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Robert Kadlec,
the former US Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response under
the Trump administration, known by close associates as “Dr. Doom,” spent
more than a year scouring public records and conducting interviews
alongside colleagues with backgrounds spanning from national security to
infectious disease. In
a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, the team had
covered the walls with maps, newspaper clippings, timelines and pictures
of bats, mice and minks. This
was all at the behest of Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a
Republican member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions, who’d tasked them with figuring out where Covid-19 had come from. Their
initial 35-page report, which was released just days before the US
midterm elections, claims “the Covid-19 pandemic was, more likely than
not, the result of an accidental biocontainment breach at the [Wuhan
Institute of Virology] between mid-October and no later than
mid-November, 2019.” That controversial statement foreshadows months, if
not years, of partisan clashes and additional probes of the virus’s
origins. But
there’s more to the story than those 35 pages. Vanity Fair and
ProPublica obtained a 236-page companion report prepared by a member of
the team: Toy Reid, a State Department official who’d been detailed to
the office of Sen. Marco Rubio to work on China policy issues. Together,
Vanity Fair and ProPublica conducted their own five-month
probe of Reid’s translations and interpretations of Chinese-language
documents and published a piece describing the Wuhan Institute of
Virology as a “biocomplex in crisis” that had experienced an “acute
safety emergency in November 2019.” In other words, they said the lab
had long faced issues maintaining safe conditions and had a particularly
suspect breach take place just before the first known cases of Covid. A column in the Los Angeles Times called the exposé a “train wreck”
based on mistranslations and misinterpretations of Communist Party
memos that painted a more dire picture of biosafety conditions than was
evident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Semafor, a new media
startup, reported that ProPublica has scrambled to call translators to fact-check the story days after it published.
Virologists
and epidemiologists suggest the story doesn’t give sufficient weight to
the case they’ve built for animal-to-human transmission. Even a senior
Republican aide to Sen. Burr has sought to distance the preliminary
Senate report from the Vanity Fair-ProPublica piece, telling me that
many of the details the two outlets cited weren’t vetted or included in
the memo they ultimately released.
A spokesperson for the two
publications said in an emailed statement that the Communist
Party “postings are often opaque and open to varying interpretations.”
The spokesperson said that the publications “are continuing to report on
questions raised online about how the committee characterized those
postings and will update our story as needed.” If
you take a step back from the debate, one thing remains true: There
still isn’t any conclusive evidence of where Covid-19 first began. Even
Dr. Doom himself doesn’t think the world will ever unearth exactly how
the pandemic started. “You’re not going to find the smoking gun,” Kadlec told me in June. Nearly
three years since the beginning of the outbreak, and after endless
debate about Covid’s origins, the answers we’re getting aren’t simple,
definitive or satisfying — but they’re useful if you look at them
another way. Current and former US officials and international experts
in national security and epidemiology agree that both hypotheses —
animal-to-human transmission and a laboratory accident — could be true,
and we should assume they’ll happen again if we don’t take proper measures. Any
chance at protecting humanity from the next pandemic means accepting
both sides of the controversy and finding ways to overcome the
geopolitical and technical challenges that have prevented us from
solving this harrowing mystery. —Riley Griffin. |