THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
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EDITORIAL
Merkley
on right
track with
forests
Sen. Jeff Merkley has ambitious ideas about mak-
ing federal forests healthier and less susceptible to
the sorts of horrendous wildfi res that devastated
parts of Oregon in September 2020.
Ambitious, and good.
The Oregon Democrat hopes to leverage his posi-
tion as chairman of the Senate Interior, Environment
and Related Agencies Subcommittee, the post he’s
held since February, to boost by billions of dollars
the federal government’s budget for work such as
thinning overcrowded forests and lighting prescribed
fi res to reduce fuel loads.
That’s precisely what millions of acres of federal
forests need in Oregon — including across parts of
the Blue Mountains in our northeast corner of the
state.
During a conference call with reporters last week,
Merkley said he will lobby the Biden administration
to spend at least $1 billion more each year on such
projects.
That’s a large sum.
But the task is bigger still.
In Oregon alone, Merkley said, forest improvement
projects totaling 2 million acres have already gone
through the environmental review process but are
awaiting money. The estimated cost: $388 million.
This would seem to be an ideal time for Merkley
to make his pitch. The scars from the terrible La-
bor Day weekend fi res have barely begun to heal.
Drought persists, with fi re danger likely to reach
extreme levels in much of Oregon this summer.
Moreover, as the senator mentioned, Biden is
proposing to spend vastly larger amounts of public
money — more than $2 trillion — on infrastructure
and other projects.
“Any plan to boost America’s infrastructure, create
jobs, and protect lives and our economy must include
responsible forest management,” Merkley said.
It’s no revelation, certainly, that federal forests are
ailing in many areas. Merkley himself, along with
Oregon’s other U.S. senator, Ron Wyden, and former
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., have advocated for more
than two decades for a more aggressive approach
in dealing with this dilemma. Our forests, and our
economy, will benefi t if Merkley secures signifi cant
fi nancial backing for the campaign.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
We need details from Wuhan
By Doyle McManus
Last week, President Joe Biden set
an example that all of us — Demo-
crat and Republican alike — should
embrace.
It wasn’t so much what he did — or-
dering U.S. intelligence agencies to take
a new look at the origins of COVID-19,
including whether the coronavirus that
causes the disease escaped accidentally
from a laboratory in China — as it was
the mindset that prompted his action.
For more than a year, debate about
the origins of the virus has been deeply
political, with former President Donald
Trump and many of his followers
embracing the lab-leak hypothesis,
while many of his detractors scoffed at
the idea.
Biden took a refreshingly different
approach: He’s keeping his mind open
to both possibilities and asking for
more information to get closer to the
truth.
When COVID-19 appeared in the
central Chinese city of Wuhan in late
2019, most scientists’ fi rst guess was
that it came via an animal-to-human
transfer, because that has been a fre-
quent route for viruses to spread.
Chinese offi cials said the source of
the pandemic appeared to be a “wet
market” that sold live animals. Wuhan
is home to a government-run research
center that specializes in studying
coronavirus, but offi cials there said the
strain found in humans didn’t match
anything they were working on.
Some scientists said the possibility
of a lab leak shouldn’t be ruled out, and
China hawks led by Sen. Tom Cotton,
R-Ark., said the theory deserved more
attention.
Trump initially ignored the issue
and even praised China’s govern-
ment for its “transparency.” But in the
spring of 2020, as the pandemic spread
uncontrolled across the United States,
he began to blame Beijing for what he
called the “China plague.”
He told reporters that he had seen
secret intelligence suggesting the virus
came from a lab. “I think they made a
horrible mistake and they didn’t want
to admit it,” he said.
Trump’s political motive was
transparent. He was under fi re for his
administration’s chaotic response to the
pandemic and he needed someone to
blame. “It’s China’s fault,” he said.
And after years of outlandish
falsehoods from the president, it was
diffi cult for Trump’s critics to believe
him, especially in the absence of any
publicly available evidence.
What was often lost, though, was
that there was little direct evidence to
support either the lab-leak or the wet
market hypothesis. The virus’s origin
remained stubbornly undetermined —
a frustrating fact for those who yearned
for a clear, uncluttered narrative.
Over time, paradoxically, that ab-
sence of new evidence shifted the scien-
tifi c debate. Researchers spent months
trying to determine what species had
spread the coronavirus to humans, and
came up empty-handed; maybe the lab-
leak theory wasn’t so unlikely after all.
Meanwhile, China’s government re-
mained uncooperative toward outside
inquiries. An international team sent
by the United Nations’ World Health
Organization got only limited access to
the Wuhan Institute and its databases.
The WHO chief said the results of the
visit were inconclusive: “All hypoth-
eses remain open and require further
study.” That prompted several groups
of scientists, including some who had
been skeptics about a lab leak, to write
open letters urging a new look at all
the possibilities.
In Washington, the U.S. intelligence
community had already told Biden —
and Congress — that it was divided:
Two agencies still leaned toward
animal-to-human transmission, one
favored the lab-leak idea, but none
were certain.
So the president asked them to look
again and report back in 90 days.
