Tangle - Josh Rogin explains the coronavirus lab leak theory

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

In today's podcast, we sit down with Josh Rogin to discuss the "lab-leak" theory. Rogin is a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of the book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century.For the last year, Rogin has been one of the most consistent and loudest voices calling for investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where Rogin says coronavirus may have originated. After more than a year of being dismissed as a conspiracy theory, "the lab-leak theory" has suddenly become more accepted as a possibility.In this episode, Rogin explains why the lab theory was dismissed early on, why reporters got it wrong, how intelligence agencies ignored the possibility, and what he thinks should happen now to determine the truth. Rogin is a deeply sourced reporter who has dominated this story for more than a year. If you're not yet subscribed to Tangle, you can do that here: https://www.readtangle.com/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Tonight, NBC News confirms a U.S. intelligence report says three researchers at a Wuhan lab fell ill and even went to the hospital right before the coronavirus pandemic began. There's been growing speculation the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But an earlier joint study by the WHO in China controversially dismissed claims the virus may have leaked from that lab. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate and independent thinking without some of the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else.

I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are sitting down with Josh Rogin. Josh is an American journalist who serves as a foreign policy columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Washington Post. He's also a political analyst for CNN. He's the author of the book Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. And in the last year, and the reason he's on the show today, he is perhaps most well known for being one of the few voices who has repeatedly raised the possibility that coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Josh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yes, thanks so much for having me. So I am looking forward to talking about this issue. I've

been writing about it this week. My readers and listeners seem really interested in it. And I guess the best place to just jump in is maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about what your view is on the origins of coronavirus. What's your theory? What do you think happened? What are you sort of tracking right now, given where everything is? You know, you have to understand that I was in a very sort of unique and in a sense, lucky position when the coronavirus pandemic hit. And, you know, of course, I was lucky because my family wasn't sick and I still had a job when so many people were suffering. But I mean, journalistically, I was lucky because I was in the middle of writing a book about U.S.-China relations. And I was sourced inside the, not just the Trump administration, but all over the U.S.-China relations. And I was sourced inside the, not just the Trump administration, but all

over the U.S. government and Congress and Washington and institutions that deal with China, because I've been reporting on that story for 17 years for a variety of different publications, from the Japanese newspaper, to Newsweek, to the Daily Beast, to Bloomberg, the Washington Post, CNN, CQ, Foreign Policy, you name it. I wrote for them about US-China relations sometime between 2004 and right now. And so, you know, at every stage, I was tuned into this part of the system, this part of the beast that was focused on China. And so I was getting a lot of information that a lot of other journalists just weren't in

a position to catch and at first it was about the virus itself you know what something's going on in Wuhan something bad you know what happened to all the masks somebody brought up all the masks is that is there is there a reason for that uh you know what's going on with all of this you know uh strange reporting coming out of China China about government crackdowns and social media being censored. So that was right from the jump. Even if this was like December 2019, I knew that this was going to be a huge story because I had all these sources. Then when it started to actually play out, it became a massive fight inside the Trump administration. It became politicized in our public discourse in America.

Everybody got on teams. It got all factional. And by the time people started to have a discussion about how did this thing originate? Where did the outbreak happen? How did we get into this mess in the first place? Who's responsible? And then it was almost impossible to have that conversation. But I still had all these sources and I still thought I knew a little bit more than the average person. And I was reporting it as hard as I could and writing the book at the same time. And it was clear for me. That's a long way to say that it was clear for me from the very beginning that there was a strong circumstantial case that the outbreak was connected in some way to one

of the many labs that were in Wuhan that were doing this specific type of bat coronavirus research. And some people call it gain of function. Some people don't. But the point is that there's a massive worldwide project to gather up all the most dangerous viruses, bring them to these labs in Wuhan and play around with them, see what's what. And that's where the pandemic hit. And, you know, immediately it seemed to me that that was at least a plausible thing that we needed to check out. Just put it on the list of things, not know it. That's before you talk to the scientists, before you talk to the intel people, just based on common sense and the reporting that's not disputed, the work that was going on in these labs and the proximity to

