I am the author of this post and I want to issue some corrections, as the blog owner doesn't seem to want to take the piece down.
First of all, I want to emphasize that I do not consider "just asking questions" to be a valid rhetorical device to shoe-horn bad thinking into academia. I do believe conspiracy theories to be hypotheses, but not all of them are good, and most people who peddle them do not treat them as hypotheses at all. Including some people reading this blog. I included this statement to attempt to make this clear ----- "It may enter crazy territory when its proponents do not offer a way to falsify it and then extrapolate unfounded conclusions. There are certainly lab leak proponents who take it in this direction. But there is nothing wrong with asking a question if you do it scientifically." --- However I realize the ease at which readers can dismiss this sentence as being about other people, and not them. It is not and never has been my intention to promote conspiracy thinking and I am horrified at the possibility that it may have been interpreted this way. In my attempt to be balanced, I failed.
Second of all, The WiV laboratory on the hotseat was not doing simulated evolution. They were genetically modifying virus particles. I failed to make this clear because I was editing for length and by mistake a false connection between WiV and passaging/simulated evolution resulted. Furthermore, my reason for explaining passaging was to give some clarity to the misunderstanding if it's gain-of-function, then it's bad, but there are lots of types of GOF and not all of them are risky. In the literature, the "risky" type of GOF is the type that generates "PPPs" or Potential Pandemic Pathogens. This is what Marc Lipsitch opposes. His perspective on this makes sense to me as someone who reads a lot about the philosophy of science behind evolution. But Lipsitch disagreeing with GOF doesn't mean he supports lab leak. Another accidental conflation I didn't intend to make.
Furthermore, after exchanges behind the scenes with another HxSTEM reader, who should be submitting a piece to follow up this one soon, I realized that I am not actually qualified to assess the two perspectives on the lab leak hypothesis. This paper (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2) seems rigorous and traces a common ancestor of the pandemic virus and a virus found at the Wuhan market to be the same, along with evidence that various mammal species were shedding viruses at that time in the location where the bulk of initial cases were. This does provide very good support for a natural origin. However, Matt Ridley shares his rejected COVID-19 origin paper on his substack which can be found here: https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/i/164035356/the-preponderance-of-evidence-suggests-that-the-covid-pandemic-began-as-a-result-of-a-research-accident. In this paper, he explains why he still believes the lab leak hypothesis. I am not qualified to assess either of these papers to determine which is making the better case. You are welcomed to read both of them as well as the many hundreds of other papers on this topic and decide for yourself.
You may find, though, that in doing that you're just as in over your head as I was in trying to weigh in on this issue. I do not belong in this discussion, and I apologize for having accidentally strengthened the anti-science movement. I will say that I think there's not much I can do to stop the anti-science movement as a whole because it likely started long before I was ever born and reached the point of no return before I ever finished college.
One of my own career goals was to try to bridge the gap between the right and the left on science issues and help people understand that you don't have to sign on to an entire ideology just because you agree with one part of it, a thing I see a lot of people doing regardless of education level. HxSTEM's mission is one that I support, but all too often these groups claiming to want to "think for themselves" just become a reservoir for populist paranoia and oversimplification of key issues. Academia leans left, and this means anyone who doubts any part of the progressive left-leaning worldview is suddenly a conservative and ends up over here.
I had intended to write another post about the mRNA vaccine, which I support, and which breaks from the usual cluster of viewpoints, which I thought I was clear about in my last few paragraphs but it seems I wasn't. But I have decided not to weigh in anymore on this topic at all. Thanks for reading, and I am sorry for making things worse.
I think this is a very thoughtful comment. I also feel I am way over my head in this discussion. I had thought there were some very credible reasons why the lab leak hypotheses seemed to be the most likely.
Then when I read the very spirited objections to the lab leak theory by Spartacus, I suddenly realized that perhaps I had been too hasty. He raised a number of plausible questions about the lab leak hypothesis. In short, Spartacus changed my mind a bit. I understand his frustrations because in my own areas of expertise, these are exactly the kind of challenges that I face. I applaud Spartacus.
So now, I have to admit, I have no idea what to think about the virus origin.
We have had far too many examples in the past of one potential hypothesis dominating alternate hypotheses. Those supporting the alternatives are frequently classified as ridiculous or beyond the pale. Obviously, we should not be doing this as scientists.
The consensus is frequently wrong. And people who go against the consensus are correct many times. We have seen this far too often in the past. So we should be cautious.
This is a well written and important piece. I agree with the author that both the lab leak and natural origin hypotheses should be open for exploration. Sadly, the damage to science has been done...and the GOF function research community and most scientists frankly deserve the bulk of the blame for the public's rightful distrust of science. The reality is that GOF research that was being funded by NIH at the Wuhan lab of virology had been made illegal by the US Congress. Elected officials, not the scientific community, had the final word on whether such research should be allowed. The arrogant scientific community broke the law. It does not matter at that point whether the virus arose from a lab leak. The scientific community demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with the resources to conduct such research. The massive defunding science is now facing is the least of what should occur. Frankly...many in the GOF research community should be under arrest and facing prison time for taking risks that public officials had denied them the right to engage in. The scientific community will not hope to regain any credibility until it demands these scientists pay the price for their arrogance.
