Did 60 Minutes Wrongly Accuse Mike Pompeo of Reviving a Debunked Theory About Coronavirus?

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On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “attempted to resurrect a debunked theory that [coronavirus] was manmade in China.” The reporting was quickly disputed by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, while others on Twitter took issue with 60 Minutes’ tweet about the segment, including Sohrab Ahmari, whose take was given additional attention thanks to a retweet from Donald Trump Jr.:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Stephen Maturin

    This is just one more example of, if the media wants to get you, they will get you.
    Politicians are talking all the time. Inevitably a foot will be put in a mouth from time to time. Take Obama for example. He was as smooth an orator as you could ask for. Yes he depended heavily on his script, but he was smooth. Even he slipped up from time to time. The difference here, which is my major beef with the media, is that when Obama or Biden or Pelosi or Clinton say something stupid, even by accident, nobody pays much attention in the media. When Bush or Dole or Romney or Palin or Trump say something dumb, we get bombarded from the media at the highest levels.
    Did Pompeo mean to indicate that the virus is man-made? I doubt it. Could he have misspoken? That is probably the simplest explanation. But rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt, as they would for a democrat, CBS blasts the news all over Twitter, etc.
    The tweet from CBS is the worst, since they knew that Pompeo's answer was, at the worst, ambiguous. They still chose to tweet out that he still thinks the virus was engineered in a lab. Engineered! Can you believe that idiot!?! Ha! Ha!

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  2. John Quillin

    ? Assuming it was a lab accident -- is there a theory as to how the lab would have gotten the virus initially?

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    1. Luke Thompson

      The lab was studying coronaviruses. I'm pretty sure that was widely known beforehand.

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    Pat Riot

    Forget about his both-sides-of-the-mouth dog whistling about it being manmade/not and focus on the bigger, more dangerous lie that China essentially *chose* to give this virus to us. He is basically trying to blame Trump's catastrophic incompetence that lead to 100k American deaths on China.

    Most Americans are going to see right through Trump and Pompeo's ploy, but the sad fact is that millions of Americans are going to conclude, "China did this to us" which isn't true.

    The 60 Minutes statement, "Last Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attempted to resurrect a debunked theory that the virus was manmade in China." is absolutely positively *true*. Pompeo is dog whistling this to Trump's base and they only heard the first part, which the rest of his statements show.

    60 Minutes could have shown the rest of his statement (and they should have) and their point would have been exactly the same.

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      Paul Reichardt

      And it wouldn't be the Pompeo's first orally-ambidextrous rodeo...
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-usa/pompeo-tiptoes-away-from-talk-of-imminent-attack-planned-by-irans-soleimani-idUSKBN1Z61TE

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    2. Dave D.

      This is so utterly ridiculous that I can't believe that you believe it, but are simply trolling in bad faith. He misspoke. That is completely obvious from the clip. It would be a really ineffective way to try to make the "dog whistle" for his base by "agreeing with the intelligence community" in that same statement. And how can you say China didn't do this to us? Specifically, the Chinese regime? They intentionally suppressed warnings from scientists and clinicians in Wuhan, while shutting down travel within the country but not outside from the same region. This is a documented fact. And the point has nothing to do with Trump--they chose to put us all at risk to try to get away with keeping this under wraps.

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        Pat Riot

        The way he misspoke was *awful* convenient is all, and perfectly in tune with his deflecting of the problem to China.

        We know China lied for the first few weeks *because we knew the truth*. Our IC knew what was going on there and briefed Trump on it, who promptly ignored them and held more rallies. There is no way China could have magically made our response to the crisis so incompetent.

        And there's no blaming of China for the difference between South Korea's response and ours. Etc.


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        1. Luke Thompson

          If you exclude New York, where both the governor and the NYC mayor publicly fought with the President and encouraged people to go out after he'd made it clear that they shouldn't, our number of cases and deaths drop significantly. When you include the fact that new research is showing that most of the cases in the US came from NY, blaming the President looks even more ridiculous.

          What did Trump do so much better than Charles Michel and Sophie Wilmes that Belgium's per capita death rate is currently three times ours?

