Since its creation in 2007, the independent investigative organization ProPublica has exposed wrongdoing at all levels of government and exposed corporate misconduct, earning six Pulitzer Prizes in the proceedings and ensuring a reputation for meticulous and accurate journalism.
A ProPublica article published Friday, pushing the claim that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese virus lab before proceeding to infect the world, does fall into that category.
It is, to be charitable, an accident.
Anyone who claims to be the one who can perceive a language spoken by 1/5 of the species is promoting something to you.
China’s Brendan O’Kane Questions New Claim About COVID Origins
The article relies heavily on Chinese-language documents that appear to have been mistranslated and interpreted, according to Chinese-language experts who have accumulated on social media since it was published.
It also takes as gospel a report through a Republican congressional staffing group organization that claims the pandemic is “more likely than less likely, the result of an investigation-related incident. “
This conclusion goes precisely against the overwhelming weight of opinion among scientists in the fields of virology and evolutionary biology.
The scientists conclude that COVID reached humans via zoonotic pathways, that is, directly from one or more host animals. Their conclusion is that the contagion was centered in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, where animals vulnerable to COVID infection were sold.
As a team of 18 scientists reported in a Science article on July 26, “our analyses imply that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19] occurred through the wild animal industry in China and shows that the Huanan market has been the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. “
Another significant paper with 29 authors published via Science provides more circumstantial evidence indicating that the Huanan market is the site of at least two zoonotic events.
By contrast, there is no evidence that COVID has escaped the Chinese lab: none, innuendo and claims from knowledge shredders with no experience in the applicable clinical fields.
You wouldn’t know that from reading the ProPublica/Vanity Fair article. The article asserts lifestyles of “a fierce battle. . . between an organization of virologists claiming their study problems against a market source and an organization of academics and online detectives who argue that there has been an attempt to hide a most likely laboratory origin.
The editors and authors of the ProPublica/Vanity Fair article don’t seem to realize the gap in experience among proponents of those theories: on the one hand, virologists and biologists publish in peer-reviewed journals; on the other, “online academics and detectives”. (These “academics” tend to work in fields other than virology or evolutionary biology. )
There are reasons to worry about selling an unproven theory about the origins of COVID. Attention to the claim that a guilty Chinese virus laboratory diverts efforts to solve the proper objective of regulation, which is too lax regulation of contact between humans and disease carriers. Wildlife.
Another domain of fear is the performance of ProPublica. His organization of top-notch reporters and editors has worked hard to earn the credibility and respect they have among hounds and readers. But it doesn’t take much to shake its credibility.
ProPublica gave the impression of putting its reputation on the line with an article that elevates a partisan view of a public health crisis above the paintings of experienced scientists. This is not what is expected of the organization.
The article makes little reference to clinical consensus, beyond the quote from University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey, the leader of one of the clinical papers.
Worobey publicly questioned the description of his paintings in the ProPublica/Vanity Fair article in a lengthy Twitter thread in which he posted a note he wrote to the authors prior to publication. In the memo, he warned the authors that they opposed what he called erroneous assumptions. They did on their own and that of others.
However, the article has an “expert” to offer. This is Toy Reid, who speaks fluent Chinese and has worked on Chinese issues for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla. ), according to the article.
The article describes Reid as a researcher who was somehow able to decipher Chinese-language dispatches on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online page whose “meaning cannot be discovered by just anyone. “gained experience, Reid believes he has exposed secrets that were hidden in plain sight. “
The so-called “secrets” were that the Wuhan lab was suffering from biosecurity criteria and experienced a security crisis in late November 2019, around the time of the first known outbreak of COVID-19.
Let’s identify some with the ProPublica/Vanity Fair article.
The article rests on two pillars. One is Reid’s translation and interpretation from the Wuhan Institute website. The other is the Republican committee report. We will take them in order.