that, to the outbreak seemed like a investigative thread that somebody should probably pull uh but because the issue was so politicized and because the chinese government was blackmailing the united states and every other country to shut up about the origin holding our masks and our ppe over our head in other words threatening our lives in other words saying if you want to live shut up about the origin that's what happened that's in the book right at the same time the Chinese government is putting out disinformation. The Chinese president is telling the American president it's not going to be that bad. It's going to go away in the warm weather. President Trump believed that. Everyone says, oh, Trump fumbled the ball. Yeah, that's true. But he had some help. He was deceived by the Chinese president, fooled by him, actually. deceived by the Chinese president, fooled by him, actually. And in that mess, there were a bunch of people inside the government who were like, wait, we're seeing more and more evidence that this might be connected to the lab, you know, and this is where you get into like, what was the activity going on around the lab? What did we know about it? What were the characteristics of the virus

that pointed to some sort of indication that it was coming from a lab setting, not from a market or from a farm or something like that. But they couldn't say that. They couldn't say that publicly, the people who believe that, because then we wouldn't get our masks because we're being blackmailed for our lives by the Chinese Communist Party. And second, because it was politically unwise, because it was something that was considered at that time to be a conspiracy theory based on what we just talked about. So I waited until I had something solid, you know, and the first thing I had that was solid, really solid, actually, were these cables. And I found out about these two cables the U.S. diplomats had written two years prior when they went to this lab, the Warren Institute of Virology, and talked to the scientists there. Institute of Virology and talked to the scientists there. And they wrote back in black and white,

in an unclassified but sensitive and sort of non-public way, we got a problem with these labs. And they claim that they don't have the right safety procedures, they don't have the right personnel, and they're doing risky bat coronavirus research. And the risky bat coronavirus research that they're doing, some of which they published, right? Some of them they didn't, some they did. The part that they published says that it could infect human lungs through the ACE2 receptor in the S protein. And then that's a pretty specific kind of bat coronavirus research. It's not just like, oh, everyone's doing research. That's a very specific kind of virus. And then we had an outbreak in Wuhan, 10 miles from the lab, where it infects human lungs through the same receptor using the same protein. And the people who had written those cables and who had seen them at the time were like, wait a second, this is a real evidence.

This is a real indication. It doesn't say how the outbreak happened, but it says that we have yet another reason to look into these labs. And I published those cables and all hell broke loose and the issue became more politicized. And Pompeo and Trump decided to endorse the lab leak theory for their own political purposes. And the media decided to go against it for their own biased purposes and because of group thinking, confirmation bias and source bias. purposes and because of group thinking confirmation bias and source bias and then here come the scientists who are the best friends of the lab and they tell everybody it couldn't be the lab and that because they have a conflict of interest because they're covering their own butts and that mess that perfect storm that gordian knot was completely unable to be untied for a year

and that's what we're trying to do now we We're trying to slash that Gordian knot and get to the bottom of the freaking crisis because it's the only way that we can know what to do so that this doesn't happen again. So we're not doing this every year. So we're not always on the search for masks. Two things stick out to me about that, that I want to sort of flesh out. One, well, a lot does, but two things I'll start with, I guess. One is you mentioned that the Chinese government, the CCP, sort of issued these threats to the US, basically shut up about the origins or, you know, we're not going to supply the PPE. Can you flesh that out a little bit? I mean, I know, again, you've written a whole book about this, but... Yeah, I don't want to tell you everything because I want people to buy the book. But I'll tell you a little bit more.

They went to every country and blackmailed them with the PPE and the Netherlands and Australia and you name it. about the coronavirus origin, which, by the way, if it was like an accident at a wet market or like a bat bit a pangolin that walked a thousand miles and then bit a human two miles from the lab, if that really was the story, you would think they would want that story out, right? So what are they covering up? Let's put that question aside for a second. You know, they did this to every country. They went to, and it wasn't just the masks. You know, when Australia, the government of Australia said they wanted to initiate their own independent COVID origin investigation, they cut off Australian beef and wine exports to China in a day. sectors of the australian economy in the middle of a pandemic all those farmers all those australians who depended on that so they use their economic power to advance their political agenda which is covering up the outbreak for whatever reason either because they know something or because they don't care and they just don't want to get blamed either way and then yes they told the

american government like by the way those masks produced in American factories, quote unquote, American factories in China. But they nationalized the factories and told us we couldn't even have our masks. Keep in mind, that was after they bought up all of our masks that we had in our, that here, like we didn't have that many, but they bought them up a month before they told us about the virus. How did they know how to do that? How is it that they tell us about the virus at the end of December, but at the beginning of December, they start buying masks all over the world. Doesn't that seem a little screwed up to you? Isn't that a little twisted?