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            Pat Riot

            So wait, Cuomo had control over all of the Federal agencies in charge of dealing with pandemic threats to the USA? Cuomo got daily intelligence briefings from our Intelligence Community telling him in December that the threat was real and China wasn't publicly divulging everything? Cuomo has the ability to mobilize companies to produce necessary goods in times of emergencies e.g. tests?

            Cuomo is followed by millions on Twitter and covered every single day on Fox News? Cuomo has absolute control over his party and controls the messaging from that party to set the tone for half of the country?

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    Kyzyl Tuva

    CBS (and other MSM outfits) have been so dishonest through this crisis. Substantiated allegations that they formed fake testing lines for good filming opportunity to the Pompeo interview and 60-Minutes story and Bill Barr interview. Selective editing is as good as lying. If only Trump was better able to make a point without baiting them. It's all so disgusting and this is the reason why I am a member of The Dispatch.

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    Kevin Durant?

    The best part is the Chinese apologist at the end who says

    “This has closed down communication with scientists in China and we need that communication to understand how they are controlling the virus. Sadly this will cost lives.”

    Communicate? So the reason they did not communicate the risk initially to anyone was because they knew we would be rudely making fun of their crappy scientists 4 months later? Really?

    I mean.......💀💀💀💀💀🦇🦇🦇

    They also do the whole
    “There is no evidence....”
    thing which is Democrat shorthand for something that badly needs to be investigated but hasn’t been

    Gross. CBS is utter trash

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      Pat Riot

      China has a ton of data on their outbreak we can use, and already have used. We need this to understand how to treat people better, for instance. It's asinine to cut that off because of conspiracy theories.

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        Jake

        It’s unfortunate they didn’t share their data before this became an outbreak. How can anyone believe their data at this point? I hope our medical and scientific communities vet everything that comes out of China. They are not trustworthy, IMO.

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          Pat Riot

          The data is *from* the outbreak. And our scientists are believing their data in the same way they believe any data that comes in.

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        Kevin Durant?

        It isn’t a conspiracy theory, it is one of the two possibilities:

        -wet market
        -lab accident

        The reason you are lobbying so hard on behalf of the Chinese for the wet market option, even though creating a pandemic with barbarism isn’t a great look, is because you can easily defend it with baseless charges of racism

        You can’t abide the lab accident version because that would connect communism with technological failure which diminishes the sophisticated facade of your favorite governing philosophy

        Yay CCP!!! 🦇🦇🦇

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          Pat Riot

          I am not "lobbying" for anything. (?)

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        2. Luke Thompson

          And that still doesn't avoid the fact that it's now been proven from their internal documents (as if their numbers didn't provide enough proof) that they lied to the WHO about the very data in question.

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            Kevin Durant?

            They stopped travel from Wuhan within the country and maintained flights from Wuhan out of the country. It was an act of violence

            Actually, they just had a disaster and, rightly, calculated that *they* would look less bad if *everybody* had a disaster

            I’m sure that during Chernobyl, Russia would have triggered a meltdown at other countries’ reactors too if they could

            Have you seen ‘Billy Madison’ where Adam Sandler’s character makes all of the kids pee their pants so the one kid who peed his pants doesn’t look so bad? It’s like that

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  6. Luke Thompson

    After watching the exchange a few times, it seems really unlikely that this was anything other than Pompeo accidentally leaving out the word "not" in the initial statement (or more likely, he meant to say "wasn't"). Looking at the full transcript again, Raddatz had just mentioned the DNI memo and that they didn't believe it was manmade. For Pompeo to have meant to say that it was manmade doesn't make sense (and he certainly wouldn't have said the opposite only moments later). His statement, in context, appears to have been in frustration at her asking him to contradict what she'd just pointed out the DNI believes. (Hence starting with "Look")

    Framing it as walking the statement back when it's not clear that he even realized that he'd said anything different at the time seems dishonest. He definitely wasn't trying to have it both ways, as the clip claimed.

