Negative information can be compelling

This past week there has been two news releases related to the ongoing public debate about the origins of Covid-19.  The debate has been whether Covid-19 emerged naturally in the wild and was communicated humans via the wet markets of Wuhan or whether the virus is engineered and or man-made origin.

The Chinese government has been vociferous in its insistence that Covid-19 is a natural phenomenon.  The American public health authorities under the guidance and influence of Fauci has likewise been equally insistent and more than willing to suppress speech to the contrary and professionally punish dissenters.

Both parties of course have obvious motives for taking these positions.  The Chinese government doesn't want the blame for careless lab work (best scenario) or accusations of deliberate bioweapon research (worst scenario).  Fauci et al are known to have funded such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Fauci is already on the hook for one of the worst public health responses on record.  He especially would not want to have to deal with accusations if he both created the crisis and also failed badly to respond to it.

Epistemically however, the argument has mostly been one over a balance of probabilities and has seemed like that was all that it could be.  The Chinese government will not allow any evidence to emerge that they can control if indeed the release of Covid-19 was the consequence of a lab accident.  While data on the American side is a little more accessible, the full weight of public health institutions are still deployed to prevent discussion.  

I am inclined to believe that Covid-19 was engineered and that it escaped owing to poor lab protocols but am also cognizant that the case might be strong but is not overwhelming.  I have been inured to the conviction that we might never know. 

One of the reports released this week was from the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) which concluded that Covid-19 was more likely than not engineered and escaped a lab.  Fair enough.  I agree but I also don't see anything in the skimming read which nails the case down.  Still a balance of probabilities.

The more interesting report, and a report which I am not sure got as much exposure, was from, of all places, Vanity Fair.  From COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab by Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao.  The subheading is The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the cutting-edge biotech facility at the center of swirling suspicions about the pandemic’s onset, was far more troubled than previously known, explosive documents unearthed by a Senate research team reveal. Following the trail of evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica provide the clearest picture yet of a laboratory institute in crisis.

So they are using information from the same source as the Committee report.  But the Committee report is preliminary and cautious in its conclusions whereas the Vanity Fair reporting seems willing to use the full range of documentary sources and from that also willing to draw reasonable conclusions more emphatic than that from the bureaucratic processes of a Senate committee.  

The Vanity Fair report covers a lot of ground but the substance is:

The WIV has two campuses and performed coronavirus research on both. Its older Xiaohongshan campus is just eight miles from the crowded seafood market where COVID-19 first burst into public view. Its newer Zhengdian campus, about 18 miles to the south, is home to the institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facility, designed to enable safe research on the world’s most lethal pathogens. The WIV triumphantly announced its completion in February 2015, and it was cleared to begin full research by early 2018.

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside of the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But much like imperfect propaganda, the dispatches hold glimmers of real life: tension among colleagues, abuse from bosses, reprimands from party superiors. The grievances are often couched in a narrative of heroism—a focus on problems overcome and challenges met, against daunting odds.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On November 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.

[snip]

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically, or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

On a separate note entirely, the reporters allude to something we have seen more and more of during the past two years - the administration bringing its full weight to bear on critics, often through the Department of Justice.  Often there is no actual charge but the process of determination is the actual punishment.

In the foreword of the interim report, Burr wrote, “My ultimate goal with this report is to provide a clearer picture of what we know, so far, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so that we can continue to work together to be better prepared to respond to future public health threats.”

Burr has served in the US Congress for 28 years, first as a congressman and then, since 2005, as a senator. By today’s standards, he is a moderate Republican, having voted to convict Trump in the January 6 impeachment. Long known for his work on biodefense issues, he helped lead passage of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in 2006 and also worked to speed up the FDA’s approval of drugs for rare diseases.

The pandemic also immersed him in scandal, as ProPublica has previously reported. In February 2020, after receiving Senate intelligence committee briefings on the health threat of COVID-19, he sold up to $1.7 million in stock holdings before the market tanked, sparking a Justice Department investigation into insider trading. Burr said he relied on public news reports to guide his decision to sell stocks. He stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cell phone. In January 2021, the DOJ closed its investigation without charging him.

This is alarming.  We seeing so many instances of cavalier and illegal retributive actions by the Administration against critics.  Not because the critics were doing anything illegal but because they were inconvenient to the Administration's narrative.  

Back to the article which is very old-fashioned.  Old-fashioned in the sense that it is substantive reporting, well written and informative.  Not like most of what we get today.  

Seven days after the Zhengdian party branch members wrote their memo about rushing to the front line to defend against viral dangers, fallout arrived in the form of an official visitor from Beijing. That visitor, Dr. Ji Changzheng, is the technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the sprawling state agency that oversees more than 100 research institutions in China, including the WIV. His visit was billed as a senior safety-training seminar for a small high-level audience, including the WIV’s research department heads and top biosafety officials.

But the meeting, chronicled in a one and a half page summary uploaded to the WIV website on November 21, was no pro forma seminar. According to Reid, it appears to have been “out of the ordinary and event driven,” and distinct from the annual safety training, which had been held in April.

For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”

Though the summary’s language is characteristically vague, Ji described:

many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years, and from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.

The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.”

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

Is it possible that Ji meant to invoke the authority of China’s supreme leader in a general way? As Reid acknowledges, “When Chinese officials want to be taken seriously by whoever their audience is, they invoke more senior officials.” To assess whether Ji had simply been dropping Xi’s name, as a way to underscore the importance of his message, Reid researched nine of Ji’s visits to different facilities prior to the pandemic. All were characterized as annual or routine. None mentioned a pishi. “There wasn’t this bandying about of Xi,” Reid says.

Throughout the article, Eban and Kao emphasize and reemphasize one weak link.  Reading bureaucratic Chinese is reading through a glass darkly.  Much is necessarily inferred rather than explicit.  This is negative space inference.  In World War II, America anticipated another major attack by the dominant Japanese Navy.  US intelligence had trouble tracking where Naval assets were and what they were doing.  They eventually tracked many of the aircraft carriers and battleships to a particular anchorage.  Not through direct evidence such as aerial photographs or human intelligence but by the signals chatter of ships issuing shore leaves, receiving fuel and supplies, etc.  

And then the fleet went silent.  Americans still had no direct evidence of what was going on but the silence told them that communication security protocols had been put in place and therefore the fleet was almost certainly at sea.  

All of which is negative space intelligence, dogs that don't bark in the night.  It is less than ideal but it is much better than nothing and can often be compelling.  

I take Eban and Kao's point but they have multiple lines of investigation, not just linguistic.  All the lines are mutually reinforcing of one another and of the overall conclusion.  Covid-19 was a consequence of bad lab safety protocols and the accidental release of an engineered virus.

We'll see how much energy this report gets.  It is the most solid and holistic reporting I have seen on the issue for a while and it should be exciting headlines even though it runs counter to the narrative established by the CDC and Fauci.