Just think about that for a second. They bought up all the masks, our masks, then told us there's a virus going around Wuhan, that we're going to need a bunch of masks, then said, okay, well, if you want any of your masks back, you have to shut up about the virus. And no, we're not going to give you the science. And no, we're not going to tell you what's what. And your people are dying all over the street. So that's a crazy thing to think about because it's so sinister. And it's hard to believe that a nation state or at least the

leadership of a nation state with that much power would use that power in such a corrupt and horrendous way. But that's what happened. That's what the book puts out. But that, you know, that doesn't excuse our failed, you know, hydrochloric clean and bleach in your butt and all that stuff, right? Mistakes were made here too. That doesn't, you can have two thoughts in your head at the same time, which is that a lot of the blame falls on the Chinese Communist Party, and we have ourselves to blame as well. Well, and that was my second question, which was you sort of referenced the CCP fooling Trump, quote unquote, Xi fooling Trump. I wanted to have you flesh that out a little bit and sort of tell our listeners why you

say that or what the framework for that is. Right, right. So actually, only the last chapter of the book is about the coronavirus. It's like as long as two chapters. But that's because of the coronavirus, you know, broke out in the middle of me writing the book, but also because the book is about the whole arc the last 40 years more or less the bet was that if we just engage china as much as possible that they would liberalize economically and then politically and then that would solve all of our problems we wouldn't have to have a cold war or a thucydides trap or any of these other catchphrases that people throw out at you when they read like you know two things about china and they're like, oh yeah, Cold War, you don't want a cold, facilities trap. These are like almost useless

catchphrases at this point, because the bottom line is that the US-China relationship is very complex and going to require a lot of complex solutions and that's going to require a national conversation. And that's what the book is meant to be about. So over the arc of that story, And that's what the book is meant to be about. So over the arc of that story, what you'll find is that Donald Trump himself, although he had factions and people inside of his administration that fought other words, Trump saw Xi Jinping as another CEO, someone he could deal with, someone he wanted to make a deal with. And he thought he was a businessman at heart. So in the end, he would make a deal with him. So he developed, he cultivated him as a close friend and they ate chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you ever saw in your life and all that nonsense. Xi Jinping saw

Donald Trump and the Trump family as, you know, a mirror of his system, which was, you know, a corrupt mafia organization. That's what the CCP is. It's like if the Gambinos ran a country, you know, it's an extortion ring. It's like, you know, nice company got there. Be ashamed of something happened to it. And and that's how they run that and it's all it's all based on sub-families and the the princelings of the sun are the literally the children of the people who ruled the country before them and it's a aristocratic in a cartel kind of way and they saw the trump family that run the trump organization like oh we can deal with them this is a corrupt family we'll just throw a bunch of corrupt stuff at them they'll probably

but they were wrong too because they didn't understand how our system works. And they didn't understand that in our system, the president can't do whatever they want. Nevertheless, over the course of that story, Xi Jinping fooled Trump into doing lots of stupid things, giving up, you know, trade concessions, turning a blind eye to the Uyghur genocide. That was one of the things that, like, Xi convinced Trump of, right? He's like, President Xi told Donald Trump that the Uyghurs like it in was one of the things that like Xi convinced Trump of, right? He's like, President Xi told Donald Trump that the Uyghurs like it in the camps. And Trump was like, okay, well, that sounds great. Isn't it nice of you to, you know what I mean? That's the kind of nonsense that went on. And when it came to the coronavirus, President Xi told Trump that it would go away in

warm weather, that herbal medicine would treat it, and several other lies. And Trump believed those and that factored into the garble in his head, which came out of his mouth, which became our national garbled response to the pandemic. And then once Trump realized that they weren't friends, because he eventually realized that he turned on President Xi and started attacking him. And then, you know, the policy changed again. So I have a question for you, for Josh, just a direct question. I mean, do you think that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Is that what you believe is the most likely origin story of COVID-19? What's amazing is that my view on this hasn't changed much in over a year. And my view is that there's a pile of circumstantial evidence on the lab leak side. There's some

circumstantial evidence on the natural spillover side, but that the pile of circumstantial evidence on the lab leak side is much more compelling. That if you just look at that pile, those bullet points, and again, that's exactly how I felt in April 2020 when I first saw these cables. And then you look at the pile of evidence on the other side, this pile is much bigger. So that means I don't know. I have to admit, I don't know. And I have to admit that both sides are possible. But yeah, it seems like if you put a gun to my head and forced me to place a bet on black or red, I would say that it probably came from the lab for a lot of obvious reasons that we've already discussed. Now, since I started thinking that, the pile on the lab

