The NY Times sent me an explainer for the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. It’s long. It’s very careful to present Both Sides at length. It’s what I’ve come to expect from the NY Times, a diligent, earnest explanation that gives equal weight to every position that requires some technical expertise to see through the bullshit to recognize that A) we’re in a realm of uncertainty, and B) that doesn’t mean every explanation is equally valid, and C) they’re giving disproportionate attention to a theory that has no supporting evidence. We don’t know every single intermediate step in the evolution of COVID-19, and can never know the full details of its origin, but that doesn’t imply that a claim that an intelligent Chinese designer intentionally constructed the virus in a lab.

So they cite a letter to Science signed by 18 people that says, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The letter doesn’t include any evidence. It doesn’t explain why we should consider the lab-leak hypothesis reasonable, while citing a WHO report that considers a lab accident to be “extremely unlikely”, only to dismiss it.

They cite an article in the Wall Street Journal as evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is “plausible”. Did they read the same article I did? Because that article starts with a group of Chinese miners who came down with a serious respiratory illness after collecting bat guano in an abandoned copper mine. Unless you think the Wuhan biological warfare scientists store their samples in bat shit in old caves, that only tells us that bats harbor all kinds of interesting and potentially horrible viruses, not that the viruses are intentionally created. The WSJ and the NYT do share a similar disease, though, bothsideritis. Notice the one-two punch in this short quote: first they tell us that lab origin is extremely unlikely, and then swivel to say the question divides the scientific community.

“If the world wants to shut down work that was not gain-of-function because of a conspiracy theory, that’s a huge mistake,” Dr. Daszak said earlier this year. ”This virus, it’s extremely unlikely that it came from a lab. If we focus on the lab issue and ignore what really happened, we do so at our ultimate peril.”

One question now dividing the scientific community is whether such experiments could have created SARS-CoV-2, either accidentally or as part of a deliberate effort to see which viruses could evolve into ones dangerous to humans.

I don’t think the scientific community is divided. There are a few scientists who think the lab leak hypothesis is possible and should be investigated more (but they lack any evidence), while the majority are saying “Wha…? But we already know viruses evolve rapidly, and that there are vast numbers of unknown viruses lurking in natural reservoirs, so why are you asking us to waste time on the least likely explanation?” And so it will go, round and round, with major news organizations feeding the conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Meanwhile, the strongest piece of evidence the conspiracy theorists can muster is the claim that the Chinese have been dodgy about allowing investigators in. This is nonsense. The head of the Wuhan labs, Zheng-Li Shi, explains.

Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinese Academy of Sciences, has engaged in a long-term study on natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV[16–18] and is among the first institutions that identified the SARS-CoV-2 after the COVID-19 outbreak.[2,19] In addition, WIV discovered a virus sequence (RaTG13) that shows a 96.2% genomic sequence identity match with the SARS-CoV-2 genome, in its archived bat samples collected in 2013.[2] These results lay a foundation for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, development of diagnostic methods, antiviral drug screening, and vaccine development; the findings also provide an important clue pertaining to the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Sadly, WIV was at the center of the misleading speculations regarding the origin of the virus, which were not fully clarified until a recent joint study was performed by an international expert team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese experts.

The joint expert team has been working in three groups, the epidemiology, molecular research, and animal and environment groups.[20] The experts have been working together through video conferences, onsite interviews and visits, and extensive discussions. Over the course of 4 weeks, the joint team studied massive volumes of epidemic-related data and visited some facilities, including the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (Wuhan P4 laboratory) run by WIV; in addition, they also visited the Huanan seafood market. The team interviewed local medical workers, laboratory researchers, scientists, market managers, residents, and recovered COVID-19 patients.

The joint team visited the Wuhan P4 laboratory, a facility which is the most widely speculated place of origin of the SARS-CoV-2. The Wuhan P4 laboratory is the first of such facilities to be constructed in China and runs high-level biosafety checks. The laboratory is a state-of-the-art design by French experts, jointly constructed by French and Chinese engineers and accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS). It was designed to be a laboratory studying highly classified pathogens and an international collaboration research center on emerging infectious diseases. All activities in this laboratory on specific viruses were qualified by the China National Health Commission (CNHC). All administration and management have been strictly regulated and regularly examined and reviewed by these two Chinese authorities. It has been examined by CNAS and CNHC four and three times, respectively, since its opening at the end of 2017. Currently, this laboratory is approved to study the Nipah virus, Ebola virus, Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus, and SARS-CoV-2. This laboratory has played a pivotal role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by way of animal model studies and inactivated vaccine development, drug screenings and tests, and basic research for understanding SARS-CoV-2.

The WHO joint team has had extensive exchanges with the laboratory manager, scientists, and staff and has highly appraised the cooperation, transparency, and openness of the WIV leadership and staff. The team concluded, “They upheld a very stringent and high-quality management system. Also proceeding from the current evidence, we regard the lab leak hypothesis as extremely unlikely” in a statement released to the media on February 9, 2021, Wuhan.[5]

Shi summarizes their goals.

