This is an example of the most recent class assigned essay formatted response to an article, “The Lab Leak Theory” by Katherine Eban.
For original essay format, here is the PDF Document
Where And How To Point The Finger
This article delves into a large and complex issue still relevant to today. It was written by Katherine Eban who is a well-respected investigative journalist. June 3rd, 2021, Vanity Fair published this article. Vanity Fair is a left-leaning magazine broadly accepted as the go-to magazine for political, business, and pop-culture matters. Due to the outstanding reputation of both the magazine and the author, the article does a great job of not drawing conclusions where there is no call for one. Katherine emphasizes the ambiguity of the entire topic and the shadows surrounding it.
Although Eban ensures to include emphasis on the fact that there just hasn’t been enough evidence to come to one solid conclusion, she does put evidence together. She tries to lay the leading hypotheses, as well as the evidence supporting it, along a semi-chronological path toward modern consensus. This makes it relatively easy to digest, even for someone like me who has a hard time following along in politics. Eban tells a story that should be carefully read so as to not draw the wrong messages from. I think she does a fine job of trying not to alter situations or scenarios in anyone’s specific favor. It’s more of a process of elimination as the timeline proceeds.
Eban starts by introducing a character named Demaneuf. She describes his certifications that allow him to be considered a necessary part of this article as she does with every character she introduces. He is a Bank of New Zealand data scientist with Aspergers who claims to be extremely proficcient in finding patterns where others don’t. This adds a lot to his credit already, but he gets even more likeable because he becomes a cofounder of a group called DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19). It sounds a tiny bit weird and conspiracy theorist-like at first, but eventually in the article you start to root for them as the underdogs.
What led to his interest in the subject as well as the creation of such a group was the sheer lack of evidence supporting the natural occurrence of an outbreak. Another time Demaneuf’s interest was piqued is when a band of scientists and health professionals from multiple different disciplines signed a statement by Lancet calling the lab leak theory xenophobic. He thought that was the least scientific and outwardly evasive evidence to support there wasn’t a lab leak. At the very least, there was a little too much evidence pointing toward a more specific avenue of exposure.
Demaneuf himself collected enough data to ask questions leading him to suspect a lab breach due to the number of previous security breaches within China after 2004. He then met his cofounder of DRASTIC, Rodolphe de Maistre. Maistre was a lab project director in France who had studied and worked in China. His take on the Covid-19 story is similar. Except he was busy studying the mysterious workings of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Maistre claims that WIV labs are barely labs at all considering their security levels. WIV had only one lab that had a safety protocol rating high enough to conduct that type of research. Noting that the other labs were extremely susceptible to lab leaks.
DRASTIC was having a hard enough time wading through all of the political mess that Covid had already brought up, but when Trump had aired the lab leak theory, his lack of credibility and waning reputation with the public put a strain on that term. This made it even harder to access paths to find the truth. It made China seize and the U.S government lock up any relations to the theory. Due to the staunch reaction felt by this theory, that created even more suspicion among DRASTIC and allowed them to make more progress than the U.S government themselves, as noted by a senior investigator under the State Department.
Continuing with the State Department, faculty of the State Department investigators were even told by colleagues to not explore WIV’s gain-of-function research due to “unwelcome attention to U.S funding.” The staff from Arms Control and International Security even went as far as to say opening an investigation on it would “open a can of worms.” This suggests that the U.S might have something to hide from the public. It was so frowned upon that even the implication that a closer look at the theory to cover all bases was viewed as “morally out of bounds,” and the former Director of the CDC received death threats from scientists and fellow colleagues. This begs the question as to why the xenophobic agenda could not have been detached from further investigation into the lab leak theory. Painting the PR statement of the Chinese scientists a little suspicious for using such buzz words. Someone who dealt in the State Departments day-to-day Covid-19 origins inquiry even said it “soon becomes clear that there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy inside the federal government.”
Just because most of the public was opposed to the theory, doesn’t mean it died to everyone. For an accomplished doctor who was the board of governors of chemistry and chemical biology, he narrowed his search for the origin down in “a nanosecond.” He confidently asserted that there were only three places in the entire world that would be conducting that research and two of those places are here in the U.S. I believe Eban included this to dial into WIV with confidence and agility. This allows her to center the rest of the article moving forward on WIV almost exclusively.
Eban then introduces the Lancet statement as having been signed and organized by a Peter Daszak. Daszak was a zoologist who distributed funding from multiple sources, including the U.S government, to facilities working in the gain-of-function type of research that was being questioned at the time. One of those facilities was WIV. Later in the article, Eban makes it clear that Daszak was trying to conceal his role in the creation and signing of the document to keep himself removed from the intentional evasion of scientific investigation and questioning. To throw people off his scent.
