“In an eye-opening Medium post, the former assistant Secretary of State alleged Thursday that the lab-leak team had been conducting briefings without even subjecting their central claims to review by scientific experts or the intelligence community.” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
“When he finally persuaded them to, even a panel of largely sympathetic experts found the evidence quite circumstantial and the aggressive lab-leak case built on it irresponsibly overstated.”
“A lab-leak origin did seem possible, but a committed team of State Department insiders hadn’t been able to assemble much more evidence for it than Yuri Deigin or Alina Chan or Nicholson Baker had.”
“The eventual result was that Pompeo downgraded his rhetoric and retailed a considerably more modest version of the hypothesis when he took it out on the road.”
“According to Ford, speaking very much out of turn against his old boss, Pompeo had originally wanted to declare publicly that it was ‘statistically impossible’ for the disease to have come from anywhere but the Wuhan Institute in his effort to pin blame on China.” (X/x)
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