In the past several decades, more than 70% of emerging or reemerging infectious diseases are zoonoses and were transmitted to humans from their animal reservoirs through intermediate hosts. A huge number of unknown viruses exist in their natural reservoirs and continue to evolve, which results in the generation of new strains. Many of these viruses may have intrinsic characteristics that enable them to cross species barriers and infect humans. The rapid global economic development, including urbanization, land usage, animal domestication, and intensive agriculture, increases the chances of contact between humans and wildlife, thereby increases the risk of interspecies transmission of viruses carried by wild animals. To prevent future zoonosis, the best strategy is long-term and extensive surveillance based on science. We need to learn about unknown viruses, assess the potential risks of interspecies transmission, pinpoint the hotspots of animal-human interfaces, and eventually prepare diagnosis methods and use them for monitoring high-risk animal and human populations. With this prophylactic strategy, we can rapidly identify and limit the rapid spread of emerging pathogens at the very early stage and prevent the next epidemic. To this end, it is necessary to unify experts from different disciplines, including microbiologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, clinical specialists, ecologists, sociologists, and policymakers, to work together on the basis of science.

Exactly. The Chinese labs are right there at the forefront of studying how zoonotic diseases emerge from animal reservoirs. It doesn’t help if, when a population is infected with a disease of natural origin, they grab the torches and pitchforks and descend in a mob on the laboratories that are trying to control the disease. Yeah, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is studying coronaviruses, because they knew these were a potential source of human pandemics; do you want to shut them down? Do you really think that an institution that was studying viruses is therefore the source of a virus?

The New York Times earned my contempt over a decade ago with their he said/she said approach to Intelligent Design creationism. They presented then their notion of balance, with long articles that highlighted creationism with equal weight to scientific studies of evolution. It drove me crazy then, and this is exactly the same thing here. The idea that the COVID-19 virus was the product of intentional design can be dismissed with a simple statement: we have no need of that hypothesis. Instead, the NY Times will quote Matt Yglesias and Tom Cotton insisting that we do, and conclude with this:

So what’s the truth?
We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.

Let’s pretend they’re equally plausible, and then find an excuse to blame China. That’s what this was really about.

This is cute. What’s the difference between politicians and scientists?

I have been thinking about how different people interpret data differently. And made this xkcd style graphic to illustrate this. pic.twitter.com/a8LvlmZxT7

— Jens von Bergmann (@vb_jens) March 17, 2021

There are at least two ways to look at that, though. My first assumption was that gosh, politicians are simply innumerate. But another perspective would be that politicians have an agenda and interpret data to fit a desired conclusion.

And then I read all the nonsense about attempts to pin the pandemic on an intentional conspiracy. The latest news is that workers at Wuhan labs were coming down sick before the pandemic hit.

A State Department fact sheet released by the Trump administration in January said that the researchers had gotten sick in autumn 2019 but did not go as far as to say they had been hospitalized. China reported to the World Health Organization that the first patient with Covid-like symptoms was recorded in Wuhan on December 8, 2019.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the intelligence surrounding the earlier hospitalizations.
Importantly, the intelligence community still does not know what the researchers were actually sick with, said the people briefed, and continues to have low confidence in its assessments of the virus’ precise origins beyond the fact that it came from China. “At the end of the day, there is still nothing definitive,” said one of the people who has seen the intelligence.

That last paragraph is the important one. I can believe that people were sloppy, that the labs may have been poorly managed, or that they were secure, but employed human beings who could get sick for reasons that had nothing to do with their work. But I have yet to see any evidence that the disease was engineered. There is no evidence that the workers had COVID-19. There is no reason to think this virus was the consequence of anything other than chance variation.

But that wouldn’t fit the teleological imperative!

This cartoon does sort of accurately illustrate how Muller’s Ratchet works, but like any metaphor, it drags in a lot of baggage.

xkcd

Here’s what I don’t like: every step involves intent. In the metaphor, every change has a purpose and brings in a functional element in addition to the random noise and degradation, and the recombination step is portrayed as combining specific, useful parts. Intelligent design creationists will love this cartoon, which is too bad.

I guess my primary objection is that last panel that says “…if you have an image editor that lets you spice together parts of two images, you can make a new version with the best parts of both“. Recombination doesn’t discriminate what parts are best. It’s random.

I’m seeing a lot of slack in my little town: I’m vaccinated, but I still wear a mask in public and shy away from getting within 2 meters of anyone, but apparently a lot of the locals think the pandemic is over and have stopped bothering. It doesn’t help that we have idiots everywhere who claim without evidence that masks and vaccines are bad things that violate their rights.

So look at this ninny virtue-signaling to his fellow ignorati.

Just wear the mask, guy.

And then there’s the new conspiracy theory going around: getting vaccinated turns you into a plague rat.

A conspiracy ripping through the anti-vax world may finally drive some anti-maskers to do the unthinkable: wear a mask and keep their distance.