    I certainly disagree with your assertion that his intent was "anything but clear." The answer to the title should be yes. I don't think anyone acting in good faith could agree with 60 Minutes' assertion in the clip, and the added context that she had just brought up the same memo makes it clear that this isn't Pompeo being challenged and backtracking, as they tried to imply.

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      A Citizen

      What you say here is so obviously correct that only in a low trust environment like we see today is this even a controversy. It also applies even worse to Donald Trump, whose syntax and forethought in his best utterances is challenging to parse. The best example of this is the "bleach incident." It is, I think, impossible to play that tape and fairly think that he was asking anyone to take bleach, or even that he was asking doctors to experiment with bleach. But we do not live in a time of generosity of spirit for the inarticulate.

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      1. Vermin8

        The inarticulate should not be in such positions of high authority. If they can't clearly convey their thoughts how do they negotiate with other leaders, domestic or foreign?

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        1. Luke Thompson

          Pompeo really doesn't count here. You're not going to find someone who never misspeaks, especially when they're responding to what they clearly thought was a stupid question.

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          1. Vermin8

            You are correct - we will not. I'm thinking of Obama and "57 states," W and his gaffes, and Clinton's infamous "it depends on what the meaning of "is" is." But it's best not to pretend that one didn't say it.
            And being handed a stupid question is not an excuse for a stupid answer.

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          A Citizen

          I agree with you completely. We shouldn't elect inarticulate people. But we did. Conditional on having done so, it behooves us all to try and interpret what he says on a good faith basis. I don't see that being done.

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            A Citizen

            And by the way, the upcoming election suggests that the American people don't value the ability of their leaders to articulate themselves very highly. This is unfortunate, as I said. But I have no solution.

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        Pat Riot

        Not for the President of the United States in a time when thousands are dying each day, no, we're not too patient with utter mind-numbing incompetence...

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          Kevin Durant?

          Be honest, Pat. You have treated conservatives like garbage your entire life. It did not start with Trump + COVID

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          1. Avatar photo
            Pat Riot

            Voted for Republican presidents until Obama's second term...

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          A Citizen

          I forgot which state he was governor of. Can you remind me?

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  7. Avatar photo
    Kevin Durant?

    They also intentionally conflate the lab accident theory with the engineered theory in a way that is totally dishonest

    Pompeo clearly just misspoke and immediately agreed when corrected. That isn’t taking both sides of an issue. It is a lie to say he was taking both sides of an issue. CBS was lying because they are Democrats and that’s what they do

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    1. Vermin8

      They aren't lying. Pompeo said one thing. When questioned again, he said the complete opposite. That's a fact and it's on tape.
      Do I think he just misspoke or stumbled over his words? It's quite possible (and I do get the difference between manmade virus versus lab accident). But he should have acknowledged his mistake rather than just keep talking like he didn't say he thought the virus was manmade. He did.

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      1. Luke Thompson

        If there's a significant possibility he misspoke (and I don't think there's a significant possibility that he didn't), the clip lied by saying he tried to have it both ways. They're clearly trying to add intent to a situation where there's no evidence for it. (And I don't think he realized he'd misspoken.)

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        1. Vermin8

          He might not have realized that he misspoke during the interview. But there is plenty of opportunity since them for him to admit his mistake since then.
          By not acknowledging his mistake, he does make it appear that he's trying to have it both ways. I don't think that's what he meant but HE made the mistake.

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          1. Luke Thompson

            I would assume they think he adequately corrected it in the interview. When you watch the whole thing, there's simply no way to come away with the impression that he thought otherwise, so why bother apologizing for something that didn't actually do any harm or cause any actual confusion? 60 Minutes didn't include the fact that they'd literally just discussed the DNI memo; they'd hardly include the fact that he said he misspoke.

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    Kevin Durant?

    “and elided the secretary’s acknowledgement, moments later, that the intelligence community has concluded the virus is not manmade”
    —————————————-
    Elided? Eh lied

    Same thing Chuck Todd just did to Bill Barr

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About Alec Dent

Alec Dent is the culture editor and a staff writer for The Dispatch. He is a graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill, and previously oversaw The Dispatch's fact checking team.
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