WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy, which determined with “low confidence” that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.
Meanwhile, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who has argued in favor of the “lab leak” hypothesis, told The Washington Post the assessment “gives us momentum to expose the true origins of COVID. … As a physician myself, a biochemistry major, I think that there’s just no way this virus could have come from nature. It’s just too perfect.”
From wikipedia:
Marshall was born in El Dorado, Kansas.[4] He attended Butler Community College[5] before attending Kansas State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and was a member of Beta Theta Pi.[6][7] He received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Kansas. He completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Florida.[8]
Yup, that seems like totally the right combination of credentials to be able to make authoritative opinions about the origin of a pandemic and the perfectness of a virus.
On a totally unrelated note: Does anyone else interpret someone mentioning their major in college when sharing their opinion as a reason to view their claims with greater scrutiny?
Hmm. It appears that I am making a form of ad hominem by pointing at his credentials as a reason for doubting his claims. Fair enough. Let’s see if I can analyze his arguments on their own merits.
Here’s the full quote from the Washington Post:
“It gives us momentum to expose the true origins of covid,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who supported Senate probes into Fauci and argued in favor of the leak theory, citing the virus’s infectiousness and ability to evade human immune systems. “As a physician myself, a biochemistry major, I think that there’s just no way this virus could have come from nature. It’s just too perfect.”
I would counter the first argument by pointing out that a “low confidence” report from the DOE does not provide much evidence in support of the “lab leak” theory, by definition. If his implication is that it provides evidence that the “true origins” do not lie in a “lab leak”, then I think there could be an argument made there, but I do not believe he is making that claim.
His second claim, that the virus could not have come from nature, seems to be supported by the following three pieces of information:
- He (is) a physician.
- He (is) a biochemistry major.
- It (the virus) is just too perfect.
My counterargument to the first point is that although he was trained as a physician and during an earlier time period practiced as one, he is currently a Senator. At best this is an appeal to authority, but more likely an appeal to false authority. There is nothing inherent in being a physician that automatically makes one’s claims about any topic more reasonable. It’s possible that the knowledge and skills gained while training to be a physician would give him greater ability to form arguments based on medically relevant evidence. None of that is presented alongside his claim, unfortunately.
To his second point, I would make much the same argument, merely replacing the word “physician” with “biochemistry major”.
As for his last point about the relative perfection of the virus. If I am generous in my reading, I could interpret perfect as referring to the virus’ infectiousness and ability to evade the human immune system. Without more information, I can’t reasonably asses whether or not COVID-19 is particularly extreme in either of these categories relative to other viruses involved in global pandemics. If we were to compare based on death toll, the 1918 flu pandemic killed more people in less time than COVID-19. I would even go so far as to say that infectiousness and ability to evade the human immune system are the prerequisites for a pathogen to reach pandemic status. So if the evidence to back up the argument that the COVID-19 virus must be created in a lab instead of in the wild is that it is pandemic worthy, then I think it’s a pretty weak argument at best.
In other words, he’s probably full of shit, but at least I tried to show my work.
The meat of the article is about how the WHO is frustrated at the lack of transparency and sharing information by both China and the US, while being accused by the US of not being transparent themselves, which all feels a bit:
