I’m a science and technology writer and my job often entails taking complex scientific data and translating it for a general audience. So as a public service allow me:
- You big Orange Ultramaroon and Pompeous Pompadour, nature made this bug. Period. A Rush rant isn’t evidence. Evidence is evidence. There are plenty of issues to engage China on. This isn’t one of them. My God, are you really that stupid?
- Funny how you’re now talking about a severe second hump after humiliating CDC head Dr. Redfield at the podium two weeks ago when he mentioned it. FYI, he didn’t even repudiate his statement like you wanted him to. He just added another couple words to confuse you.
Two things to start:
1. The structure of COVID-19 is natural, not manmade.
2. And it is called “novel” because it previously didn’t exist
anywhere. It’s a naturally occurring mutation.
Now that DOESN’T address the remote possibility that it walked into or out of the worldclass Wuhan Virology Institute on somebody’s shoe. But they definitely didn’t make it. So no intent. Which makes all the difference to scientists, but none to Trump and racist supporters like the one who accosted and blamed my neighbor, an Asian-American doctor, for bringing the virus here.
For further explanation, I turn to my scientist (Virology PhD candidate) nephew, Mike.
Mike: It seems like there are two really compelling pieces of evidence that point towards this being a naturally occurring virus. First, if scientists wanted to manipulate the virus, they would have likely used something called a “*reverse genetics system.” These exist for coronaviruses already. This would have left a fingerprint of sorts when sequencing viruses found in infected people, but that was never observed.
Second, the part of the virus that actually sticks to human cells looks very similar to ones found in pangolins. It also looks like there are some features of this part of the virus that came about due to pressure from an animals immune system, again pointing towards it likely coming from an animal source.
I guess the theory that this was accidentally leaked from a lab doing legitimate research cannot be completely refuted, but why are people jumping directly to that?
If it were an American lab, would we jump to that conclusion? It just makes much more logical sense that this jumped from an animal reservoir to humans.
The real Wuhan controversy
Mike’s question is a good one. Another FB friend found this Newsweek article. It’s well-researched and a bit complex, which means Donny and Pompy will have nothing to do with it. But it’s also kinda troubling, a skeptical critique of the state of virus research that is actually being done in Wuhan and in this country.
At issue is “gain of function” research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to mirror what happens in nature as the virus mutates from species to species. The goal of this research is to speed up and understand how viruses evolve their potential for infecting humans. If SARS COV2 had been manipulated in this fashion, it would have had telltale markers. It wasn’t engineered. That doesn’t categorically rule out that Wuhan had it and maybe studied it but it also doesn’t prove they deliberately set it loose on all humanity by way of their own people. Killing their own citizens. Crushing their own economy. Perhaps seriously damaging their own supply chains for years. That’s where I call fake.
Gain of function sounds like serious mad science for any country. Let alone one that doesn’t always share or play nice. It is wise to be concerned about Chinese transparency. But what about our own transparency? Don’t believe for a second that research like Wuhan’s is not happening here.
“The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.”
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
We may never know whether if Patient 0 came from a bite-infected lab worker or some street vendor’s bat soup on a cold January night, but there’s no proof of Chinese intent to unleash it on their own unsuspecting populace.
I do think that engineering or reverse engineering viruses to investigating how they migrate from species to species is inherently dangerous. But if we DON’T understand that process, how will we ever prevent it? Scientists should conduct this research and scientist should police it and if need be, report to Congress. This is a good debate for scientists and informed citizens to have, not politicians as ignorant as Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.
Dr. Fauci defended the work. “[D]etermining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” wrote Fauci and two co-authors in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011. “Decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
Yeah. Transparency. Which incidentally, is a great argument for staying at least on speaking terms with China and its scientists before the next pandemic catches us with our pants down. And it’s also a good time to turn that skeptical eye on the transparency of virus research in our own country.
“We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all,” wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. “[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process.”
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
This from the Washington Post in early 2019, where Inglesby and Lipsitch came down hard about virus research being done in this country. Much has changed since. The world has changed.
*Reverse genetics is a new approach made possible by recombinant DNA technology, that starts from a protein or DNA for which there is no genetic information and then works backward to make a mutant gene, ending up with a mutant phenotype.
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