The Dispatch Podcast - The Origin of Coronavirus

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

The politicization of the China lab-leak theory has only gotten worse as more and more information surrounding it comes out. To talk about why that is, and the merits of the theory itself, is Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. Rogin has been doggedly reporting on this very subject and even wrote a book about it. Show Notes: -Chaos Under Heaven by Josh Rogin -Josh’s Twitter page -Josh’s Washington Post page -Josh’s story on unsafe Wuhan lab Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgar, joined by Steve Hayes. And today we are talking to Josh Rogan. He is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of the Washington Post, a political analyst for CNN. You may have seen his work previously, foreign policy and national security correspondent for Bloomberg Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy Magazine, Congressional Quarterly Federal Computer Week magazine, which I'm sure all of you are subscribers to still. But most importantly, He is out with a fabulous book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. And today we're going to talk to Josh about the origins of COVID-19, the lab leak theory, and why it took so long for this to be taken out of the conspiracy theory category and put into something we actually need to investigate. Let's die then. Josh, how do we as news consumers think about the Wuhan lab leak theory, why it was unacceptable for a year, why it's back now? Who are we supposed to blame for that? And how do we prevent it from happening again? Sure.

Great question. You know, the bottom line is that dating back to the outbreak of COVID-19 in which, Wuhan in the beginning of 2020, there was always a large group of people, both inside and outside the government, who thought it was pretty obvious that based on the circumstantial evidence that was clearly available, not that the coronavirus outbreak emanated from an accident at one of the labs in Wuhan, but simply that we couldn't rule it out. Very simply that it was a possible, if not plausible scenario, which meant we couldn't rule it out, which means meant we had to investigate it, along with the other possible scenarios among them being a natural

spillover in the wild or an intermediate host like a pangolin or a palm civet or whatever you want to say. Now, for a number of really crazy and disturbing reasons, those people were marginalized, shouted down, attacked, or ignored in their various institutions. And we're talking about inside the government, inside the intelligence community, inside the media, and inside the scientific community. All four of those institutions decided for one reason or another, and we can get into the reasons, that that was not a theory, a hypothesis that was polite or even acceptable to talk about in public. And, you know, the story of exactly how that played out is detailed extensively in chapter 14 of chaos under heaven. But to summarize it

quickly for you now, the bottom line was that it was a mixture of things. And, you know, inside the government, it was a battle between the Trump political people and a lot of the careerists inside the State Department and also the intelligence community who are already at war with each other over a number of issues that we all remember. And in the scientific community, It was an effort by those scientists who had clear conflicts of interests who were connected to the work of the Wuhan lab, who were determined to try to make sure that no one ever looked into those collaborations, who conspired quite corruptly to mislead the public to say that this was a conspiracy theory and we best not look into it. And if you did look into it, you were a conspiracy theorist or racist or worse. And the minority of scientists who didn't believe that were made to believe that if they bucked that consent, that fake consensus, that they would suffer professional and personal consequences. And many of them, in fact, did when they decided to speak out, including Robert Redfield.

Now, you know, in the media, that's a story I happen to know very well. And I'm not a media critic. I'm just a guy who worked in the Washington media for 17 years and who report wrote more articles about this than almost anyone else. And what I noticed is that, you know, there was a lot of group think and a lot of confirmation bias and a lot of source bias and a lot of anti-Trump bias and, you know, all of these things combined to create a perfect storm of conditions where the media really dropped the ball. they screwed the pooch. They didn't do their job, which was to dispassionately report out the facts for their readers and then disclose to their readers exactly what they did know and what they didn't know, basic function of the mainstream media. Now, I'm an opinion columnist, so I can just tell you what my opinions were and I can be transparent about my processes. But for most of the objective news media, quote unquote, objective news media, the news side of all of these major newsrooms, newsrooms that I, as you just pointed out, I worked in for the better part of the last 17, years, you know, they were an objective and they were biased, both, you know, against the Trump administration they felt was incredible. Spoiler alert, they were incredible, okay? And also against, you know, this, this notion that that was, that the scientists could have been wrong, that the

scientists who were the most vocal who had the most conflicts of interest could have been misleading themselves. And you also had a break inside the media. You had national security journalists who were following their national security and intelligence sources. You know, then you had science journalists who were following their science sources. And if you read the, you know, really sort of unselfaware, you know, too little too late Mayo Culpa is being written by all these science journalists and Don McNeil and Nicholas Wade and all these guys who like 10, like 10 months, 12 months, 14 months later, are like, oh, yes, look, we took another look at it. It turns out the Lab League theory is totally plausible after all. You know, my reaction to that is,

wait a second, why didn't you write that a year ago, you know, if all that evidence was available. And as Don McNeil reveals in his quite, you know, I think unintentionally, is that he was listening to his best sources, Peter Dasick, the head of the Eco Health Alliance, and Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIH, who he had known for years, who Don McNeil says very clearly, that would never lie to him. They would never mislead him. So they, he must have been right to follow their guidance that the Lab League theory was BS. And, you know, that's why he was right to be wrong, and now he's right to be right. You know, some sort of convoluted logic.