I am still sort of surprised we have not yet had Nuremberg-style international inquiries into this pandemic and our response to it. This COVID-19 event was almost like a world war, in terms of the number of deaths and the economic disruption that were associated with it.
There have been a few lawsuits and other legal inquiries in various parts of the world about covid19. But most of them have not progressed much at all.
At least in my opinion, this was a pretty disgraceful episode in STEM. Numerous people behaved outrageously because of arrogance and/or greed. And no one so far has been held accountable, even though almost everyone knows that something went very, very wrong.
This was NOT the way that our amply-funded public health system was supposed to work. This was just awful. And most people feel they were lied to, repeatedly, but no one seems to care in the least.
Sadly, the greatest price may yet to be paid. The scientific community, and biomedical community in particular, are no so discredited that a warning about a REAL pandemic threat may go unheeded with the resulting far more massive casualties that will arise. The blame for that will not lie on the public for not trusting scientists...but on the scientists for having squandered that trust previously. The boy who cries wolf who ends up eaten by the wolf has only himself to blame for being allowed to be ingested!
Once these topics get politicized, then we sort of lose control of them, as scientists. Others are driving the bus and making the decisions, it would seem. And truth seems to take a hit somewhere along the way.
It is interesting to note that despite all the gain of function research, the effective counters to the covid 19 pandemic were discovered by treating medical doctors, like Dr. Zev Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, the late Dr. Jackie Stone, Dr. Shankara Chetty, and many others, most of whom were confronted by relentless persecution, in some cases instigated by academics. Except for the monoclonal antibodies, which worked well for a while, we have not seen any impressive results follow from the GOF research in terms of pandemic response, in this first real-life emergency that all this research was supposed to be preparing us for.
The real bottom line here is that the health system and science are being systematically broken by disgusting third-world born toadies. I think they know they are lying---Makary does, but they don't care because they have power, and I think they understand RFK Jr's long-con grift. All of these anti-vaxxers and their toady-grifters are getting "credentialed" so that RFK Jr. can trot them out in court when he files his cases against the vaccine makers and demands billions. He will do this as soon as he can get the vaccine special master's court closed down. With that, he gets jury trials, their ticket to billions.
This 21st century should be the bio-warfare century. The poor man's atom bomb is what biological warfare has been called. If you look around you in America, every bit of land you see was taken from native Americans. You don't see that in India, or China, or Africa. What is the difference?
The native people of north America evolved for tens of thousands of years without urban diseases. Their immune systems became very vulnerable to viruses, and they died at rates exceeding 95% when exposed to European sniffles and influenza. Smallpox killed many, but it didn't kill entire villages. It killed 75%-80% and broke or nearly broke societies, but the peoples didn't disappear.
Did you know that Plymouth Colony was founded in an Indian village that had crops in the fields? They dug up graves to get dishes and such. That village had been visited by a European ship and everyone had died except one---Squanto. This pattern repeated, over and over. A settler visited a village, not thinking anything of his mild cold, and everyone in the village died.
Did you know that observing this was the origin of the phrase, "Manifest destiny"? It first appeared in a sermon in the Puritan colony citing the fact that god was yielding up the land to them, and it was their manifest destiny to take the land.
Eradication of the population of continents is what biological warfare could do. I know directly that islamists want such weapons.
We already had piss-poor surveillance against real biological attack. By this I mean that anything sophisticated would get by us, and our MD's would be the ones that found it, like anthrax. Now? Now we aren't even tracking measles nationally. This is insanity.
7. The demonization of mRNA
I know you didn't talk about this, but it's wrapped up in the package with the anti-vax and lab-leak nonsense that you went to bat for here.
The problem is that mRNA vaccines are a must have for biodefense. Only this way can we respond. Moderna proved that. January 10th, the sequence was posted. By the end of January, they had designed, produced, and animal tested their vaccine. They turned in the paperwork to FDA before close of month. I designed and outsourced production of a DNA vaccine a little slower.
But mRNA vaccines have another big factor. If the materials are stockpiled, 5 million doses can be produced, per day, in a space the size of a kitchen table. Nothing else can touch that.
If there is a real biological attack, and we detect it in time, and we don't have an organization that can roll out a vaccine in 20-30 days? We are done. The war will be over and we will lose. That stark. DNA vaccines are fine, but nobody can produce them in safe to administer doses that fast.
8. Citations
(2023) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10019034/ - This article leaves the most room for a "lab leak" by saying it cannot be ruled out. But this article neglects to mention that all the sequences at WIV were far from COVID's sequence. That rules it out.
"Lab leak" reappeared for me May-June of 2021 with Jon Stewart. There was another bump then in the Hong Kong protests after Biden had that press conference where he announced he would, "Stop China, by any means necessary." One of the big lab leak influencers is a Taiwanese young woman that hates China. Even within Taiwan people are divided, and this is one of the stories that has been used to motivate Taiwan's government and opinion to reject unification with the mainland. This May-June 2021 was when the US politics started with "lab leak".