That didn’t add up to a major change
in policy — only an admission that
after more than a year, we don’t know
much more than when the pandemic
began. Francis Collins, the director
of the National Institutes of Health,
repeated his unchanged diagnosis last
week: “It is most likely that this virus
arose naturally, but we cannot exclude
the possibility of some kind of lab ac-
cident.”
This new inquiry may just end in
more uncertainty. And even if a scien-
tist or spy fi nds conclusive proof of how
the virus came to be, that won’t change
the course of the pandemic, or what
governments are doing to combat it.
But it could have consequences in
other ways. If the virus came from a
lab, there will be a worldwide demand
for tougher security standards, not only
in China but every other country that
does virus research as well. There will
be renewed debate over the wisdom of
“gain of function” experiments — re-
search that deliberately makes viruses
more potent as a step toward devising
defenses. And China’s authoritarian
government, which has claimed to deal
better with the pandemic than demo-
cratic countries, will suffer a serious
loss of infl uence and prestige.
Meanwhile, there are lessons here
for the rest of us. In scientifi c disputes,
resist the temptation to choose a side
based on the politics of the moment;
wait until the evidence comes in. And
get used to ambiguity. There’s no guar-
antee that a 90-day study will produce
clear answers. Some mysteries are
destined to remain unsolved.
On hearing of the new inquiry,
Trump, unsurprisingly, saw a very dif-
ferent lesson, but characteristically, it
was both self-referential and wrong:
“Now everybody is agreeing that I
was right.”
Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los
Angeles Times. Readers may send him
email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.
Texas proves that lack of masks doesn’t spell doom
By Cynthia M. Allen
FORT WORTH, Texas – My par-
ents, visiting from the East Coast,
were surprised (but not so disap-
pointed) to arrive in Texas and fi nd
so many people not wearing masks
and so few businesses requiring
them.
They were less surprised to learn
that despite nearly three months of
living without state-mandated pan-
demic restrictions, the COVID-19
caseload is still receding. Texas
never experienced the massive
spike in infections and deaths that
Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted and
that President Joe Biden insisted
would be the cost of such “Neander-
thal thinking.”
Indeed, Texas reported zero
COVID deaths on May 16, and
on Thursday, the lowest number
of hospitalizations from the virus
since the fi rst week of June 2020,
quite a victory for a state that’s
home to some 30 million people.
(According to the latest data from
The New York Times, Pennsylva-
nia, my parents’ home, reported 66
deaths on May 16. And the state’s
mask mandate is still in place.)
Maybe Abbott was lucky.
Or, given what we are learning
about COVID mandates’ inconsis-
tent outcomes, maybe he was right.
Whatever the case, he deserves
an apology.
It might be edifying to have the
president and the nation’s pre-
eminent infectious disease expert
admit not just that Texas’ success-
ful reopening was “confusing,” as
Fauci begrudgingly allowed, but
that their verbal assaults on its
governor’s decision proved to be
totally wrong. But the lost opportu-
nity to say “I told you so” isn’t the
great cost here.
The real loss is in public trust of
institutions and leaders, beginning
with the public health establish-
ment.
In fairness, public trust began
eroding long before national leaders
began pillorying Texas for allowing
its residents to decide for them-
selves when and if to go maskless.
From the earliest days of the
pandemic, health and political of-
fi cials (because sometimes the two
converge) have squandered public
confi dence by giving them incom-
plete and sometimes completely
inaccurate information.
No one should forget how, early
on, Fauci and other health experts,
spent weeks telling us that masks
were useless, not because that’s
what they believed, but because
they wanted to be sure there were
enough available for medical per-
sonnel.
Months later, when masks were
plentiful, Fauci began recommend-
ing “double masking” and scolding
those who remained skeptical of
their effi cacy. I can’t imagine why
they would be.
More recently, Centers for Disease
Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walen-
sky, testifying before the Senate,
emotionally defended her agency’s
guidance for summer camps (which
includes almost universal outdoor
masking) using a wildly inaccurate
description of the frequency with
which COVID is spread outdoors.
She referred to a single study that
said “less than 10 percent” of trans-
missions occurred outdoors.
One of the study’s authors quickly
clarifi ed that the likelihood of out-
door transmission is “still substan-
tially less than 1 percent.” Yet with
the school year about to end, the
CDC’s camp guidance still requires
masks for unvaccinated campers,
most of whom aren’t even eligible
for the shots.
And while the origins of COVID
remain unknown, detailed report-
ing that suggested a possible lab
mistake in China was for months
ignored or besmirched as racist and
absurd by public health offi cials
(among others). The only apparent
reasons is that the origin story was
associated with Donald Trump, who
admittedly isn’t the soul of cred-
ibility.
But a renewed interest in the lab
leak theory is fi nally so prominent
(and distanced enough from the
Trump era) that Biden has ordered
his administration to further inves-
tigate.
In fairness, every public-policy
maker during the pandemic de-
serves a modicum of grace, especial-
ly for decisions made early on when
so much was unknown.
But at this stage, our leaders
know a lot about what will serve
the public good and what further
erodes the public trust.
Admitting when they have erred
or miscalculated would help to start
rebuilding that trust.
Apologizing to Abbott would be a
good place to start.
Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Readers
may send her email at
cmallen@star-telegram.com.