Chris Cillizza (Substack), "CHRIS CRUCIAL: I screwed up"

Summary

A Substack newsletter post by Chris Cillizza titled "CHRIS CRUCIAL: I screwed up", dated Jan 28, 2025. Its first item says the CIA now believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and quotes an agency spokesperson that the CIA assesses "with low confidence" that a research-related origin is more likely. The author quotes a May 2020 analysis of the author's own that sided with Anthony Fauci over Donald Trump on the virus's origins. The post states that it now appears Trump was right and Fauci was wrong, and that the Energy Department reached the same conclusion around two years earlier. It closes with an invitation to continue reading or purchase a paid subscription.

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CHRIS CRUCIAL: I screwed up 😬

PLUS: The curious case of John Fetterman 🤔

Chris Cillizza

Jan 28, 2025

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1. On the origins of Covid-19

Over the weekend, the CIA made a major announcement: They now believe that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab leak from a Wuhan, China infectious disease laboratory rather than from an outdoor “wet” market.

“ CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a spokesperson for the agency told the Wall Street Journal.

The “low confidence” is a reflection of two things: 1) The CIA isn’t yet totally certain that the lab-leak theory is correct and 2) They will continue to analyze the data — and any new data that becomes available — to see whether it supports or contradicts the lab-leak theory.

In short: Covid-19 probably came from a lab.

Which, if you’re keeping track, is what Donald Trump and lots of prominent conservatives — most notably Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton — have been saying for a very long time now.

And, candidly, they have taken a lot of shit for it. Including from me.

Here’s the headline of a piece I wrote in May 2020 — right at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic:

In that analysis, I wrote :

For weeks now, President Donald Trump has been making the case that the coronavirus originated not in nature but in a lab in Wuhan, China. He said late last week that he had a “ high degree of confidence” that was what happened (although he didn’t specify why he felt that way) and on Sunday night in a Fox town hall offered cryptically “something happened.” Enter Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and perhaps the single most prominent doctor in the world at the moment. In an interview with National Geographic posted on Monday night, Fauci was definitive about the origins of the virus which has sickened more than a million Americans and killed more than 68,000 : “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.” Now, before we play the game of “he said, he said” remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump.

My belief then was that if this was a debate between Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci on the origins of a pandemic-level virus, I was going to go with the guy who spent his entire career studying this stuff, not the reality TV-star-turned-president.

Except, it now appears that the reality TV-star-turned-president was right. And Anthony Fauci was wrong.

(Sidebar: The CIA isn’t the only organization now saying Covid likely originated in a lab. Around this time two years ago, the Energy Department reached the same conclusion .)

Which reminds me of this meme :

I kid.

But, since I have always pledged to a) admit when I get something wrong and b) try to learn the lessons from my mistake so as not make them again, I think it’s worth a bit of serious self-reflection here.

So, without further ado, here are the wrong assumptions I made (and how I plan not to make them again):

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