Lab leak debate versus AI, tariffs, & TikTok
All part of the same game
Most international stories spark only surface-level debate. The human mind sees a national border and draws a conclusion before reading the evidence. Social media is much like a contagious disease that crosses borders without hesitation. The most recent example is tariffs.
The parallels between the lab leak debate, AI, and TikTok are interesting. All involve international influence, algorithmic control, and public perception shaped by borders rather than evidence.
A former lab leak reporter for the Intercept, now with the New York Times, investigated TikTok’s origins, beginning with an American businessman:
In 2009, long before Jeff Yass became a Republican megadonor, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, invested in a Chinese real estate start-up that boasted a sophisticated search algorithm.
Yass, it turns out, owns more of TikTok (via ByteDance) than the Chinese government does—1% versus Susquehanna’s 15%. For reference, the creator of the TikTok algorithm, Zhang Yiming, owns a 20% stake.
Yass’s American firm wasn’t a passive investor. He nurtured Zhang’s career and helped implement his powerful algorithm into TikTok’s app. The TikTok algorithm, invented by Zhang at ByteDance, excels in image understanding. ByteDance formed TikTok after it bought Musical.ly, which started with American kids lip-syncing on a California train.
In the summer of 2014, Alex Zhu, living in San Francisco and working for software giant SAP, had an epiphany on a commuter train in California, seated near a bunch of teenagers. “I would say 50 percent of those students were listening to music,” he says, “and the other 50 percent were taking selfies and putting digital stickers on top to create something hilarious and share it around.” Why not create a social media site where you could do both at once? Zhu and Yang (based in Shanghai) directed a skeleton crew of developers to assemble a prototype for Musical.ly, which went live in July 2014.
According to Senator Rand Paul and public information, 60% of TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is owned by international investors like Yass, 20% by Chinese co-founders, and the remaining 20% by employees, including 7,000 Americans.
The TikTok cofounder, Zhu, and ByteDance co-founder Zhang both stepped down in 2021 and were replaced by a new Singaporean CEO, Shou Chew, who was asked about potential connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Senator Tom Cotton was one of the first lab leakers, but he was only half right. The fact-checkers called him a conspiracy theorist, but he later claimed lab leak victory since “being proven right doesn’t matter. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.”
But like COVID-19, the TikTok algorithm itself has international roots. Initially designed as a real estate tool, it used viewership time to gauge user preferences. The algorithm was later fine-tuned in Singapore, where it remains based. It feeds users what they linger on most—whether homes, dance memes, or political content. As of November 2024, the international ByteDance board of directors consisted of:
Liang Rubo, Chinese co-founder of ByteDance
Arthur Dantchik, American director of Susquehanna International
William E. Ford, American CEO of General Atlantic
Xavier Niel, French businessman and owner of Iliad SA
Neil Shen, Chinese founder of HongShan hedge fund
Dancing to TikTok tariffs?
The TikTok phenomenon piggybacked off Dancing Nurses during Covid, so read the entire New York Times article by former Intercept lab leak reporter Mara Hvistendahl.
The kids loved dancing to Donald Trump memes but did not sleep to Joe Biden's naps. Trump won the battleground states (Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, etc.) because he loves tariffs. Little does the voting public know how modern supply chains work.
However, Trump decided against a TikTok ban since he has a “warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points.” Like Trump, the algorithm failed in real estate but took off in social media. Lip-syncing or karaoke is popular with American kids and Chinese adults.
Wuhan
Karaoke has cultural roots on both sides of the Pacific. Shi Zhengli and Linfa Wang, prominent virologists involved in coronavirus research, are known to enjoy karaoke. However, Western academics often sing the same tune regarding the origins of Covid, blaming Shi’s BSL2 lab. The public is unaware of how frequently frozen bat samples and vaccines cross borders.