For scientists it was a blind-side. We had discussed it, there wasn't evidence for it. We thought it was put to bed, and then... it kept popping up, over and over. This story has been placed and revived over and over by political interests.
And of course, with an election, political consultants "shop the issues" and anything with traction gets exploited, regardless of merit.
After that, it surfaced again, and became one of those, "Everybody knows this is true." Stories within journalistic mainstream, and has been run with by Bari Weiss and her inner circle as "obviously true".
Meanwhile, for the past 3 years, the scientists who actually KNOW about this are systematically excluded. Nobody talks to Angie Rasmussen. Nobody talks to Hotez. Nobody talks to me. Nobody talks to Osterholm. Nobody talks to the authors of the papers in Nature about Covid Origin. And that is quite odd. Usually, when there is a science topic, the experts are sought out.
This has also become an Animal Farm situation in biosciences with the current administration. It's gotten all wrapped up with the anti-vaxxer insanity.
2. Anger and frustration.
You think I expressed anger about this with some capitalizations? I've had people scream in my face. Hotez has near daily death threats and people stalking him. People who speak up and try to get in touch with journalists are treated with contempt, and a big "F*ck off." Once the conspiracy creepers grab hold of something like this, it's vicious. Journalists are mostly idiots without a clue who view everything through a political lens. I have had death threats for a while, though those are anti-nuclear dingbats mostly. Ever talked to a man who openly said he was going to kill you? I have. Why? Because I also studied terrorism and how it works, and the first step is to engage. Since authorities don't care, it is up to me.
I worry a lot about the safety of scientists in the field. I am wary. This is a time of prelude to civil war that I hope will not happen. Universities and the extremist professors in them are at the core of that.
So yeah. I capitalized some things. It's frustration. Extreme frustration. This is endless! And it is as correct as the flat-earth people are. This has impact! Big impact.
3. The conspiracy---grifter ecosystem.
Online, there is an ecosystem of bad info. First are political placements, backed by money and/or power. (The Qatari hundred billion plus money has wracked our universities, turned aspects of them into information charnel houses.) I put RFK Jr.'s "Children's Health Defense" in this category. He has been the greatest originator and pusher of anti-vax garbage for 25 years. I put this lab-leak business in the same origination pot.
Our own CIA puts out false material if the president tells them to. It's their job to act at the whim of the president. And sometimes CIA does things that oppose a sitting president for political purposes. The Free Press ran an article citing CIA as their source that lab leak was a high probability.
... James Clapper lied to congress about the illegal mass phone data program. (Ironically The Free Press had an article about that within a few days of their lab-leak article.)
... CIA plotted to assassinate hostile foreign leaders, and denied it. "We're running a goddamned Murder, Inc in the Caribbean." - Lyndon Johnson
... the Senate torture report documents an overwhelming array of CIA deceptions, ranging from misrepresentations about the "effectiveness" of torture to misstatements about the number of detainees in CIA custody.
Second are grifters. These are people who mostly just don't care. They will take any position that gets them money. Some get paid directly. They also get paid by how much play they get. They live in the, "Ain't no such thing as bad publicity." world. They take troll positions and it makes them well off or rich. If I were to put together a garbage book, I could be a multi-millionaire in a year, two years tops. There are plenty of people who take that and run with it.
Third are the paid-protester-activists who get up and go out to protest for some position, not because they care (although some might also care) but because it makes them money. There is serious money on offer for many of these.
Fourth, dingbat scientists like Ebright, who I think is in the early stages of dementia. I experienced that with a bright colleague.
Fifth there are the normies who just don't know, and aren't equipped to know. Some of these become useful idiots who feel that they need to "do something".
Last, trailing it all up are the dangerous attack-dingbats. The do anything from intimidate people they don't like, to sneak up and punch them in the back of the head, to shooting someone dead because they feel like it.
4. Heterodox STEM.
The operative part here is SCIENCE Technology Engineering and Mathematics. There isn't much science here. I appreciate that you express interest in engaging. I haven't experienced that very much. And I've done the citations thing quite a bit online. I will respond to your request for citations. They are at the bottom.
5. Gain of Function.
Literally, there were three absolute nothing-burgers of work on trying to make bat viruses culturable in cell culture. The alternative is to NOT do it, and decide to culture them in a bat colony or find another animal that will get infected. Bat colonies are nearly impossible in a lab setting, so finding another animal like ferrets or civets or raccoon dogs is the way. And that would be much more potentially problematic.
GOF is like the telescope that is used by astronomers. Without it, we become blinded. You can't do work on the details of what each gene does and how it works without cell culture very well. Even with it, for the immune-modulator genes, you have to make some assumptions.
I see that you know why GOF is done. What you don't make clear is that the GOF at WiV has nothing to do with passaging. You leave the impression that WiV did passaging.
May I ask if you also understand why it is that these bat viruses were collected and studied in the first place? What was the specific trigger?
I agree with Dorian. I have never seen such an enthusiastic and fervent defense of the natural origin theory of COVID-19. I have read numerous arguments in favor of the lab leak theory. So I think a longer essay countering those arguments would be very interesting. That is, if Spartacus is able to mount one, given their "background", which makes me wonder.