And, you know, what I see in the media is just like a lot of hand-wringing and navel-gazing and, you know, using sort of the lab-league theory as a cudgel to whack at whatever other part of the media that you're opposed to. And, you know, all of that is, to my mind, you know, a huge distraction and besides the point because, you know, nobody got it right. I mean, there were some on the right-wing media and in the MAGA media who were more right than the mainstream meter. That's just a fact. I don't think that's deniable at this point, but none of us bathed ourselves in glory,

okay? None of the institutions in American society took a look at this pandemic head on and did everything right. Not the governors, not the federal government, not the scientists, not the intelligence community. The frontline workers, they're the only heroes in the story. They are the ones that, you know, selflessly put their personal and political crap aside to do what's right for the country. But the media, no, forget it.

They, you know, we all, we all screwed up, okay, but a year later as we're trying to dissect that, it's really important that we do that correctly. And that's why, you know, conversations like this one that we're having are so important because as now the mainstream media, you know, if mainstream media is like a game of like seven-year-olds playing soccer, right? The ball gets kicked over here and then they run over there. Then the ball gets kicked over here and everybody runs over there. over there. And that's about as much

strategy and intentionality goes into most mainstream newsroom decisions. People don't understand that. They think, oh, you must be compromised by the CCP. No, it's mostly incompetence and group think, an unconscious source bias. And I think that's what happened here. But now, as we're trying to unpack all that, rather

than the media, most of the mainstream, my most mainstream media colleagues saying, oh, okay, well, we screwed this up. That's okay. Let's learn some lessons from that. What they're saying is like, it wasn't our fault, or it was the other media's or, you know, we did everything right and, you know, that was just, it wasn't, it was all kooky Steve Bannon and how could you listen to Steve Bannon, so we didn't listen, you know

what I mean? They'll come up with any excuse to explain why they didn't screw this up, but I'm here to tell you they screwed it up. Now, I didn't screw it up, but that's, I'm not, that's not because I'm a genius. That's because I was writing a book about U.S.-China relations when the pandemic hit, and I had the best sources in the most reporting, and I, you know, just knew that the stuff that I was digging up meant it was a more complicated story than, oh, the Lab League Theory's conspiracy theory, let's all go home. And I just, as I'm sitting there

writing this book in my quarantine, in my basement, you know, I had a conundrum, right? Because I knew that I was going to put this in a book that wasn't going to come out for 10 months. But I trusted my reporting. And here we are a year later when the book comes out and was like, oh, we just found out the Lab League theory is not crazy. We just discovered it. it suddenly became credible.

Like, what the hell are you talking about? The theory was the same. I can prove that because I wrote it in a book a year ago. It only came out three months ago. But the theory didn't change at all. The people changed, okay? They're writing about themselves with no self-awareness. And the theory didn't go from kooky to okay.

Just people stopped, certain people stopped treating it as kooky. And that was their mistake. So they're, you know, we screwed up the story. Now we're screwing up the story over the story. And again, that's not just a media criticism. criticism. That's really bad for our public health and our national security because unless we figured out how this happened, how do we figure out how to present it from happening again? We have to figure out how this happened in order to prevent it from happening again, millions of lives

are alive. It's that important. Steve, to me, I think part of what makes this maybe the most important media story in my lifetime even is because when you talk about like, well, Donald Trump tweeted something, what does it mean? Or Dr. Seuss, things that people can, for the most part, make their own minds up about with some really basic facts that are sort of you can get off the internet type stuff. This isn't that story. You had to have access to scientists. You had to have access to national security officials. Most people, the vast, vast majority of people have no access to. And it is this filter that you had to get your information through the mainstream media. And not the one thing that Josh left out that I'm interested

in talking about also, was the cudgel of, you can't talk about it because it's a conspiracy theory, but also because it's racist and using that as a label to shut down the conversation, which I think will have repercussions moving forward in how people consume news and how trusted media will, I think, take a serious hit because of this. Yeah, let's, I want to, I definitely want to get to walking people through exactly what the lab leak theory was, Josh, how you came to. to first report on it, to walk people through the circumstantial evidence that you talked about, the CCP obfuscation of that evidence. I want to make sure that we spend time

doing that explainer, but I think it's really important to talk through this media part of the story because it's a huge part of the story. And Sarah, directly, to your point, was a New York Times reporter, I believe it was just last week, sent a tweet. She's covering the coronavirus. She's a health and science reporter. Sent a tweet. And, tweeted, someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit it's racist roots, but alas, that day is not yet here. And before I ask you to sort of reflect on that and tell us what you think about it, Josh, I think it's important to actually dwell on what she's saying there. She's calling for the end of reporting on this, right? She doesn't want anybody to talk

