Business
Column: With final report on pandemic, House GOP fully embraces COVID conspiracy-mongering
Over the last two years, the Republican-dominated House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic conducted 38 interviews and depositions, held 25 hearings and meetings, and examined more than 1 million pages of documents.
Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a podiatrist, called it “the single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date” in his introduction to its final report, issued Dec. 2.
Wenstrup and his colleagues must be hoping that nobody actually reads the 557-page report, which is notable for its reliance on cherry-picked data, misrepresentations and flagrant fabrications.
The weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.
— House GOP, getting the facts exactly wrong
Let’s take a look at what the majority had to say.
We’ll start with its first headline, “finding,” which is that “SARS-CoV-2, the Virus that Causes COVID-19, Likely Emerged Because of a Laboratory or Research Related Accident,” specifically at the Chinese Government’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV.
In fact, the hypothesis heavily favored by the epidemiological and virological scientific communities is that the source wasn’t a lab leak, but “zoonosis,” a natural spillover from wildlife, which were actively farmed and sold — illicitly — throughout southeast Asia, encompassing the region of China that includes Wuhan, the teeming city where the COVID first emerged.
Nevertheless, the GOP report asserts with cocksure confidence that “the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.”
What evidence? We don’t know, because the report doesn’t cite any — not a single empirical finding, not a single study in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s unsurprising, because there doesn’t appear to ever have been any such study.
Although the nation’s intelligence agencies have been divided over COVID’s origins, no empirical evidence has ever been published to support the lab-leak theory.
The report does mention six scientific studies of COVID’s origin in peer-reviewed journals. Every single one supports the zoonosis theory. The Republicans cite assessments by some U.S. intelligence agencies favoring a lab leak, but no agency has ever disclosed what made them think so. A declassified report issued in June 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI — which oversees the entire intelligence community — found no evidence that a “research-related incident” at WIV “could have caused the COVID pandemic.”
As part of its bill of particulars, the GOP report resurrects an old yarn, originated by Trump acolytes at the State Department in 2020 and promoted by the Wall Street Journal, that three researchers at the WIV became sick with what may have been COVID in the autumn of 2019. The GOP report states that the ODNI release “supports this conclusion.”
Is that so? Here’s what ODNI said in its declassified assessment: “While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19.”
The Republicans devote more than 50 pages of their report to an effort to denigrate a seminal paper supporting the zoonosis hypothesis. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” drafted by five immunologists and virologists with international reputations, was published by the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. (SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.)
The paper was a product of a conference among about a dozen high-level scientists convened Feb. 1, 2020, by Jeremy Farrar, who was then director of the Wellcome Trust, a British health research foundation, and is now chief scientist of the World Health Organization. Farrar’s goal was to foster a discussion of initial concerns voiced by several virologists that features of the virus appeared to be man-made.
The GOP report notes that in his 2021 book “Spike: The Virus vs The People,” an inside look at the British response to the pandemic, Farrar refers to a paper co-written by Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Zhengli Shi, a top official at WIV, as a “how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”
The report presents this as evidence that SARS2 could have been man-made. The Baric/Shi paper was brought to Farrar’s attention by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, who would be a drafter of the Proximal Origin paper.
But the majority provides a misleadingly incomplete quote from Farrar’s book. What he actually wrote was, “At first glance, the paper Kristian had unearthed looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.” (Emphasis mine.)
The GOP report doesn’t mention that Farrar devoted the next 15 pages of his book, nearly 5,000 words, to explaining why his initial judgment was erroneous and that “the new virus was more convincingly explained, scientifically, as a natural spillover than a laboratory event.”
Farrar concludes, “I had put two and two together and made five.” The features that seemed at first to have been unique turned out to be common in the natural world.
Despite that, the Republicans strained to make the case that the Proximal Origin authors dismissed a lab leak as “implausible” because they were “‘Prompted’ by Dr. Anthony Fauci to ‘Disprove’ the Lab Leak Theory.”
This is part and parcel of the right wing’s long campaign to falsely smear Fauci, who retired in 2022 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was one of the nation’s most trusted public health professionals, as somehow the perpetrator of the pandemic.
Here the subcommittee is undone by its own text. Every reference in the GOP report to Fauci’s contacts with the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, including his emails and testimony, shows him explicitly urging the authors to investigate the lab leak theory and bring their concerns that the virus was artificially made to “the appropriate authorities” such as the FBI.
