The lab-leak theory will never vindicate Trump - The Washington Post

If you had been wrong 2,521 times, would you claim vindication if, on the 2,522nd occasion, you said something that may — or may not — turn out to be right?

That’s what former president Donald Trump — who, according to The Post’s Fact Checker, made 2,521 false or misleading statements about the coronavirus — has done in regard to the theory that covid-19 originated not in nature but in a Chinese research lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticized, as usual. Now they are all saying ‘He was right.’ Thank you!” Trump declared recently. Naturally, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R.-S.C.) offered his golf partner a hearty amen, saying, “If Trump was right about the lab leak, it would change the image the public had of President Trump regarding the coronavirus.”

Actually, no it wouldn’t. This is some serious malarkey, as Trump’s successor would say.

It is true that the lab-leak hypothesis is now looking more plausible than it did a year ago — so much so that President Biden has ordered an intelligence community investigation. The former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade lays out the evidence, all circumstantial, at great length in this Medium post. It includes three workers at the Wuhan lab falling ill in November 2019 with covid-like symptoms; a 2018 State Department cable sounding the alarm about inadequate safety conditions at the lab; the revelation that the Wuhan scientists performed bat-virus research in a low-level, BSL-2 lab, not a super-secure BSL-4 facility; the Chinese government’s efforts to impede outside investigations; and the lack of any corroborating information about zoonotic (animal to human) transmission.

While Wade concludes that “there is still no direct evidence” for either natural emergence or lab escape, he leans in favor of the latter theory. So does Donald G. McNeil Jr., another respected former New York Times science writer who was initially skeptical of the lab-leak hypothesis. By contrast, two virologists just wrote in a Post Outlook essay that “most of the data … points heavily toward natural origin.”

Whatever the case turns out to be, it does not vindicate Trump’s horrendous mismanagement of the virus. Trump was hardly a consistent critic of China or champion of the lab-leak theory, as he now claims. Initially, his instinct was to disingenuously play down the danger and to naively praise China’s handling of the pandemic. On Jan. 24, 2020, he tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

It was only when it became obvious that things were not working out well — that, in fact, they were working out really, really badly — that Trump switched to desperate, even racist, attempts to blame China for what he called the “kung flu” or “China plague.” “It’s China’s fault. It should never have happened,” he said. He claimed to have evidence that the pandemic originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but refused to reveal it: “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Trump’s former campaign manager Stephen K. Bannon went further and claimed that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon despite a complete lack of evidence for such a sensational charge. Sen. Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.), a leading advocate of the lab-leak theory, also flirted with the idea that the virus was a bioweapon that was accidentally released.

Now the right-wing disinformation machine is suggesting that Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is responsible for unleashing covid-19 on the world, because the National Institutes of Health gave a grant to a nonprofit group that in turn provided some funding to the Wuhan Institute to study bat viruses. Former Trump aide Peter Navarro outrageously calls Fauci “the father of the coronavirus.”

It now seems that mainstream scientists and journalists were too quick to dismiss the lab-leak theory last year. But their reluctance to embrace it was understandable, given the lack of direct evidence and given the way it became wrapped up with Trump’s attempt to deflect blame for the pandemic with a fire hose of falsehoods. Having a serial liar embrace a theory hardly lends it credibility.

By downplaying the need for masks and expressing sympathy for anti-lockdown protests — while touting quack cures such as hydroxychloroquine — Trump helped to make the death toll far worse than it needed to be. The British medical journal the Lancet concluded that 40 percent of U.S. covid deaths could have been avoided with better leadership. That’s about 160,000 people who died needlessly in the final year of the Trump administration.

If it is shown that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab, China will have a lot to answer for. But whatever the origins of the pandemic, Trump has a lot to answer for, too — and so do his many enablers on the right who are now excoriating the mainstream media and scientists for not taking the lab leak more seriously.

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The lab-leak theory will never vindicate Trump - The Washington Post
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