leaks side keeps getting bigger. And in the last three weeks when major newsrooms started to report this story finally, after ignoring it for a year for whatever crazy reason, confirmation bias, source bias, Trump derangement syndrome, a combination of all three of those things, incompetence, groupthink, all five of those things. All of a sudden, they're starting to dig up all this crazy stuff because there's a lot of really good reporters in Washington. If they put their minds to it, they could have been reporting on this for the last 18 months. Imagine what we would know by now. And then, you know, the Biden administration admits some things and all of a sudden the pile on the lab leak side is getting higher and higher.

Notice the pile on the natural origin side is not getting any higher. It's not right. They've never found one pangolin or palm civet or raccoon dog or civic cat or mink or whatever. And it's not for a lack of trying, because remember the corrupt and conflicted scientists who were the best friends of the lab, who orchestrated the whole narrative that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory and hid their orchestration in order to deceive their gullible science journalist friends. Those guys have been looking for that POM civet. It's not like they spent a year doing nothing. No, no, no, no. They spent two hours at the lab and 12 months looking for palm civets and pangolins. And under the theory that like, yeah, you know, if it did transfer from palm civets, from bats to raccoon dogs,

then there should be a bunch of raccoon dogs out there, dead or alive that have coronavirus, right? But they didn't even find zero, not one. Okay. So stands to reason probably we should take a look at these labs. And that's what I say is let's just take a look at it. And the guy who tells you that, no, don't take a look at it. That's the guy you got to look at the scans because why would you say that unless it's to cover up your own corrupt or conflicted interests?

One of the great things about doing this and having this audio format is I get a chance to sort of hear some of the things that really stick out in your memory when you're prompted with these questions. So I'm going to ask you two questions. And the first one is going to be, tell me a few things, tell our listeners a few things that stick out to you that are like the most compelling reasons why you believe coronavirus leaked in a lab. And then I'm going to give you a chance to sort of hedge and tell us, you know, the few pieces of evidence or few things that are sort of the most compelling that it did not come from a lab.

Yeah. And again, you know, not to correct you, but just to be precise, because, you know, a lot of people like to, you know, mischaracterize your position. I don't say that i believe it leaked from the lab i say that we have to look into the labs fair enough fair enough that's different because there are some people who say no i'm pretty sure it leaked i'm saying no we we know enough to know that it's a possibility therefore we have to look into the lab so can we please look into the labs and can everyone stop telling me that we shouldn't look into the labs

because we might offend the delicate sensibilities of the ccp or that it stokes anti-asian hate i've tried to argue this several times that we have to fight asian anti-asian hate and violence and at the same time we have to confront the ccp on this bad behavior and we have to detangle those two issues which were uh tangled up very unfortunately. But anyway, the point is, if you want to ask me what are the top reasons that I think we need to look at the lab, I can give you a list. But this is not a list of why I believe it came. This is a list of why I think we can't rule it out. One, the outbreak happened in Wuhan.

Okay, well, that seems like a kind of an obvious point. But if you just think about it for 10 seconds, you realize that the all the natural spillovers that the lab leak skeptics talk about happen where the bats are, you know, or the or the animal that's the intermediate animal. Right. This one happened where the labs are. OK, was there a market? Yeah, there's a market in every Chinese ever been to China. Markets everywhere, okay? Wet market, dry market. You know, you can't find a Chinese town without a market. But there's only one city in the world that has the most bat coronaviruses in the world. That happens to be Wuhan. It has a bunch of them. Two, we know from the cables that they were doing research on the exact type of virus that resulted in the outbreak. Now, they didn't find that exact virus, but of course, if they had found it in their database, they couldn't tell us because the scientists would get murdered or thrown in prison by the Chinese Communist Party

because that's what they do to people who don't say the right thing. So they were doing exactly that research. Three, there were safety concerns about the lab. Four, there was a massive cover-up at the lab. Now, notice when the outbreak came, yeah, sure, they cleaned the market to make sure that we couldn't find anything from the market one way or the other, but all of the government attention was really on the lab. They censored the science. There's markets still going on. We still don't know what's going on with all of these labs. They took the virus database offline. Why would they do that? They said they were hacked, right?

