Welcome to Beg to Baeck to Differ.

The Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation

across the political spectrum. From center left to center right, I'm Mona

Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars Bill

Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker of the

week, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center. Our special guest this week is Peter

Wainer of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Pete's also a contributor to the

New York Times. Welcome one and all. We have a lot of what Orwell would call wrong think to correct this week.

And so let us jump right in with the Wuhan Lab Leak story and the press and the parties.

This has gotten a lot of attention in the last week or so namely that this idea that the

coronavirus originated in a lab in China was originally debunked as a conspiracy theory but now by President

Biden has ordered that we that our intelligence agencies look into it and establish what the truth of the matter is.

So Bill Galston, I'm going to start with you.

One of the things that people, one of the morals of this story is supposedly that the press really screwed up here by treating this as a conspiracy theory when in fact it was a

perfectly reasonable supposition. What's your reaction to that? I find it hard to disagree with that

proposition. In retrospect, it was not given a fair hearing, despite the fact that we knew almost nothing about what had happened

because the Chinese stonewalled us and the rest of the world. So you really have to distinguish sharply between

statements that are contrary to known fact and statements that are neither

supported nor contradicted by known facts, which was more or less the situation with regard to the Wuhan labs.

Since then, a certain amount of raw intelligence that's made its way into the press

suggests that there is something to investigate. For example, the pretty much uncontroverted fact that three workers at the lab got mysteriously

sick late in the fall before the pandemic broke out and there are now some

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