A week ago, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya gave an interview to the NY Times where he discussed his experience of the pandemic. At the time he was an academic working at Stanford who had no experience communicating directly with the public. He was shocked by the ways in which people like Anthony Fauci and others made confident proclamations about the pandemic despite a lack of evidence.
In the midst of this discussion, Bhattacharya revealed that he is very confident the pandemic was the result of a lab leak in Wuhan.
Bhattacharya: I believe — and I think a lot of scientists agree with me — that the best available evidence suggests that the pandemic was the result of a lab accident that happened in Wuhan, China.
Douthat: What are the percentage odds of that being true would you say?
Bhattacharya: My view is it’s pretty close to certain. But again, scientists disagree with me on this. I don’t want to — —
Douthat: Well, and we don’t have the smoking gun in terms of the minutes of the Communist Party meeting where they acknowledge it’s a lab leak or something like that. So it is as much a scientific debate still as a kind of intelligence community debate.
Bhattacharya: I think if you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain. Again, there’s legitimate, excellent scientists who don’t think it was a lab leak. I tend to be on the side of the scientists who think it was a lab leak, based on other things.
What follows is a discussion of gain-of-function research, the idea that in order to get ahead of possible outbreaks, the scientific community needed to gather viruses and then experiment on them to see which ones were likely to jump to humans. Bhattacharya suggests this research may have actually created the pandemic. And that some awareness of the possibility that of that led to a kind of overreaction by the people responsible.
Douthat: So, part of the scientific establishment was committed to this project — —
Bhattacharya: Including the N.I.H.
Douthat: Including the N.I.H. And there was, at the very least, a good chance that that led to Covid-19 and the pandemic. Why then do you think that overcommitted the establishment to school closures, mask mandates and everything else? What is the link there?
Bhattacharya: OK, so what if you opened Pandora’s box? What would you do? You’ve unleashed hell on the world. And you’ve done it. You’re responsible for it. What would you do?…
Douthat: Shut it down.
Bhattacharya: With whatever means I can, at my fingertips, to make that happen. Powerful people in public health have a lot of means, it turns out — we learned in 2020 — to try to do that.
Douthat: But are you saying they tried to shut down knowledge and debate about the origins? Or are you saying that the attempts to crush Covid itself through lockdowns and so on were a kind of expression of guilt? Like, “I have to be able to crush this disease because I, myself, released it.”
Bhattacharya: I’m saying both. So imagine that you’ve done this. You’ve recommended the lockdowns, you’ve recommended the school closures, you’ve recommended a set of measures that are going to harm the poor, you know are going to harm the children, but you’re doing it because you want to suppress the spread of this deadly disease that, in the back of your mind, maybe you think you might have been responsible for. Maybe you can’t admit that to yourself…
And so you’re like: “Well, what went wrong? We just didn’t do it hard enough.”
The problem is a lot of people have been hurt. There are people in the scientific community, pesky “fringe epidemiologists,” who are saying: “Look, this is a really bad idea. And you can’t get the political will to do this unless for something so extraordinary.” In the scientific community, you need absolute unanimity. And if there’s debate, it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to have another lockdown.
And so what you do is you suppress speech, you suppress dissent, and you make sure that anyone who dissents, that their reputation is destroyed so that other people won’t speak up.
Granted this isn’t the only way to see what happened but it certainly tracks with some of the underhanded behavior of the people involved, i.e. Fauci’s decision to set up a paper dismissing the lab leak while keeping his name out of it.
The problem of course is that any evidence to confirm this is in China and China has made it very clear they aren’t going to share the information. So we can say it seems possible or even likely but we probably won’t have absolute proof until Xi Jinping is no longer in power.
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