Bob Kadlec: "I call it virological Russian roulette"

In a devastating review of Dr. Robert Kadlec's work on the origin of COVID-19, Wendy Orent highlighted a revealing September 2024 discussion between Kadlec and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX). Prompted by Orent’s find, I listened myself as Dr. Kadlec told Rep. Crenshaw that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered by pasting together bits from bat and pangolin viruses found in the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guangdong, and Zhejiang.

Kadlec called it "virological Russian roulette" and Crenshaw was stunned: "So they combine three viruses into one super virus!"

There is only one problem: every part of this claim was already known to be false by early 2020.

With the war with Iran bringing counter-proliferation to the forefront, the person responsible for separating existential threats from science fiction is a man who cannot tell the difference.

Kadlec's career between mid-2021 and late 2025 focused on COVID-19 origins, piling falsehood upon falsehood and culminating in a white paper speculating that the pandemic was an accident of mind-control bioweapons research 🤯. This absurd mad scientist story was compelling for certain audiences. Judith Miller, who'd spent 2001 to 2003 passing on unsubstantiated tales of Iraqi mad scientists in the New York Times, fell for Kadlec's fiction as well, writing that the "virus released from the lab in China may well have been part of that offensive bioweapons effort."

Prior to his latest white paper, Kadlec's errors propagated into reporting from Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair and Jeff Kao of ProPublica [link omitted; the ProPublica Guild is on strike] and a report from the Senate HELP committee. Last month, Kadlec was confirmed as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence, Chemical, and Biological Defense, Policy and Programs.

With the war with Iran bringing counter-proliferation to the forefront, the person responsible for separating existential threats from science fiction is a man who cannot tell the difference. Entrusting a key role in national defense to someone untethered from reality is a staggering risk.

The simplest demonstration of Kadlec’s ineptitude starts with the half-billion-dollar air conditioner.

In August 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (TX) was publicizing his investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic from the minority staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. One detail was particularly compelling for the DC audience. Josh Rogin wrote in the Washington Post that McCaul had unearthed plans from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that had been "scrubbed from the Chinese Ministry of Finance website" to "completely renovate its air conditioning system for an estimated $606 million." None of this was true.

The golden rule of lab leak commentary: evidence is irrelevant and easily replaced when it turns out to be wrong, yet commentators only become more confident in the conclusion.

First, McCaul hadn't unearthed anything. The report cited a link that had been posted to Twitter by a conspiracy theorist nine months earlier. Second, the document wasn't scrubbed from the Internet; it was online when Rogin published in August 2021 and remained online until at least December 2022. Finally, McCaul's report listed the estimated cost of the air conditioner work as $606 million rather than the correct value of $606 thousand. The thousand-fold error arose from relying on Google Translate, which, at the time, struggled with the Chinese character for 10,000 (万) when paired with decimals.

Rogin's story was corrected on the number, but not on the other errors. A thousand-fold change in evidence that Rogin considered important had zero impact on anything else in his op-ed. The same thing happened in the Wall Street Journal, where Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Marc Siegel wrote that, "[WIV] put out requests for more than $600 million for a new ventilation system. What prompted this new need?" Likewise, this article was amended to replace the badly wrong number, with no other changes. The golden rule of lab leak commentary: evidence is irrelevant and easily replaced when it turns out to be wrong, yet commentators only become more confident in the conclusion.

Of course, none of these mistakes should've been made in the first place. Because air conditioners don't cost 600 million dollars. In China, the state news agency Xinhua noted that "it was sad to see some U.S. congressmen and major U.S. newspapers making such errors, and multiple gatekeepers failed to catch them." It was a gift for Chinese propagandists, who wrote that it exposed "a lack of independent and rigorous professionalism" in the U.S. government.

Kadlec's work began in mid-2021, just as this mess was playing out. Surely, he wouldn't repeat exactly the same mistake?

A few times a year since 2020, a story will be reported that's heralded as the latest bit of evidence that COVID-19 began as a lab accident in Wuhan. These stories never hold up to scrutiny, yet few pay attention for long enough to notice. Rare corrections are accompanied by curious statements that, actually, evidence is immaterial. And so, the political-media Zeitgeist on COVID-19 origins is a monotonically increasing certainty that, surely, there must be something to the lab leak theory.