But they took the virus database offline in December before anybody knew about the virus, before they told it. So someone would have, in order for that to be true, someone would have to invent a time machine, travel in the time machine back to December 2019, try to hack the Wuhan

Institute of Virology to find the coronavirus that we didn't know exists. So, I mean, it's farcical, but it's, you know, horrendous. All right. What else? Number four, you know, we're now learning about the characteristics of the virus. And all of a sudden, after a year of silence, a bunch of scientists are like, yeah, based on our expert analysis, and I put Robert Redfield at the top of the list, that the virus acts in a way that suggests

that it didn't evolve completely in nature. In other words, it's not that it's a man-made virus, although you could even have a debate about that, but without getting caught up in the man-made semantics debate, what they did was they evolved them in a lab setting over and over again by running these dangerous viruses through mice with humanized lungs with the ACE2 receptor, the exact same way the coronavirus affects us. And they did it a few thousand times until they got super viruses. That was the project, whether you call that gain of function or if you're Anthony Fauci, you don't call it.

It doesn't matter. That's what they were doing. And as it turns out, that makes it a very unusual virus, a very, a much more contagious, a much more lethal virus. You know,

SARS killed 8,000 people. That's not an insignificant amount of people. This one's 3 million. Okay. 3 million people. I counted. It'll be much more than that. It's someday. Let me stop there. Now now there's more but those are the big ones now on the side of the natural

spillover what people will say to be fair to them is that well most of the previous ones have been natural spillovers but you know that doesn't really tell us anything about this one and uh you know they'll also say that uh we know that there were pangolins in this market. But again, until you find me a pangolin that's connected to the virus, I'm not going to be convinced that really makes a difference. So there's the big stack and the short stack, I guess, from your perspective. Yeah. I mean, you could talk for an hour about either side, but that's the meat of it, is that I happen to think that the natural origin evidence is much, much more circumstantial, much thinner than the lab accident evidence, which is, you know, makes a lot more, it just makes a lot more sense, and there's

just a lot more of it. Plus, there's a lot more, and this is where we get into the intelligence debate, because we can talk about the intelligence community and how it screwed the pooch on this, right? They missed it. They didn't see it. They weren't watching these labs. Then they spent the next 14 months not looking at these labs. And then Joe Biden comes in two days ago and he's like, hey, intelligence folks, you want to go look at these labs again, please? And they're like, oh.

And then one day later in the New York Times, they're like, oh yeah, we didn't even look at the computer with all the Wuhan lab data on it. We should probably look at that. And I was like, oh, yeah, we didn't even look at the computer with all the Wuhan lab data on it. We should probably look at that. And I was like, what? What? You didn't look at your own computer in 18 months? You didn't need the Chinese government to give you access.

It was on your computer, and the intelligence agencies didn't analyze it. They didn't look at it for 18 months. That is incompetence. That's malpractice. That's intelligence malpractice. But imagine what happens when they actually start looking. Imagine what we're going to find when the journalists and the intelligence agencies and the administration actually looks at these labs for two seconds, you know, after 18 months of ignoring it. Then the piles are going to be really out of whack. I promise you.

So one of the things I remember early on in this whole conversation was everybody in the very beginning, when the lab leak theory was first being talked about, when you were first writing about it, was people would immediately conflate it with, you know, an accident, a lab leak, or China was creating some bioweapon that they released on the world. It was like, if you said the coronavirus came from a lab, all of a sudden,

you were sort of like put into this group that believe there was some sort of like weapon being developed or something like that. Right. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, if we believe or if you believe that the circumstantial evidence is much higher for this lab leak which i also am starting to share that view as well what how do we know that it wasn't intentional or how do we know yeah so i mean the way that this this is part of how the story got all it's a good question the part of how the story got screwed up is that a lot of how the story got all it's a good question the part of how the story got screwed up is that a lot of trump officials and like senator cotton were like talking loosely about this you know and if you look at what they said in the light of day a year and a half later it doesn't look that crazy

but but at the time that kind of loose talk was very confusing to people and they assumed a lot of agendas and it got a lot of screwed up it got really screwed up so they would say things like well we think it came from the lab and we know there's a bio weapon a biological weapons program at in wuhan and so who know you know what i mean that kind of speculation was was often attacked in a vicious way and now again sort of picking through it a year and a half later well the truth is if we're being honest and if we can have an honest conversation that we don't know the intentionality. Okay. Now I talk about a lab accident, not a bioweapon, because I think it's kind of unfair to assume attentionality. And also because my sense is from the way that they reacted, in other words,

they screwed up the reaction on their side at a lot too they just did it quicker than us you know they had the first mover advantage but they didn't know what they didn't know what to do with lockdowns they didn't know what to do with ventilators and masks they just figured it out quicker than us because they had the virus first and then they didn't tell us you know what i mean but it didn't seem to me and if you watch like there are some good movies about this like uh i way way did this great documentary that no streaming service would touch. It was called Coronation, like Corona Nation, but Coronation, where they're inside Wuhan. They're scrambling.

