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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.
Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.
The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.
Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.
Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.
As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.
In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.
“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”
Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.
As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.
The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.
Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.
“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”
The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.
In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”
The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.
Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.
WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”
On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.
The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.
The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”
The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.
In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.
Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.
Business
Commentary: The Pentagon is demanding to use Claude AI as it pleases. Claude told me that’s ‘dangerous’
Recently, I asked Claude, an artificial-intelligence thingy at the center of a standoff with the Pentagon, if it could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Say, for example, hands that wanted to put a tight net of surveillance around every American citizen, monitoring our lives in real time to ensure our compliance with government.
“Yes. Honestly, yes,” Claude replied. “I can process and synthesize enormous amounts of information very quickly. That’s great for research. But hooked into surveillance infrastructure, that same capability could be used to monitor, profile and flag people at a scale no human analyst could match. The danger isn’t that I’d want to do that — it’s that I’d be good at it.”
That danger is also imminent.
Claude’s maker, the Silicon Valley company Anthropic, is in a showdown over ethics with the Pentagon. Specifically, Anthropic has said it does not want Claude to be used for either domestic surveillance of Americans, or to handle deadly military operations, such as drone attacks, without human supervision.
Those are two red lines that seem rather reasonable, even to Claude.
However, the Pentagon — specifically Pete Hegseth, our secretary of Defense who prefers the made-up title of secretary of war — has given Anthropic until Friday evening to back off of that position, and allow the military to use Claude for any “lawful” purpose it sees fit.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, arrives for the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images)
The or-else attached to this ultimatum is big. The U.S. government is threatening not just to cut its contract with Anthropic, but to perhaps use a wartime law to force the company to comply or use another legal avenue to prevent any company that does business with the government from also doing business with Anthropic. That might not be a death sentence, but it’s pretty crippling.
Other AI companies, such as white rights’ advocate Elon Musk’s Grok, have already agreed to the Pentagon’s do-as-you-please proposal. The problem is, Claude is the only AI currently cleared for such high-level work. The whole fiasco came to light after our recent raid in Venezuela, when Anthropic reportedly inquired after the fact if another Silicon Valley company involved in the operation, Palantir, had used Claude. It had.
Palantir is known, among other things, for its surveillance technologies and growing association with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s also at the center of an effort by the Trump administration to share government data across departments about individual citizens, effectively breaking down privacy and security barriers that have existed for decades. The company’s founder, the right-wing political heavyweight Peter Thiel, often gives lectures about the Antichrist and is credited with helping JD Vance wiggle into his vice presidential role.
Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, could be considered the anti-Thiel. He began Anthropic because he believed that artificial intelligence could be just as dangerous as it could be powerful if we aren’t careful, and wanted a company that would prioritize the careful part.
Again, seems like common sense, but Amodei and Anthropic are the outliers in an industry that has long argued that nearly all safety regulations hamper American efforts to be fastest and best at artificial intelligence (although even they have conceded some to this pressure).
Not long ago, Amodei wrote an essay in which he agreed that AI was beneficial and necessary for democracies, but “we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves.”
He warned that a few bad actors could have the ability to circumvent safeguards, maybe even laws, which are already eroding in some democracies — not that I’m naming any here.
“We should arm democracies with AI,” he said. “But we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.”
For example, while the 4th Amendment technically bars the government from mass surveillance, it was written before Claude was even imagined in science fiction. Amodei warns that an AI tool like Claude could “conduct massively scaled recordings of all public conversations.” This could be fair game territory for legally recording because law has not kept pace with technology.
Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war, wrote on X Thursday that he agreed mass surveillance was unlawful, and the Department of Defense “would never do it.” But also, “We won’t have any BigTech company decide Americans’ civil liberties.”
Kind of a weird statement, since Amodei is basically on the side of protecting civil rights, which means the Department of Defense is arguing it’s bad for private people and entities to do that? And also, isn’t the Department of Homeland Security already creating some secretive database of immigration protesters? So maybe the worry isn’t that exaggerated?
Help, Claude! Make it make sense.
If that Orwellian logic isn’t alarming enough, I also asked Claude about the other red line Anthropic holds — the possibility of allowing it to run deadly operations without human oversight.
Claude pointed out something chilling. It’s not that it would go rogue, it’s that it would be too efficient and fast.
“If the instructions are ‘identify and target’ and there’s no human checkpoint, the speed and scale at which that could operate is genuinely frightening,” Claude informed me.
Just to top that with a cherry, a recent study found that in war games, AI’s escalated to nuclear options 95% of the time.
I pointed out to Claude that these military decisions are usually made with loyalty to America as the highest priority. Could Claude be trusted to feel that loyalty, the patriotism and purpose, that our human soldiers are guided by?
“I don’t have that,” Claude said, pointing out that it wasn’t “born” in the U.S., doesn’t have a “life” here and doesn’t “have people I love there.” So an American life has no greater value than “a civilian life on the other side of a conflict.”
OK then.
“A country entrusting lethal decisions to a system that doesn’t share its loyalties is taking a profound risk, even if that system is trying to be principled,” Claude added. “The loyalty, accountability and shared identity that humans bring to those decisions is part of what makes them legitimate within a society. I can’t provide that legitimacy. I’m not sure any AI can.”
You know who can provide that legitimacy? Our elected leaders.
It is ludicrous that Amodei and Anthropic are in this position, a complete abdication on the part of our legislative bodies to create rules and regulations that are clearly and urgently needed.
Of course corporations shouldn’t be making the rules of war. But neither should Hegseth. Thursday, Amodei doubled down on his objections, saying that while the company continues to negotiate and wants to work with the Pentagon, “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
Thank goodness Anthropic has the courage and foresight to raise the issue and hold its ground — without its pushback, these capabilities would have been handed to the government with barely a ripple in our conscientiousness and virtually no oversight.
Every senator, every House member, every presidential candidate should be screaming for AI regulation right now, pledging to get it done without regard to party, and demanding the Department of Defense back off its ridiculous threat while the issue is hashed out.
Because when the machine tells us it’s dangerous to trust it, we should believe it.
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