David Wallace-Wells writes:

Nothing has changed but the narrative. A majority of Americans now believe that the coronavirus emerged from a lab, not nature, and in recent weeks a new openness to the lab-leak theory has taken over “nearly all mainstream media,” as my colleague Jonathan Chait put it. But the material case for the hypothesis remains essentially unchanged from the version advanced by Nicholson Baker, in this magazine, in January — indeed more or less unchanged from the version that appeared in a September profile of Alina Chan in Boston magazine, or for that matter from the version outlined on Medium by Yuri Deigin last April, just a few months into the pandemic. Now, though, Nate Silver estimates the odds of a lab leak at 60 percent. The Washington Post has published five front-page stories about it in the last few weeks. Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban published a long account of the lab-leak saga that treated the independent researchers first calling attention to the theory as heroic detectives. The Daily Mail sent a reporter and a photographer to stake out the Rockland County home of Peter Daszak, a once-obscure zoologist now under scrutiny for his role in global “gain of function” research to make viruses more dangerous.

Prominent scientists long on the sideline, like Scott Gottlieb and Peter Hotez, have begun echoing calls for a deeper investigation. Both the National Security Council and the Director of National Intelligence have made a point of emphasizing their agreement with the previous administration that the pandemic’s origins are a very open — and very important — question. “It might have started in the wild, or it might have started in a lab,” the scrupulous science journalist Daniel Engber wrote, as the flurry of reconsiderations settled onto the front pages of the country’s newspapers late last month. “We know enough to acknowledge that the second scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true.”

Practically speaking, the media as a whole is already there, having moved in just a few weeks quite close to “acting as though it’s true” — a sign that the Trump era of American political epistemology may be mercifully receding, with liberal and center-left publications feeling now much freer to consider possibilities the president had once made functionally unthinkable. What comes next is not yet entirely clear, but one striking possibility raised by the public trajectory of the lab-leak narrative is that an increasing gravitational force tugging on any story will be its relevance for America’s growing rivalry with China — one of very few areas of broad agreement between Trumpworld and the D.C. Establishment foreign-policy “blob” that supplanted it in January.

In fact much of the new lab-leak “consensus” has been built by China hawks — Josh Rogin in the Washington Post, former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, former secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Wall Street Journal and especially its editorial board — both inside and outside of government. In an eye-opening response to Eban’s Vanity Fair piece, which presented those within the Trump administration pushing for a further investigation as hitting a brick wall of institutional resistance, former assistant secretary of State Christopher Ford alleged Thursday that the lab-leak investigatory team had been conducting briefings both throughout the State Department and with “interagency partners” without even subjecting their central claims to review by scientific experts or the intelligence community. When he finally persuaded them to, even a panel of largely sympathetic experts found the evidence quite circumstantial and the aggressive lab-leak case built on it irresponsibly overstated. A lab-leak origin did seem possible, but a committed team of State Department insiders hadn’t been able to assemble much more evidence for it than Yuri Deigin or Alina Chan or Nicholson Baker had. The eventual result was that Pompeo downgraded his rhetoric and retailed a considerably more modest version of the hypothesis when he took it out on the road. According to Ford — who describes himself as very much open to the possibility of a lab-leak origin, just focused on making a well-substantiated case — Pompeo had originally wanted to declare publicly that it was “statistically impossible” for the disease to have come from anywhere but the Wuhan Institute in his effort to pin blame for the pandemic on China.

But the question of blame is a complicated one, even if one credits the lab-leak theory, since, as Baker documented, the work being done at the Wuhan Institute was in partnership with American scientists and institutions, and was funded in part by both the NIH and the Pentagon. To a degree that is hard to fathom given conventional wisdom about “the new Cold War,” the dangerous research at the heart of the lab-leak hypothesis was conducted largely in the spirit of basic cooperation and coordination, even though both countries regarded it as sensitive work bound up in national-security interests. This is a basic confusion of the whole “new Cold War” framework: The two most powerful countries in the world are, transparently, rivals, and yet they are also, in almost inextricable ways, partners. They are not — as the Cold War analogy suggests — competitive, self-contained empires operating from incompatible ideologies and separated by an Iron Curtain; they are something much more complicated and intertwined, if not quite one economy ruled by two governments. [Continue reading…]