It is not my area of expertise. But I am open to hearing points from both sides, or even a third side, if one exists.
I have some background in national security and intelligence. And three separate independent sources "inside" told me with fairly high confidence in January of 2020 that this novel virus definitely came from the WIV.
I am not sure since I never worked in bioweapons, but I know a bit about the operations of the CCP. And this sort of thing seems to fit with what I know about the CCP. Including several recent efforts of CCP operatives to smuggle or release further infectious agents inside the US. These are not some bumbling bureaucrats. They are smart, and they are dedicated and they are dangerous.
I cannot reply directly to Spartacus. For some reason, although I do not believe I have ever interacted with them, this account was "born blocked" by Spartacus. Perhaps I know this person from before during my work in the IC. I do not know.
I could tell you stories from being "on the inside". And sometimes, when it seems like trails go cold or dead on assorted stories, it is for very "good" reasons.
Clearly this WIV and its funding through more than 11 US agencies (that we know of) has some national security implications. For some reason, the US was (and might still be?) collaborating with a Chinese military bioweapons research facility. I know that because there are treaties that allegedly ban this kind of research that all the major players have supposedly signed onto, that this sort of activity gets very sensitive.
This is the issue with scientific communications and journalism, even Congressional testimony, or discovery in lawsuits. When they butt up against very sensitive topics, then the investigator feels like they are in a house of mirrors. Nothing seems to make any sense.
So if this really WAS a natural occurrence associated with a wet market, why are there so many articles and suggestions that it wasn't? Since neither of us are privy to the actual information, we are really not in a position to judge it. And if we did know the actual truth, then we probably would be barred from writing about it on the open internet.
Is the lab leak theory just a decoy of some kind? Is the wet market theory just a decoy? Are they both false stories covering up something else going on?
Of course, if one is prone to conspiracy theories, there are all kinds of crazy rabbit holes here. And it is very difficult for someone "outside" to understand what is going on. That is intentional.
No offense, but I think you should keep your post up. Your post represents what MOST people think, perhaps incorrectly, but based on what APPEARS to be lots of evidence.
Obviously, because of stuff neither of us know, it could be completely wrong. Which to me, is very interesting.
I would think that one of the main things we would be interested in is preventing something like this from happening again.
But, what do I know? That just sounds way too sensible. So...
1. The lab leak conspiracy people act as if THEY came upon an AMAZING idea that NOBODY in microbiology or biodefense had ever even dreamed of before them. No. Anyone with a brain in the field thought of that immediately. I have a doctorate in microbiology and before that I worked on biodefense. If I thought there was a chance COVID-19 came from WiV, I would tell you.
Lots of sharp people looked into "lab leak" starting in January 2020. As soon as the first sequence was published, and it was dead certain this was a coronavirus, the first thing almost everyone thought of was, "Maybe it leaked from WiV." I did. I looked at the evidence and right away it was completely unsupported. No sequences at WiV, matched this new one from humans. No sequences ANYWHERE matched. It wasn't for a couple of years that a sequence matched. That sequence was from the Laos-Cambodia area where wild bat harvests had history and bats were transported to Wuhan Wet Market for making bat soup.
2. But you just don't understand what we're saying! You are SUPPRESSING this TRUTH!
Yes, it's China and China shut down access and communications. Yes. That's just China being China. When in doubt, a Chinese bureaucrat locks everything down and waits for instructions. That's safe. It means nothing.
3. Gain of function MADE COVID-19! No. There is nothing suggesting that, not anywhere. Every experiment with modifying bat virus sequences at WiV was logged. China is really very good at record keeping. We know what was done there. Those were changes to make it possible to grow the virus in cell culture. There were 3. One of those 3 was able to grow. You CANNOT STUDY a virus that does not grow! Can I get a, "D"? D! Can I get a "u"? U! Can I get an "h"? H! What's that spell? "Duh". What's that spell, "Duh".
This bit about COVID-19 being a lab-leak is all unsupported with absolutely no evidence, just innuendo. Yes, all those factors are reason enough to INVESTIGATE. That's like police and persons of interest, like a guy walking down the sidewalk when a bank robber shoots a teller dead and comes running out of the bank. Does that make him guilty of bank robbery? No. And nobody would dream of prosecuting him for it without DNA evidence.
That is exactly what is happening here. You are convicting a guy that just happened to walk by of a terrible crime. And there is DNA evidence here, unlike the bank robber scenario. You are going AGAINST the voluminous evidence from Wuhan Wet Market. And that is the DNA evidence. That is the slam-dunk in this murder mystery. It was the animals at the wet market.
I am the author of this post and I want to issue some corrections, as the blog owner doesn't seem to want to take the piece down.