about it. Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory. This came at a point when we had literally a year's worth of reporting on this, suggesting that it was not only not a crazy theory, not only not a debunk theory, but a quite plausible theory for anybody who was paying attention. And Josh, you know, you don't want to give yourself too much credit. I will give you a lot of credit. You were reporting this. You're not going to fight me. on that. Go on. You were reporting this early. And, you know, your own newspaper was using headlines calling it debunked. And you reported it. And you asked more questions and you provided more information. You did it in a totally responsible way where you didn't get way over your skis. You said,

in effect, look, we can't dismiss this. I mean, just as you said here, we can't dismiss this. I'm not saying this is the truth. I'm not telling you that you have to believe this, but it's irresponsible to dismiss this. Let's continue to ask these questions. You've been now asking these questions for a year. When you hear something like a lead reporter at the New York Times, say what she said in that tweet. After a year's worth of investigation that you conducted, what's your response to that tweet? Yeah, right. I have two reactions to that. I mean, first of all, I think it's really problematic when journalists tell other journalists not to ask questions about things. I don't think we, that's, I don't think that's okay. I don't think that's right. So that's one

like general issue. Like, don't tweet at me not to ask questions about something that's really important. That's not your job to tell me not. It's actually the opposite of your job. But what's actually most disturbing about that tweet is that she doesn't know what she's talking about, right? That you could have a New York time. You know what I mean? It's not, it's not about her politics or ideologies and I have no idea what she's talking about. And she's the, one of the New York Times reporters covering COVID and people are like, oh, wait, just because you work for the New York Times, you're coming COVID, doesn't mean you have any idea what you're talking about. What I mean is that, you know, and I've said this many times, I do believe that Donald Trump, and I think it's frankly indisputable that Donald Trump merged the coronavirus pandemic and racism in a cruel way, okay, by using terms that were intended to, or at least had the effect of inflaming racial tensions against Asian Americans and Pacific Island or Americans in our country. And at that same time, those incidents of hate. violence went up demonstratively, and that's terrible. That's a blight on our society, okay? And that at the same time, none of that has anything to do with the lab. None of that is zero to do

with the lab. In fact, you know, the way that the lab theory originated was because of the people inside the government who wanted to check it out. And once it became super politicized, in part because of the scientists who lied to their sources and misled and were corrupt and conflicted. And in part because of the Trump officials who went beyond the evidence to make assertions that the evidence at the time did not support and who intentionally politicized it in rallies by saying using racist terms.

You know, a pox on both their houses. You know, there's, you know, plenty of blame to go around. So I'm not saying that the coronavirus story didn't get conflated with racism and the idea of race. I'm just saying that's not how it started. She didn't seem to know that. And the point is we have to now untangle that because, you know, if you just think through it,

there's no reason that a lab accident theory is any more racist than a wet market theory. Actually, I've always believed that it's much more racist to assume that, you know, Chinese people eat bad soup, so therefore they made the world sick. That seems really racist. I mean, have you ever been to, you've been to China, see, right? Like, you go to any... I've been to China, actually. Okay, well, you go to, I've been to China, a bunch of, you go to any Asian and Southeast Asian countries, markets everywhere, okay? And, and you can call them wet markets or live markets, but like, if you, you know, just to assume that that that culture is somehow creating a system that

is sparking pandemics. I think if either one were racist, that would be the racist one. But that's neither here nor there. The point is that, you know... And the point is that it doesn't factor into whether it's true and how the virus got out. The virus, as we've said many times over the last year,

does not care about your feelings. There are simply facts out there. Exactly. And the origin question is not a political question. It's not even a scientific question. It's a forensic question. It's a factual question. It's a historic fact of what,

happened and we need to figure out what those facts are, but with actual forensic investigators, not virologists, forensic investigators. And that's what hasn't happened. There's no plan for it happening. And if you just think about that, I mean, oh, someday we'll stop talking about it. No, no, no, no, no, we'll stop talking about it when we check it out. That's the only way to stop talking about it. True or not true. Okay. It's not as if like, imagine if like the Boeing plane, any accident, any disaster, whether it's a plane crash or a nuclear plant meltdown or a, you know, a terrorist attack, you would never say, oh, well, let's check it out. Oh, let's stop talking about it.

You know what I mean? It's a crazy thing to say. You wouldn't say, oh, well, you know, two Boeing planes flew into a mountain and, you know, we spent 90 days asking the intelligence community if they could figure out. They said, well, I don't know. And then we were like, okay, fine, forget it. And you keep flying the Boeing plans? That would be crazy because you just have planes flying into mountains forever.

Or a terrorist attack. Imagine if you, the other one that I was here as well, the Chinese are not going to let us into the labs. What if Al-Qaeda had been like, no, you can't come into the caves and see all our files, and we were like, okay, that's the end of the investigation. I guess 9-11 will never figure it out. Let's just go about our knitting. That would be crazy. That would be insane.

