Tangle - The Covid lab-leak theory.

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) concluded the Covid-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently given to the White House. The Department of Energy had been undecided on how the virus likely emerged, but updated its 2021 determination and made its conclusion with "low confidence." Plus, a reader question about staying optimistic in times like these.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (3:17), Today’s Story (5:11), Right’s Take (10:13) Left’s Take (15:22) , Isaac’s Take (20:45), Your Questions Answered (25:18), Under the Radar (27:41), Numbers (28:24), Have A Nice Day (29:09)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about a totally non-controversial issue, whether COVID-19 started in a lab or not. Obviously something we've been fighting about for, I don't know, three years now. I've covered this issue a few times. We're going to talk about the latest information we have and, of course, reference back some of the stuff that I have said in the past about this, which I think honestly is aging fairly well. Before we jump in, though, I do have a few things at the top. First of all, I want to thank the dozens of

readers and listeners who made the jump to paying subscriptions yesterday as a sign of support after some folks unsubscribed following our reporting on the Fox News story and the Dominion filing and all that. If you missed that, you can go read tomorrow's newsletter, listen to yesterday's podcast, and also check out the Friday edition on Fox News that we did. Created a lot of pushback, some people who canceled their subscriptions, and now some folks who vastly outnumber those who have subscribed and donated to support us. So I wanted to say thank you guys for that. It was really awesome and encouraging to see. Also, I wanted to share some reader feedback we got to

yesterday's edition on the East Palestine, Ohio train crash. Nick from Arlington, Illinois thanked us for a great unbiased article, but he also noted as a railroad employee, he wanted to add a little bit of context. Nick said the 1,044 derailments in 2022 may sound a little worse than it actually is. Derailments are required to be reported if they cause damage greater than $12,000. Given the extreme cost of rail cars and their parts, this is an extremely low barrier, he said. Also, 732 of the 1,044 derailments in 2022 were in Class 1 yards, which means the trains were going under 10 miles per hour. Class 1 yards are generally switching yards and customer sidings,

meaning these weren't actual train movements people think of when they think of trains on the track, he said. So a little more fair number to report is approximately 312 derailments involving actual train movements en route. Now, we can still debate whether or not this number is too high. I think it is a little less than one per day. It probably is too high, Nick said, but I just wanted to add a little more context to the number. I think that's excellent context, and I really appreciate you writing in, Nick. Thank you for that. I'm glad we got to share that. I think everybody is a little bit smarter and well-versed for it. All right, with those out of the way,

we're going to jump in with our quick hits. First up, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today on two challenges to the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan. Separately, the court is also going to hear arguments about the legality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. Number two, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made a surprise visit to Kiev and announced the transfer of $1.25 billion in economic and budget assistance to Ukraine. Number three, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a bill that revokes the Walt Disney Company's private control of its 39-square-mile district in Orlando. Number four, Representative Alyssa Slotkin, the Democrat from Michigan, says she's going to run for the U.S.

Senate in Michigan to replace Senator Debbie Stabenow. Number five, in a new deposition released on Monday, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch acknowledged that several hosts on his network promoted false conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen and that he could have stopped them but didn't. There is new intelligence that's likely to rekindle the unsettled debate over the origins of COVID. The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that it most likely came from a lab leak and not from an infected animal. The Department of Energy has concluded COVID-19 likely came from a lab leak in China. According to two sources with direct knowledge, key lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees were recently briefed by top intelligence officials on a classified report, which cited new information leading the Energy Department

to back the theory with low confidence. There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started. There is just not an intelligence community consensus. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently given to the White House. The Department of Energy had been previously undecided on how the virus likely emerged, but updated its 2021 determination and made its conclusion with, quote, low confidence. Several federal agencies and sectors in the intelligence

community have now arrived at different judgments on how the pandemic began. The DOE and FBI have both concluded that the virus began with some kind of leak from a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, as well as a national intelligence panel, believe it was the result of natural transmission from animals to humans. Two others have said they are still undecided on its origin. The DOE's ruling is especially notable because of its heavy scientific background and the fact it oversees a network of several national laboratories in the United States, including some that perform advanced biological research, according to the Wall Street Journal. Because the DOE also works on sensitive projects like nuclear weapons, it has an Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, one of 18 offices and