First of all, I want to emphasize that I do not consider "just asking questions" to be a valid rhetorical device to shoe-horn bad thinking into academia. I do believe conspiracy theories to be hypotheses, but not all of them are good, and most people who peddle them do not treat them as hypotheses at all. Including some people reading this blog. I included this statement to attempt to make this clear ----- "It may enter crazy territory when its proponents do not offer a way to falsify it and then extrapolate unfounded conclusions. There are certainly lab leak proponents who take it in this direction. But there is nothing wrong with asking a question if you do it scientifically." --- However I realize the ease at which readers can dismiss this sentence as being about other people, and not them. It is not and never has been my intention to promote conspiracy thinking and I am horrified at the possibility that it may have been interpreted this way. In my attempt to be balanced, I failed.
Second of all, The WiV laboratory on the hotseat was not doing simulated evolution. They were genetically modifying virus particles. I failed to make this clear because I was editing for length and by mistake a false connection between WiV and passaging/simulated evolution resulted. Furthermore, my reason for explaining passaging was to give some clarity to the misunderstanding if it's gain-of-function, then it's bad, but there are lots of types of GOF and not all of them are risky. In the literature, the "risky" type of GOF is the type that generates "PPPs" or Potential Pandemic Pathogens. This is what Marc Lipsitch opposes. His perspective on this makes sense to me as someone who reads a lot about the philosophy of science behind evolution. But Lipsitch disagreeing with GOF doesn't mean he supports lab leak. Another accidental conflation I didn't intend to make.
Furthermore, after exchanges behind the scenes with another HxSTEM reader, who should be submitting a piece to follow up this one soon, I realized that I am not actually qualified to assess the two perspectives on the lab leak hypothesis. This paper (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2) seems rigorous and traces a common ancestor of the pandemic virus and a virus found at the Wuhan market to be the same, along with evidence that various mammal species were shedding viruses at that time in the location where the bulk of initial cases were. This does provide very good support for a natural origin. However, Matt Ridley shares his rejected COVID-19 origin paper on his substack which can be found here: https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/i/164035356/the-preponderance-of-evidence-suggests-that-the-covid-pandemic-began-as-a-result-of-a-research-accident. In this paper, he explains why he still believes the lab leak hypothesis. I am not qualified to assess either of these papers to determine which is making the better case. You are welcomed to read both of them as well as the many hundreds of other papers on this topic and decide for yourself.
You may find, though, that in doing that you're just as in over your head as I was in trying to weigh in on this issue. I do not belong in this discussion, and I apologize for having accidentally strengthened the anti-science movement. I will say that I think there's not much I can do to stop the anti-science movement as a whole because it likely started long before I was ever born and reached the point of no return before I ever finished college.
One of my own career goals was to try to bridge the gap between the right and the left on science issues and help people understand that you don't have to sign on to an entire ideology just because you agree with one part of it, a thing I see a lot of people doing regardless of education level. HxSTEM's mission is one that I support, but all too often these groups claiming to want to "think for themselves" just become a reservoir for populist paranoia and oversimplification of key issues. Academia leans left, and this means anyone who doubts any part of the progressive left-leaning worldview is suddenly a conservative and ends up over here.
I had intended to write another post about the mRNA vaccine, which I support, and which breaks from the usual cluster of viewpoints, which I thought I was clear about in my last few paragraphs but it seems I wasn't. But I have decided not to weigh in anymore on this topic at all. Thanks for reading, and I am sorry for making things worse.
I think this is a very thoughtful comment. I also feel I am way over my head in this discussion. I had thought there were some very credible reasons why the lab leak hypotheses seemed to be the most likely.
Then when I read the very spirited objections to the lab leak theory by Spartacus, I suddenly realized that perhaps I had been too hasty. He raised a number of plausible questions about the lab leak hypothesis. In short, Spartacus changed my mind a bit. I understand his frustrations because in my own areas of expertise, these are exactly the kind of challenges that I face. I applaud Spartacus.
So now, I have to admit, I have no idea what to think about the virus origin.
We have had far too many examples in the past of one potential hypothesis dominating alternate hypotheses. Those supporting the alternatives are frequently classified as ridiculous or beyond the pale. Obviously, we should not be doing this as scientists.
The consensus is frequently wrong. And people who go against the consensus are correct many times. We have seen this far too often in the past. So we should be cautious.
This is a well written and important piece. I agree with the author that both the lab leak and natural origin hypotheses should be open for exploration. Sadly, the damage to science has been done...and the GOF function research community and most scientists frankly deserve the bulk of the blame for the public's rightful distrust of science. The reality is that GOF research that was being funded by NIH at the Wuhan lab of virology had been made illegal by the US Congress. Elected officials, not the scientific community, had the final word on whether such research should be allowed. The arrogant scientific community broke the law. It does not matter at that point whether the virus arose from a lab leak. The scientific community demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with the resources to conduct such research. The massive defunding science is now facing is the least of what should occur. Frankly...many in the GOF research community should be under arrest and facing prison time for taking risks that public officials had denied them the right to engage in. The scientific community will not hope to regain any credibility until it demands these scientists pay the price for their arrogance.
I am still sort of surprised we have not yet had Nuremberg-style international inquiries into this pandemic and our response to it. This COVID-19 event was almost like a world war, in terms of the number of deaths and the economic disruption that were associated with it.
There have been a few lawsuits and other legal inquiries in various parts of the world about covid19. But most of them have not progressed much at all.