In October 2022, the latest story of this type, "Investigating a 'Complex and Grave Situation' Inside a Wuhan Lab" was written by Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao for Vanity Fair and ProPublica [link omitted; the ProPublica Guild is on strike]. Their investigative reporting was endowed by a $5M grant from the Bankman-Fried family to "look holistically at biothreats, including the security of labs around the world doing cutting-edge research." Infectious disease risks posed by the wildlife trade were not mentioned. The unspent portion of the grant was returned when Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud was exposed.

When the report became public a few months after it had been lauded in Vanity Fair, the Halloween themed font on its cover hinted that it wasn't as serious as promised.

The subject of Eban and Kao's reporting: the investigation into COVID-19 origins that Kadlec led for the Senate HELP committee. The story was headed by a gritty, film noir portrait of Toy Reid, a self-proclaimed expert in the "secret language of Chinese officialdom." Reid's fanciful translations, the basis of Kadlec's conclusion that he'd uncovered evidence of a "biocontainment incident shortly before the virus began infecting its first victims," were a red flag for James Fallows whose "BS-detectors all switched on when [he] first read this." Independent language experts panned the translations, and so did some of those consulted by Vanity Fair and ProPublica in post-publication fact checking [link omitted; the ProPublica Guild is on strike].

Although the story described "a detailed 236-page analysis that Reid drafted as a companion report" and "advance access to hundreds of pages of the Senate researchers’ findings and analysis," the report itself was not published at the time. Eban and Kao wrote that they had "spent five months investigating their underlying evidence." When the report became public a few months after it had been lauded in Vanity Fair, the Halloween themed font on its cover hinted that it wasn't as serious as promised. When Sen. Roger Marshall (KS) published the report in April 2023, he replaced the embarrassing cover, but this remained:

Four days later, on September 16, 2019, the WIV issued a notice on a PRC government procurement website seeking consultation for a “central air conditioning renovation project.” The approximately U.S. $500M renovation project at the WIV Zhengdian campus was estimated to take 210 days.

It was the same mistake from two years earlier, updating only the exchange rate. So, no one on Kadlec's team or any of the investigative reporters who'd scrutinized his work for five months thought to question a half-billion-dollar air conditioner. Even that renegade code breaker Toy Reid, glamorized in Vanity Fair, couldn’t spot the obvious machine translation error that’d been corrected in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

As far as the evidence goes, the air conditioner is an absurd example of a meaningless falsehood that persisted for years. But, when it comes to the scientific evidence, Eban and Kao's reporting was clear: in a section headed "Scientifically, Technically Not Possible" they revealed that a Chinese scientist had been the "first researcher in the world to apply for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine" and experts argued that the work had been impossibly fast. The section ends with an ominous note that Toy Reid had discovered in a paper that the Chinese researcher, "was listed as 'deceased.' The circumstances of his death have not been disclosed."

Of course, this also was not true. This was not the first COVID-19 vaccine patent application, and the story was corrected [link omitted; the ProPublica Guild is on strike]. As per the golden rule of lab leak commentary, Eban and Kao simply came up with another reason, also wrong, about why the timing was suspicious. And Toy Reid hadn't uncovered any mysterious death—this had been conspiracy fodder for over a year before Kadlec's investigation began.

But it wasn’t until Kadlec’s investigative work for the Senate ended and he set off on his own that he compounded these errors with mind-control science fiction.

The independent phase of Kadlec’s investigative journey is where he moved from ineptly repeating others’ mistakes to actively warping reality, ignoring most critical errors outright, and inviting others to help whitewash another.

After his work for Congress, Kadlec took a position as a senior fellow at the Snowcroft Institute of the Bush School at Texas A&M and published a series of white papers. The title of the first was a mouthful:

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF COVID-19 ORIGINS: "HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT"
MUDDY WATERS UPDATE: FIRST INSTALLMENT

Kadlec has a flair for long titles (above: ‘Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19: The end of the beginning…’). If there’s another reboot of Mr. Show With Bob & David, they might consider this as a follow up to ‘The Return of the Curse of the Creature’s Ghost’ and ‘The Story of the Story of Everest: A Laugh Riot.’

Published in September 2024, it had a new twist on a three-year-old error. This time, Kadlec noted a WIV procurement notice for an "approximately $55.1M (USD) renovation" for "central air conditioning." In addition to adjusting for exchange rates, Kadlec must have learned of the mistake in his 2022 report (which has never been corrected).

