I know that Cheryl and Adam have both weighed in on the serial folly that is the “debate” about the origins of the SARS-CoV2 virus behind the pandemic. It’s been bugging me too, and I’ve had a couple of pieces go up at Nautilus Magazine over the last several days to vent my pique. One was on the lacuna that seems to have bothered no editors in major media as their reporters come up to them with assertions of the risks involved in biological research. That’s a kind of indirect criticism of media failures, about which a little more below.
The other, which posted just last night is a more direct engagement with one of the many facets of the bullshit crystal at the core of the latest flurry of interest in branding China as the malign actor at the heart of the pandemic. It takes up race-science purveyor Nicholas Wade’s proposition that features in the viral genome are nearly certain indicators of human manipulation of the virus, performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That indictment gained traction in the wider media ecosystem in part, perhaps large part, because Nobel laureate and former Rockefeller University and Caltech president David Baltimore told Wade that there was indeed within a particular feature of the genome a “smoking gun” for human intervention.
Baltimore has since walked that back a bit, retreating to a “just posing the question” kind of stance. But the damage is done, and its made worse by the way major media–The Washington Post, NYT, and Vanity Fair, to name a few, have decided to assign follow up stories to political reporters, or China bureau staff, or a non-virology checked out investigative reporter.
This is where I froth at the mouth. Science is hard to do; science journalism similarly so (with different failure modes). One of the most important skills for a science reporter is being able to figure out who is truly an expert, not just in the general area of a given line of research, but on the particular nuances of the story to be covered. This is true in any science, but most people, certainly most editors, have no idea just how true this is for modern biology. Handing off a story that turns on questions like what drives codon frequency in different organisms to someone who thinks journalism is getting one quote from a Republican and then another from a Democrat (I almost wrote, “and then one from another Republican”) is…
…sub-optimal.
Anyway…go read those pieces if you’re interested, and if you’re not, use this as yet more thread on which to open up.
NotMax
I once had a lab that leaked.
Until she was house trained.
lollipopguild
I am still trying to figure out how the covid-19 shot magnitizes your skin.
JCJ
I posted this before, but one of the questions I would like to have these leaky people address is from what virology lab did the 1918 flu leak. It seems part of their reasoning is this could really only happen if there had been some experimentation done to make the virus more infectious. Did the 1918 flu escape from a virology lab in Kansas? Or was it Obama with his time machine going back to visit his grandparents who introduced it into that timeline? I believe another argument is that this infects humans so well it must have been engineered or some other nonsense. Since this virus infects mink (minks?) and cats among others it seems even more likely to be explained by a zoonotic origin.
Chetan Murthy
Nice painting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_on_a_Bird_in_the_Air_Pump
JCJ
@lollipopguild:
In the wise words of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J – “fucking magnets, how do they work?”
David C
Both excellent pieces. The right wing, again, is driving the narrative and the MSM follows. They cover themselves by saying they’re just asking questions. I saw Baltimore’s interview and his walking back is tepid. Perhaps he doesn’t want to admit he goofed or that he’s not the expert.
JeanneT
Tom didn’t ID the painting – I believe it’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, an 1768 oil-on-canvas painting by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Otherwise, ‘sub-optimal’ seems a mild but accurate description of the failure of good scientific journalism in this case. More pungent words could be used.
HypersphericalCow
Even if the virus did escape from a lab, that doesn’t change the fact that Trump fucked up the response; blaming China might satisfy the mouth-breathers, but it doesn’t exonerate him.
cmorenc
How many media/news reporters have degrees in science or engineering, as opposed to having been liberal arts majors whose college coursework in science and math was easiest and least they could get away with to satisfy their college’s minimum requirements? That’s one big part of the problem with explaining science-heavy topics right there – the vast majority of folks going into journalism (print or broadcast) were liberal arts majors who shied as much away from any rigorous science or math courses as they could.
VeniceRiley
*Wonders to what extent Wade was trying to “actually guy” a lady scientist.*
it can definitely be a factor and it’s never unusual for other guys to show up in support of a bro who has actuall
TomatoQueen
was there a meteor in #10?