At least in my opinion, this was a pretty disgraceful episode in STEM. Numerous people behaved outrageously because of arrogance and/or greed. And no one so far has been held accountable, even though almost everyone knows that something went very, very wrong.
This was NOT the way that our amply-funded public health system was supposed to work. This was just awful. And most people feel they were lied to, repeatedly, but no one seems to care in the least.
Sadly, the greatest price may yet to be paid. The scientific community, and biomedical community in particular, are no so discredited that a warning about a REAL pandemic threat may go unheeded with the resulting far more massive casualties that will arise. The blame for that will not lie on the public for not trusting scientists...but on the scientists for having squandered that trust previously. The boy who cries wolf who ends up eaten by the wolf has only himself to blame for being allowed to be ingested!
Once these topics get politicized, then we sort of lose control of them, as scientists. Others are driving the bus and making the decisions, it would seem. And truth seems to take a hit somewhere along the way.
It is interesting to note that despite all the gain of function research, the effective counters to the covid 19 pandemic were discovered by treating medical doctors, like Dr. Zev Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, the late Dr. Jackie Stone, Dr. Shankara Chetty, and many others, most of whom were confronted by relentless persecution, in some cases instigated by academics. Except for the monoclonal antibodies, which worked well for a while, we have not seen any impressive results follow from the GOF research in terms of pandemic response, in this first real-life emergency that all this research was supposed to be preparing us for.
6. The grave danger from all this.
The real bottom line here is that the health system and science are being systematically broken by disgusting third-world born toadies. I think they know they are lying---Makary does, but they don't care because they have power, and I think they understand RFK Jr's long-con grift. All of these anti-vaxxers and their toady-grifters are getting "credentialed" so that RFK Jr. can trot them out in court when he files his cases against the vaccine makers and demands billions. He will do this as soon as he can get the vaccine special master's court closed down. With that, he gets jury trials, their ticket to billions.
This 21st century should be the bio-warfare century. The poor man's atom bomb is what biological warfare has been called. If you look around you in America, every bit of land you see was taken from native Americans. You don't see that in India, or China, or Africa. What is the difference?
The native people of north America evolved for tens of thousands of years without urban diseases. Their immune systems became very vulnerable to viruses, and they died at rates exceeding 95% when exposed to European sniffles and influenza. Smallpox killed many, but it didn't kill entire villages. It killed 75%-80% and broke or nearly broke societies, but the peoples didn't disappear.
Did you know that Plymouth Colony was founded in an Indian village that had crops in the fields? They dug up graves to get dishes and such. That village had been visited by a European ship and everyone had died except one---Squanto. This pattern repeated, over and over. A settler visited a village, not thinking anything of his mild cold, and everyone in the village died.
Did you know that observing this was the origin of the phrase, "Manifest destiny"? It first appeared in a sermon in the Puritan colony citing the fact that god was yielding up the land to them, and it was their manifest destiny to take the land.
Eradication of the population of continents is what biological warfare could do. I know directly that islamists want such weapons.
We already had piss-poor surveillance against real biological attack. By this I mean that anything sophisticated would get by us, and our MD's would be the ones that found it, like anthrax. Now? Now we aren't even tracking measles nationally. This is insanity.
7. The demonization of mRNA
I know you didn't talk about this, but it's wrapped up in the package with the anti-vax and lab-leak nonsense that you went to bat for here.
The problem is that mRNA vaccines are a must have for biodefense. Only this way can we respond. Moderna proved that. January 10th, the sequence was posted. By the end of January, they had designed, produced, and animal tested their vaccine. They turned in the paperwork to FDA before close of month. I designed and outsourced production of a DNA vaccine a little slower.
But mRNA vaccines have another big factor. If the materials are stockpiled, 5 million doses can be produced, per day, in a space the size of a kitchen table. Nothing else can touch that.
If there is a real biological attack, and we detect it in time, and we don't have an organization that can roll out a vaccine in 20-30 days? We are done. The war will be over and we will lose. That stark. DNA vaccines are fine, but nobody can produce them in safe to administer doses that fast.
8. Citations
(2023) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10019034/ - This article leaves the most room for a "lab leak" by saying it cannot be ruled out. But this article neglects to mention that all the sequences at WIV were far from COVID's sequence. That rules it out.
(2023) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7470595/ - This article concludes the evidence points to natural zoonotic origin.
(2024) https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2 - This article is the closer. This article found the DNA of susceptible animals at the Wuhan wet market, together with COVID.
I won't bother you with the Nature articles that are locked.
And now I have written a draft of something that should become an invited article on Heterodox STEM.
1. Politics.
"Lab leak" reappeared for me May-June of 2021 with Jon Stewart. There was another bump then in the Hong Kong protests after Biden had that press conference where he announced he would, "Stop China, by any means necessary." One of the big lab leak influencers is a Taiwanese young woman that hates China. Even within Taiwan people are divided, and this is one of the stories that has been used to motivate Taiwan's government and opinion to reject unification with the mainland. This May-June 2021 was when the US politics started with "lab leak".