And yet, even after recognizing the mistake, Kadlec had only changed a 1000-fold error to a 100-fold error. An anonymous email to the Dean of the Bush School raised this concern:

This error was highlighted years ago and I’m surprised Kadlec is unaware. It is inexplicable to make a minor correction in the right direction and still not get it right.

Obviously, any conclusions drawn from the magnitude of this expenditure in Kadlec’s report must be reversed. I am sure TAMU recognizes the importance of this as a matter of research integrity. Especially so given the magnitude of the allegations that Kadlec makes — significantly based on this number as important evidence.

Within a couple days, an updated version of the report was published (ironically, the first version was, in fact, scrubbed from the Internet). The text "$55.1M" was edited to "$550k" and, as always, no conclusions were changed. A thousand-fold collapse in the value of Kadlec’s supporting evidence only made him more confident than ever.

But it was only with Kadlec's final report in July 2025 that the guard rails came off and we learned what underpins his research: objective falsehoods, creationist molecular genetics, and science fiction conspiracism. Shortly after that, he was confirmed as an Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Vaccine Fiction

Dr. Kadlec theorizes that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory accident in a secret Chinese military program attempting to develop a vaccine “to protect against a novel coronavirus’ neurological effects.”

The military connection is a new emphasis in Kadlec’s independent work, which centers on the research of Yusen Zhou at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, part of the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences. The closest equivalent in the United States is the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, the leading lab for U.S. biodefense research). Kadlec’s latest report names “General Zhou” 63 times compared to zero times in his report for the Senate HELP committee. Kadlec served in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a Colonel, the same rank as the current USAMRIID commander, and has played key roles in US biodefense since. However, there is no need to—nor is it be rational to—invoke Kadlec’s military and government connections to raise suspicion about his report. Because Kadlec’s falsehoods speak for themselves.

The core of Kadlec’s theory rests on a vaccine conspiracy theory comprising three critical errors. 

First, Kadlec misrepresents the timeline, claiming that Zhou’s February 24, 2020 patent application implies research began in November 2019 at the latest, despite the actual patent data suggesting otherwise. He estimates a 4-month development timeline based upon a figure from a 2017 paper on MERS vaccine development. That two-stage timeline included optimizing dosing schedules and then vaccinating mice susceptible to MERS-CoV infection, boosting after 4 weeks, challenging them with live virus 12 weeks later, and observing them for 3 more weeks. However, the COVID-19 vaccine patent tells a far different story. Rather than a timeline of months, the patent describes only a single dose, with samples collected after only 12 days and assayed only for antibody production. The two months between first recognizing the outbreak in Wuhan and submitting the patent application provided more than enough time for this work.

The actual data described in the patent application was never described in any of Kadlec’s reports, it was not described in the article in Vanity Fair, and it was not described in the correction published by ProPublica [links omitted; the ProPublica Guild is on strike]. The correction cleverly described the content of “[Zhou’s] patent application and in subsequently published papers,” but the earliest paper was submitted on April 29 and is irrelevant to whether a February 24 patent application was suspiciously early. The only way to make sense of this is that out of Katherine Eban, Jeff Kao, and the experts they turned to for analysis, no one bothered to do the minimal due diligence and look at the patent application itself.

Second, Kadlec misrepresents where the work was done. He claims the location of the animal challenge studies for Zhou’s vaccine was "not identified." He speculates that this implies clandestine Wuhan-based research and even produces a map pinpointing the Animal Biosafety Level 3 (ABSL3) lab in Wuhan where he suspects this work occurred (thus, explaining why the outbreak occurred in Wuhan). However, his pins are off by over half a kilometer, pointing to a tunnel entrance and a university rec center rather than research labs. Now that Kadlec is an Assistant Secretary of Defense, what once was a laughable error hits differently since the tragedy in Minab on February 28, reportedly a consequence of relying on poor targeting data.

Kadlec also links Zhou’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to Wuhan via co-authorship of a paper with Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Kadlec does not mention if he would have the same theory had an outbreak started in Minnesota or New York, where other co-authors worked.