In a CNN documentary on September 19, 2021, virologists Ralph Baric (UNC) and Dani Anderson (Duke-NUS) both pointed fingers at Shi’s BSL2:
DANIELLE ANDERSON, VIROLOGIST: All the procedures that I saw happening over there (WIV) would be the same as if in any other country that I've been in.
CNN: Danielle Anderson is the last and only foreign scientist to train and work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL4 labs. When she left Wuhan in November of 2019, she had no inkling of the pandemic to come. No word of an illness spreading in Wuhan. No rumors of sickened workers. In fact, she was planning to return in early 2020.
ANDERSON: You need to know the symptoms of that particular pathogen that you work with and if you experience any of those symptoms, they need to be reported.
CNN: She spoke to us from Australia where she now works at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne.
ANDERSON: With the BSL4 in particular, every day we have to take our temperature and our blood pressure, and it's recorded in a logbook. Also, at WIV, which is not something that's done everywhere. Before I ever stepped foot in the [WIV BSL4] lab, I went to the hospital, had a blood sample taken and that was stored.
CNN: Dr. Anderson worked on Ebola and Nipah virus in WIV's BSL4 labs, and she attests to the high standards at that specific level. But again, it's not the BSL4 that concerns Ralph Baric -- it's coronavirus being worked on at lower biosafety level conditions, like BSL2.
BARIC: The experiments that they did under the conditions that they did them were risky.
Two days after the CNN documentary aired, the DARPA Defuse proposal leaked, detailing Baric’s furin cleavage site for live bat testing by Dani Anderson. Both bat virologists went radio silent.
DARPA Defuse was reused as Fauci’s 2019 CREID proposal. Dani’s CV submitted to NIAID said she worked on “coronavirus replication” in “bats” at the “BSL4 facility in China.”
The Intercept sued Fauci’s NIAID for the CREID grant. They published it on September 6, 2021. Major Joseph Murphy read it, then leaked DARPA Defuse, and told us Fauci funded it. Ironically, former Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald thinks the Intercept made that FOIA request to “debunk” Fauci and Peter Daszak’s involvement.
Mara Hvistendahl, the former Intercept reporter who wrote the New York Times article about TikTok, is familiar to lab leak researchers. During an interview, she requested that mentions of Baric and his furin cleavage site be cut from the video, because Mara wouldn’t get a promotion to the New York Times if she implicated Baric.
Mara quietly said, “actually, I would cut this part because...”
Mara is an example of a brilliant reporter who is scared of national borders. She writes books on Chinese espionage (published in Vanity Fair) but doesn’t like American trade secrets.
During testimony, Baric was asked by the Covid committee how we protect ourselves from Chinese espionage?
So, I can tell you what things we put in place in the 2015 paper. For example, although we published the approaches for building molecular clones of coronaviruses, we never had anyone from Dr. Shi's lab or anyone from the Wuhan Institute of Virology come to our lab and train. We never taught them.
In fact, if you look at their cloning technology, they use baculoviruses. They may assemble some of the full-length molecules using some of the enzymes that we have, but they implant it directly into an insect virus to maintain it as a baculovirus, which was a technology developed in Europe, not my (cDNA) technology.
We think our approach is safer because we've divided the genome into six pieces, so there’s no way any of those can initiate an infection. And we don't assemble until we're in the BSL3. So, it's fundamentally safer than what was done by others.
In terms of how we built the chimera, we didn’t publish the sequence of the virus that we built, and we didn’t share the sequence of that chimera with anyone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, we didn't give them the template on how to build the recombinant virus.
The SARS2 genome was divided into six pieces, but Baric turned it into seven pieces to cover his biological tracks. It’s a biosecurity myth that knowledge can be shared since “we can know more than we can tell.” Most lab leak journalists think knowledge crosses borders more easily than genomes.
