Media Watch should tell both sides of the Covid-19 origin story

ABC TV's Media Watch host Paul Barry.

Time has come for the ABC’s board to demand editorial management tell Media Watch, hosted on Monday nights by Paul Barry, to examine its own coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Media Watch, the wider ABC and the Channel 9 papers have produced one-sided coverage designed to reinforce the idea the virus spread from a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan rather than from a laboratory in the nearby Wuhan Institure of Virology (WIV). Media Watch has focused on Sky News host Sharri Markson, who wrote a successful book – What Really Happened in Wuhan – in September 2021 after breaking a series of stories for this paper and The Daily Telegraph in 2020 and 2021.

Media Watch in May 2020 devoted most of two full programs to trying to delegitimise Markson’s reporting, and has come back to attack her several times since. As this column remarked earlier this month, Markson’s work is holding up better than that of her critics.

Now emails and electronic communications between a group of scientists who wrote the first expert report on the pandemic for Nature magazine in February 2020 make it clear some scientists who have publicly criticised the lab leak theory privately gave it credence.

The 12 scientists who wrote the report appear to have been under pressure from government health agencies and research funders aware US National Institutes of Health director Dr Anthony Fauci had been secretly sending US money to the WIV to perform work he admitted last year would not have been tolerated in the US.

Dr Fauci told US TV networks NBC and CBS last year the outbreak could indeed have come from a laboratory. The FBI and the US Department of Energy earlier this year released reports favouring the lab leak theory, even though other agencies support zoonotic origin. The ABC has given little air time to public support for the lab leak.

This column suggested more than three years ago that Media Watch’s antagonism to the lab leak story was almost entirely driven by the support former President Trump had given the theory.

A US Congressional hearing, “Investigating the proximal origin of a cover up”, concluded earlier this month. It examined “suppression of scientific discourse” by the National Institutes of Health “surrounding the drafting, publication and critical reception” of the Nature article – The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. Two of the Nature co-authors, Dr Kristian Andersen and Dr Robert Garry, were grilled about “their effort to skew scientific evidence to fulfil Dr Fauci’s vision of a single narrative in support of natural Covid-19 origin”.

The committee concluded there was a co-ordinated effort by Dr Fauci and expert scientists “to craft a narrative that would advance the zoonotic origin of Covid-19 in order to protect the Chinese government …”

Dr Andersen confirmed to the inquiry the US had funded gain of function research in Wuhan that “fell below recommended biosafety markers”. Dr Andersen also admitted he was at least partly motivated to protect China’s standing.

US chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci pictured in December 2021. Picture: AFP

A less politicised analysis of emails presented to the committee was produced last week on Substack by two independent journalists still pursuing the lab leak story, former Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi on Racket News and former California Democrat candidate for Governor Michael Shellenberger on his site, Public.

Taibbi’s July 18 report – “So friggin likely: New Covid documents reveal unparalleled media deception” – opens with a quote from an email dated February 5, 2020 by Dr Garry as he worked on the Nature story Taibbi says became “the basis of years of reports insisting Covid-19 had natural origins”. Garry says in a group email, “Accidental release is a scenario many will not be comfortable with, but cannot be dismissed out of hand”.

Taibbi says of the “Proximal Origins” communications obtained by the House select subcommittee: “letters and chats examined here … show how health officials and scientists constructed perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) fiasco …”

One of the authors prominent in the emails is University of Sydney virologist Eddie Holmes, a prominent critic of the lab leak theory quoted by Media Watch on May 4, 2020. Holmes and three others in his regular chat group expressed a clear common belief a lab escape was possible.

Andersen opens, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin likely because they were already doing this work …’’ Garry responds mentioning the furin cleavage site on the virus discussed in this column way back in 2021 and in Markson’s book. He adds, “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened because of the GoF (gain of function) research we know is happening.”

Columbia University’s Dr Ian Lipkin expresses concern about gain of function research at WIV on bat viruses and Holmes adds, “ I agree … seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get-go. It’s the epidemiology I find most worrying.”

Yet Taibbi says the researchers’ emails “repeatedly referenced concern over the political consequences” of suggesting human intervention, even if true.

Andersen: “Destroy the world based in sequence data. Yay or nay?’’

Holmes: “Big ask!”

Media Watch in 2020 offered a different view from Holmes: “There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 … originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”

Later in that May 4 program it quotes a webcast with Holmes the previous month: “it looks for all the world … a natural coronavirus that’s come from an animal in a natural setting. There’s nothing in there at all that is a signature of laboratory manipulation.”

The released emails suggest many of the scientists who contributed to “Proximal Origin” do not believe the wet market theory. Holmes is quoted: “No way the selection could occur in the market. Too low a density of mammals: really just small groups of 3-4 in cases.”

It is important to understand what the evidence points to: not a bioweapon but work on vaccines. Shellenberger and Taibbi make a strong case the Nature article was written at the instigation of Dr Fauci and that the finished piece was sent to him for checking before publication.

Former US Centers for Disease Control chief Dr Bob Redfield tells Taibbi: “I think this (WIV activity) was purposeful research to try to make a vector to be used to help vaccinate both military and civilian populations against … different pathogens.”

Redfield says he should have been invited to a February 3, 2020, conference call at which Dr Fauci discussed the lab origin theory with the Proximal Origin authors. Redfield says the latest emails show the “scientists were both conscious of the WIV’s work and flummoxed by the task of explaining the virus’s genetic anomalies but were ultimately pressured to ignore both issues by health bureaucrats.”

None of this is proof of a lab leak and the Proximal Origin authors may have had a genuine change of heart in the early days of the pandemic. Yet the emails make it clear that even months after the Nature publication, many remained sceptical about natural occurrence.

ABC management should be asking Paul Barry and his team why it has spent so much air time in the past 3½ years trying to suppress a story that looks increasingly probable. The answer, of course, is pure politics.