Brookings/RAND on Covid

stepping outside naked in the Moscow winter

The Brookings Institute and the RAND corporation have just held a multi-day meeting on “Building resilience: Enhancing biosafety, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness”, dealing primarily with plans to defend against future pandemics while making some use of knowledge picked up from the Covid pandemic. For readers unfamiliar with these organizations, both have a long history of being close to the center of the DC establishment, with Brookings usually leaning just left of center and RAND having ties to the military with the corresponding political lean. Meeting participants came from a range of backgrounds in economics, the military, intelligence community, biodefense bureaucracy, non-governmental consulting firms, lab science, etc. For those who like to use words like “deep state”, this would be a group that might qualify.

The larger portion of the meeting was held under “Chatham House Rules”, which means that participants are free to discuss the content in general but not to attribute specific statements to identifiable participants. Since no participants said anything notably different from what they say elsewhere, these rules aren’t quite necessary but they are perfectly convenient for a participant who takes fragmentary notes and doesn’t have the sharpest memory yet would like to let others know what transpired.

The first obvious question concerns the group’s consensus on how Covid started. Several participants expressed explicit views. These ranged from what sounded like a somewhat forced bureaucratic agnosticism to a very strong likelihood, based on some cited evidence, that the origin was a lab leak. Beyond the explicit statements, the balance of the agenda implied that a lab origin was pretty much assumed. The background possibility of zoonosis was always acknowledged but very little time was spent on how to deal with it. Instead the focus was on how to improve research safety and how prevent rogue actors from using increasingly available synthesis techniques for deliberate attacks.

Although the speakers often dwelt on proposed bureaucratic rearrangements of regulation methods, some ideas had more direct value. One was that specific tough laws were needed against the most dangerous types of pathogen research. That would allow not only regulation of government funded work but also of work by big companies or garage tinkerers. The consensus was that AI will allow easier design of enhanced pathogens and that commercial DNA sequence supply will get even cheaper than now. There’s some hope for regulating even the private sector because there are only a few suppliers of those DNA sequences, and AI may help flag suspicious orders.

A lot of discussion went into proposed lab safety improvements, about which I’m pessimistic. The great dangers come from highly transmissible pathogens, like SARS-CoV-2. These are notoriously hard to contain for long by any real-world measures as implemented by actual human beings, regardless of whatever formal protocols are in place. The best place to stop them is before they are made.

One speaker pointed out that describing the dangerous research by the phrase “gain of function” was counterproductive since a lot of safe useful work involves gain of function and some of the dangerous work doesn’t. Gathering and culturing new pathogens can be dangerous even if they are not deliberately modified. A phrase referring to potential pandemic pathogens comes closer to capturing what needs to be most tightly regulated.

In a passing reference to zoonosis, it was suggested that sending people out to collect pathogen samples (e.g. in bat caves) is likely to raise risks more than reduce them, a point that has been noted for years but until recently often ignored by key agencies. One speaker suggested that remote water sampling stations with automated interpretations of the sequences found might provide a safe, affordable, effective way of keeping an eye out for new dangers, perhaps in time for shutting them down- a valuable idea that I hadn’t heard before. Several speakers noted the enormous gap between that ideal and our failure to take any worthwhile measures as H5N1 bird flu repeatedly spills over into humans.

No measures can guarantee that there won’t be future pandemics from one or another of those sources. That’s why “pandemic preparedness” is essential. There was consensus that we need to have rapid vaccine platforms (initially mRNA for rapid production scaling) available for each major category of pathogen. We need manufacturing capability for masks, filters, syringes, etc. In my opinion (I’m not sure if many others agreed) we need already-established air filtering and UV-C in many public places, helping reduce the ongoing burden of Covid and other respiratory diseases and potentially allowing quicker resumption of normal activities when the next pandemic hits. None of these projects cost anything like what a pandemic costs, even aside from the direct suffering. Some (ongoing air filtering) may even pay for themselves in reduced sick days during normal seasons.

Despite the group’s consistent reasonableness about the spectrum of possible pandemic sources and countermeasures, I got an uneasy feeling that much of the discussion was taking place in a dream world. The key players in any of the proposed measures were the US government and the bioscience research community. Useful laws require first being passed and then being enforced by people with guns. Good research requires competent, honest researchers.

So I asked one panel how they would deal with their rational, thoughtful proposals going out for implementation to the brutal Trump administration, whose biological side is represented by the lunatic RFK Jr, and to the scientific establishment (Science, Nature, Cell…) that lives in its own fantasy world where Covid came from a raccoon dog and the scientists represented at the meeting were just conspiracy theorists. A panelist laughed and said they mainly deal with it by listening to music. Getting more serious, they added that many lower-level government employees are still reasonable well-meaning people with whom one may communicate. As inadequate as that may sound, the response on what’s going on with the leading scientific institutions was more alarming. Crickets. No response at all.

So these well-meaning people, a good cross-section of the most serious and benign side of the deep state, seem to be making serious plans for a scientific/political environment that no longer exists. I couldn’t help but think of Trotsky’s remark about another plan, that it was like deciding whether to go out naked in the Moscow winter, ignoring only two things: the weather and the police.

What can we as outsiders do to help? The political task of replacing or at least restraining the current governmental regime is part of a broader effort in which our role as scientists is not especially large. The task of pulling our leading scientific institutions out of their self-interested epistemic bubble is a hard enough challenge. It will not be easy to get the major journals or the National Academies or their followers in the popular science press to even tolerate the evidence-based mildly lab-leak leaning conclusions of the French National Academy of Medicine, of the FBI, of the National Center for Medical Intelligence, of the German DNI, or of the RAND/Brookings consensus.

The RAND/Brookings group is not particularly suited to the task of changing broad popular opinion. With one or two exceptions, their remarks were aimed at fellow power-adjacent elites, using language that would draw a blank with any outside group. Everything was muted, out of a constant sense that it was essential not to offend the government and the scientific institutional leaders who would be needed to get anything done. That’s a realistic approach for that group, and it may be productive at the margins.

Power, however, has shifted. Muted language doesn’t reach out enough to change public opinion or official scientific opinion enough to have much effect, given the current scientific weather and political police. Or perhaps I should say political weather and scientific police.

I think it would help if some scientists were to speak out in a more organized way for realism about Covid origins, rather than leave that field to MAGA conspiracists and anti-vax nuts. I hope that if a public summary of the RAND meeting is published it will use simple, clear language accessible to ordinary citizens. Although the government is heading off in scary directions on multiple fronts and Science and Nature show no signs of allowing heresy, I think there are a few people in the press who might pay attention.

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