For scientists it was a blind-side. We had discussed it, there wasn't evidence for it. We thought it was put to bed, and then... it kept popping up, over and over. This story has been placed and revived over and over by political interests.
And of course, with an election, political consultants "shop the issues" and anything with traction gets exploited, regardless of merit.
After that, it surfaced again, and became one of those, "Everybody knows this is true." Stories within journalistic mainstream, and has been run with by Bari Weiss and her inner circle as "obviously true".
Meanwhile, for the past 3 years, the scientists who actually KNOW about this are systematically excluded. Nobody talks to Angie Rasmussen. Nobody talks to Hotez. Nobody talks to me. Nobody talks to Osterholm. Nobody talks to the authors of the papers in Nature about Covid Origin. And that is quite odd. Usually, when there is a science topic, the experts are sought out.
This has also become an Animal Farm situation in biosciences with the current administration. It's gotten all wrapped up with the anti-vaxxer insanity.
2. Anger and frustration.
You think I expressed anger about this with some capitalizations? I've had people scream in my face. Hotez has near daily death threats and people stalking him. People who speak up and try to get in touch with journalists are treated with contempt, and a big "F*ck off." Once the conspiracy creepers grab hold of something like this, it's vicious. Journalists are mostly idiots without a clue who view everything through a political lens. I have had death threats for a while, though those are anti-nuclear dingbats mostly. Ever talked to a man who openly said he was going to kill you? I have. Why? Because I also studied terrorism and how it works, and the first step is to engage. Since authorities don't care, it is up to me.
I worry a lot about the safety of scientists in the field. I am wary. This is a time of prelude to civil war that I hope will not happen. Universities and the extremist professors in them are at the core of that.
So yeah. I capitalized some things. It's frustration. Extreme frustration. This is endless! And it is as correct as the flat-earth people are. This has impact! Big impact.
3. The conspiracy---grifter ecosystem.
Online, there is an ecosystem of bad info. First are political placements, backed by money and/or power. (The Qatari hundred billion plus money has wracked our universities, turned aspects of them into information charnel houses.) I put RFK Jr.'s "Children's Health Defense" in this category. He has been the greatest originator and pusher of anti-vax garbage for 25 years. I put this lab-leak business in the same origination pot.
Our own CIA puts out false material if the president tells them to. It's their job to act at the whim of the president. And sometimes CIA does things that oppose a sitting president for political purposes. The Free Press ran an article citing CIA as their source that lab leak was a high probability.
... CIA ran the op that got 51 officials to say Hunter's laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. This was a political act against a sitting president. https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/spies-who-lie-leader-cosigners-were-cia-payroll-when-they-falsely-claimed-hunter
... James Clapper lied to congress about the illegal mass phone data program. (Ironically The Free Press had an article about that within a few days of their lab-leak article.)
... CIA plotted to assassinate hostile foreign leaders, and denied it. "We're running a goddamned Murder, Inc in the Caribbean." - Lyndon Johnson
... the Senate torture report documents an overwhelming array of CIA deceptions, ranging from misrepresentations about the "effectiveness" of torture to misstatements about the number of detainees in CIA custody.
Second are grifters. These are people who mostly just don't care. They will take any position that gets them money. Some get paid directly. They also get paid by how much play they get. They live in the, "Ain't no such thing as bad publicity." world. They take troll positions and it makes them well off or rich. If I were to put together a garbage book, I could be a multi-millionaire in a year, two years tops. There are plenty of people who take that and run with it.
Third are the paid-protester-activists who get up and go out to protest for some position, not because they care (although some might also care) but because it makes them money. There is serious money on offer for many of these.
Fourth, dingbat scientists like Ebright, who I think is in the early stages of dementia. I experienced that with a bright colleague.
Fifth there are the normies who just don't know, and aren't equipped to know. Some of these become useful idiots who feel that they need to "do something".
Last, trailing it all up are the dangerous attack-dingbats. The do anything from intimidate people they don't like, to sneak up and punch them in the back of the head, to shooting someone dead because they feel like it.
4. Heterodox STEM.
The operative part here is SCIENCE Technology Engineering and Mathematics. There isn't much science here. I appreciate that you express interest in engaging. I haven't experienced that very much. And I've done the citations thing quite a bit online. I will respond to your request for citations. They are at the bottom.
5. Gain of Function.
Literally, there were three absolute nothing-burgers of work on trying to make bat viruses culturable in cell culture. The alternative is to NOT do it, and decide to culture them in a bat colony or find another animal that will get infected. Bat colonies are nearly impossible in a lab setting, so finding another animal like ferrets or civets or raccoon dogs is the way. And that would be much more potentially problematic.
GOF is like the telescope that is used by astronomers. Without it, we become blinded. You can't do work on the details of what each gene does and how it works without cell culture very well. Even with it, for the immune-modulator genes, you have to make some assumptions.
I see that you know why GOF is done. What you don't make clear is that the GOF at WiV has nothing to do with passaging. You leave the impression that WiV did passaging.
May I ask if you also understand why it is that these bat viruses were collected and studied in the first place? What was the specific trigger?
