Review of "The Lab-Leak Illusion"

 I recently read the Lab-Leak Illusion, a 13,500 word article by Jamie Palmer in Quillette Magazine.  Some comments and observations:

1. The main meta issue seems to be related to Martin Gurri and The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis Authority (in the Internet Age).  Jamie Palmer's (the Quillette author) take seems to be as follows:

All (lab-leak sympathizers) allowed themselves to be seduced by a heroic narrative in which humble internet gumshoes, armed only with a laptop and a commitment to the truth, humiliated arrogant elites and exposed a cover-up that reached all the way to the top of the US medical establishment.

2. A related issue is that of conspiracy theories. My take (see also here, here, and here) is that the government had something of a monopoly on conventional wisdom until the Internet made it possible for many more people, working from home, to do their own research.  It's quite obvious that governments are capable of engaging in conspiracies, and that they are more likely to get away with hiding the truth due to classification, censorship, monetary incentives, and the general power of the status quo.  In general, it is quite illogical to generalize with regard to conspiracy theories.  Conspiracies do occur, including conspiracies to spread false conspiracy theories.  Each needs to be evaluated on its own merits.  
3. My personal exposure to the lab-leak hypothesis was just the opposite of Palmer's characterization.  I read an article which was meticulously documented with dozens of scientific references, many going back before the issue became politicized in the mainstream (i.e. before covid-19). The research in question has a long history and context which was not addressed by Palmer.
4. Aristotle and Nathan Robinson point out the importance of logic, emotion, and character in discourse.  In particular, I want to stress character and reputation.  Palmer takes the side of the medical establishment in his polemic, while diminishing critics such as myself as being seduced by "Internet gumshoes" and being overly influenced by perceived conflicts of interest. To question the oppositions' motivation and analytical capability is valid, but his particular evaluation of character is not convincing, in my opinion.

For example, Palmer says:

Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they allow a person to feel more intelligent than the drones who passively drift along on the current of received consensus. This is why the February 2020 Lancet statement organised by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak was such an unfortunate error… The EcoHealthAlliance’s connection to WIV research was hardly a secret, but in the minds of Daszak’s critics, that only made the declaration of “no competing interests” more brazen and galling.

Palmer treats this as a one time lapse. But the Lancet paper stating "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" was signed by 26 other scientists, many of whom had conflicts of interests, and was published in a leading scientific journal. Then, 11 months later, Daszak led a team of scientists from the World Health Organization who "agreed (the evidence) most likely pointed to an animal origin".  So the conflict of interest represented by Daszak in the Lancet paper was not just one person or one time.  It continued well after the issue had been highly politicized.

Palmer also dismisses the revelation, by U.S. House of Representatives investigators, that the scientists behind Nature’s seminal paper from March 17, 2020, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, had themselves considered a lab origin likely. Citing Kevin Drum, Palmer claims "the flagrant misrepresentations of those Slack discussions are emblematic of lab-leak theorists’ approach to scientific inquiry:".  But here Palmer is once again confounding the science and the politics.

5. How did the political situation get out of hand?  
1. The fundamental research at issue was a legitimate political issue long before covid-19 emerged.  Palmer does not discuss this, yet it is critical to the logic, emotion, and ethos surrounding the debate.  Again, this paper seems to be a fairly objective description of the history leading up to the possible involvement of the Wuhan Lab(s) being related to the emergence of covid-19 in Wuhan.  For example:

Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013).  In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015).

2. In the aforementioned chats, dismissed by Palmer via Kevin Drum, the discussion was political as well as scientific:  

It’s in the context of all of this that Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gets a handful of bizarre mentions. On February 16th, 2020, Dr. Garry shared a Washington Post article by Paula Firozi titled, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.” Garry’s comment: “Important to get this out.” The Post piece blasted Cotton for repeating “a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.” … The ironic thing about this is that Cotton in early 2020 was not saying anything remotely controversial, at least not about this topic... But the early 2020 comments on Covid-19 that earned him years of excoriating headlines were simple, true, even boring. But because Cotton was perceived to have bad or anti-Chinese motives in even bringing up the possibility of lab escape, Andersen did what “anti-disinformation” experts now frequently do on whole ranges of issues involving factual-but-unpleasant matters like vaccine side effects, declaring him not-wrong-but-obviously-wrong, or narratively wrong.

Andersen’s comments were made in private, but he was soon joined in spirit by a stampede of furious pundits…

Humorously, the worst offender was probably Nature, which wrote that “US senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News to share his fervent belief that the virus was a biological weapon.” Again, he did nothing of the sort. The Daily Beast might now want to reconsider its own February 16th, 2020 headline, “Sen. Tom Cotton Flogs Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists,” it being incorrect on two fronts. Not only were actual scientists not dismissing the lab-leak theory, as Andersen’s remark shows, but Cotton wasn’t “flogging” such a theory, unless “considering it as one of the less likely of four possibilities” means “flogging” in Beast-ese.

Of course the worst take of all, in retrospect, was that of Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, who decried the “suggestion that Coronavirus originated at a super-lab in Wuhan,” tweeting, “Wow. Just like the Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”

...

However, even the New York Times framed Cotton’s frankly dull remarks as “echoing the anti-Communist thinking of the Cold War.” All this because Cotton had the temerity to note that the door wasn’t actually closed on lab release, a belief we now know was shared by all of the “actual scientists” who wrote the Proximal Origin paper.

6. Concluding Thoughts on the Meta Narrative

I disagree strongly with Jamie Palmer's assertion that the lab-leak consensus has "capsized".  My impression is that the foundation of my disagreement is with regard to who we trust to be expert on the matter.  Logic is important with regard to the science and the politics of the matter.  But on a highly technical matter such as this, reliability of sources seems to be the fulcrum of disagreement.  

My opinion is that the national security state is something that has been spreading throughout society, often in ways which restrict or slant public discourse.  With regard to cooperative US-China biolab ventures, I am certain that national security is a major and legitimate concern.  When a global pandemic breaks out in close proximity to such a biolab, we have to consider the possibility that national security concerns play a role on how the outbreak is reported.  This is confirmed by the fact that the Chinese government destroyed much of the data from the biolabs (something Palmer doesn't mention), and by the fact that many of the relevant U.S. documents have been classified or released with redaction. 

There is money to be made, directly and indirectly, by supporting the status quo.  This is not good or bad, per se, but is a legitimate perspective in evaluating the credibility of the various scientists and journalists participating in the discourse.  Daszak, Anderson, Fauci, and company need not recuse themselves from the discourse, but should be more transparent about their conflicts of interest.  The scale of the politicization of the events and the history of their involvement would make this extremely uncomfortable, so it is understandable.  But the rest of us in a healthy democracy should be more open to discussion of issues of character and credibility.