No one would let you get away with that. But for some reason on this case, not for some reason for all the reasons that we've been talking about, people wanted to go away, okay? And it's not going away because three million people died, okay? and the statute of limitations on those 3 million deaths never runs out. And every one of those 3 million coffins comes with a lawyer. And someone is going to have to answer for all of this, and that's going to require us finding this out.

Whether the Chinese like it or not, whether they invite us into the labs or not. There are investigative threads that we must pursue on our soil with our labs and includes asking uncomfortable questions to heroes of the pandemic, including Anthony Fauci, and whether they like it or not, whether or not uninformed incompetent New York Times

reporters like it or not either, you know? And again, it wasn't just her because as New York Times, when Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC and a trained virologist goes on CNN and says, hey, I think it came from the lab based on my expert opinion as the guy is the only person, the only person who saw all the intelligence

and as a trained virologist, you know, he was dismissed and called a racist and conspiracy theory and apparently had his life threatened, I guess. And what of the New York Times headlines said, it said, redfield pushes debunked theory and i was like wait a second where do they get that how does that happen how could they be so wrong not that one reporter tweeting something silly that the headline of the new york times yes so invest in as an institution exactly exactly you know how many checks how many

people touch a story like that at the new york times must be you know 10 people yeah who all were like yeah yeah let's call it debunk and they were all wrong why how does that's that's that's that seems pretty screwed up to me. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy

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it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. So, Josh, in your first answer, you mentioned sort of a growing amount of circumstantial evidence. You know, back in the spring of 2020, I wonder if you can just walk us through what that circumstantial evidence was and is, and how it was that you first came to report on this? Yeah, sure, absolutely.

You know, there's this trope out there, which was sort of, again, part of the intentionally misleading narrative set by some that there was no evidence of the lab leak theory, right? You'll hear this all the time. It was written into news stories, objective news stories. For years, it still is, actually. And it was never true, and it continues not to be true. But the way I like to describe it to people is like, well, listen, you know, of course there's no proof. There's no smoking gun.

But if you just think about a court of law, you would never, it's very rare, like, for example, in a murder trial that you would have a video of the person shooting the victim and then holding up his driver's license to the camera. And then the person who took the video testifying that they know that's the person. And then, you know, the body is produced in court and the, you know, the fingerprints are on the gun. it's almost never the case that you have 100% proof. What you have is a circumstantial case based on circumstantial evidence that at some point may pass what we call a reasonable doubt or even less a preponderance of the evidence. So from the beginning, the people who didn't want the Lab League Theory to be true

or didn't want it investigated did two things. They put out this narrative that there's quote unquote no evidence, which is not true, which I'm about to get to. And also that, oh, well, we're never going to find a smoking gun, which is probably true because if there was a smoking gun the Chinese government probably buried it

and buried all the people who knew about it because of the massive cover-up that they perpetrated from day one which is an odd thing to do if it was a natural spillover why would you cover it up

you'd probably want that out there but let's put that to the side for a second so I think what we're going to have at the end of the day frankly no matter how much we investigate

is a massive preponderance of evidence in one direction or the other now I look at the evidence that we have in May, June 2021 for the lab leak theory and I look at the evidence

for the natural spillover theory and it seems to me that there's a lot more circumstantial evidence to be sure on the lab leak side and here's a bunch of it all right and again none of this is direct proof smoking gun but it's if you were you know in a court of law

this is stuff that the judge would definitely say yeah we want that we think that's relevant okay so it starts with the work that they were doing at this lab and the work that they're doing the lab, which was known to U.S. diplomats as early as 2018, because they published some of it. They didn't publish all of it, but they published a lot of it, was included working on

the, I mean, the largest projects to work on back coronaviruses and how they could infect humans. And a lot of that work was about how to work with these viruses to make them more infectious towards humans. Now, Anthony Fauci will say that doesn't fit his definition of what's called gain of function research, which is a convenient way to avoid the oversight that gain of function research must go through. In other words, if it's not gain of function research, we don't have to do the oversight, according to Anthony Fauci's logic.

A lot of scientists call it gain of function research, but it doesn't really matter what you call it. What we know is that the research was that they would take these dangerous viruses from the wild and run them through mice with adapted lungs, lungs that had human characteristics, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times to see which ones got the most dangerous,

and then play around with those and see what's what. So they were doing research that resulted in horseshoe back coronaviruses that were more and more infectious and dangerous to humans. Now, if that's not a relevant piece of data right there, I don't know what is. If you went into a court of law and you were like, hey, the exact type of research that we're looking at

was the exact type of research that they were doing, I can't imagine a judge being like, no, that's completely irrelevant, right? It's crazy. So that's before we knew anything. what they published. That's what we knew. We also knew from the cables that I wrote about in 2020, uh, in April 2020 that this lab was not operating up to snuff, which is not unusual, actually. What were those cables? Because this was really, I mean, I read that piece and immediately sort of sat upright and thought, okay, this seems like a big deal. What were the cables