But, the main reason Kadlec identifies to suspect the work was done in Wuhan is, he says,  that “Zhou’s AMMS team did not identify where they conducted these animal vaccine challenge studies.” He says there is no way to tell whether one study with mice and another study with monkeys and mice  were performed in Wuhan or in Beijing. Authors’ affiliations in the studies are overwhelmingly in Beijing and also in Shanghai, Changchun, and Tianjin. Wuhan is nowhere to be found. Yet, a quick glance at the supplementary material for both papers reveals that all work with infectious SARS-CoV-2 (e.g., all animal vaccine challenge studies) was done in Beijing. Once again, it’s simply a reading comprehension failure.

Lastly, Kadlec alleges a cover up that never happened. Tragically, Yusen Zhou died in 2020. It was Zhou whom Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao were describing when they oddly noted that the “circumstances of his death have not been disclosed.” This note was orphaned in their story with zero significance to anything that came before or after. The only purpose of describing someone’s death in the story was to add some voyeuristic flair. Many others have written even more lurid stories of the same type. The introduction to Rand Paul’s book Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up is a fictionalized, Fu Manchu fantasy in which Zhengli Shi works, fearing for her life, in Wuhan under the thumb of Yusen Zhou. It gets much worse from there.

So, what evidence does Kadlec offer of some sort of cover up? Oddly, he says “neither the PLA nor the Government of China seems to have formally acknowledged” the death, while also describing how Zhou was memorialized in multiple publications, the first of which is what started this conspiracy theory in the first place. Not much of a cover up. Further, Kadlec notes that he can’t find mention of the “vaccine in any COVID-19 vaccine reviews published by researchers in China, including one by the PLA” and that “whereabouts of samples and data from General Zhou’s study remain a mystery.”

Once again, this is simply false and it’s another failure of due diligence on Kadlec’s part. A quick search for papers citing the 2020 and 2021 studies at the heart of the conspiracy theory finds the explanation: the name of the vaccine changed. What was referred to as “RBD-Fc Vacc” in pre-clinical research was named “SCoK” when it went to clinical trial. Kadlec’s speculation that “in theory, immunizing with this protein could afford protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection” is a safe bet given the phase I/II results. Development continued with an omicron-targeted version and so on.

These three errors were at the core of the Vanity Fair story that so many readers found compelling. Its editors never seriously reviewed it and that failure becomes more embarrassing every time Kadlec publishes a new installment.

Whitewashing the Record

This time around, when confronted with these errors, Kadlec’s response was not correction, but curated equivocation. I sent Kadlec notes demonstrating each error and heard back from the “Muddy Waters Update Report Team” in a few days with confirmation that they’d revisit the text and make sure that it was accurate.

However, nothing was corrected, and not because the “Team” was too busy. Within months, they'd solicited four reviews. Two reviewers found nothing to criticize, with one of them agreeing that the vaccination timeline was impossible, adding that there must be “21-28 days post-vaccination” observation and demonstrating an unfamiliarity with the patent (which includes data no more than 12 days after vaccination).

After several rambling pages, another reviewer, Roger Brent, acknowledges that a vaccine patent timeline starting in January 2020 is perfectly plausible. This, despite the fact that Brent also does not appear to have translated the patent to know that samples were collected after no more than 12 days since he treats the collection time as an unknown (“The description of the mouse immune response in the patent application does not rule out the possibility that the ELISA used to show serum immunity was set up to detect the faster-appearing IgM.”) Regardless, his writing implies that he knows the core of Kadlec’s theory (and the basis of the Vanity Fair article), that November 2019 isn’t an upper limit for starting the vaccine development timeline, is nonsense. But he doesn’t say so, and this sliver of criticism is buried in a rambling review that ends with the assessment that “Kadlec’s work moved human understanding a millimeter closer to that knowable truth.”

The review from Alina Chan starts the way that Brent’s ended: “Dr. Kadlec’s report is the most exhaustive Covid origins analysis … the type of extensive investigation that we should expect of our government.” Chan summarizes Kadlec’s report by conveniently leaving out the part of his theory in which SARS-CoV-2 was engineered to cause neurological symptoms as part of a bioweapons program. Chan joins in the pointlessly cruel speculation that Zhou’s death “is shrouded in mystery,” before, like Brent, half heartedly exonerating Zhou while not mentioning why Kadlec was in error. Chan writes that “the experiments in the patent could plausibly have been conducted starting in December” when January is perfectly plausible as well. Neither Chan nor Brent can bring themselves to speak plainly: Kadlec is wrong.

