Is it just me or is that lab leak cover story one big “haha what if...unless?”

Okay so when NY Mag announced their latest cover story, which is illustrated with a very spooky-looking vial spilling mysterious neon thingamajigs under the ominous headline The Lab Leak Hypothesis earlier this week, my first thought was hmm, I thought that was mostly not a thing? in that I knew it existed as a conservative conspiracy theory from the early pandemic days and had been officially addressed by the “Bat Woman” virologist Shi Zhengli since then.

So I had some concerns going into the piece — sure, the Chinese government has been mega sus about the way they suppressed information about the pandemic, especially in the early days, so it wouldn’t surprise me that the fuck-up goes deeper than what we know. But as an Asian-American (and someone with personal ties to Wuhan — it’s where my mother grew up, where my parents went to college, and where I’ve visited several times), I’m painfully aware of the xenophobia this kind of speculation has already spun up and amplified, absolutely no thanks to an outgoing president who branded it as the “kung flu.” But I read the piece anyway because I figured, well, there must be a lot more to this that I haven’t been following.

And I was intrigued at first — there’s an early paragraph that seems to set up the promise of a big payoff. So I thought, okay holy shit, here comes the compelling evidence that’s about to rock my world...

But then I read the rest of it, and afterward, it just left me feeling...wholly vexed? 

Obviously, I’m not a virologist or a scientist or even remotely a science writer in any way, so I could sense how clumsily I was making my way through the piece. But I just kept waiting for writer Nicholson Baker to provide that promised payoff — i.e., to bring to light solid evidence that wasn’t A) examples of lab leaks that have happened in the past (he happens to be promoting a book he wrote last year on the topic) or B) quoting from interviews with experts that are basically him being like “So a lab leak is a possibility, right?” and the experts are all like “yeah it’s a possibility, there are lots of possibilities.” 

It’s a lot of this:

And a lot of this: 

And this:

And reaches a crescendo with this: 

At which point I started flipping back through the pages trying to figure out at what point Baker mentions his credentials, because surely, to bolster this theory out into the world (for a national magazine!) and under the primary reasoning that well it’s happened in the past so it could totally have happened this time and lots of people are saying it’s not impossible felt quite thin on its own. 

In the piece, Baker points to his book as his primary credential (“I did know something about pathogens and laboratory accidents; I published a book last year, Baseless, that talks about some of them.”) But he’s not actually a virologist or scientist or prolific science journalist; he’s primarily a novelist (Wikipedia describes him as an author and essayist), and there’s an NYT article about his erotic novels called Nicholson Baker's Dirty Mind that mentions how his most well-known book is a phone-sex novel that Monica Lewinsky gifted Bill Clinton). 

Does writing sexy novels disqualify you from being able to conduct solid journalistic inquiry in other matters? No. Can only Big Science professionals be allowed to weigh in on matters of this pandemic? No. But it does strike me as odd for a cover story on such a high-stakes issue involving public health and national security to be coming from someone whose fifth google result is for being “the mad scientist of smut.”

What’s funny is that I kept searching on Twitter to see if there was any big uproar or reactions around the piece, since it seems like it’s designed to provoke debate, but there isn’t a whole lot (then I remembered what happened last week). The best I could find in terms of criticism from the “Big Science” types is a thread by a biology professor Carl T. Bergstrom and a very exhaustive thread by virologist Dr. Angela Rassmussen, the latter of which outlines how problematic she finds the entire piece, ranging from the iffy use of a lot of scientific terms to “sinophobic jeering” (Between you and me, I could live without the unnecessary detail about how “the shredded meat of a short-legged raccoonlike creature … was served in a regional dish called ‘dragon-tiger-phoenix soup.’” My dude, this is not your Parts Unknown moment). (For what it’s worth, there’s also a dunk on Baker’s apparently controversial erotica writing as well.)

Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen

Nice of @NYMag to give @nicholsonbaker8 a 5000 word marketing package for his most recent nonfiction book...which is partly about lab accidents in the 1950s.

New York Magazine @NYMag

"What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe," writes @nicholsonbaker8. "It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out." https://t.co/0rZDwPvLH8 https://t.co/MB2lYnbRma

Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen

So the bottom line is that there is SO MUCH about this he factually and scientifically gets wrong (including but not limited to): -Misrepresents documented lab accidents -Completely misunderstands how BSL-3/4 work is regulated -Defines pathogenicity as "godawfulness"

Overall, I think the central theses of Baker’s piece are important: that the experts aren’t ruling out the possibility that COVID came from a lab leak, and that given our collective track record with biohazards, we need to recognize how dangerous it is to be messing with viruses. And while taking a speculative approach in a science piece isn’t itself verboten (see: Ed Yong’s The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready? from 2018), it does come with an enormous burden of proof. If Baker took a framing cue from that Ed Yong story and was more in the vein of hey everyone, whether or not COVID came from a lab, we should be prepared for the possibility that our next pandemic will, it would be very different. 

Baker’s article, as it stands, just doesn’t meet that burden. He doesn’t provide evidence that’s convincing enough to take the lab leak theory seriously outside of well tbh anything’s possible, and I’m not persuaded by the piece’s authoritativeness, either. To me, Baker’s piece veers too much into the sinophobic and the flippant (see: the kicker??). Plus, while there are plenty of times where Fauci is mentioned, the piece is unable to get a comment for him, which leaves me unimpressed in those terms as well. (The man is giving interviews about his bday! Doesn’t seem like the most difficult get if you ask me!)

At the end of the day/one very obsessive Sunday, I kept coming back to this paragraph at the beginning, which sums up the entire piece both in terms of its premise and what it actually delivers on:

“It’s just a theory,” Baker writes, effectively summing up the beginning, middle, and end of his entire argument — thereby getting uncomfortably close, as the pandemic reaches horrifying new heights, to ~just putting this out there~ / “it’s just a thought experiment!” troll-level discourse that we’ve all seen veer down some pretty dark paths already.

---

Deez Links is a dailyish newsletter written by delia cai.