that you obtained and what did they say? Right. So this gets to your other question is how did I get into the story. So, you know, around March and April 2020, there were a lot of people inside the government, not just the Trump people, by the way, but also scientists, also health officials, also diplomats who had nothing to do with Trump, okay? Nothing to do. We're in friends of Pompeo who were like, wait a second. You're telling me the back coronavirus outbreak happened on the doorstep of the lab with all the back coronaviruses, a thousand miles away from the bats, and we're not supposed to look at the lab with all the back coronavirus. And then they're like, wait a second, the Chinese government just shut down that lab, barred all of the resources,

researchers from talking barred all the research on back coronavirus from China from every single the day of light jailed the journalists you know shut up the doctors you know denied us access to any of these labs wait that's pretty suspicious you know and then they're like wait a second look at you know look at these cables that we dug up from 2018 and what were the cables the cables were a bunch of u.s diplomats in Beijing who caught wind of this research and went down there three times in 2017 and 2018, three teams of U.S. diplomats from the embassy of Beijing to check out this lab and to talk to the scientists. And they were so alarmed by what they found and people will say, oh, well, the cables don't say what you say, they say, Josh. Well, I talked to the

people who wrote the cable. Did you? No, I didn't think so. So I did. So let me tell you what they meant. Okay. They were warning us that a pandemic, but what they thought was like another SARS-like outbreak come from this lab. That's what they told me. They looked around the lab. They talked to the Dr. Scher and the Batwoman and all these people, and they heard from them that they didn't have enough people and safety training to safely operate their newest part of the lab, the BSL4 lab. But they weren't even doing the bat coronavirus research in the BSL4 lab. Mostly they were doing it in less safe labs. And it was dangerous, risky research. And these cable writers, these U.S. diplomats, they told me, so I'm not making this up, so you don't know what they meant because I do because I talk to them.

they told me, they said, we wrote these cables as a warning shot because we thought that a SARS-like outbreak was going to happen out of this lab dealing with bat coronaviruses that infect human lungs through the exact same spike protein and receptor that, you know what I mean? And they said to me, if we thought it was going to be a worldwide pandemic, we would have made a bigger stink about it. That's what they said, okay? So they literally called it.

Okay, now that doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is true because the cables were written two years before the outbreak. so they could not have been writing about something that happened in the future from their perspective. Suffice to say they predicted it, if it's true, that seems to me to be evidence. Is there any judge in any court of law who would look at that and be like, no, that's irrelevant. We can't enter that into the record. No, that's evidence. It's called circumstantial evidence, not proof, evidence, okay?

Then when you started to actually look into it and to the intelligence, and, you know, this is where the no evidence trope came from, is that Matthew Pottinger, the Deputy National Security, advisor goes to the intelligence community and he says give me all the intelligence we have on the outbreak and not he didn't just ask for the lab stuff he asked for all the stuff if you got the the seafood market smoking gun give me that too give me it all okay and the intelligence some of intelligence officials who didn't like the fact that the trump people were pushing the lab leak narrative for whatever reason leaked to the uh you know to my news side colleagues uh that Pottinger was trying to prove the lab leak theory.

No, he was just trying to figure out what we had on any theory. And the truth is that they didn't have much. The truth is that $86 billion of intelligence spending that year, none of it was spent looking at this network of risky labs that was doing all this risky research that the U.S. diplomats had warned about it. Now, that's a huge intelligence failure. That's another part of the story that the regular media hasn't even started to sniff out yet, which is that how did we miss this?

How do we miss this? because the point of this is really important is that people are like, why would the intelligence community crap on the lab leak theory? Well, that's why, because they missed it. Because they know they missed it. They continue to miss it, and they still won't look at it. The New York Times wrote last week that they hadn't checked

their own computers for the lab league analysis that's been sitting there for 18 months, right? It's gross, gross negligence on the part of our intelligence community, and that doesn't mean I endorse all the other attacks on the intelligence community, but this one is really bad. And someone's going to have to investigate that. You know who can't do it? the intelligence community. Okay, so someone else is going to have to do it.

So Matthew Pottinger, Deputy National Security Council or advisor to the president, goes to the intelligence community and says, give me everything you got. The intelligence community looks back at him and says, we got nothing. Almost nothing. And then, and then because he asks the question, it triggers a series of leaks suggesting the Trump administration is irresponsibly. pursuing pursuing conspiracy theories. Exactly. To call that an intelligence failure is a pretty dramatic understatement.

Exactly. It's a huge scandal. Bigger than 9-11 and Iraq WMD put together if you think about it. 9-11, right, the intelligence community missed that one or, you know, it's a debate of whatever, 5,000 of dead Americans. We're up to 594,000. So it's 100 times worse, 100 times worse than 9-11. And the intelligence community doesn't want, they can't have the lab leak theory be true.

because it implicates them, okay? In an ongoing scandal, by the way, because they still haven't checked their own computers. 18 months later, you know, I talked to these Biden officials were like, whoa, yes, the intelligence community, they said, we don't know, you know, so what are we going to do? I'm like, tell them to go keep digging.