Reid claims in the article to have understood how to interpret the “party discourse” practiced through Chinese communist officials. Reid describes the party’s language as “its own lexicon. “The article quotes him as saying that even a local Mandarin speaker ‘may’ not get attached to it. “
Mandarin speakers, local and otherwise, disagree.
Brendan O’Kane, a Chinese translator who says he has been contacted for help through one of the authors since the article was published, said on Twitter that “reading the language of the match is a specialized but not uncommon skill. Understanding a language spoken through 1/5 of the species sells you something. “
Jane Qiu, a molecular biologist and scientist in Beijing, says Reid’s inability to perceive the time of a line in a key Chinese document misled him by describing a safety factor at the Wuhan Institute that was occurring at the time of the COVID outbreak.
In fact, he says, it was a generic reference to operate with protection criteria closer to the time of the institute’s foundation. It also says that a line was lost in the same document indicating that the security issues were resolved.
Others questioned Reid’s claim to have read Chinese dispatches “between the lines. “”You have to correct the lines first,” Zhihua Chen, a Chinese-born knowledge scientist, also observed on Twitter. In this case, he says, Reid mistranslated a key phrase.
ProPublica, its editor-in-chief, Tracy Weber, and Katherine Eban, one of the authors, did not respond directly to my requests for comment. I was sent a strangely weak joint reaction from Vanity Fair and ProPublica via Rachel Janc, a Vanity Fair publicist says Chinese publications “are occasionally opaque and open to various interpretations. “It states, “We continue to report on issues raised online about how the committee has characterized those publications and will update our story as needed. “
At the time of writing, there appear to be no updates to the story other than a minor explanation similar to Worobey, published the same day the story was published.
As for the Senate committee’s report, it is appropriate to place it in the context of the original creation of the laboratory for leaking speculation into partisan politics.
I already reported that it was first defended in 2020 by State Department ideologues under then-President Trump. For them, blaming the Chinese government and its labs for a pandemic served the dual purpose of writing things contrary to a geopolitical adversary and diverting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent reaction to the pandemic.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese intentionally created the virus as a biological weapon. This became a claim that the virus arose from experiments to improve the infectivity of microbes studied in the lab and ultimately the proposal that researchers at the institute accidentally inflamed fieldwork and brought the virus to the institute.
No evidence has ever been presented for any of those theories. All that remains is an argument based on unsubstantiated conjecture and lack of evidence: why don’t we know more about the Wuhan Institute’s work, unless the Chinese government hides its guilt?
Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic remains the only immutable detail of the hypotheses, with a specific one at the Wuhan Institute, which sits only about 10 miles and across a river from the seafood market in a city teeming with around 8. 6 million people: about the length of New York City, with extensive regional transport links.
At least one of the early proponents of the Trump-era lab leak theory reappears in the ProPublica/Vanity Fair article, cited as suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party intentionally obscured the lifestyles of a security crisis at the time of the COVID outbreak. This is Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, lately at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Pottinger has been for Katherine Eban, one of the authors of the article, in at least 3 previous Vanity Fair articles, and added two in which she attacks the Wuhan lab.
The Republican minority new report to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is necessarily a heated presentation of the same old allegations of lab leaks.
It states that “substantial evidence has emerged that the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of an investigation-related incident,” but only makes assumptions based on findings that the Wuhan lab advanced its protective apparatus and conducted protection education sessions in 2019.
Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan, co-author of Worobey’s clinical paper, describes those steps as “normal” for any bioscience lab handling pathogens: regular, proactive renewals.
Rasmussen notes that, referring to the Wuhan lab, the Senate Republican report “provides no evidence of a biosecurity breach or failure, but sufficient evidence that they operated a containment lab in a popular manner, with one exception: WIV was more innovative than many others. “
ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a compliance claim about sinister acts in a Chinese studies laboratory providing any evidence. They put their credibility at the service of a blatantly partisan and ideological claim and presented it, baselessly, as if it were more credible than the real clinic. findings on the genesis of the COVID pandemic. It’s a shameful performance.
This story gave the impression in the Los Angeles Times.
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