agencies that make up the intelligence community at large. U.S. officials have not yet released or commented on the new intelligence that led the Department of Energy to update its position, and they noted that it and the FBI came to their conclusions for different reasons. The New York Times reported that each of the agencies investigating the pandemic origins had access to new intelligence, but only the DOE changed its assessment. The National Intelligence Council and four other as-yet-unidentified federal agencies conversely assess with low confidence that the virus came through zoonotic transmission or natural transmission from an infected animal. The CIA and another unnamed federal agency remain undecided. There is, however, a consensus among

all the agencies that COVID-19 was not a part of a Chinese biological weapon, as some members of Congress have long suggested. COVID-19 first began circulating in Wuhan, China no later than November 2019. There have been 675 million global cases since, and more than 6.87 million people have died from or while testing positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began. In America, over 1 million people have died from or with COVID. The dominant view early on in the pandemic was that the virus had arisen naturally, as several other coronaviruses had in the past, by moving from animal to human. But no animal host has been conclusively identified, and as time has passed, more skepticism

about that view has arisen in the scientific community. On the other hand, Wuhan is the center of China's extensive coronavirus research, and in 2018, U.S. State Department cables and internal Chinese documents showed there were safety concerns about laboratories in Wuhan. U.S. intelligence reports have also indicated that in November of 2019, three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough that they had to seek hospital care, though the subsequent intelligence reports concluded the researchers may have just been sick with the seasonal flu. Coverage of the debate about COVID-19's origins has been a contentious point throughout the pandemic. Early on, several

social media companies, including Facebook, censored or took down content suggesting COVID-19 originated in a lab. Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas, was lambasted as a conspiracy theorist by major news outlets for suggesting COVID-19 may have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. The view was scorned for a long time by politicians and academics, but has slowly become more acceptable. China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded to the report by dismissing the findings and saying the issue should not be politicized, pointing to a World Health Organization-China joint study that concluded the lab leak theory was very unlikely. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions to this Wall Street Journal report from the right and the left, and then my

take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Many on the right say the report adds even more credence to the idea COVID-19 came from a lab. Some frame it as proof of the lab leak theory and say there should be harsh consequences for China. Others criticize the media coverage of the theory and the way it was so easily dismissed. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it another turn in the COVID lab leak story. The journal scooped Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China doesn't mean the case is definitive. But it is more evidence that the media and public health group think about COVID was mistaken and destructive, the board said. China has covered up whatever evidence it has about the virus's origin,

and it refuses to let the World Health Organization conduct a more thorough probe than it did in 2021. News reports say the WHO recently abandoned the second phase of its investigation. China's behavior is prima facie evidence that it fears what an independent inquiry might find. On April 22, 2020, we published Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's op-ed pointing to the possibility of the lab leak and raising doubts about Beijing's claim that it had originated in an animal wet market. The media conformity caucus immediately derided Mr. Cotton for peddling a, quote, conspiracy theory that had been, quote, debunked, as the Washington Post put it at the time. We have since learned that public health

officials wanted to hide that U.S. financial aid to the Wuhan lab may have contributed to the gain of function research that could have led to the leak, the board said. It is a disgraceful episode, like so much of the initial COVID dogma. Given China's cover-up, we may never know for sure how the virus first struck humans, but Americans deserve to know the facts about the relationship of the U.S. National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan lab and to promoting gain-of-function research. In Fox News, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested holding people accountable. Retrospectively, key U.S. officials and leaders in the private sector should publicly admit their mistake over the last two years in suppressing discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.

This starts with the censors-in-chief at social media companies. Elon Musk has done a good job at Twitter in lifting the veil on government tech censorship, but Facebook and Google need to admit that they suppressed the fact that COVID-19 leaked from a lab and share the details. Even more importantly, tech companies and the mainstream media need to apologize for labeling as racist everyone who dared to question the official narrative and said that China was responsible for the pandemic, he wrote. This had nothing to do with racism. It was about attacking President Donald Trump. In the name of stopping misinformation, leaders in the public and private sectors created misinformation. Perspectively, the U.S. must hold the Chinese

