Chasing the raccoon dog's tail, once again
The story that a raccoon dog transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans at a Wuhan market has pretty much fallen apart. But journalists have yet to do an honest assessment of the role they played promoting it.
On March 16 of this year, The Atlantic, followed the same day by the New York Times and Science, broke stories claiming that an “international team” had found what The Atlantic headlined as “The Strongest Evidence Yet That An Animal Started the Pandemic.” The leading suspect, as media around the world trumpeted over the following days, was the raccoon dog.
Since then, the story has almost entirely fallen apart, thanks in large part to an analysis by virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle showing that there was actually a negative correlation between the presence of raccoon dog DNA. The best correlation was with various species of fish, not known to be able to transmit the pandemic virus. A number of media outlets, including the New York Times and Nature covered this important update; as far as I am aware, Science has not, which is surprising.
(For a good examination of what really happened behind the scenes, see this June 1 story by Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair.)
I and others have been very critical of the media coverage of the raccoon dog story, especially how some reporters showed their biases by posting “breaking news” stories before they even had many details about the claims of the “international team” and the basis for them. (For my own reporting on what Bloom found, please see here.)
On May 24, the author of the original piece in The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, published a new story with a very different kind of headline: “There Is No Evidence Strong Enough to End the Pandemic-Origins Debate.” This new story is much better, and seemingly much more balanced. I say “seemingly,” however, because it still has some very serious shortcomings.
(I realize that The Atlantic is behind a paywall for many readers, but hoping at least some will be able to access it.)
While Wu’s story argues that scientists interpret new data through the lens of their preconceptions and biases—something that is undoubtedly true—it fails to evaluate whether the original claims that raccoon dogs had been linked to the Covid-19 virus were exaggerated, possibly even deliberately, by the raccoon dog team. Thus Wu’s original story from last March included quotes such as this one from team member Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatechwan, a fierce online warrior in the Covid origins debate:
“This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”
(Amazingly, Rasmussen and other members of the team now claim that they did not make the statements they are on record as having made. See screenshot below.)
But instead of admitting that her first article represented a rush to judgment, Wu now goes from that very slanted perspective to posing as a neutral referee in her second piece. My intention here is not to pick on Wu personally; a number of reporters have likewise failed to acknowledge the problems with their original reporting on the raccoon dog story. And that is a big problem for journalism, especially science journalism.
It’s understandable why some journalists would not want to do this, even though the ethics of our profession really requires it. It avoid having to be self-critical about the role the mainstream media played in putting out a biased and inaccurate story in the first place. Journalists love to expose the foibles of others, but often hate being the subject of examination themselves.
Another problem with Wu’s piece is that she repeats the now very current “we may never know the answer about Covid origins” trope that has become a convenient way for those wedded to the zoonotic spillover hypothesis to avoid confronting the growing circumstantial evidence for a lab or research related origin.
While it may be true that a narrowly defined “scientific” approach to investigating the pandemic’s origins (analysis of the virus genome, sequencing samples from the Huanan market, etc.) will not resolve the issue, that is not the only kind of existing or possible evidence. Indeed, the intelligence agencies probably have forensic evidence of various kinds that have led two agencies, the Department of Energy and the FBI, to lean towards a lab origin for the pandemic.
The deadline for the intel agencies to declassify their evidence on Covid origins is June 19, and we may learn a lot more. Much of the existing circumstantial evidence in the case already consists of documents received by independent reporters through the Freedom of Information Act and FOIA litigation (note that mainstream journalists have done next to none of this kind of forensic reporting.) These documents have given us the best evidence we have about the kind of genetic engineering of SARS-like viruses going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology over many years, to a large extent in collaboration with U.S. and other scientists and partly funded by the NIH.
In sum, while Wu’s article (and others like it) are welcome to the extent that they correct the record on the raccoon dog saga, they will not make up for the serious misrepresentations the “international team” provided to often gullible reporters, whether those misleading statements were made consciously or unconsciously (or both.) There’s still a chance for mainstream reporters to now move forward and engage in the kind of investigative reporting they should have been doing from the very start of the pandemic.