Hiltzik: How the House GOP got addled by conspiracists

Over the last two years, the Republican-dominated House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic conducted 38 interviews and depositions, held 25 hearings and meetings, and examined more than 1 million pages of documents.

Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a podiatrist, called it “the single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date” in his introduction to its final report, issued Dec. 2.

Wenstrup and his colleagues must be hoping that nobody actually reads the 557-page report, which is notable for its reliance on cherry-picked data, misrepresentations and flagrant fabrications.

Let’s take a look at what the majority had to say.

We’ll start with its first headline, “finding,” which is that “SARS-CoV-2, the Virus that Causes COVID-19, Likely Emerged Because of a Laboratory or Research Related Accident,” specifically at the Chinese Government’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV.

In fact, the hypothesis heavily favored by the epidemiological and virological scientific communities is that the source wasn’t a lab leak, but “zoonosis,” a natural spillover from wildlife, which were actively farmed and sold — illicitly — throughout southeast Asia, encompassing the region of China that includes Wuhan, the teeming city where the COVID first emerged.

Nevertheless, the GOP report asserts with cocksure confidence that “the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.”

What evidence? We don’t know, because the report doesn’t cite any — not a single empirical finding, not a single study in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s unsurprising, because there doesn’t appear to ever have been any such study.

Although the nation’s intelligence agencies have been divided over COVID’s origins, no empirical evidence has ever been published to support the lab-leak theory.

The report does mention six scientific studies of COVID’s origin in peer-reviewed journals. Every single one supports the zoonosis theory. The Republicans cite assessments by some U.S. intelligence agencies favoring a lab leak, but no agency has ever disclosed what made them think so. A declassified report issued in June 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI — which oversees the entire intelligence community — found no evidence that a “research-related incident” at WIV “could have caused the COVID pandemic.”

As part of its bill of particulars, the GOP report resurrects an old yarn, originated by Trump acolytes at the State Department in 2020 and promoted by the Wall Street Journal, that three researchers at the WIV became sick with what may have been COVID in the autumn of 2019. The GOP report states that the ODNI release “supports this conclusion.”

Is that so? Here’s what ODNI said in its declassified assessment: “While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19.”

The Republicans devote more than 50 pages of their report to an effort to denigrate a seminal paper supporting the zoonosis hypothesis. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” drafted by five immunologists and virologists with international reputations, was published by the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. (SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.)

The paper was a product of a conference among about a dozen high-level scientists convened Feb. 1, 2020, by Jeremy Farrar, who was then director of the Wellcome Trust, a British health research foundation, and is now chief scientist of the World Health Organization. Farrar’s goal was to foster a discussion of initial concerns voiced by several virologists that features of the virus appeared to be man-made.

The GOP report notes that in his 2021 book “Spike: The Virus vs The People,” an inside look at the British response to the pandemic, Farrar refers to a paper co-written by Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Zhengli Shi, a top official at WIV, as a “how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”

The report presents this as evidence that SARS2 could have been man-made. The Baric/Shi paper was brought to Farrar’s attention by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, who would be a drafter of the Proximal Origin paper.

But the majority provides a misleadingly incomplete quote from Farrar’s book. What he actually wrote was, “At first glance, the paper Kristian had unearthed looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.” (Emphasis mine.)

The GOP report doesn’t mention that Farrar devoted the next 15 pages of his book, nearly 5,000 words, to explaining why his initial judgment was erroneous and that “the new virus was more convincingly explained, scientifically, as a natural spillover than a laboratory event.”

Farrar concludes, “I had put two and two together and made five.” The features that seemed at first to have been unique turned out to be common in the natural world.

Despite that, the Republicans strained to make the case that the Proximal Origin authors dismissed a lab leak as “implausible” because they were “‘Prompted’ by Dr. Anthony Fauci to ‘Disprove’ the Lab Leak Theory.”

This is part and parcel of the right wing’s long campaign to falsely smear Fauci, who retired in 2022 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was one of the nation’s most trusted public health professionals, as somehow the perpetrator of the pandemic.

Here the subcommittee is undone by its own text. Every reference in the GOP report to Fauci’s contacts with the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, including his emails and testimony, shows him explicitly urging the authors to investigate the lab leak theory and bring their concerns that the virus was artificially made to “the appropriate authorities” such as the FBI.

In not a single statement or testimony cited by the report does Fauci argue against the lab leak hypothesis. Indeed, as the report itself documents, Fauci urged experts to look into various ways the virus might have been grown in a lab before escaping into the world.

The Republicans tried to rewrite history in other respects. They accused the American Federation of Teachers of exercising “influence” over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the CDC’s guidelines for reopening schools during the pandemic, and asserting that the AFT “continually pushed for school closures throughout the pandemic.”

This is a flagrant misrepresentation. The AFT actually pushed to open schools as rapidly as possible “with appropriate safety protocols in place” such as “physical distancing, proper ventilation, deep cleaning procedures and adequate personal protective equipment.” Its concerns were not only for the children, but also for teachers and other school personnel, as well as family members who were exposed to the virus via children.

The truth is that neither the AFT nor the CDC had any authority to impose school closing policies. These were always the product of local decisions, not all of which paid attention to CDC guidelines.

The subcommittee’s Democratic minority produced its own report, which is more measured in all respects, though not entirely devoid of problems. The Democrats observed, accurately, that “Republicans spent the 118th Congress amplifying extreme claims against our nation’s scientists,” especially Fauci.

The GOP members “relentlessly attacked Dr. Fauci” by claiming absurdly that Fauci created the virus and is “responsible for the millions of ensuing deaths,” the Democrats wrote. They also refuted another smear, aimed at EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was formed to oversee international virus research funded by government agencies.

The Republicans insinuated that EcoHealth played a role in inventing the COVID virus, which is utterly preposterous. As I reported earlier, however, the Democrats connived with the GOP to undermine EcoHealth by accusing it unfairly of mishandling government funds. EcoHealth responded that the “falsehoods and accusations” about its work “stem from political motivations.” That’s correct. Unfortunately its valuable work has been hampered by these smears.

The Republican report promotes other long-debunked notions about the pandemic. It criticizes the efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to discourage people from taking nostrums that have been shown to have absolutely no therapeutic value against COVID, such as versions of the livestock dewormer ivermectin and the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, beloved of right-wing medical quacks.

I asked the GOP majority to explain on the report’s misrepresentations and contradictions, and whether the absence of evidence for its brief against Fauci suggested that its accusation was a fabrication. I also asked for its response to letters entered into the subcommittee record disputing the report’s claims from representatives for Fauci, the AFT, the Department of Health and Human Services and Francis Collins, who was head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic. I got no reply.

In a supreme irony, the GOP asserts that arguments favoring the zoonosis theory of COVID’s origin rest on “assumptions rather than facts.” That would be a more appropriate description of the majority report, which advances no “facts” but rests on fabricated and tendentious assumptions.

If one seeks a guide to how not to perform oversight over the work of scientists, this report sets a dismal standard. It’s a disservice to anyone who lives in the real world, not a partisan fantasy.