Communist Party, the CCP, accountable for the origin of the deadliest pandemic in over a century that wreaked hell on the United States and the rest of the world, or else we can rightly expect even worse from the CCP in the future, he said. The U.S. must pursue damages through international courts for the financial and non-financial losses incurred by the U.S. government and its citizens. We must go further to extract reparations from the CCP using every available financial lever. The U.S. president should impose sanctions on CCP officials who played a role in covering up the origin of the pandemic ended up obstructing international investigations into the origins of the pandemic. At long last, China should be expelled from the World Trade Organization unless and until it is paid due recompense to other WTO members. In Mediaite, Isaac Shore called out the many journalists

who smeared anyone that suggested COVID-19 may have come from a laboratory. Tom Cotton wasn't just wrong, they said. He was a conspiracy theorist and quite possibly a racist. The report is not definitive proof that the lab leak theory is correct, but it does demonstrate the contrived disgust with Cotton's tentative suggestion of a connection between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID-19 was the product of ignorance as well as partisan interest, Shore said. And while Cotton has been magnanimous, it's important for news consumers to remember the names of those who misled them. Two they might be familiar with are the New York Times and the Washington Post. On February 17th, 2020, the day after Cotton's interview on Fox, both ran a variation of the same headline.

Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins, lamented the New York Times before accusing Cotton of contributing to an infodemic. Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked, explained the Post, which later issued a correction that still characterized the theory as fringe. The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a coronavirus conspiracy theory dismissed by actual scientists. Ann Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton's comments to those of Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying.

Many on the left argue that the report is not at all definitive. Some say the intelligence experts, agencies, and scientists who believe COVID-19 originated naturally still outnumber the lab leak theorists. Others argue we may never know the origin, and focusing on prevention is more important. In MSNBC, Hayes Brown said this isn't the smoking gun the right has been looking for. The prevailing theory is that the coronavirus that causes the disease known as COVID-19 first emerged in a Wuhan market where live animals were sold, Brown wrote. This thesis has been published in multiple credible sources, including the journal Science last year. The lab leak theory, on the other hand, posits that the virus was a version of the SARS coronavirus that was studied and or manipulated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before escaping.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases.

What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. There's substantially less evidence available to back that theory, but the U.S. intelligence community still cautions that there is not a definitive answer, as White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday. It is very much worth noting that the department lab leak determination was made with low confidence, according to NBC News

reporting. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that rating generally means that the information's credibility and or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or too poorly corroborated to make solid analytical inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources. Importantly, while new information reportedly caused the Energy Department to change its views, other agencies aren't following suit. It and the FBI are reportedly now the outliers among those that have looked into the pandemic's origins, with the latter determining with moderate confidence that the lab leak theory is the most likely source. In the Washington Post, Liana S. Wen

said we're asking the wrong question about COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, Republicans have latched onto the news as confirmation of their beliefs and are clamoring to use it against perceived enemies, including China and scientists such as Anthony Fauci. But the department's conclusion, which is at odds with other intelligence assessments that support animal to human spillover, answers the wrong question, Wen said. The main reason getting to the truth has been so difficult is that the Chinese government has actively obstructed international investigations, refusing to disclose key data, and going so far back as to block a WHO team from entering China.

This behavior is reprehensible, but because it's unlikely to change, I believe we need to shift our primary question from what caused the coronavirus to if either hypothesis can be true, then what? In the meantime, the world must be on guard for more zoonotic diseases, Wen said. It's estimated that three out of every four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals. The Marburg virus, now causing an outbreak in Equatorial Guinea, is believed to be spread by fruit bats to monkeys and humans. Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has been transmitted to humans from non-human primates and pet prairie dogs. And avian influenza, which has spread like wildfire and wild and

domestic birds in recent months, has caused 458 human deaths over the past 20 years. Regardless of whether the coronavirus also jumped over from animal to host, much more needs to be done to address the root causes of interspecies pathogen transfer. In The Atlantic, Daniel Enberger wrote about how we may never know. If you're keeping count, and really what else can one do, the matter still appears to be decided in favor of zoonic origin, by an updated score of 5 to 2. The lab leak theory remains the outlier position, he said. Are we done? No, we aren't done. None of these assessments carries much conviction. Only one from the FBI was made with moderate confidence, the rest are rated low,

as in, hmm, we're not so sure. This lack of confidence, as compared with the overbearing certainty of the scientists and journalists who rejected the possibility of a lab leak in 2020, will now be fodder for what could be months of congressional hearings as House Republicans pursue evidence of a possible cover-up. But for all the sturm and drang that's sure to come, the fundamental state of knowledge on COVID's origins remains more or less unchanged from where it was a year ago. The central ambiguity, such as it is, of COVID's origin remains intact and perched atop a pair of improbable-seeming coincidences. One concerns the Huanan market, and others have to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Chinese researchers have specialized in the study of bat coronaviruses.