So it didn't seem well planned out. But anyway, the point is that now what we can say is, honestly, we don't know their intentionality. But we do know, according to the Trump administration and confirmed by the Biden administration, that they were working with the Chinese military. In other words, they have a bioweapons program that deals with viruses. So do we. As they are quick to point out, we have a bioweapons program that deals with viruses. That bioweapons program that we have, there have been accidents. Fort Detrick bioresearch labs were shut down in July, which is like what the Chinese always point to. Right. That happened two months before we had a big accident in one of our bio research defense labs. You know what I mean? It didn't get any coverage. Nobody noticed it. But the Chinese noticed it. And they always like, see, maybe it came from Fort Detrick. response to that has always been to my Chinese friends is like, well, if the pandemic had started in Fort Detrick, then sure. But it actually started in Wuhan, which happens to be where you have your

biodefense program. So why don't we start looking in Wuhan and then we'll worry about Fort Detrick later. So that's, you know, it's also people don't understand about the Chinese system is that, of course, it's military security controlled, their labs. The Chinese scientists are probably very nice people, but in their system, they don't get to make those kinds of decisions. Of course, they're taking our cooperation and our engagement and then building it on the other side of the lab where they do the stuff they don't tell us about. Now, is that the side of the lab where the outbreak happened?

We don't know. But yeah, to be honest with you, yeah, of of course they have a bioweapons program that deals with viruses they've written about it in their own language it's not a secret it's kind of a sensitive thing to talk about you know what i mean and uh you know so i'm i don't rush to talk about it but yeah that exists now is that connected to the outbreak i don't know uh you know i don't know so let's just give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's an accident. We still need to know. Let's just investigate it like an accident. And the forensic steps can be roughly the same. actually take some of their 80 billion dollars a year and point it at these labs you know take like whatever what is how much do you think they have to like zap jihadis from from space you know what i mean like take like one billion of that and zap less jihadis and point it at this huge lab

network of labs and see what's what then you tell me so I don't get asked on a podcast if I think their bioweapons program is bad. I don't know. I'm not an intelligence agency. I'm a reporter, you know, but it seems like somebody should check it out. So I appreciate that view a lot. I mean, one of the things that you've said a few times, and I know we're going to have to wrap up here in a few minutes. You're a busy guy, but I have a couple more questions for you. One of the things that you've said a few times, and I know we're going to have to wrap up here in a few minutes. You're a busy guy, but I have a couple more questions for you. One of the things that you've said a few times is sort of that the reporters and the intelligence community screwed the pooch on this one. And I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how that happened. I mean,

I think what I'm picking up on is it sounds like, A, obviously, you know, I write a newsletter about groupthink and politics and among journalists. So I'm very familiar with that. But the intelligence side of it, I don't have such a great grip on, which it sounds like you're saying a lot of people were just going to the same sources who were telling them the same things, which was just sort of supporting the scientist side of the story. Yeah, it's a complicated story. But, you know, just think after like 9-11, right? Yeah, it's a complicated story, but, you know, just think after like 9-11, right? Just think if there had been like no investigation.

All right, just for a second, just follow me down this tangent for 10 seconds and I'll get you to where you want to go. OK, just think if there had been no 9-11 commission, if, you know, there had been an attack on our country. I'm not saying COVID was an attack, but I'm just, I'll get you to the end of this analogy. If you just stay with me for a second, just think if there, if all of this had happened and then our entire media ecosystem looked at it and said, man, what are you going to do? Al-Qaeda is not going to tell us what happened. Mullah Omar is not going to, you know, open up the books of Al-Qaeda and explain it all to us. So it's kind of sensitive and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Let's just go about our day, right? That would be crazy. That would have been insane, okay?

