News bits: COVID and lying to the public; Examples of ethical behavior in the courts

The Intercept writes about apparent lying by authors of an influential research paper that led many people to believe that COVID probably arose naturally from wet markets and not from a Chinese government laboratory somewhere in China, maybe Wuhan.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS ON the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.”

The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.

According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. .... When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.
 
All the files can be found here. A spokesperson for committee Republicans declined to comment.  

Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health. Later minutes showed that the consensus among the experts leaned toward a lab escape. Yet within days, they were circulating a draft — including to Fauci and Collins — that came to the opposite conclusion, the first draft of which had been finished the same day of the conference call. How and why that rapid turnaround occurred has been the subject of much debate and interrogation.  

The authors have said, and repeated during Tuesday’s hearing, that new data had changed their minds, but the new Slack messages and emails show that their initial inclination toward a lab escape remained long past that time.

So, yet again, we see that some people in government are comfortable with lying to the American people. This rule of thumb appears to include Collins and Fauci. Why they did this is unclear to me. It makes no sense that I can ferret out. 

Maybe this is at least partly why the radical right keeps howling about the horrors of Fauci. As usual, the liars in congress deploy the fun and easy KYMS propaganda tactic to avoid further embarrassment. One has to wonder if this leak was intentional or not.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

NOTE: This version of events has been disputed. The scientists involved may not have been lying due to the uncertainty present at the time, Feb. 2020. 

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This opinion piece about ethics in the NYT by a federal judge really resonated with me. Judge Michael Ponser writes:

The Supreme Court has avoided imposing a formal ethical apparatus on itself like the one that applies to all other federal judges. I understand the general concern, in part. A complaint mechanism could become a political tool to paralyze the court or a playground for gadflies. However, a skillfully drafted code could overcome this problem. Even a nonenforceable code that the justices formally pledged to respect would be an improvement on the current void.

Reasonable people may disagree on this. The more important, uncontroversial point is that if there will not be formal ethical constraints on our Supreme Court — or even if there will be — its justices must have functioning noses. They must keep themselves far from any conduct with a dubious aroma, even if it may not breach a formal rule.

The fact is, when you become a judge, stuff happens. Many years ago, as a fairly new federal magistrate judge, I was chatting about our kids with a local attorney I knew only slightly. As our conversation unfolded, he mentioned that he’d been planning to take his 10-year-old to a Red Sox game that weekend but their plan had fallen through. Would I like to use his tickets?

I was tempted. The tickets were beyond my usual price range, and the game would be a fun outing with my 7-year-old. It didn’t seem to me that the lawyer was trying to do anything improper. It seemed to be — and almost certainly was — just a spur-of-the-moment impulse arising out of a friendly conversation. Moreover, the seats at Fenway Park, like the much more expensive seat on the private jet used free by Justice Samuel Alito on his Alaska vacation, would probably go empty if I didn’t take them. Who would be harmed?

To my chagrin, as I pondered the situation, I became aware of an aroma of something off. Not an actual smell, of course, but something like that — something like a whiff of milk on the verge of going sour or a pan left on the stove too long. It wasn’t that the lawyer had evil intent; it was that I was approaching a boundary. Silently gnashing my teeth, I turned the tickets down.

A few years later, after I’d received my appointment as a life-tenured U.S. district judge, I issued a decision reversing the Social Security Administration’s denial of disability benefits to an older plaintiff. I was in our clerk’s office one day when the man and his wife approached me with a package. He had a woodworking hobby, and inside the package was an exquisitely crafted oak pencil case with bronze hinges. My ruling had made a big difference for them, and they wanted to extend this modest, personal gesture of gratitude. Again, they were obviously not being underhanded. Their lawsuit was over, and this was probably the last they would ever see of me. Nevertheless, as my police officer friends tell me, the road to perdition starts with a free cup of coffee. As politely as I could, I turned the pencil case down. It still pains me to remember their embarrassed, crestfallen faces.

All my judicial colleagues, whoever has appointed them, run into situations like these regularly, and I expect they have responded in just the same way. You don’t just stay inside the lines; you stay well inside the lines. This is not a matter of politics or judicial philosophy. It is ethics in the trenches.

To me, this feels personal. For the country, it feels ominous. What in the world has happened to the Supreme Court’s nose?

One can clearly see the difference between ethical judges and the morally rotted scumbags who sit on the Supreme Court.

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Afghanistan update: An NPR segment that aired this morning reported that the Taliban are forcing all hair salons in Afghanistan because doing hair dos and makeup are un-Islamic. According to the report, hair salons are about the last place in open society that women are allowed to be and work. The woman NPR interviewed owns a hair salon and asked the Taliban thugs who came to make sure the salon would close by the deadline, sometime next month.

The woman asked the thugs how she could make money for their family. The thugs responded as one would expect, they told her that her not having a job was not their problem. They suggested that she could go sell slippers in the streets, which she can't do because unaccompanied women are generally not allowed on the streets. 

The woman's husband was been unemployed ever since the Taliban declared his work as a wedding photographer was un-Islamic. The Taliban had long ago banned women and girls from going to school and working in various jobs. 

By God, that $2.31 trillion the US spent so far on nation building in Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks built one hell of a nation. It's literally a Dark Ages hell on Earth. 

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From the Hooliganism Files: The NYT writes: 

California wildlife officials are hoping to apprehend a 5-year-old sea otter, who has a knack for riding the waves after committing longboard larceny. Named otter 841, she has committed surf board thefts and ridden the waves with them.  

For the past few summers, numerous surfers in Santa Cruz, Calif., have been victims of a crime at sea: boardjacking. The culprit is a female sea otter, who accosts the wave riders, seizing and even damaging their surfboards in the process.

Ms 841 stealing a surfboard

Officials plan to capture 841 and move her to a new habitat without surfboards.