In not a single statement or testimony cited by the report does Fauci argue against the lab leak hypothesis. Indeed, as the report itself documents, Fauci urged experts to look into various ways the virus might have been grown in a lab before escaping into the world.
The Republicans tried to rewrite history in other respects. They accused the American Federation of Teachers of exercising “influence” over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the CDC’s guidelines for reopening schools during the pandemic, and asserting that the AFT “continually pushed for school closures throughout the pandemic.”
This is a flagrant misrepresentation. The AFT actually pushed to open schools as rapidly as possible “with appropriate safety protocols in place” such as “physical distancing, proper ventilation, deep cleaning procedures and adequate personal protective equipment.” Its concerns were not only for the children, but also for teachers and other school personnel, as well as family members who were exposed to the virus via children.
The truth is that neither the AFT nor the CDC had any authority to impose school closing policies. These were always the product of local decisions, not all of which paid attention to CDC guidelines.
The subcommittee’s Democratic minority produced its own report, which is more measured in all respects, though not entirely devoid of problems. The Democrats observed, accurately, that “Republicans spent the 118th Congress amplifying extreme claims against our nation’s scientists,” especially Fauci.
The GOP members “relentlessly attacked Dr. Fauci” by claiming absurdly that Fauci created the virus and is “responsible for the millions of ensuing deaths,” the Democrats wrote. They also refuted another smear, aimed at EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was formed to oversee international virus research funded by government agencies.
The Republicans insinuated that EcoHealth played a role in inventing the COVID virus, which is utterly preposterous. As I reported earlier, however, the Democrats connived with the GOP to undermine EcoHealth by accusing it unfairly of mishandling government funds. EcoHealth responded that the “falsehoods and accusations” about its work “stem from political motivations.” That’s correct. Unfortunately its valuable work has been hampered by these smears.
The Republican report promotes other long-debunked notions about the pandemic. It criticizes the efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to discourage people from taking nostrums that have been shown to have absolutely no therapeutic value against COVID, such as versions of the livestock dewormer ivermectin and the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, beloved of right-wing medical quacks.
I asked the GOP majority to explain on the report’s misrepresentations and contradictions, and whether the absence of evidence for its brief against Fauci suggested that its accusation was a fabrication. I also asked for its response to letters entered into the subcommittee record disputing the report’s claims from representatives for Fauci, the AFT, the Department of Health and Human Services and Francis Collins, who was head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic. I got no reply.
In a supreme irony, the GOP asserts that arguments favoring the zoonosis theory of COVID’s origin rest on “assumptions rather than facts.” That would be a more appropriate description of the majority report, which advances no “facts” but rests on fabricated and tendentious assumptions.
If one seeks a guide to how not to perform oversight over the work of scientists, this report sets a dismal standard. It’s a disservice to anyone who lives in the real world, not in a partisan fantasy.
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
Business
Commentary: How right-wing anti-transgender attacks led to a Supreme Court ruling upholding sex discrimination
At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality.
On the surface, the Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women’s and girl’s sports teams looks like a victory for women’s rights.
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh certainly presents itself that way. “Females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Therefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.” He also asserted that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.”
The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against “biological” males’ participation on women’s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.
There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court’s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl’s sports
Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one’s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth.
Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of “gender ideology extremism.” The U.S., his order stated, recognizes “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” That’s a “biological truth,” he declared.
In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: “As all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.”
Science recognizes that some people are “born with sex traits that don’t fit into typical male or female patterns,” to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page on the topic “intersex.” The condition “may involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.”
From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes “gender dysphoria” as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.
No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.
But that’s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women.
The International Olympic Committee — in a policy statement Kavanaugh cited incompletely — says that in “most running and swimming events,” males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That’s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes — transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The “cis” prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)
West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls’ teams. So under their rules transgender girls can’t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what’s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?
But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court’s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they’re members of an alien species.
It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations.
Trump’s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination. He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care.
He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)
I wrote during Trump’s first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that “one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law.
In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, “there was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.”
In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students’ requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create “an enormous practical and administrability problem.”
Is that so? That wasn’t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student’s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would “result in an unfair athletic advantage” or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn’t be learned.)
It was Maine’s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams. “We’ll see you in court,” Mills snapped.
Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to “invasive sex verification procedures,” as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling.
They’re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men’s protection, Theoharis wrote — “the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.” (There don’t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men’s sports.)
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl’s teams — track and cross-country — in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn’t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join — her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she “came in near the back.”
Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones.
Thanks to the court’s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports “because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria.”
So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?
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