Cameron
Sub-optimal? Politicized science journalism tends to be sub-urinal.
MDB
There are reasons Baltimore walked back his statement. Among them, the furin cleavage site that he initially regarded as a “smoking gun” actually appears all over the Coronavirus family tree, and most often encoded with the same two supposedly rare codons. Moreover, the mechanism by which it is generated is a simple frameshift mutation, which has occurred multiple times in Coronavirus evolution. So there’s nothing unusual or suspicious about it.
Basically, there is precisely no evidence for the virus having been engineered. That does not mean that it wasn’t, but the hot-breathed speculation taking place in the rightwingosphere is (as usual) based on nothing at all.
TheOtherHank
@lollipopguild: I find the whole magnetizing thing enterfuriating (entertaining crossed with infuriating). From what I’ve heard it’s because the protein that is encoded by the mRNA binds metal ions. Have these morons never heard of hemoglobin? It’s chock full of iron. Which as we all know can be magnetic. And your body (theirs too) is drenched in hemoglobin (myglobin, too).
Cacti
The lab leak theory is Iraq WMD 2.0
Puddinhead
@TheOtherHank: don’t forget ferritin, lots of iron there too. Plus, the depth of the injection would preclude this even if the vaccine were chock full of iron. Like trying to stick too many pieces of paper on a fridge with a refrigerator magnet. Then they declare that the vaccines are using iron nanoparticles, which wouldn’t likely make a difference due to the depth of the injection, blood circulation, etc. They will move the goalposts and invent new reasons ad infinitum.
Puddinhead
One issue that sticks in my craw is that people use the lab leak and lab origin hypotheses interchangeably. A lab leak would imply that some scientist was studying natural coronaviruses, perhaps had a bad day regarding PPE, and got infected with one and subsequently spread it. A lab origin would imply that a scientist modified an existing coronavirus with the intent of making it more infectious and/or lethal. Those are vastly different scenarios and should not be treated as even remotely similar to each other.
Ruckus
@lollipopguild:
It’s the magic of the stupid. It makes a lot of things work funny.
Bill Arnold
The first piece, about the reporting neglecting to estimate the probability of escape from a lab taking biosafety precautions, is especially on point since after a year and a half, it is well-established that SARS-CoV-2 spread is almost entirely airborne and mostly related to the nasal mucosa. If, hypothetically, there was hidden research being done with animal models, presumably that research would have been done with a high biosafety level, e.g. level 4, at least including good respirators and no nose picking with potentially-contaminated fingers. Memories of SARS/MERS were still fresh. (Is there any evidence for that hypothetical?)
On the other hand the civilian population was not, pre-pandemic, using masks, and that would include “wildlife” farmers and generally people closely physically interacting with animals. And humans are animals, and China has 1.4 billion of them!
Which is a long-winded way of saying that the press’s priors about SARS-CoV-2 origins have been fucked up, and that the fucking-up has been deliberately engineered.
evodevo
@TheOtherHank:
Funny you should say that….that there is one of the pseudoscientific rationales the morons come up with to “explain” how “healing magnetism” works….i.e. the basis for buying magnetized bracelets/anklets/pillows(?) that supposedly relieve arthritis/PTSD/depression/etc. etc. Suckers born every minute…
Lacuna Synecdoche
@lollipopguild:
There will be Nobel Prizes in both Physics and Medicine for the brilliant scientist who ultimately answers that pressing, burning, question.
Procopius
I think the current probability is that it has zoonotic origin, because almost all viruses do, but many people (“Follow the science”) seem to misunderstand what “science” is. It’s just the best story we can put together right now that seems to coherently to explain a set of facts that we’ve observed. As Gregory Bateson put it in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, “Science doesn’t prove anything.” Even theories as well tested and successful as gravity, thermodynamics, and General Relativity are subject to revision. People should have learned by now that “follow the science” should not mean “follow the advice of a person, who calls herself a scientist, without question or looking to see if the advice works as advertised.” We got some bad advice in the early days of the pandemic and there are people still denying that Covid-19 is spread by aerosol, not by skin contact. Washing your hands often is still a good practice, but you won’t catch Covid-19 from a toilet seat.
