“Which laboratory is responsible matters little” - InvestingChannel

“Which laboratory is responsible matters little”

Back in 2014, there was a vigorous debate over gain-of-function (GoF) research. Prestigious journals published articles showing that this research is extremely dangerous, and probably should not be allowed:

First, from the calculations in two in-depth pandemic risk analyses (79), there is a substantial probability that a pandemic with over a 100-million fatalities could be seeded from an undetected lab-acquired infection (LAI), if a single infected lab worker spreads infection as he moves about in the community. From the Klotz (2014) analysis, there is about a 1–30% probability, depending on assumptions, that, once infected, the lab worker will seed a pandemic. This large probability spread arises from varying the average number of people infected by an infected person between 1.4 and 3.0 (R0, in standard epidemiology notation), varying the details of commutes to and from work on public transportation, and whether infected acquaintances are quarantined before spreading infection. The Merler (2013) study, based on a computer-generated population grid of size and varying density of the Netherlands, supports our concern over a lab escape not being detected until it is too late: “there is a non-negligible probability (5–15%), strongly dependent on reproduction number and probability of developing clinical symptoms, that the escape event is not detected at all.”

These concerns were not completely ignored. The US stopped funding gain-of-function research in 2014. However, the moratorium was lifted in 2017.

Former NYT reporter Donald McNeil says there have already been serious lab leaks:

Despite constantly rising biosafety levels, viruses we already know to be lethal, from smallpox to SARS, have repeatedly broken loose by accident.

Most leaks infect or kill just a few people before they are stopped by isolation and/or vaccination. But not all: scientists now believe that the H1N1 seasonal flu that killed thousands every year from 1977 to 2009 was influenza research gone feral. The strain first appeared in eastern Russia in 1977 and its genes were initially identical to a 1950 strain; that could have happened only if it had been in a freezer for 27 years. It also initially behaved as if it had been deliberately attenuated, or weakened. So scientists suspect it was a Russian effort to make a vaccine against a possible return of the 1918 flu. And then, they theorize, the vaccine virus, insufficiently weakened, began spreading.

Even worse, these sorts of lab accidents are fairly common. This is from a 2015 comment on a research paper:

The 1977 H1N1 virus caused a global epidemic, and as Rozo and Gronvall themselves concluded, it originated in a microbiology laboratory and its release was unintentional. Which laboratory is responsible matters little in the GoF debate.

Rozo and Gronvall also stated that, “in 1977, influenza research was performed without modern biosafety regulations and protective equipment, making the lab accident hypothesis much less relevant to the modern GoF debate.” However, the current record of containment of high-consequence pathogens is hardly reassuring.

My review of 11 relevant events (2) found that escapes of high-consequence pathogens causing community infections typically occur from state-of-the-art laboratories, including six outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome and one of foot-and-mouth disease since 2003. [Emphasis added]

Tyler Cowen argues that proof of the Chinese lab leak theory would be a big blow to the prestige of the Chinese government. (Not for me, I already had an extremely low opinion of the CCP.) I think Tyler is right, but Thomas Frank argues that the biggest effect would be to discredit the global scientific establishment:

The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties. . . .

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

It isn’t just that we were doing the same sort of dangerous research as the Chinese, we were actually funding the Wuhan lab. But it gets worse. Another former NYT science reporter (these guys get cancelled pretty often) suggests that the global community of virologists have been less than completely honest with the public. Here’s Nicholas Wade:

By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

In 2008, I became disillusioned with the field of macroeconomics. In my view, macroeconomists caused the Great Recession by not emphasizing that at each an every point in time the Fed needed to set monetary policy at a position expected to lead to on target growth in aggregate demand. When economists inside and outside central banks failed to correctly diagnose the problem in 2008, policy became highly contractionary and the global economy collapsed.

The scientific establishment needs to avoid doing research that could lead to the death of 100 million people. It’s that simple. And this is true regardless of whether of not Covid came from a Wuhan lab.

The scandal is not the fact that Covid came from a lab (which we don’t know yet, but seems doubtful), the real scandal (if there is one) is that Covid could have come from a lab. That in itself would be totally unacceptable. Some people would probably be reassured by this:

Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Her lack of sleep makes me even more nervous. Is this research really that dangerous?

On the other hand, most evidence still points toward a natural origin for the Covid-19 virus. If Covid-19 is eventually found in nature, it will be a huge black eye for the US and a huge PR coup for China.

PS. Our regulators are probably far too risk averse when it comes to nuclear power, and nowhere near risk averse enough when it comes to virus research.

Related posts

Carl Icahn Increases His Stake In Take-Two Interactive To 10.68%

ValueWalk

iPad Mini Display Outperformed By Kindle Fire HD & Nexus 7

ValueWalk

Foxconn Might Open Manufacturing Plants In The U.S. [REPORT]

ValueWalk

Peter Cundill Protégé Tim McElvaine on Investing in Japan [VIDEO]

ValueWalk

Set Bing Home Page Image As Lock Screen In Windows 8

ValueWalk

Morning Market News: JCP, APO, MCHP, ZIP, ENR, LGF, EA, ATVI, COV, LNT

ValueWalk