And apparently they have to keep digging because they didn't even look at their own computers. Now, all of this played out while I published these cables, and in the article about publishing the cables, I published a lot of information about how a lot of officials thought the lab leak theory was, you know, checkable. you know how we should basically that we should just check it out not that it was true

just that we can't not check it out and then Pompeo who didn't want to give me the cables like there was this like this is kind of in the book I went to the Pompeo staff and I knew the cables existed but I didn't have them you know what I mean and I went to Pompeo's senior staff I'm like listen why don't you just give me the cables you know what I mean like they're going to come out sooner or later and they said they were like no Pompeo said no I'm like okay so I got them from somewhere else and Pompeo was really angry and he yelled at me. I had a meeting with him. He screamed it. And then he turned on a dime and endorsed the Lab League theory because it was already out. So then it seemed like he was pushing it. That's

actually what he really thought. So anyway, this is how screwed up it got in real time. And we're trying to untangle it now. We're doing a poor job of entangling it now. I'm not us. Like the three of us right now, we're doing an excellent job of untangling it right now. And if people just listen to this episode of the dispatch, they'd be much, much better informed than reading that 11,000 word Vanity Fair article. you know what I mean, where they take, or the 9,000 word New York, you know, or the 20,000 word this, because everyone's trying to recreate history, but I'm just telling you exactly how it happened in real time. And so, you know, it's really important that we sort of, again,

sort of realize that so that we can now untangle it and look into the labs. That's it. We need to investigate the labs. Even if the Chinese government doesn't like it, even if the scientists who are the best friends of the lab don't like it, even if Anthony Fauci doesn't like it or he pretends to like it and he really doesn't like it. It doesn't matter. We have to look into these labs. We have to do everything we can. And that means looking into our collaboration with the labs, which means looking into ourselves, which is the big reveals that the lab leak theory. It's not about blaming China. Of course, you could blame China for any number of things that we've already mentioned, shutting down the science, jailing down

scientists. They still haven't given us the data. They destroyed the early samples. The Chinese government took many, many actions that cost our American lives and lives all over the world. to. And that doesn't excuse our poor response. Doesn't excuse hydrochloroquine and bleach shots in your butt or any of that nonsense. Okay. They both, we all screwed up, but they continue to deny us critical national security and public health information. And it's unacceptable. And if that means ruffling some feathers in Beijing, well, then so be it because this is, unless you want to do this every year, unless you want to, well, you know, if we're not going to look into this, this is what I said, okay, you're going to throw up your hands. Well, I'm going to buy some masks because we're

going to be doing this every year. That's the other alternative. All right. I want to look now forward. So two things can happen from here. Well, three, I suppose. One, we find evidence that it in fact was animal to human a jump. Two, that it was the lab leak. Three, that we never find out. I'm curious which one you think is more likely out of those at this moment. There's a fourth, right? So by the way, I'm by no means saying that we should stop looking for that magic pangolin, okay? Yeah, yeah. If the magic pangolin or Ponson. Self-work found it.

I don't know if you saw that episode. I did. I did. I think we need to double-check their reporting. Not to say they're wrong, but the point is that if Peter Dazek and his merry bunch of friends want to go searching caves in Indonesia for the next 10 years, I say do it. I say go. Actually, I want them to go do that. You know what I mean? And if they find the magic palm civet or the magic raccoon dog,

then God bless. I will celebrate them. I will leave the ticker tape parade to celebrate their fantastic scientific. Meanwhile, someone else is going to have to check out these labs. And it can't be the best friends of the lab. And it can't be the WHO because the Chinese just told them to go pound sand. So the only organization that's powerful enough to actually do it is or to force the Chinese to open up is the U.S. government. It's the only one. The Australian government tried to start an investigation. They crushed their wine and beef industries in the middle of a pandemic, exacerbating their suffering in the middle of a crisis to defend their political agenda. That's what people don't understand.

That's what even Fauci, when he's like, oh, we've known these Chinese scientists for 15 years, and we were digging up bats in Yunnan, and it was wonderful. And they would never, ever hide the, well, anybody who understands how the Chinese Communist Party system works know that those scientists don't have a choice. That if they speak up and say, anything that counteracts Beijing's line, they will die or go to a gulag. You know, I'm not sure which is worse. So once you understand that, once you understand that the real problem here is that we're dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, which is a criminal organization, like a mafia

organization. It's like if the Gambinos ran the most, the richest country in the world. Okay. That's what it is. They have no moral compunction, no concern for our public health, no regard for the rules of the international community or good science or any of that stuff. of. And what ended up happening to finish the anecdote, Steve, was that when the intelligence community did find some stuff finally after a year, what they found is that there was another

side of the lab. Not that we were funding the research that sparked the virus, but that we had built up this system of labs and given them a ton of money and knowledge. And then they took that engagement and cooperation and built another side of the lab, the side that we didn't know about with the military, a network of labs that we didn't know about that had no oversight and no transparency and no accountability. Okay, that's what happened. So that's why I'm not on the Tucker Carlson side of we need to jail Fauci. Because I don't think, because it's very easy for Fauci to say, well, we didn't fund the

supervirus. No, of course, it's a straw man argument. You just set up a system, an industry that built up a network of labs in China that you failed to oversee, okay, that no one was overseen. And of course the Chinese Communist Party built the other side of the lab to do nefarious stuff that we didn't know about. And we still, and a lot of that stuff we'll still know about. So what that means, Sarah, is very simple, is that what, without a smoking gun, right?

