How the Media Failed Its COVID Test: The Truth Behind the Lab Leak and Masking Debates
Derek Thompson welcomes Dan Engber and Jason Abaluck to the podcast to discuss some of the more contentious debates of the COVID-19 pandemic
Today’s episode is a long one: It’s about the debate over media coverage of COVID. Three years after the fateful March of 2020, when it feels like the world shut down for COVID, we are revisiting two of the most contentious debates in this space. No. 1: the lab leak hypothesis, which is the debate over the possibility that COVID originated at a laboratory in China and not, as the official story went, at a wet market in Wuhan. And no. 2: the mask debate. And why a seemingly simple question—do masks work—is so hard to answer. Today’s guests are Dan Engber, a science writer and editor at The Atlantic who has chronicled the ups and downs of the media’s relationship to the lab leak. And Jason Abaluck, a Yale economist who has conducted masking research in Bangladesh.
In the following excerpt, Dan Engber discusses the media’s coverage of the lab leak theory that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dan Engber: So I remember hearing about the work that had been done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before I heard about the idea of the lab leak hypothesis, actually. I think as most people would, when they heard that in 2020, they’d go, “That’s weird. Wait a second. Hold on. How likely is it that this kind of research would be happening in Wuhan, China, of all places, and now we’ve got this pandemic unfolding?” So actually, the blatant coincidence hit me first before I was aware that there was kind of this shadow discourse happening about how likely it was. And I will say I was totally tuned out on the politics stuff. I wasn’t aware that Tom Cotton said it was a Chinese bioweapon. All of that stuff got folded in for me, and for the media, into this sort of Trump versus the science narrative about the “China flu” and how Trump was blaming all of these failures of his own administration on China.
So I kind of slipped very easily into that story of, like, this was the thing that was happening, right, in terms of the politics of it, and that was disconnected from any underlying scientific truth. But I still wondered about that coincidence, and I thought, “Hey, that’s really odd.” And then I think I kind of didn’t dig too deeply into it until the Nicholson Baker story came out in New York magazine. And I remember feeling relief that someone had done that story and gone big on it. And then of course that set off a bunch of angry reactions, and we went from there. But that was the very end of December 2020, if I remember correctly.
Derek Thompson: And how would you characterize the media’s reaction to the lab leak theory in 2020 and early 2021, say, just before the Baker piece comes out in New York magazine? And to my recollection, it really crystallizes this sense that despite the fact that in the mainstream media there hasn’t been much talk about taking the lab leak theory seriously, it introduces this idea that actually there’s been a kind of shadow discourse happening where people have been poking around and asking, “Can we find smoking gun evidence that this came from Wuhan, from WIV?”
Engber: Yeah. I mean, my recollection as an editor editing stories about the pandemic then was that it was just incorrect. We just knew it was incorrect. There was almost like a copy-paste macro you could put into a story if this were an issue. Scientists say this is not the case. And particularly, what I think was missing there, and I take responsibility for this as an editor editing COVID stories at the time, was deep thought about the different shades of what the lab leak theory or hypothesis could mean. So again, this was kind of all lumped together into the most extreme version of it that was easy to dismiss, that had been dismissed in prominent venues by leading scientists. And that would be kind of the Chinese bioweapon theory of this. So once that was all swirling together in your head and the politics of it made it very easy for that to be one’s notion of what “lab leak” meant, it just was like you knew that was just a false narrative, one of many false narratives that were swirling around at that time.
And so it was just not something to cover. The Baker piece, I mean, really goes into much more nuance about what kind of lab accident might have been in play, what was the research that was going on. And even just the history. I think if you hadn’t been paying attention, you didn’t have this in your head about lab accidents in recent years or the moratorium on gain-of-function research that had been put in place during the Obama administration. So I just thought it was incredible that Baker brought all that to the fore, told the story of these arguments about the dangers of doing this kind of virology work, and just forced everyone to look at this. I mean, still, I would say it would be another five months or so before, really, the mainstream media was looking closely. But that was the first one where, at least for me, I was like, OK, I need to actually go beyond my initial thought of “Hey, that’s a weird coincidence” to start taking this very seriously.
