I briefly noted the fallacious Dr. Fauci’s New York Times interview in “Fauci speaks: It ain’t me, babe.” This interview deserves more attention than I gave it. The Spectator’s pseudonymous Cockburn takes a longer look in the column “Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview,” which the Spectator has now made accessible at our request (for the next week or so).
Cockburn does a particularly good job deconstructing Fauci’s serpentine zigzag on the subject of the lab leak. Fauci speaks:
[A]ll of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence.
Cockburn deconstructs:
Let’s unpack that marvelous trickery. There is some limited truth that intelligence agencies agree that the virus was not “genetically engineered,” as the DNI reported in 2021 that “most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered”. The first wrinkle, obviously, is that this assessment is from “most agencies” and is “low confidence.” The second wrinkle is that “two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.” Not exactly a resounding renunciation of an engineered virus. It is not clear to Cockburn how the agencies have shifted their opinions, if at all, on the topic since 2021, though we may know soon once the intelligence is declassified.
Further, his definition of a lab leak is comically oversimplified. For Fauci, the way it could be a “lab leak” is if the scientist caught the virus from some natural source and then infected his or her colleagues. Admittedly, Fauci gets points for creativity: he effectively coopts the lab leak theory to confirm his own belief that that virus spread from a natural origin point.
Fauci appears to be following Peter Falk’s instruction in evasion to Alan Arkin in The In-Laws: “Serpentine, serpentine!”
Whole thing here.
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