I agree with Dorian. I have never seen such an enthusiastic and fervent defense of the natural origin theory of COVID-19. I have read numerous arguments in favor of the lab leak theory. So I think a longer essay countering those arguments would be very interesting. That is, if Spartacus is able to mount one, given their "background", which makes me wonder.
It is not my area of expertise. But I am open to hearing points from both sides, or even a third side, if one exists.
I have some background in national security and intelligence. And three separate independent sources "inside" told me with fairly high confidence in January of 2020 that this novel virus definitely came from the WIV.
I am not sure since I never worked in bioweapons, but I know a bit about the operations of the CCP. And this sort of thing seems to fit with what I know about the CCP. Including several recent efforts of CCP operatives to smuggle or release further infectious agents inside the US. These are not some bumbling bureaucrats. They are smart, and they are dedicated and they are dangerous.
I cannot reply directly to Spartacus. For some reason, although I do not believe I have ever interacted with them, this account was "born blocked" by Spartacus. Perhaps I know this person from before during my work in the IC. I do not know.
I could tell you stories from being "on the inside". And sometimes, when it seems like trails go cold or dead on assorted stories, it is for very "good" reasons.
Clearly this WIV and its funding through more than 11 US agencies (that we know of) has some national security implications. For some reason, the US was (and might still be?) collaborating with a Chinese military bioweapons research facility. I know that because there are treaties that allegedly ban this kind of research that all the major players have supposedly signed onto, that this sort of activity gets very sensitive.
This is the issue with scientific communications and journalism, even Congressional testimony, or discovery in lawsuits. When they butt up against very sensitive topics, then the investigator feels like they are in a house of mirrors. Nothing seems to make any sense.
So if this really WAS a natural occurrence associated with a wet market, why are there so many articles and suggestions that it wasn't? Since neither of us are privy to the actual information, we are really not in a position to judge it. And if we did know the actual truth, then we probably would be barred from writing about it on the open internet.
Is the lab leak theory just a decoy of some kind? Is the wet market theory just a decoy? Are they both false stories covering up something else going on?
Of course, if one is prone to conspiracy theories, there are all kinds of crazy rabbit holes here. And it is very difficult for someone "outside" to understand what is going on. That is intentional.
No offense, but I think you should keep your post up. Your post represents what MOST people think, perhaps incorrectly, but based on what APPEARS to be lots of evidence.
Obviously, because of stuff neither of us know, it could be completely wrong. Which to me, is very interesting.
I would think that one of the main things we would be interested in is preventing something like this from happening again.
But, what do I know? That just sounds way too sensible. So...
1. The lab leak conspiracy people act as if THEY came upon an AMAZING idea that NOBODY in microbiology or biodefense had ever even dreamed of before them. No. Anyone with a brain in the field thought of that immediately. I have a doctorate in microbiology and before that I worked on biodefense. If I thought there was a chance COVID-19 came from WiV, I would tell you.
Lots of sharp people looked into "lab leak" starting in January 2020. As soon as the first sequence was published, and it was dead certain this was a coronavirus, the first thing almost everyone thought of was, "Maybe it leaked from WiV." I did. I looked at the evidence and right away it was completely unsupported. No sequences at WiV, matched this new one from humans. No sequences ANYWHERE matched. It wasn't for a couple of years that a sequence matched. That sequence was from the Laos-Cambodia area where wild bat harvests had history and bats were transported to Wuhan Wet Market for making bat soup.
2. But you just don't understand what we're saying! You are SUPPRESSING this TRUTH!
Yes, it's China and China shut down access and communications. Yes. That's just China being China. When in doubt, a Chinese bureaucrat locks everything down and waits for instructions. That's safe. It means nothing.
3. Gain of function MADE COVID-19! No. There is nothing suggesting that, not anywhere. Every experiment with modifying bat virus sequences at WiV was logged. China is really very good at record keeping. We know what was done there. Those were changes to make it possible to grow the virus in cell culture. There were 3. One of those 3 was able to grow. You CANNOT STUDY a virus that does not grow! Can I get a, "D"? D! Can I get a "u"? U! Can I get an "h"? H! What's that spell? "Duh". What's that spell, "Duh".
This bit about COVID-19 being a lab-leak is all unsupported with absolutely no evidence, just innuendo. Yes, all those factors are reason enough to INVESTIGATE. That's like police and persons of interest, like a guy walking down the sidewalk when a bank robber shoots a teller dead and comes running out of the bank. Does that make him guilty of bank robbery? No. And nobody would dream of prosecuting him for it without DNA evidence.
That is exactly what is happening here. You are convicting a guy that just happened to walk by of a terrible crime. And there is DNA evidence here, unlike the bank robber scenario. You are going AGAINST the voluminous evidence from Wuhan Wet Market. And that is the DNA evidence. That is the slam-dunk in this murder mystery. It was the animals at the wet market.
I've responded in a couple of comments above. Size limits you know.
x
Would you like to write a response post?
Message me on substack.
Yes, thanks. I wrote something that can become that that I just posted above as two comments.
I appreciate the surprise that Gina might actually be interested in engagement.
LOL