If COVID really started in the lab, one position holds, then it would have to be a pretty amazing coincidence that so many of the earliest infections happened to emerge in and around a venue for the sale of live wild animals, which happens to be the exact sort of place where the first SARS coronavirus pandemic may have started 20 years ago. But also, if COVID really started in a live animal market, then it would have to be a similarly amazing coincidence that the marketing question happened to be across the river from the laboratory of the world's leading bat coronavirus researcher, which happened to be running experiments that could, in theory,

make coronaviruses more dangerous. All right, that is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to my take. One of my favorite bits about the COVID-19 lab leak theory actually came from Jon Stewart in 2021. During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that went viral, Stewart delivered the kind of simplistic, funny argument that tends to move the dialogue. Oh my god, there's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do, he said in a mocking voice. Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab.

That's just a little too weird, don't you think, he said. And then they asked those scientists, so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen? And they're like, oh, a pangolin kissed a turtle. Stewart's diatribe, which went on for a few minutes, drew a lot of headlines and a lot of scorn on the left. The Washington Post's Aaron Blake said he was going all in on the lab leak theory and noted that Stewart is often criticized for, quote,

oversimplifying complex issues to land a joke, end quote. In Slate, Matthew Dessim asked in a concerned tone, was he joking? Meanwhile, many on the right celebrated Stewart for pointing to the absurdity of dismissing the idea. The lesser seen part of that now viral clip, which has been viewed tens of millions of times, is how Colbert actually responded. It could be possible that they have the lab in Wuhan to study the coronavirus diseases because in Wuhan there are a lot of novel

coronavirus diseases because of the bat population there, Colbert said. And he's right. I've always been a soft proponent of the lab leak theory, or at least I've never been dismissive of it. In May of 2021, about a month before that Stuart moment, I actually interviewed Washington Post columnist Josh Rogan about the lab leak theory. A month before that, I'd covered a World Health Organization report on the COVID-19 origins that created more questions than answers. Writing then, I said this, Since my initial writing about this over a year ago, the lab leak theory has become far more plausible than I had initially expected it to be. The most damning pieces of evidence are still

circumstantial, but they're worth noting. We know that lab accidents happen regularly. We have U.S. intelligence that predates the coronavirus warning about safety protocols in the lab in Wuhan. We have the Trump and Biden administrations both confirming intelligence about COVID-like infections occurring in WIV researchers in the autumn of 2019. Isaac Schor helpfully listed many of the journalists who smeared people like Cotton for asserting something that was always plausible. The list of news outlets who aired those smears is damning. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, CBS, NBC News, CNN, and Vanity Fair, just to name a few. Mentioning the theory made you anything from a tinfoil hat lunatic to a racist. I was called the latter by a few Tangle readers several times

for emphasizing the plausibility of the lab leak theory. Obviously, this DOE report does not settle the question, nor does it make it official, as Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has claimed. Scientists behind two of the most regularly cited studies on the origins of COVID still state quite confidently that the evidence is overwhelming for zoonotic origins. We know in the past, viruses like this have regularly jumped from humans to animals, including in Wuhan. We know wet markets like the ones in Wuhan are just the kinds of places these things happen, and we know the virus behaves similarly to a lot of naturally occurring viruses too. But three years later, we still have no animal or species pegged for

the zoonotic origins of COVID-19 and very little in the way of a consensus. Meanwhile, we have the circumstantial evidence of the virology institutes in Wuhan, the sick laboratory workers in November of 2019, the U.S. cable showing concerns about the safety of those labs, and China's refusal to allow anything approaching a comprehensive investigation. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons China would not want to open its doors to international investigators, but still. The uncomfortable and frustrating truth is that I can't say with any degree of confidence where COVID-19 originated. There are, however, still plenty of helpful takeaways and lessons. The lab leak theory