Kris
@Bill Arnold: the coronavirus research at wuhan was done in BSL2 or BSL3 labs. Here is Shi Zhengli’s response to science on this matter:
sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf
Kris
I would add that one does not need to require malice for a lab leak hypothesis. It could just be that a virus being studied escaped as the result of a lab accident. In the past there have been several instances of sars-cov1 and other viruses leaking from labs in China, Taiwan, the US and elsewhere.
Rodger
I am a virologist, a vaccinologist, and I spent most of the last 18 months working on one of the COVID 19 vaccines…not in the lab itself but in a closely supporting role. And I shouldn’t have to state my political affiliation in a scientific discussion, but I am a Democrat.
I am 50/50 on the lab leak hypothesis, trending more toward lab leak than not. Most prior coronaviruses have been poorly adapted to human infection and transmissibility. Meaning both SARS COV 1 and MERS were apt to kill their host before they could be transmitted. Second, the fact that the first infections were reported in a city hosting a major coronavirus lab is a coincidence beyond belief.
Further, the media is treating evidence for genetic manipulation and the lab leak hypothesis as the same thing. The virus could have been collected in the wild or evolved in the lab through serial passage – an experiment so trivial that a first year grad student could design it.
Regardless of whether it was collected, evolved, or engineered, I very much doubt its release was intentional. As a grad student I worked I a lab that was equipped for a high level of containment, although we didn’t need the containment for what I was going on in the lab while I was there. It’s pretty easy to see how, without extreme precautions, someone could take a little viral gift home with them.
That’s all I have to say.
YY_Sima Qian
@Rodger:
While I am not a virologist or vaccinologist, a couple of points:
Since genetic manipulation has largely been dismissed, that leaves virus collected from the wild & un-evolved, or virus collected from the wild & evolved through serial passage, as the original source to be leaked from the lab.
If the former, then the argument is that a virus that is well adapted to humans is already in the wild, but failed to infect humans in the wild (many of whom have regular close contact with animals of all kinds, & who pre-pandemic were taking zero precautions); instead, the virus already well adapted to humans was collected by researchers to be studied in a lab, which then escaped from said lab via the few said researchers (who are at least trained & equipped to take precautions, even if vigilance is not 100%). Which is the more probable pathway? This scenario contradicts one of the reasons you think lab leak is possible, that the virus is too well adapted to humans. (However, the past 18 months have shown that SARS-CoV-2 can & has evolved to be much better adapted to human to human transmission).
The problem w/ evolution via serial passage scenario is how many serial passage experiments are required to bridge the difference between RaTG13 & SARS-CoV-2. I have read decades of evolution in the wild is required to close the 3.8% difference in genome sequence, and it would have taken much longer to do so in the controlled settings of a lab with limited number of animals. It would taken a monumental operation to do so in 6 years, something one cannot hide in a lab w/ extensive international collaborations. The pandemic to date has resulted in hundreds of millions of humans infections, & unknown number of animal infections. While transmissibility (w/ Alpha & Delta variants) has significantly increased with evolution, there has not been a substantial %change in genome sequence.
Then one has to suggest that the WIV actually has an unpublished virus w/ genome sequence much closer to the SARS-CoV-2 (original Wuhan strain), like 99%. That supposition can never be resolved. Either the WIV has such a virus, in which case I do not see any circumstance under which the CCP regime will own up to it, or the WIV does not have such a virus, which will never satisfy people who subscribe to the lab leak theory, since one cannot prove a negative.
Yes, the fact that the world’s foremost institution studying coronaviruses is located in the city with the first detected outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic will forever be fodder for speculation. That is the only reason I give > 0% probability for a lab leak.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@lollipopguild: Maybe they mixed it up with the formula for Spider Tack?
