By Philip Bump National correspondent June 3, 2021 at 9:53 a.m. CDT
Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News Channel has by now settled into a familiar style, offering wild speculation and political attacks with a veneer of studious certainty. Carlson’s Harvard-senior aesthetic and well-honed oratory precision give the sense that he’s at long last presenting the results of his semester thesis when, in fact, he’s often just stapling together various angry tweets.
On Wednesday night, Carlson again turned his attention to Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s leading expert on infectious diseases and a frequent target of conservative anger during the coronavirus pandemic. Fauci was perhaps the only member of President Donald Trump’s administration to repeatedly and publicly contradict Trump’s eternally rosy assessments of the pandemic and, because of that, he became a face of some sort of “deep state” opposition to the political right. As early as last summer, Trump’s allies were disparaging Fauci for things such as revising his position on mask-wearing as more information about the virus emerged. Such shifts were cherry-picked to present Fauci as standing in opposition to the American people and, with Republicans, such arguments worked.
More recently, Fauci has been targeted for having repeatedly urged caution on the idea that the virus emerged after escaping from a virology lab in China. The “lab leak” theory has become a focus of conversation of late, in part because of a report from the Wall Street Journal elevating claims that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalized well before the virus is known to have emerged. Fauci has also been fending off claims that he and the U.S. government helped fund research at that lab centered on “gain of function” — in short, changing viruses to make them do different things. The Washington Post’s fact-checking team has evaluated those claims in the context of repeated attacks on Fauci by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.); as with so much else centered on the virus, the verdict is murky.
The occasion for Carlson’s focus Wednesday was the release of a batch of emails sent to or by Fauci last year that were obtained by The Washington Post and BuzzFeed and published in their entirety by BuzzFeed. The emails extend over 3,200 printed pages, many of them duplicative. But for those looking to pick out points of suspicion, the terrain was fertile.
That was Carlson’s aim.
In a seven-minute riff at the top of his show, Carlson used a handful of heavily redacted emails to argue that Fauci lied under oath, lied to the public and deserves criminal prosecution. As is so often the case, Carlson’s claims went miles past the evidence, a problem that seems to have given him little pause.
For example, Carlson looked at a pair of emails sent late on the evening of Jan. 31, 2020. This was days after the virus was confirmed to have been in the United States and very early in scientific analysis of the virus. Carlson, who uses “covid” as a shorthand for the virus, describes the exchange:
The first email came from an immunologist called Kristian Andersen, who works at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Andersen warned Fauci that covid appeared to have been possibly manipulated in a laboratory. Quote: “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, less than 0.1 percent, so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” The next day on February 1st, Tony Fauci wrote back: “Thanks, Christian. Talk soon on the call.”
Fauci then sent an urgent email to his deputy, a man called Hugh Auchincloss. The subject of that email in all caps was, “IMPORTANT.” Quote: “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this a.m. Keep your cell phone on. ... Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward. You will have tasks today that must be done.” Attached to that email was a document. It was entitled, quote: “Baric, Shi, et al - Nature medicine - SARS gain of function.pdf.” Now the Baric in the attachment refers to Ralph Baric, a virologist based in the U.S. who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Baric worked with a woman called Shi Zhengli, known as the Bat Lady, because she manipulates coronaviruses that infect bats. She was the “Shi” in the attachment. Now, keep in mind that during the questioning from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky fairly recently, Tony Fauci denied that this same Ralph Baric had conducted gain of function research. Again, this is the Ralph Baric in Fauci’s attachment, which was entitled, “Baric, Shi, et al - Nature medicine - SARS gain of function.pdf.”
And yet under oath before the United States Congress, Fauci denied this.
The clear implication for viewers is that Fauci received a heads-up on the virus being artificially engineered, panicked and put his deputy on alert.
The reality is more nuanced. Andersen was responding to Fauci’s having sent him an article from Science magazine looking at the investigation of the virus’s origins. The point of Andersen’s email is that, although he and his team find “the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” they need to look more closely and “there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.” In other words, in late January, a month after the virus’s emergence was first reported, this researcher found something curious that he wanted to investigate further. As Andersen notes to Fauci, he was quoted in the same article, making that point.
Fauci’s exchange with Andersen occurred late in the evening on Jan. 31. His email to Auchincloss came the following morning, hours later. It’s not obviously connected to the communication with Andersen in any way except that Fauci sent Auchincloss the same article he’d sent Andersen. He also sent that article to various other people, including a National Institutes of Health official named John Mascola. (Incidentally, Carlson’s summary of the email to Auchincloss skips over the part where Fauci says he has a meeting that morning with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, which certainly might inspire a need to have his deputy available.)
The other document sent to Auchincloss was that PDF, the title of which included the trigger phrase “gain of function.” What did the article say? It’s not clear. There was, however, a research paper from Ralph S. Baric and Zhengli-Li Shi and others (et al) published in Nature Medicine in 2015. That document became the focal point of conspiracy theories about the virus being engineered, to the point that the journal added a note at the top: “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
This is why Carlson accuses Fauci of lying, though. Answering a question from Paul last month, Fauci denied that Baric was engaged in gain-of-function research. That filename, Carlson argues, is all the evidence needed to prove that the government scientist was being intentionally dishonest. That, of course, is an enormous stretch.
It’s very possible, if not likely, that during the conference call on Feb. 1 to which Fauci replied in his response to Andersen, the assembled scientists explored various possibilities for the emergence of the virus. But it’s simply impossible to tell from the evidence what the discussion was.