Eban then highlights China’s aggression regarding blocking efforts for transparency for the investigation. Also, the fact that China has a history of abusing their power on their subjects as well as lying. Eban then brings up a good point of whether Shi, the lead scientist for gain-of-function research at WIV, or anyone with pressure on them is at liberty to say anything different than the Chinese government allows them to. On the flip side, she emphasizes the question of why parts of the U.S government that didn’t seem to care should have shown more care.
Apparently, there was talk about pressing China to allow a transparent investigation of all things regarding the outbreak and information on where more clues could be found, but the U.S government was then stumped on what they should and shouldn’t share with the public due to their own involvement. What did get revealed was that a few WIV researchers fell ill a whole season before the outbreak started. So that may have made the U.S government feel a little more secure with handling information from China.
Although, the State Department didn’t seem very concerned with the WIV leak theory until China had started showing opposition to transparency and creating cover-ups. Highly suspicious behavior. The intel community di try to calm the public but Trump’s premature statements about the theory caused the theory to be linked to “destructive nativist posturing.” Which created an even more volatile environment to try to find a truth either through the U.S or China.
Eban mentions a paper released by two separate university students in China who drew the same conclusion that the virus could have originated from the WIV labs in Wuhan. The paper was taken down very quickly though, which is mysterious because you would think any information on the origin of the virus would be good information.
Eban then goes on to point out how WIV had created many pathogens that were very similar to the Covid-19 pathogen for research on how to stop or treat a potential outbreak. Regardless of its intentions, there were very similar strains of viruses housed in that facility that were created to infect human DNA. A weird detail though, is that although this type of research was already being conducted, the mice that they were experimenting on with human-like lungs were engineered only as early as the summer of 2019. This leads to even more suspicion to be gained on this theory.
Eventually Eban refers to a MIT and Harvard fellow who claims that there just aren’t enough mutations in earlier found sequences of virus to prove that it took a natural leap from bats to humans. He claims that it would have more evidence of changes throughout time and adaptations to take that leap. China also denied testing the researchers from the labs to see if they showed antibodies for the virus to see if they could get a match with earlier codes.
As a matter of fact, China was hiding the fact that a few of the WIV researchers were actually hospitalized in November of 2019 with similar symptoms to that of Covid-19. Then after that, in December, Shi Zhengli was called personally by her director to see patients who have been hospitalized with symptoms of pneumonia that weren’t ceasing as soon as she possibly could. Not long after that incident, the Chinese military apparently completely occupied the WIV labs which revealed a big lie by Shi when she said that her labs didn’t have anything to do with research done by the military.
Finally, by the time the Biden administration was able to work with the World Health Organization (WHO) to press China enough to allow an investigation party, China was able to cover up everything they wanted to and were confident enough to control who could be allowed to investigate. Of course, China chose Peter Daszak to take point. Apparently, not a single bit of raw data was recovered from the “investigation” and they barely even toured the labs. Daszak didn’t even ask for the database to the labs in WIV because he took China for their word when they said they powered down the system due to hacks during the pandemic. He was also either in on it or too ignorant to see the problem, but he also said that EcoHealth basically has all the information from that database anyway. Even though DRASTIC discovered that the database had actually been shut down in 2019. Which means EcoHealth can’t be too up to date. Eban emphasized how the 120-page report that resulted of this investigation only amassed 2 pages to discounting a lab leak hypothesis. For the number of questions and open ends summed up in Eban’s article, that is an outrageously low number. That’s hardley enough to just list the concerns about a lab leak, and apparently there was nothing of the sort and no evidence to back it up. As far as the rest of the paper goes, it was all China’s analysis of events rather than raw data. Poorly executed analysis too.
After reading this article, my thoughts on the subject have changed a little. Before reading, I didn’t take a side because I thought Covid-19 really could’ve come from nature just as easily from a lab. This detailed analysis of events has influenced me to keep an open mind on the subject and that any possibility is still capable of proving true, but there is a lot more evidence pointing toward a lab leak. Not that it was intentional, but just that it could have a high probability of transpiring. This article was rather open-minded until the later sections. Section XII did a great job of emphasizing keeping that open-mindedness, because perhaps the reason China is so apprehensive of sharing information is because they are afraid of wild accusations and charges. It really could have been an accident born of innocent practice of research. This article unlocks the view of a more level head when it comes to viewing the possible cause of the Covid-19 pandemic.