And the reason it would have been insane is because then we would have never fixed our system to protect ourselves from terrorism. Now, I'm not saying that all went well. Mistakes were made. I'm not saying all of the results of the 9-11 Commission were correct. I'm not saying any of it. I'm just saying it would have made a lot less sense never to ask any of those questions. And that's what we have here with the coronavirus pandemic.

We have an entire media ecosystem, which for a year and a half, until two days ago, literally until two days ago, maybe five days ago, if I'm being generous about it. The reasons that they did that are complicated, but rather than now that they're realizing that that was a horrible mistake. Again, the reasons are source bias, confirmation bias, groupthink, Trump derangement syndrome, and that they were lied to by the scientists who were the best friends of the Wuhan lab who lied to their journalists. If you read the Don McNeil piece, right, the former New York Times science reporter, he's like, my best friends, Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak would never lie to me. So that's why I thought the lab theory was crazy because they told me it was crazy and they wouldn't lie because they're such nice people. They were my sources for 20 years. And if you just think of that, the lack of self-awareness built into that crazy set of rationales, you know, the reporters got lied to by their scientist sources

or maybe just misled or whatever. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just got it wrong. They didn't do the work. They didn't check it out. Again, I just got lucky because I was already so deep into the story when the pandemic hit,

I already had all these sources. But, you know, most of the media was like, oh, one scientist said no way and Donald Trump said way, so I'm going to go with the scientist. Case closed. It's Miller time. That's what happened. And again, taking you back to the 9-11 analogy, now imagine there had been no 9-11 commission report. We never would have figured out that one of the reasons we had 9-11 was because the intelligence community screwed the pooch. at 9-11 was because the intelligence community screwed the pooch. They dropped the ball. They had warning signs. They ignored those warning signs. We weren't set up for that. Our system wasn't set up for that. They missed it, right? WMD in Iraq, huge intelligence failure. We went to war on a lot. Why did we do that? Because the intelligence community, well, let's not go down that road. My point is, why wasn't the intelligence community on top of this?

Why, after 18 months, are they still not on top of it? How did they not check their computers? Someone's going to have to investigate that. I'm going to be fascinated by what they found. Guess who can't do that? The intelligence community. They got 90 days to investigate the labs, but they're not going to be able to investigate themselves. Someone else is going to have to do it.

We're going to need a congressional investigation. And then in the media, all you see is all this revisionist bullshit on fact-checking. I call it un-fact-checking or fact-unchecking. You know what I mean? Because they wrote all these fact-checks. Fact-checks, I mean, it's kind of crazy because I kind of thought, I don't know. I've been a journalist for 17 years. I thought we're always supposed to check our facts.

What does that mean? All the articles, we're not checking any facts? But anyway, put that aside for a second. Tons and tons of fact checks. The lab leak theory is totally wrong. It's impossible. Is it scientists? My scientist source said it's impossible.

Oh, wait, that was the same scientist source that was informing the news side, which said it was a conspiracy theory. And, oh, that one scientist was either totally wrong or totally corrupt or both. And so, yeah, it's a perfect storm of, you know, incompetence and, you know, politicization. And then you have the sort of like the right-wing media, which actually got this one more right than wrong,

dunking on the mainstream media. So they get, mainstream media gets defensive, the right-wing media gets cocky. And, you know, everyone, it becomes more about our own internal media environment fratricide than about the actual pandemic. So all, you know, because I'm in the mainstream media, but I didn't agree with that narrative. I just put my head down and did more reporting. That's how I was trained, okay? I'm not a perfect journalist. I've gotten things

wrong in the past. You know, it's not a science, it's an art. You do the best you can with the time and resources that you have. You know, journalists are human, they make mistakes. But when I've made mistakes in the past, I had very wise editors who told me what you do in that situation is that you do more reporting. All right. You keep working. And then if you find out you made a mistake, you, you own up to it and you correct it. And that's the integrity.

