Over the weekend, a group of journalists engaged each other in something you don’t see enough of on Twitter — a reasoned, thoughtful discussion that managed to avoid descending into trollish inanity, notwithstanding the inherent disagreement and strong feeling on all sides.

The topic at hand was the likelihood of whether or not a “lab leak” could explain the eventual presence of the COVID-19 virus in the wild and the subsequent global pandemic that followed. It’s something we’ve all been living with for more than a year now and contributed to more than 2.7 million deaths globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. And on Tuesday, a long-awaited World Health Organization report is expected to finally be made public (emphasis on finally, since Chinese officials stalled for months before allowing outside observers in-country to conduct this study) that will ostensibly present some conclusions about what led to this crisis in the first place.

The group of journalists mentioned above — including The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, The New York Times’ Ben Smith, ex-Buzzfeed editor Tom Gara, and Megyn Kelly podcast executive producer Steve Krakauer, among others — found themselves grappling with the COVID origin scenario that the WHO report says is actually the least likely of them all: A leak of some kind that could have caused the coronavirus to slip the confines of something like the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory and escape into the wider world.

The entire Twitter thread, available here, makes for thought-provoking reading on a number of levels. It kicks off with Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney taking issue with the framing of a New York Times headline about a related news item from over the weekend — specifically, involving President Trump’s CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield saying that he suspects that the coronavirus escaped from a lab setting. The initial NYT
NYT
hed: “Ex-CDC Director Favors Debunked Covid-19 Origin Theory.”

Tweeted Carney, succinctly: “The theory has not been debunked.”

He’s actually literally correct on that point. The theory has not been debunked, insofar as the conventional wisdom now is that there is no evidence to support it. But for something to be actually debunked or disproven, evidence to the country would need to be presented, and that’s not the case here. The absence of evidence supporting lab leak, in other words, is not the same thing as actual evidence disproving lab leak. But let’s continue:

Rogin, another participant in the aforementioned Twitter thread, has been writing about this very topic for a while now, in addition to the power struggle between the US and China more broadly. In fact, earlier this month saw the publication of Rogin’s book, “Chaos Under Heaven” (which includes plenty of focus on the coronavirus pandemic as well as the possibility of a lab leak scenario). Earlier this month, writing for Politico, Rogin also published a deep dive into the possible origin of the coronavirus, titled: “In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.”

That Politico piece, by the way, is one example among many that we could point to, by way of asserting that not all mainstream journalists hold the lab leak theory to be implausible. That’s another important point to keep in mind, in light of Tuesday’s reporting about the report — which will no doubt try to fix in people’s mind that the case is closed, and let’s just move on.

At any rate, the NYT changed the wording in its hed that called the lab leak theory “debunked.” Taking a new tack, that hed now reads: “The C.D.C.’s ex-director offers no evidence in favoring speculation that the coronavirus originated in a lab.” Make of that what you will.

Picking back up with the Twitter thread, Gara asks, with a bit of a nod to how much time has been allowed to pass thanks to stonewalling from China: “Is there “evidence” for any of the theories?” Or, more specifically, is there evidence for any of these theories that’s still obtainable, that hasn’t disappeared over the course of the previous year in which Chinese officials were dragging their feet on an outside investigation?

Krakauer notes at one point in the Twitter thread that simply saying the virus escaped from a lab is not the same thing as saying it was bioengineered in a lab for some nefarious purpose.

Credit to Smith, who used that point to acknowledge his own personal feeling on the matter, saying that ‘Pompeo et al poisoned the waters with stunts like this, so many people (incl me) have a bit of a reflexive reaction.” Rogin eventually weighed in, frustrated that Redfield’s comments fell victim to a kind of “he was a Trump official, so everything he says must be treated with caution, if not outright disbelieved” style of media coverage.

“Robert Redfield is a scientist,” Rogin tweeted. “A virologist. Head of the freaking CDC during the outbreak. He saw the intelligence. Dismissing his on the record, detailed explanation why he doesn’t believe the virus could have evolved only in nature as ‘speculation’ is a journalistic atrocity.” I caught up with Rogin afterwards, and he emailed me the following, by way of expounding on his points:

“Different people have different reasons for reflexively rejecting the still unproven but possible theory that the lab is somehow connected to the outbreak. Some don’t want to admit Trump may have been right about something. Some don’t want to admit they might have been wrong about something. Some people have confirmation bias. Some people are biased to their sources. Some of those sources have blatant conflicts of interest, such as the WHO investigators who are friends and colleagues of the (Wuhan Institute) scientists and who ruled out the lab accident theory BEFORE the investigation. Some people have a mix of two or more of these motivations.” Add all that up, Rogin continued, and the result is a mess that begs to be untangled.

“The origin question is not a political question,” he told me. “It’s a forensic question. It requires a real investigation. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just a theory.”

Without ascribing any confidence one way or another to the lab leak theory, here are some additional important points to reminder in light of the WHO report, and whether its findings should be embraced at face value (as some of the coverage on Tuesday will no doubt attempt):

Biden officials, for one thing, have already expressed skepticism about the report, and on the record, no less. “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a CNN interview.

And here’s White House chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as quoted by the Associated Press: “I’d … like to inquire as to the extent in which the people who were on that (WHO) group had access directly to the data that they would need to make a determination. I want to read the report first and then get a feel for what they really had access to — or did not have access to.”

Matthew Kavanagh, an assistant professor of global health at Georgetown University, likewise told the AP: “It is clear that that the Chinese government has not provided all the data needed and, until they do, firmer conclusions will be difficult.”

The WHO report will point out that, as a mark against the lab leak theory, that these kinds of accidents are rare and that the Wuhan labs were managed well. Rogin’s book, however, presents plenty of circumstantial evidence to the contrary that, if not disproving such protestations, at least shows they deserve closer scrutiny. “One senior administration official told me,” he writes in “Chaos Under Heaven,” “that many officials in various parts of the US government, especially the NSC and the State Department, came to believe that these (Chinese) researchers had not been as forthcoming as had been claimed.

“They had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of.”

Consider, further, the vehemence with which even the faintest whisper of the lab leak theory is greeted in journalistic circles. And compare that to the fact that the WHO report — which was shared with member states ahead of the wider dissemination on Tuesday — recommends that more study be given to lines of inquiry pushed by Chinese officials, such as that the virus may have been circulating in other countries in the final months of 2019 including in the US. And that the report treats possible COVID spread via frozen food, a scenario that Chinese officials have pushed especially hard, as more likely than the lab leak scenario. And that after dragging its feet against international cries for an official inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, China won veto power over participants in the investigation and pushed for the investigation to look at other countries, not just China.

It is possible to treat received official wisdom with healthy skepticism, especially when, as the French news outlet France 24 notes, members of the WHO team spent a mere four hours at the Wuhan virology institute, an hour at the “wet market” that was an initial area of focus, and then a number of days ensconced inside their hotel. Just because Trump administration officials may have espoused a particular position relative to the coronavirus pandemic, though, that shouldn’t be a good enough reason to discount it. And news accounts of what the WHO found in Wuhan shouldn’t treat this or that scenario of the pandemic’s origins as universally embraced fact, because at this point none of them is. It’s like one expert told the NYT, “We may never find the true origins” of the pandemic — as maddeningly unsatisfying as that sounds.