We could find a smoking gun one way or the other, but that's probably not going to happen. What we're probably going to have, again, is a preponderance of the evidence, a big pile of circumstantial evidence that points. So I think it's going to point to the lab, but let's say whichever way it points, then we have a decision to me, you know, do we take that huge pile of circumstantial evidence and do nothing? do we say that, okay, we can be 80% sure that the lab was involved somehow, and it's just business as usual with these labs. In fact, the current plan is to dump $1.2 billion into a global viral project to expand these labs in China sixfold to take $200 million project and sextuple it to dig up. I couldn't make this up. According to the website, 500,000 new dangerous viruses that are infectious to humans and bring them back to labs, including labs in China, play around

with them. That's the plan. Now, does that response plan make any sense before we know if this research sparked the pandemic? Shouldn't we check it out before we create six times as many of these risks? And that brings me to my next point, which is, I'll just say real quick, which is that even if these labs didn't cause the virus, we've now identified the risk. In other words, how can you justify working with these Wuhan labs that have zero accountability and zero trust and zero transparency when the chips are down, right? We now know, even if it doesn't come from the lab, that we can't trust these labs. And we can't trust the workers, we can't trust the Chinese.

So we have to change that collaboration, not end it, but we have to increase the oversight. That means we have to totally rethink that collaboration with all the Chinese labs that have worked on anything that could be dual use. And again, Fauci will say, oh, whoa, you know, we're all trying to prevent a pandemic. Yeah, but that's a dual-use technology. Okay, viruses are a dual-use technology. And the reason that I know the Chinese think this way is because they wrote it. But the Chinese government has a foolproof encryption system.

They put things in their own language. And then no Americans ever see it, okay? But if you read their own documents, it's clear that this is something that they care about. Okay, so we have to think about that. And so that's what we have to do. It's like no matter how this investigation turns out, U.S. scientific collaboration with China, especially on dangerous things like viruses, will never ever be the same if we live in a sane world at all.

So I take your point that it in some ways doesn't matter which theory is true because we now know the risk of the lab. So whether it escaped from the lab or not, it at least appears that it could escape, something could escape from a lab in the future. So what are the pressure points realistically that the U.S. has against the Chinese Communist Party that could actually make a difference moving forward?

sanction all the labs, all the Chinese labs, every single one in them right now. Okay. Now, there are people on Capitol Hill who are devising legislation to do just that, including Marco Rubio and others. And that has a twofold effect, right? One, it constitutes real pressure because they want those labs. And keep in mind, those labs are still getting hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money. Why are we still giving them hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money? Does that make any sense before we know if when they won't even let us in the lab? Here's $100 million. Hey, can we see inside the lab? No, go to pound sand.

Okay, you know, it makes us into schmucks, okay? So first thing is sanction all the labs, okay? Now, what that does is it puts the punishment where it belongs, right? It's limited, it's proportional, it's responsive to the thing at hand. And if they want their labs to run again, well, then they're going to have, if they want our money to run, then they're going to have to let us into the labs to do the investigation. And if they don't, and if they say, screw you, you can't get into the labs, well, then we don't not long the sanctions essentially decouple us from those labs because if they if we can't

even do an investigation when there's a pandemic then we shouldn't be working on those labs anyway and good ridden so i say sanction all the labs it it works whether they whether they cooperate or whether they don't cooperate it we can't lose what are the broad geopolitical implications if the preponderance of evidence does point to the lab leak i mean given the fact that we We will have played a role. The U.S. government will have played a role in a not insignificant role, but then you go back and look at the obfuscation from the Chinese Communist Party and the great lengths to which they went to keep any of this information from getting out.

Do you have any confidence given the kind of the ability of the Chinese government to push propaganda and to flood the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon likes to say. in a similar context, that there will be repercussions for the Chinese. I mean, your book is about much more than this. You know, it's about Xi Jinping and what he aims to do and what the American response and the back and forth is. How would this complicate Xi Jinping from reaching his goals from doing what he wants to do? Right.