Thompson: I’m really glad that you pointed out that the media’s reaction to the lab leak early on was a kind of mess of conflation. There’s all these things that you have to sort of keep in the air. That Trump was explicitly anti-China in a way that many liberals found to be racist, no. 1. No. 2, that many Republicans were getting over their skis suggesting that COVID was a bioweapon and that it also was a bioweapon that emerged from a lab. So right there, you have this conflation of lab leak equals bioweapon, plus lab leak equals normal virus or not-engineered virus that comes out of a lab.
And I think that there was a liberal or mainstream-media-leaning-liberal eagerness to disprove the lab leak hypothesis that was basically just displaced eagerness to reject Chinese racism and bioweapon rumors. But this created a really weird discourse space. I remember in the fall of 2020, I was having a conversation with my wife and her friends. I remember we were in the bathroom, her friends were on speakerphone, and we were just having a conversation at the end of some Friday where my wife and I had made dinner together. We were talking about conspiracy theories, and they said, “Derek, what conspiracy theory do you believe?” And I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I just don’t dabble in them, generally.
Engber: All conspiracy theorists say that, by the way. But go on.
Thompson: OK, OK, yeah. Well, that’s going to set up the next thing I’m going to say very well. I said, “I have a lot of time for the theory that this virus came from a lab.” And the reaction was like, “Wait, we know you’re not racist, but that theory is kind of racist.” And my feeling was—you already articulated this. Well, look, it’s not racist to say that a good candidate for the emergence of a bat coronavirus is a local laboratory that studies bat coronaviruses. Right? I’m not saying, “Here’s the truth, and the doubters are a bunch of idiots.” I’m saying we have a crime, and this is a reasonable murder suspect that we should consider in the investigation. But it’s really interesting to think back to that period, remember just how strange it was to take the theory seriously.
So let’s continue the talk. The Baker article comes out in New York mMagazine. It inspires a pretty fierce backlash among some people. But in the months that follow, this approach of—I want to describe this carefully—taking the lab leak seriously without saying, “I believe it to be true in any kind of probabilistic, more than 70 percent kind of way,” that became more common among certain journalists. Would you agree?
Engber: I would. I mean, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind doubling back for just a minute, because in this last piece I wrote about the lab leak, this little behind-the-scenes thing, I wanted to represent it as having been so politicized from the start, that it was Democrats and Republicans disagreeing fundamentally on this question from the get-go. And then I went back to find, is there a speech that Chuck Schumer gave in 2020 where he was talking about this? And the answer was no. This was something that Republican lawmakers were talking about a lot, Republican and conservative columnists and such. But it’s not something that Democratic lawmakers were talking about. It was sort of, not Republicans versus Democrats, but Republicans versus the media, basically. And then, having been in the media at the time, we were taking our cues from the scientists.
So I edit science stories, work with science journalists who talk to scientists. And so I think what was happening was you were getting a lot of news stories that reflected the “scientific consensus,” as probed by journalists calling a bunch of people who are scientists who are prominent on Twitter, maybe. But in any case, they were being told, “There’s no doubts here. We know where it came from.” And they were reporting that accurately. And then it was the segments of society that are distrustful of elite authority, including scientists who were saying, “Eh, we don’t know if we believe that.”
I don’t know if this is worth bringing up, but actually, I thought it was interesting that in writing my last piece about this, I realized my own memory of what had happened was distorted. I thought it had been overtly politicized from the get-go. I think in a sense it was, but not in this explicit left-right way. It was like this elites-right way, kind of, which is, I think, a little bit different and, I think, important as it plays out now. But we can go back. I’m sorry to—
Thompson: No, that’s really interesting.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Dan Engber and Jason Abaluck
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