has never been a conspiracy theory, it's just a theory, and it's a rather plausible one. It's a great example of why we should stop calling everything we don't like a conspiracy theory. It's also a great example of how stopping the spread of misinformation often turns into censoring important debates. And it's a reminder that we should always be willing to accept the fact there are a lot of things we just don't know, and might never. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Emily in Fort Collins, Colorado. Emily said, I've got a question for you, and it might be a little personal. How do you stay optimistic, if that's

the right word, with your career and life so entrenched in political reporting? I know if you look hard enough, there are good stories in the world, but I feel like the political scene is so overwhelmingly negative and discouraging the more I read about it every day. At 24, I feel like I'm too young to be this discouraged and upset about the country slash the world, and a lot of my friends and peers seem to share similar sentiments. All right, Emily, well, bluntly, I think this is fundamentally the best time ever to be alive. By any measure I can think of, poverty, violence, suffering, equality, education, etc., I'd rather be living now than at pretty much any point in human history, especially as a Jew. Really think of it for a moment. What time period would you transport yourself to if you could?

My answer would be to stay here or maybe to go back to 2019 just before the pandemic. And if your answer is like mine, which is that I'd ultimately prefer to stay right here in this era to pretty much any other time I can think of, what's the implication? To me, it's that things are on a constantly positive trajectory over the long term. Even if there are some large bumps in the road, see the year 2020, I still believe this is true. My editor Ari Weitzman explored aspects of this question in a PC published entangle titled, Is it still ethical to have kids? That piece was focused mostly on climate change, but in it, Ari argued that our ancestors persisted to raise their children in much

darker time periods than ours, which also applies broadly to the current state of things to me. Yes, there is still a lot of war, suffering, famine, greed, corruption, violence, illness, and so much more. Of course, there is a lot of political division. But over a long view, there aren't more of those kinds of hardships than there have been historically. And there is also a lot of peace, wealth, collectivism, generosity, optimism, scientific advances, and measurable happiness, even in the face of COVID-19. In short, there is a lot, from my perspective, to be optimistic about. team. In short, there is a lot, from my perspective, to be optimistic about.

All right, that is it for our reader question today, which brings us to our under-the-radar story. The U.S. Marshals Service suffered a major security breach this month when hackers stole data from a computer system that included a trove of personal information on investigative targets and agency employees. The service, which is a division of the Justice Department, carries out some of the computer system that included a trove of personal information on investigative targets and agency employees. The service, which is a division of the Justice Department, carries out some of the most sensitive work in government, protecting judges, transporting federal prisoners, and operating the Witness Protection Program, among other things. It says the Witness Protection Program was not breached, but the hackers did get access to information about fugitives sought by federal authorities.

The New York Times has the story, and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of cases in U.S. labs between 2009 and 2013 where workers received medical attention for incidents involving select agent pathogens, was 800. The year in which one person died in China after a small outbreak of SARS that started in the National Institute of Virology laboratory in Beijing was 2004. The number of labs in nine states in South Korea which were accidentally sent live anthrax in 2015, was 18. The estimated proportion of known infectious diseases

in people that can be spread from animals is six of 10. The number of new or emerging diseases in people that come from animals is three of four. All right, that is it for our numbers section, which brings us last but not least to our Have a Nice Day story.

It's become a trope these days that young Americans don't care enough about politics, their country, or even the idea of voting. We seem to think they are too busy playing around on TikTok or staring at their phones. But Jalen Smith is turning that stereotype on its head. The 18-year-old just became mayor of Earl, Arkansas, making him the youngest mayor in the United States and the youngest black mayor in United States history. He ran on a platform of public safety,

reopening a local grocery store and tearing down abandoned buildings. Now he has a reputation for constantly being on the phone and working on something for his community at all hours. The Christian Science Monitor has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. Like I said at the top,

I want to thank those of you that subscribed to Tangle to support our work. After we got some folks unsubscribing last week. A reminder, you can do that by going to retangle.com slash membership. We'll be right back here at the same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by Zosia Warpea.

Our script is edited by Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Vakova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.tangle.com. We'll be right back. Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases.

What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.