Before DARPA Defuse leaked, Baric said, “Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China.” He speaks in half-truths because, in February 2019, Baric sent his SARS2 chimera (CRG7 or UGGUCGC) to Fauci’s biodefense lab in Montana. Fauci’s aerosol specialist, Vincent Munster, then forwarded it to Dani Anderson, while DARPA Defuse was funded by Fauci in Washington, D.C.
Katherine Eban dug up even more dirt in Wuhan than in Washington, D.C. The Republican-led Covid committee gave her an advance copy of Baric’s 2024 testimony. The headline of her Vanity Fair article summarized the details of her reporting: Ralph Baric, Whose Virology Techniques Were Used in Wuhan, Testified That Lab Leak Was Possible.
There is no mention of Baric claiming a wet market in southern China was the source of Covid. There is no mention of Fauci secretly inviting Baric to the Feb 1 call. There is no mention of Baric “attacking” Kristian Andersen for suggesting his patented SARS2 genome “looks engineered.” However, Katherine mentioned that Baric testified that the Chinese could not copy his methods.
Throughout his interview, Baric took pains to emphasize to congressional investigators that he had not simply turned over his research techniques to his colleagues at the WIV. Referring to his 2015 research with Shi, he said, “Although we published the approaches for how to build molecular clones of coronaviruses, we never had anyone from Dr. Shi’s lab or any of the Wuhan Institute of Virology come to our lab and train. We never taught them.”
There are barriers to entry with high-end technology, so the Chinese couldn’t copy Baric’s cDNA, mRNA vaccines, or AI chips.
AI wars
Elon Musk once tweeted, “I tried using TikTok and felt their AI probing my brain, so I stopped.” In 2022, he bought Twitter for $44 billion to gain political influence, only to degrade its algorithm by elevating his posts. After Elon’s 2023 Super Bowl tweet had worse numbers than President Biden’s, he ordered changes to the algorithm. When a Twitter engineer told Elon that public interest in him had declined, Elon fired him.
Elon himself was fired from OpenAI after a failed takeover. He recently offered $97.4 billion for OpenAI, but its CEO countered with an offer to buy Twitter for its current valuation of $9.74 billion. One month later, Elon somehow sold Twitter (now called X) to his own xAI for $33 billion. Having already blocked OpenAI from accessing Twitter’s data, Elon soon faced another rival from China.
The Wall Street Journal noted:
The case of AI newcomer DeepSeek provides a counterexample to China’s state-led strategy. Rather than emerging out of a government lab, DeepSeek was built by a Chinese math geek who had founded a hedge fund. Many economists have argued that China could better rev up its economy by easing controls on its private sector, strengthening the country as it competes with the U.S., without many of the downsides of its state-led model.
The New York Times summarized the AI issue:
But then, as time wears on and people who are experts in this stuff start digging through the details, they’re coming to the conclusion that, well, yeah, maybe the cost is a little higher than DeepSeek claims. Maybe they have a few more chips than they’re telling us about. But in general, it seems like they actually just built a really good model using some very clever engineering techniques.
The hype surrounding the new Chinese AI company DeepSeek is all wrong. Nvidia has designed its high-end chips to comply with US regulations, allowing it to continue exporting to China. And the parent company of DeepSeek already had the illicit Nvidia A100 chips.
called DeepSeek a hedge fund looking for a competitive edge.
The DeepSeek’s software doesn’t gather its information from the web, but aggregates answers from other AIs—essentially piggybacking on the work of Google and OpenAI.
Pontificator Tyler Cowen expands:
The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)
One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.
You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–CCP terms, as a Taiwan query might be, [the Chinese DeepSeek] still thinks like an American.
AI vs Wiki
Similarly, American reporters like the lab leak debate, but hate the US lab origin evidence. However, AI is not a topic in the lab leak debate, like Wikipedia. Most Wiki pages can be easily edited, but not the lab leak theory, since it’s protected from edits.