The conspiracy—which comes in several shapes and sizes—more or less says the vaccinated will “shed” certain proteins onto the unvaccinated who will then suffer adverse effects. The main worry is the “shedding” will cause irregular menstruation, infertility, and miscarriages. The entirely baseless idea is a key cog in a larger conspiracy that COVID-19 was a ploy to depopulate the world, and the vaccine is what will cull the masses.

Experts say the conspiracy is born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work.

There has to be a limit to the absurdity, doesn’t there? First they bumble about claiming that a disease that has killed a half million people in the US doesn’t exist, and now they’re claiming that a disease that doesn’t exist and can’t exist is going to make everyone sterile. And they’re led by pseudo-intellectuals who have figured out that anything that causes fear will make them rich and famous.

There’s this guy named Jay Bhattacharya, whose claim to fame is that he is one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, that infantile libertarian whine that we ought to ignore all of epidemiology so that people will start spending money at businesses again. Back in January, he wrote this:

This is rather like Elon Musk claiming we’d have “zero new cases” by April…of 2020. Why does anyone listen to these wankers?

Do read this great debunking of Bhattacharya, but I think this is the most appropriate dismissal of his (and Musk’s) claims:

India reports daily rise in coronavirus cases of 343,144

Twenty-five million cases and a quarter million dead is a pretty strong argument that you should just ignore these evil people…or arrest them.

I am not an immunologist by any stretch, but I do teach a bit of basic immunology in my cell biology course every year — you know, just the basic concepts of immunological memory and core proteins and the innate and adaptive immune system, that kind of thing. I’d heard about the idea of mRNA vaccines, but if you’d asked me last year, I would have said that’s far too speculative for a course that was just an overview, I can’t possibly wedge such a tenuous proposal into the class, and why should I? It has no real world utility yet. Well, next year I’ll have to start wedging. Here’s an article that describes the importance of mRNA vaccines.

…mRNA’s story likely will not end with COVID-19: Its potential stretches far beyond this pandemic. This year, a team at Yale patented a similar RNA-based technology to vaccinate against malaria, perhaps the world’s most devastating disease. Because mRNA is so easy to edit, Pfizer says that it is planning to use it against seasonal flu, which mutates constantly and kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. The company that partnered with Pfizer last year, BioNTech, is developing individualized therapies that would create on-demand proteins associated with specific tumors to teach the body to fight off advanced cancer. In mouse trials, synthetic-mRNA therapies have been shown to slow and reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis. “I’m fully convinced now even more than before that mRNA can be broadly transformational,” Özlem Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, told me. “In principle, everything you can do with protein can be substituted by mRNA.”

In principle is the billion-dollar asterisk. mRNA’s promise ranges from the expensive-yet-experimental to the glorious-yet-speculative. But the past year was a reminder that scientific progress may happen suddenly, after long periods of gestation. “This has been a coming-out party for mRNA, for sure,” says John Mascola, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “In the world of science, RNA technology could be the biggest story of the year. We didn’t know if it worked. And now we do.”

At least the article does a lot of the work for me, organizing the history of the technology and explaining its strengths and weaknesses. Maybe I can just assign it as reading in the class, because I just checked the latest edition of our textbook, which seems to come out with a new edition every year, and there isn’t a whisper of a hint of a suggestion of this use for mRNA. That’s how fast this technology has emerged.

The last time this happened was when CRISPR/Cas appeared on the scene — 3 or 4 years ago I had to start including a segment on that in my course, because it was starting to appear in students’ senior seminars, and had such obvious research applications. But there was negligible clinical use, and none of my students had used or been the subject of CRISPR/Cas. Now this fall I expect every single one of my students to show up having been injected with an mRNA vaccine, so I’d better get it into the curriculum.

I do appreciate that the article also comes right out and explains that mRNA vaccines aren’t a miracle cure for everything.

“This is not a magic bullet, and it’s not perfect for everything,” Pfizer’s Dormitzer told me. His partners at BioNTech concurred. “I do not claim that mRNA is the holy grail for everything,” Türeci said. “We are going to find that there are diseases where mRNA is surprisingly successful and diseases where it’s not. We have to prove it for each and every infectious disease, one by one.”

It also makes it clear that this isn’t the product of a single genius making a breakthrough.

The triumph of mRNA, from backwater research to breakthrough technology, is not a hero’s journey, but a heroes’ journey. Without Katalin Karikó’s grueling efforts to make mRNA technology work, the world would have no Moderna or BioNTech. Without government funding and philanthropy, both companies might have gone bankrupt before their 2020 vaccines. Without the failures in HIV-vaccine research forcing scientists to trailblaze in strange new fields, we might still be in the dark about how to make the technology work. Without an international team of scientists unlocking the secrets of the coronavirus’s spike protein several years ago, we might not have known enough about this pathogen to design a vaccine to defeat it last year. mRNA technology was born of many seeds.

The one thing it’s missing is the growing awareness that the missing ingredient here isn’t technological, it’s sociological. The absurd opposition to vaccines in some quarters isn’t based on evidence or reason, it’s a phenomenon of irrational brains. I’ll resist the temptation to wedge a whole course on sociology or psychology into my biology class — that’s why I’m at a liberal arts college, because the students should be studying that with real experts in a different building on campus.