Well, you know, you could ask you two ways, right? how does it complicate Xi Jinping's strategy, but also how does it complicate President Biden's strategy? So remember, like the Biden administration is very carefully, you know, going through every aspect of U.S. China, cooperation, engagement, competition, and confrontation to try to sort through all of that stuff that's in my book about what the Trump administration did. And if you read the book, it's really about a really broad repositioning of U.S. foreign policy towards a more competitive and often confrontational stance vis-à-vis Beijing. and the Chinese Communist Party. And the Biden administration, I think, to its credit, is going through all that stuff one by one and continuing a lot of it,

not all of it, but more of it than I would have expected, frankly. And at the same time, they're engaging with allies and they're keeping the Chinese at arm's length, but they're not ignoring them. They're trying to keep the lines of communication open and work with them on climate change in Iran. All of that delicate balance, right, would be totally destroyed

if there was a preponderance of evidence that the Chinese labs were, because it would become the most important issue in U.S.-China relations and dwarf everything else and upset all of those other plans. And I think that's a big reason many people inside the Biden administration

don't want to touch it. You know, I hear from Biden administration officials, well, you know, this is just going to make all of our lives selling. We're still never going to figure it out. And my response to that is like tough. You don't have a choice. Can you imagine, though,

choosing not to see that reality because it's difficult to deal with? That's what's been going on. I mean, look, this is a criticism of the Obama administration's foreign policy generally, right? They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was there. But it's also the bureaucracy. I think you're seeing it. Yeah, very much true. I mean, it's the intelligence bureaucracy. It's the diplomatic bureaucracy, the scientific bureaucracy, the media

bureaucracy. You know, it's so disruptive. It's such a, it's such a mind, you know, blowing thing that we, if, you know, that's why people inside the state department were like, oh, you're going to open up a Pandora's box. But, you know, the Pandora's box is the only way to uncover the truth. And I don't, my argument is we don't have a choice but to do it. And we should

do it carefully, but we're still not there. We're still not doing it. And this 90-day review is like, you know, kind of like a fig leaf. I mean, let's see. Hopefully they'll do it for real, but I'm not that confident in it, to be honest with you. And now, to answer your question directly, Steve, from the Chinese side, this is the most important thing in their

foreign policy right now as evidenced by the fact that they're willing to punish and ruin relationships and jail and gulag people for uttering it, okay? And so that should tell you everything you need to know about both what's going on inside the CCP. In other words, the sheer amalgamation and concentration of power at the very, very, very top. And the fact that the politics of the CCP now trump everything, no pun intended, including

economics, including diplomatic relations. And so there is no lengths to which they will go to make sure that. that this issue becomes so muddied that no one can figure it out. And that's their goal. They don't have to prove that it came from the wet market. They just have to make sure we can't prove it came from the lab and muddying the waters and selling discord into our discourse

and into our understanding. That's the propaganda goal, right? It's a much easier goal. That's why disinformation, as you know, Steve, is so effective because you don't have to win the argument. You just have to not lose the argument. And you can play that string out forever and ever. but if the world decide

that okay well we know enough to know that even if we don't find the smoking gun that the preponderance of evidence is that it likely came from the lab now we have to act on that that would be the biggest disruption in China's relations with the world not just with the United States because every country India you name it is suffering all right continues to suffer

and so that would have an enormous negative effect on China's power and influence soft power around the world, and that could create a very dangerous situation because that's what happens when you take a wild animal and you put it in a corner. It's very, very risky. So that's something that, again, that we're going to need to manage if that becomes the case. But again, I don't think that's a good reason not to try to figure it out. All right, Josh, this has been a real treat, but I do have a very important question I want to end on. You are married to Allie Rogan, nay Weinberg, the daughter of Max Weinberg, and around these parts, she's known as

probably the most talented singer that we have in our world here. I'm curious, A, whether you ever join her in singing and what your go-to song is, and B, if not, what the request that you make for her to sing at home. Got it. Well, Allie Rogan, foreign affairs producer, for PBS NewsHour is also the lead singer in a band called the Space Otters coming to a dive bar near you if you live in the

Northern Virginia area. Allie is also a very talented accordionist and has been known to play accordion with her father's band which is Bruce Springsteen and the East Street band which has been on hiatus because of the COVID

but if I'm not revealing any information but let's just say hypothetically, Bruce Springsteen and the East Street band go on tour again in 2022. I don't know, but let's just say you could expect to see her playing accordion on the show. So I always request

the songs where she plays accordion, that's like America Land and some other songs. And no, she doesn't let me sing with her. And occasionally she'll let me break in with a little saxophone solo. Wow. So keep your eyes peeled to her Instagram. And you might see me pop in an Adidas track suit and sunglasses playing the saxophone.

It's been known to happen. It's been known to happen. Watch this space. I sort of thought we might have some cowbell, you know? More cowbell, Josh. More cowbell. Well, I think she, that might be my next assignment. You know, they say the only thing, you know, the even bad sax is better than no sax at all.

Oh, bad. A great place to end. Thank you so much, Josh. The book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. It's obviously, it's become one of the most important books you can read right now, given that it has changed the media coverage

from this entire country, basically, when it comes to the origination of COVID-19. So thank you for joining us, Josh. This is really interesting. Thank you so much. With Ames Platinum, Exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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