(reference: Tank McNamara)
Rodger
@YY_Sima Qian:
I don’t have time for a full reply, but it is simple to speed up the evolution of viruses (or bacteria, or yeast) by the addition of a little mutagen, and you don’t need to do the experiment in animals — it would be done in cell culture, probably with a cell that contains a reporter gene to allow sorting the most successful mutants out. Generation times in cell culture are on the order of a few days.
There is a very legitimate reason for doing these experiments — by evolving in vitro and selecting and sequencing the most successful mutants, you can study the determinants of infectivity pretty effectively.
I didn’t note this before but if the virus was indeed of natural origin there would be absolutely no reason for China to be so cagey about it.
Again I want to say that there was likely nothing nefarious going on. They certainly weren’t engineering a bioweapon or anything like that. If it is a lab leak, it was someone who got sloppy and took the virus home with them.
MDB
@Rodger: Your experience as a virologist/vaccine researcher is worth noting, but none of your speculations touch on that expertise. You note only the coincidence of the location of the Wuhan viral research lab, and the plausibility of doing something like serial passage to come up with a highly transmissible/infective virus, followed by an accidental leak.
The coincidence of the lab’s location has never impressed me. SARS-CoV-1 originated from that area as well, after all, and notably it first appeared hundreds of miles away, in Guangdong, so we have no assurance that SARS-CoV-2 originated near Wuhan. Moreover, there’s a reason that the Wuhan lab is located where it is, and it has a lot to do with the prevalence of novel viruses in the surrounding area. This renders the argument using the coincidence of the lab being near the location of the initial COVID-19 outbreak more than a little circular.
It’s also more than a little silly to assign that level of significance to the high infectivity of the virus. The zoonotic origin hypothesis accounts for this quite well, after all. There has been speculation that SARS-CoV-2 may have been in the human population for some time prior to the Wuhan market outbreaks (both of them – A and B strains – that is, another hurdle for the lab leak idea), and so could easily have done its “serial passage” quite naturally.
As for China supposedly having “no reason” to be cagey if nothing untoward was happening in the Wuhan lab, that’s well out of a scientist’s ken, whether yours or mine, and there are plenty of experts on China who will explain to you that the PRC doesn’t need to be guilty to be reticent in dealing with the rest of world.
YY_Sima Qian
@Rodger:
I think it has been noted by a number of prominent virologists that the crucial furring site (of much debate surrounding speculated artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2) tend to be lost very rapidly when the virus is grown in cells cultures (on the order of minutes?), yet survive in animal & humans hosts. The reason is still unknown. This would make it difficult for evolution to go in this direction via serial passage in cell culture, no?
Caginess is the default mode of the CCP regime, from the center to the local levels, across the board. The regime does not believe that its inner workings should be open to scrutiny by even Chinese citizens, & that workings within China should be open to scrutiny by foreigners. The regime can maintain control of the narrative w/o such scrutiny.
It is important to keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the CCP regime’s actions have the domestic population in mind. To the regime, facing foreign criticism of regime opacity is a price well worth paying to maintain its dominant domestic narrative of dedicated & flawless response to the COVID-19. In fact, unhinged accusations from abroad actually serves the regime’s purpose, to discredit any & all foreign criticism as unhinged and in bad faith.
The CCP regime has enough respect to reality (this is where it differs from Putin’s regime) that its propaganda will not try to convince people there were no mistakes made in early to mid-Jan. in Wuhan & Hubei Province. Instead, it tries to air brush that history out so no one will dwell on it, like all the other policy mistakes and disasters in the regime’s history (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, early response to the original SARS outbreak, etc.). The regime has no interest in a thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19, unless in a setting where it can exert fail-safe control (see the Joint WHO-China Mission into the Origins). A truly independent investigation will uncover missteps and obfuscations early in the Wuhan outbreak, at least at the provincial level, which the regime has no interest in revisiting. Those findings will also become ammunition to be used in the global geopolitical rivalry.