The Wiki entry regarding DARPA Defuse claims, “There is no evidence that any genetic manipulation or reverse genetics (a technique required to make chimeric viruses) of SARS-related bat coronaviruses was ever carried out at the WIV.” That’s because the chimeric viruses were created by Baric at UNC and tested by Dani at the WIV.
I’ve started to stealth edit other parts of the Wikiverse for you footnote lovers:
Friedrich Loeffler Institute (FLI) in Germany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA, and Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, CO have Egyptian fruit bat colonies. These bats are born and bred in biolab captivity for infection research. CSU breeds the bats for Rocky Mountain Laboratories and their DARPA PREEMPT transmissible bat vaccine project. According to FLI, Egyptian fruit bats are a "reservoir host" and "useful model" for SARS-CoV-2 research, "although this species is certainly not the original reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 because these bats are not present in China, the epicentre of the pandemic."
Tyler Cowen claimed that persuading AI boosts our influence because many more people will follow the same route in the future. He also thinks the experts got Covid right, so take everything with a grain of salt. The “experts” even want to use AI to predict the next pandemic. It is likely that the experts will create the next pandemic, as they created Covid, and other experts covered it up.
I, for one, welcome our AI overlords if they listen to reason and logic. So, after inputting the five transmission models of Covid, I asked ChatGPT:
Why does COVID-19 from China transmit in North American white tailed deer, American deer mice, American mink, Egyptian fruit bats, and Syrian hamsters?
AI answered:
So when SARS-CoV-2 emerges in non-Chinese, lab-associated mammals across continents, it raises the possibility that this wasn’t a natural emergence at all—but a spillover of a virus already optimized in lab-relevant animals.
Ultimately, TikTok, AI, and Covid share a critical irony: all were funded and created in America before being exported to China.
New White House lab leak website
https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/
EcoHealth reborn
After more than 50 years of operations in the USA and around the world, EcoHealth Alliance (formerly Wildlife Trust, and before that Wildlife Preservation Trust International) is closing its doors. As I write this EcoHealth Alliance’s headquarter offices in New York are already closed, and only a handful of staff members remain to finalize the official dissolution of the organization.
All is not lost, however.
In January 2025, a group of us – former EcoHealth Alliance staff and collaborators – decided that we weren’t going to let the important mission of this organization end. Over the last few months, we’ve been hard at work incorporating a new nonprofit, setting up our programs, and building the framework for the mission to continue. Now, five years since EcoHealth Alliance was first targeted politically, we are announcing the launch of Nature.Health.Global., Inc. a nonprofit that conducts scientific research and designs on-the-ground solutions for conservation and global health.
https://naturehealthglobal.org/announcing-the-launch-of-nature-health-global/
Fauci’s bodyguards
Fauci negotiating an extra week on retirement (Jan 2023) for extra bodyguards (MOU).
https://dailycaller.com/2025/04/18/anthony-fauci-retirement-net-worth-congress/
New NIAID director resurrected 1918 flu
https://www.science.org/content/article/researcher-1918-flu-virus-takes-over-niaid
Speaking of AI, I asked Grok to execute a Monte Carlo simulation using Python. The aim was to estimate the likelihood of the double CGG codon motif emerging via natural selection among diverse mammalian host species. Simulation outcomes suggest that human represents the most plausible natural host.
The URL of outcomes is as following: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_bde4e98f-8191-4961-8eef-5976aca09493
This is simply ANOTHER victory lap in a game already played and won. The previous two pieces were grand slams, which left Mudville already dispirited and hopeless. In a 'non-upside down world' the "flailing NYT" would already have been relegated to the dust bins of history, and our brainiac author here elevated to some kind of "DOGE-like" position of "DOG-Catcher and Fauci/Baric/Daszak Kennel Master. But these are not those times... and we are not privileged with the full disclosure of the really big crimes behind it all. So for now, these masterful tongue-in-cheek allusions to the cloying nepotism and mediocrity of it all - are all we get to enjoy, like some kind of peep-show peek into a reality still occluded from full view.