Creationist Molecular Genetics

Kadlec further argues that military researchers in China, before the pandemic, were not only developing a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, but that SARS-CoV-2 itself was a synthetic virus. Kadlec says his results “casts doubt on the IC [intelligence community] assessment that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not part of a military weapons research effort.”

I covered a somewhat less ridiculous, but no less false, version of Kadlec’s “virological Russian roulette” theory in a previous post. In Kadlec’s version, that outdated conspiracy theory (SARS-CoV-2 is a chimera of a bat and a pangolin virus) is mashed up with another that appeared dead on arrival as a very obvious and very weird propaganda campaign, yet persists to this day. For Kadlec, this theory involving bat viruses from Zhejiang province is impossible to drop because the lab work was done at a military research institute in Nanjing. Yet, the only relevance it has to the origins of COVID-19 is that it shows how viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 can naturally travel all the way to the East China Sea. Somehow, some even made it to Japan.

Perhaps the most technically absurd portion of the report is what can only be described as creationist molecular genetics. Kadlec claims that SARS-CoV-2 "contains a pattern of restriction enzyme sites that, while naturally occurring, are evenly distributed, suggesting a synthetic origin.” Here, he refers to one specific “restriction site” theory (claiming the distribution of a handful of nucleotides out of 29,903 in the SARS-CoV-2 genome is a fingerprint of genetic engineering). This popular theory involving enzymes called BsaI and BsmBI (which Kadlec sometimes calls Bsa1 and BsmB1) was plainly false when published and its authors omitted including contradictory evidence.

But Kadlec goes one step further and does the world a favor by proving that it’s usually trivial and invariably possible to construct such a cherry picked theory from a sufficiently long and complex genomic sequence. He also mentions enzymes FauI, BglI, EcoRI, and BstEII. Perhaps he’s simply not aware of the conspiracy theories about BamHI and BsaXI, and that’s why they weren’t included.

The Science Fiction

Not only does Kadlec say that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, he suggests it was engineered for a specific, sinister purpose. He says that his study “casts doubt on the IC [intelligence community] assessment that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not part of a military weapons research effort.”

Good news! That “RGD” is not, in fact, an artifact of human mind control experiments.

One thing Kadlec emphasizes over and over again is that the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein is somehow unique in sharing the amino acid sequence “RGD” only with a pangolin coronavirus. He suspects that the presence of this sequence in the virus, along with a clandestine project to vaccinate against it, “indicates an intent to promote immunity against a feature not seen before in SARS-related viruses that appears to play a central role in SARS-CoV-2’s neuropathology.”

Good news! That “RGD” is not, in fact, an artifact of human mind control experiments. It’s found at the same place in Spike in bat coronaviruses found all over: in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Japan, and even in Gloucestershire in South West England. Case closed.

The report regularly dips into this pure science fiction, speculating that the pandemic was a byproduct of a Chinese military focused on "biology-enabled warfare" and "mind-control.” Surprisingly, Kadlec finds evidence of these devious plans out in the open, authored by Chinese researchers publishing in U.S. government journals from Army University Press and AMSUS, The Society of Federal Health Professionals.

High Stakes

This level of conspiratorial thinking would be laughable if Kadlec were just another nobody. But he is not. Recent reports indicate that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is getting out of the biodefense business, ordering staffers to scrub "pandemic preparedness" and "biodefense" language from its website. If civilian health agencies are bowing out, this leaves the responsibility for biological threats to the Department of Defense. More specifically, it leaves it to the newly confirmed Assistant Secretary of Defense Bob Kadlec, a man who cannot reliably tell fact from fiction.

Kadlec's career between mid-2021 and late 2025 was singularly focused on investigating COVID-19 origins. Yet, during his Senate confirmation process, it was as if the recent five years of his career did not exist. There was no scrutiny of what Kadlec had dedicated his recent years to. He was given a free pass on his inability to discern basic reality in his own field. Now, he’s added nuclear deterrence to his portfolio. Is it a coincidence that the war with Iran, premised on counter-proliferation, isn’t going to plan?

Ultimately, the Kadlec saga exposes a reality: some powerful people do not care what is true and what is false. They are making critical decisions without bothering to verify facts. And the media often doesn’t care to get it right, either. Whenever the truth doesn’t matter to people with the power to determine biodefense policy, the rest of us are the ones left playing virological Russian roulette.