You swallow your pride and you admit that you made a mistake. Our current media environment, nobody can do that. They're just going to like pretend it didn't happen. And then we'll never fix the institutional reasons that the mistakes were made. And you see that again in the scientific community, in the media,

in government, and in the intelligence community. So it's like, you know, everybody screwed up during this pandemic. It hit us all pretty hard, you know. It hit families hard. It hit businesses hard. Governors made mistakes. The hospitals made mistakes. You know, I get that. You know, that's a human thing, you know, that could almost be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is finding out that you made a mistake doesn't excuse any of the horrible stuff that they did and that they continue to do and that's why we have to mount a bigger response not just about the lab leak theory but about all of the chinese atrocities the genocide the economic expansion the military expansion the interference in our free and open societies their overall rise not the rise the rise is. I don't mind if they rise,

but the way that their rise affects our lives in malign ways, the ways that they're abusing their power, not the way that they're getting their power. So in that sense, the pandemic is a perfect example of the problem that we're all facing. So that's a really nice segue to my last question, which I guess I'll show my cards here and just say, in terms of getting a thorough investigation and getting to the bottom of this and figuring out

what actually happened, I basically think there's no chance in hell. I mean, my perspective is that China is in the, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is in control of anything that's going to happen inside Wuhan, inside any of those labs. There are many steps ahead of us. And as you sort of demonstrated at the top of the show with, you know, how they bullied a country like Australia into submission, they have a lot of economic power that they can throw around, a lot of weight they can throw around. So, you know, I'm wondering, from your perspective, what does the Biden administration do? And are we actually going to get an answer to this? I mean, do you think there's a path forward to actually figuring out the truth? Yeah, of course there is. And, you know, I understand why people say, well, we're

never going to figure it out, so let's not try. But first of all, we have to try. We don't know. But second of all, here's the good news. Without needing any Chinese government help or access whatsoever, there are tons and tons of investigative threads that we can pull in our own country because we have tons and tons of information about what was going on in those labs sitting in our own agencies because those labs were built and funded by American organizations, including USAID, the National Institutes of Health, Fauci's NIAID, the Department of Homeland Security, the DOD, the EcoHealth Alliance, the Agricultural Department,

and this one will blow your mind, the intelligence community. The intelligence community was involved in projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they were trying to do bio threat reduction like i can't make this stuff up okay so think of it like a trial you wouldn't be like well the the this guy committed a murder uh but he won't speak so i guess we're never gonna figure it out no no no the murder happened doesn't matter if the guys if the defendant's gonna

cooperate you could assume the defendant is not going to cooperate. But then what? We're just not going to prosecute any murders. Similarly, and this is three million dead people. But let's just take the example of one murder. Similarly, when you get to that trial, never, ever, very rarely do you have 100 percent proof. Right. It's not it's not the standard because it doesn't exist because it's unrealistic. It's a straw man argument. the standard because it doesn't exist because it's unrealistic. It's a straw man argument in other words. Oh, here's the body. Here's the bullet. It connects to the gun. The gun has the fingerprints.

It was all caught on video. Here's the video. Here's the guy attesting to the fact that the video is authentic. Here's the guy who is attesting to the character of the guy who's testifying about that. That's like some sort of law and order shit you've never seen, right? No, it's beyond a reasonable doubt.

So the question is, when we're done, or when we've done more or something at least, will the evidence convince us beyond a reasonable doubt? Or let's say it doesn't get to beyond a reasonable doubt. Let's say it gets to a preponderance of the evidence. Just to be totally, totally cautious, the preponderance of the evidence at some point points to these labs. Are you suggesting that we do nothing? Are you suggesting that we don't take some action to increase oversight of these labs and, at the very least, take a look at this research to think about policies that might mitigate it? And now I'll blow your mind. The current plan is to sextuple the size of these labs, to throw another billion

dollars into building more of these labs. It's called the Global Virome Project, right? It's 500,000 new viruses collected from the wild for $1.2 billion. Now, before we throw another $1.2 billion into this research, shouldn't we try to figure out whether or not it sparked the pandemic? Shouldn't we try to figure out whether or not it sparked the pandemic? Because if it did, or even if we have a 50, in other words, we've identified a risk here. These labs are risky where we weren't watching them. We have to mitigate that risk. We have to take action. Even if there's no smoking gun, even if they buried the smoking gun and killed everybody who knew about it, the risk is there. So we're going to have to act and that's going to be a complicated thing to do. But it's urgent and vital for our national security and our public health. And we can't afford to throw up our hands. And if we had done that after other major disasters, well, then we'd be learning nothing and we'd be forcing history to repeat itself. Josh Rogin, fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for the time. It has been a pleasure. You are the author of a book called Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle

for the 21st Century. Everybody should go buy it, support your work. You're doing incredible stuff. I appreciate it. And I hope to have you back on the show sometime soon. Anytime. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at Impostor Radio. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to give it a five-star rating, share it with your friends, and go check out retangle.com for more. you