That call was organized by Jeremy Farrar, chairman of a nonprofit organization called Wellcome Trust. Carlson notes that, after the call, Farrar asked participants not to share the call’s subject “until agreement on next steps” — a request that Carlson frames as his declaring the call “top secret.” It’s not clear from his segment that Carlson recognized that this call was the same one to which Fauci was referring in the email; it may simply be that Carlson wanted to elevate the idea that something nefarious was happening after Farrar requested that the discussion not be shared.
After all, Carlson also wanted to talk about Farrar for another reason.
Carlson: Jeremy Farrar passed along an article from the website Zerohedge. That piece suggested the coronavirus might have been created as a bioweapon. We now know that is a more plausible explanation than the one we believed at first and were told by the media, which is that corona came from a pangolin. And yet for the crime of saying that out loud — a more plausible explanation — Zerohedge was banned from social media platforms. Until recently, you were not allowed to suggest that covid might be man-made. Why couldn’t you suggest that The fact-checkers wouldn’t allow it. Why wouldn’t they? Because Tony Fauci assured the tech monopolies that the coronavirus could not have been man-made. And so the tech monopolies shut down the topic. Watch Fauci lie. Fauci, on video: “A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there, the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Carlson: That was April 17, 2020, very shortly into the course of this pandemic. At that point what Tony Fauci just asserted as known could not conclusively have been known. That was a lie.
Farrar did pass along the Zerohedge article. In the context of the email, it’s obvious why: to eye-roll about its claims.
More important here is how Carlson engages in a now-common tactic: extrapolating from increased attention being paid to the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab to assuming that the attention increases the likelihood that it did. Carlson goes further still, to argue that, somehow, the idea that the virus was deliberately engineered is more likely than that it had a zoonotic origin; that is, that it was transferred from an animal to a human.
That’s absolutely not the case. Many, if not most, scientists still think that zoonotic origin is more likely, given the history of viruses making that jump. (This Twitter thread explains the case neatly.) Could it have escaped from a lab? Yes. Is that proven? By no means.
Fauci’s very tempered statement — virologists think that the virus is consistent with zoonotic origin — is not in any way a lie. It’s not even facially incorrect. And it relates to the conclusion of Carlson’s monologue.
Two days after he said that, one of the virologists that Tony Fauci had funded to conduct dangerous coronavirus experiments in Wuhan wrote to thank him for the help. That man, a man called Peter Daszak, complained to Fauci that the American tax dollars he'd taken for these experiments were being, quote, “publicly targeted by Fox News reporters.” Yet Daszak remained grateful for Tony Fauci's support. Quote: “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators,” end quote. Now, strangely, most of this specific email from Daszak to Fauci has been redacted and it was redacted under Section (b)(7)(a). That specific exemption to the FOIA law applies to, quote, “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that production of those documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” Are Peter Daszak and Tony Fauci under criminal investigation? We can only hope they are. They certainly deserve it. At this point we can’t say for sure.
Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the group that received funding from the National Institutes of Health to research viruses and that helped fund the lab in Wuhan, China. His organization is at the center of the thin case Carlson and Paul have been elevating about NIH culpability for the virus.
His email of thanks is related to that news conference on April 17, 2020. There, a reporter asked Trump about the NIH-to-Wuhan-lab thread. Trump used the question to attack Barack Obama.
Later, a reporter asked about the lab-leak theory, with Trump disparaging the idea that the virus might have originated in a bat.
“A lot of strange things are happening, but there is a lot of investigation going on and we’re going to find out,” he said.
The quote from Fauci that Carlson aired was his response to subsequently being asked the same question. The research to which he was referring appears to have been published by Nature Medicine in mid-March. It argued that the evidence suggested a zoonotic origin for the virus.
The lead researcher on that study? Kristian Andersen. A month and a half after that email to Fauci, his work argued that natural emergence was the most likely genesis of the virus.
It’s not clear why the section of the email from Daszak to Fauci was redacted under section (b)(7)(a). But that’s the point: Speculating that Daszak and Fauci are under investigation on the basis of that detail is completely irresponsible — more irresponsible than the various unfounded assumptions Carlson makes.
Again: The possibility exists that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. It is even possible that officials believed in early February that the virus was engineered and tried not to have that revealed. But that’s not the assumption made by most of the scientists who’ve studied this and it’s certainly not the case that a few email attachment filenames prove that this happened.
We’ve seen this pattern over and over in recent years: Big caches of documents are released and motivated parties cherry-pick questionable elements and present them as somehow definitive. We saw it with the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2015 and 2016. We saw it with the material stolen by Russian hackers in 2016 and released by WikiLeaks. We saw it with the text messages between two FBI officials released in 2017.
That’s perhaps the best example, in fact. One of those messages, from former FBI agent Peter Strzok, mentioned an “insurance policy” — a phrase that has been used countless times to suggest an effort to blackmail Trump, although the actual reason for its use was entirely different. But it was lifted out of the pile, framed in a particular way and it stuck, despite a more obviously accurate alternative later emerging.
That’s the risk with Carlson’s attacks on Fauci. It’s not just that Carlson is leapfrogging over the evidence. It’s that he’s helping to establish a framing of this material that is far more compelling than it is well founded. Carlson’s presentation of Fauci as a liar and a criminal is planted in thin soil, but it will have an entire community working to nurture it. That’s the recent pattern, too: using isolated, decontextualized bits of material to support other such material, building out an accusatory house of cards.
Last year, Fox News attorneys deflected slander allegations against Carlson by arguing that his show was obviously an exercise in “ 'exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary’ ” that viewers should understand is often not “stating actual facts.” They don’t.
And for what it’s worth, Carlson may not know that either.
That does make me wonder if it has been scientifically documented that one can't be a carrier if personally immune?Originally posted by Chris
“El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"
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