Is it lying if you say you know something you don't really know (and then admit minutes later that you really don't know)?

Acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak's testimony to Congress on Covid-19 origins, and media coverage of it, was a perfect storm of all that has gone wrong with the origins debate.

Emily Kopp @emilyakopp

NIH's Acting Director says the quiet part loud: "I don't know what other work they're conducting there [at the Wuhan Institute of Virology]"

(NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak, directly contradicting himself before Congress. Emily Kopp is a reporter for U.S. Right to Know who covers Covid origins)

As those following closely know, now that Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, some House committees and subcommittees have begun investigating the origins of the Covid pandemic (a bipartisan inquiry in the Senate has been under way for some time now.)

In a recent piece for the progressive online publication Truthdig, I traced the history of the politicization of the origins debate, and urged Democrats to drop their long resistance to serious investigations into how a pandemic that has killed so many millions got its start. As I argued there (and repeatedly in this newsletter and on social media), no one knows which of the two main hypotheses for the origins of Covid-19—natural origin or lab origin—is correct, except perhaps some Chinese scientists and officials. Any claims that there is some kind of scientific “consensus” around the natural origins (or zoonotic transfer) hypothesis are bogus.

Yesterday, February 8, acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak testified on the matter before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Amazingly, he told the committee members something that he could not possibly know. Here is what he said, according to an account in the New York Times by reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

The acting director of the National Institutes of Health pushed back on Wednesday against Republicans’ assertions that a lab leak stemming from taxpayer-funded research may have caused the coronavirus pandemic, telling lawmakers that viruses being studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to the one that set off the worst public health crisis in a century.

Those viruses “bear no relationship to SARS-CoV-2; they are genetically distinct,” the N.I.H. official, Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, told a House panel, using the formal name for the virus. He added that to suggest otherwise would be akin to “saying that a human is equivalent to a cow.”

I would suggest reading this statement two or three times to let it sink in. Tabak told Congress, in effect, that he had some knowledge of what viruses were being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or possibly other labs in Wuhan. But in fact, Tabak does not know. Indeed, that has been a key point in the discussion of Covid-19 origins over the past three years: We do not know exactly what research was being done at the WIV, what recombinant or chimeric viruses or viral backbones they were working on, or any details that might help us to distinguish between the likelihood of the two rival hypotheses.

And Tabak himself knows that. In the clip above, he contradicts himself and admits that while NIH may think it knows what experiments were done with the grant funds it gave to the WIV (another dubious claim), scientists there may well have done other things that he and NIH do not know about. Just last year, NIH cut off a sub-grant to the WIV (administered by the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance) precisely because the institute refused to share its lab notebooks and other records and tell the agency what it had done even with the NIH money it received.

From Nature Medicine, March 17, 2020

The contention that Covid-19 could not have arisen in the Wuhan lab because scientists there were not working with any viruses closely related enough to the pandemic pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, has long been a talking point of scientists committed to defending the zoonotic transfer hypothesis against all comers—despite this distinct lack of evidence. This argument was made way back in March 2020 in a now infamous correspondence in Nature Medicine, published by five scientists after closely consulting with now retired NIAID director Anthony Fauci, former NIH director Francis Collins, and former Wellcome Trust chief Jeremy Farrar.

Here is what they said:

…if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used¹⁹. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone²⁰.

Reference 20, however, as skeptics of the natural origins hypothesis have been pointing out ever since, is to a 2014 paper, which thus cannot possibly reflect what was going on in the Wuhan lab during years close to the pandemic’s origins, in 2019. Nevertheless, the “Proximal Origins” authors continue to make this argument today. If they have other evidence about what viral backbones were being used at the WIV, they have not produced it.

This is far from the only time that scientists have claimed to know something about the origins of the pandemic virus they actually do not know at all. A similar situation has arisen around a critical genetic segment of SARS-CoV-2 called a furin cleavage site, which scientists at EcoHealth, WIV, and the University of North Carolina clearly wanted to experimentally insert into SARS-like backbones that did not already have it.

And researchers investigating Covid origins have unearthed other suggestive evidence, from student theses and other sources, about relevant pre-pandemic experiments that were going on at the WIV.

One of many pre-pandemic studies conducted in Wuhan that could have relevance to Covid origins

There can be no doubt that Tabak knows all of this. So why is he telling Congress that he knows what he clearly does not know? I am always hesitant to use the L-word, because sometimes we get caught up in falsehoods without even realizing it. But Tabak made definitive statements to the Congressional committee that he had no basis for, as he himself admitted shortly afterwards. It appears that Tabak went into the hearing with an agenda—to counter the lab origins hypothesis, with all its implications for possible NIH responsibility for the pandemic—and he was sticking to his story.

Speaking of sticking to a story, we must now turn to the New York Times’s coverage of Tabak’s remarks. The reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, is fairly new to coverage of Covid origins. I think she is trying to do a good job despite the Times’s long history of biased and incomplete coverage of the debate. I had an exchange with her on Twitter late last year, when she wrote that “most” scientists favored the natural origins hypothesis—a statement for which neither she nor anyone else who has made that claim has any evidence whatsoever, from surveys of scientists or any other source.

As you can see from this exchange, Sheryl admitted her use of “many” was incorrect and unsupported. That’s a good sign that she might be more open minded than other reporters who have covered the Covid origins debate for the paper. So I hope she will be willing to listen and learn from this most recent examination of her reporting.

Much (much) further down in her coverage of Tabak’s statements, Stolberg does cite a contrary opinion to Tabak’s unfounded contentions, from Representative Morgan Griffith, Republican of Virginia:

While he conceded that he did not have absolute proof that a lab leak caused the pandemic, Mr. Griffith said that, as a lawyer, he did not feel the need to eliminate “all doubts.” Rather, he said, he is convinced beyond “a reasonable doubt,” in part because China has withheld information from the United States and in part because of the irregularities uncovered by the inspector general.

“What he has is a lack of evidence,” Mr. Griffith said of Dr. Tabak. “He does not have evidence that they didn’t study the coronavirus that became Covid-19.”

Unfortunately, this simple but logical statement from Griffith comes so far down in Stolberg’s story that many readers will never get that far. As we know, many will not read past the headline:

N.I.H. Leader Rebuts Covid Lab Leak Theory at House Hearing

And by putting Griffith’s comment about Tabak’s “lack of evidence”—something that is demonstrably true, while Tabak’s claims to know what was done at WIV are demonstrably false—so low in the story, this reporter, despite her attempts to do a balanced job reporting this matter, has really done the opposite. She has favored one narrative in the Covid origins debate by not providing her readers, up front, important facts and context that would allow them to evaluate what we know and do not know.

My hope is that, as the Congressional investigation goes on, including sworn testimony from key witnesses (yes, including Fauci), the mainstream news media will start doing a better job covering the pandemic’s origins. There are already signs this is happening: A rash of reports on NIH’s failure to monitor what EcoHealth Alliance and WIV were doing behind the scenes has generated a lot of recent media coverage, and the general public knows full well that these issues are closely related to those of the pandemic’s origins. To do a better job, reporters need to start talking regularly to scientists who have good reason to think a lab origin is a distinct possibility, paying careful attention to their arguments—as well as to the flaws in the arguments of those who have dominated the debate for the past three years.