:58.140 And then he says, like, for defensive purposes.
00:13:00.540 Right, right.
00:13:01.160 We would never do anything bad in the labs.
00:13:03.820 We have various labs that are identical to this one, although we use them for friendship.
00:13:08.600 So this launches, like, the first wave of discourse around this conspiracy theory and a year later, another round of discourse.
00:13:18.980 OK, so I'm going to send you one of the most cursed paragraphs we've ever covered on the show.
00:13:25.120 This is a summary of all of the pieces that came out, basically saying that, like, how dare you suppress the lab leak for so long?
00:13:31.660 Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of esteemed thinkers.
00:13:33.400 It's a real who's who of this podcast.
00:13:34.960 Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote that the Trump era, quote,
00:13:38.360 created expansive pressures to describe more and more things without any ambiguity and shading and judge more and more right wing claims preemptively.
00:13:47.420 Preemptively?
00:13:47.860 Brett Stevens argued that good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives.
00:13:56.180 Don't do narratives.
00:13:57.300 Megan McArdle at The Washington Post wrote that science came to mean, quote,
00:14:01.720 a demand that others subordinate their judgment to an elite approved group of credentialed scientific experts, unquote.
00:14:10.620 Asked some tough questions.
00:14:12.420 Matthew Iglesias. 1.00
00:14:13.740 I'm going to fucking lose my mind. 0.99
00:14:15.380 I know. 1.00
00:14:15.660 I know.
00:14:16.340 I had to cut a couple because there were some more.
00:14:18.460 I was like, man, we can't do too many of these.
00:14:20.300 If Andrew Sullivan weighs in, I'm jumping out.
00:14:23.320 Matthew Iglesias on Substack assailed a, quote, genuinely catastrophic media fuck up and a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse policing.
00:14:36.540 I hate it when people police the discourse. 0.76