Thank you for this report. As a scientist, I never understood why random immunologists, including friends, would blow up at the idea of a lab leak. I would ask why they were so adamant and they either wouldn’t say or intimated they knew more about evolution than I did.
Untangling the MAGA politicization from the research (much of which seems to have been suppressed) by honest researchers investigating the lab-leak theory from the apparent System I thinking of immunologists who’d only ever experienced zoonotic infections is a big job. It reminds me of the Craig Venter - NIH (Francis’s Collins) war over the human genome that, as I recall, took Bill Clinton to resolve. Sadly, we don’t have such enlightened leadership.
Hopefully, when all the cards are on the table, we can move to the next step. When there is another virus released that is adapted to humans and rapid human to human transmission, what rapid measures can we take or invent to protect us.
Western scientists circled the wagon and insisted the respiratory Anthrax infections were caused by a natural phenomenon in a similar way after the Sverdlovsk leak in the Soviet Union. That's a very instructive episode to understand what's happened in the last 5 years.
I think it has something to do with funding worries and preserving the global prestige of science.
In my experience, the loss of bipartisanship for science started in 1994, when the Tea Party came into power. Gingrich shut down the government and shut down NSF and NIH. The Tea Party reps went to NIH and found any grant that included the word minority and demanded they change it. That began the cat and mouse game of changing program names and broadening who was included that persisted until the anti-DEI moment, which is a disaster for US innovation and education. The politicization of climate change, endangered species, and the various attacks on faculty by groups like Turning Point and the Professor Watchlist also contributed to this kneejerk response of scientists to what seemed to be an anti-science program on the right.
There are so many things that could be better in the scientific world, and the reliance on and empowerment of heirarchy is one of them. I have many stories about this in my career - all I can say is it never serves a scientist well, especialy in anything related to biology - to be absolutely sure about something or not be open to the value of new data. There is always an outlyer or some exception. I also think that immunologists and others were freaked out because they owed so much of their careers to NIH and Tony Fauci, they always looked up to him, and they could see him struggling with Trump. The level of emotion was high, they were scared with the body bags, and the scientific journals publishing the market story all the time, and the idea of people actually swallowing bleach, that they lived in a System 1 world, where they couldn't discriminate between political attacks and honest scientists just asking questions. They were dealing with so much at the lab and clinic level, it created a huge dissonance for them to reconsider origins, especially if it meant negating the heirarchy's narrative and aligning themselves with MAGA.
Also, at another level, there was a desire on the part of US Public Health to keep one message, so anything that deviated from that message was attacked by the heriarchy of scientists. That was such a mistake because citizens didn't learn how science worked real time, changing approaches as new information becomes available, and it made the public distrust science even more. (This was of course, exacerbated by the RW media, whose reporting on science was never without political overtones.)
The covid advisors to Biden were generally an East Coast in-group that seemed hermetically sealed and were very empowered and, from teh outside, sure of themselves. They were oblivious to what they were missing by not having broader representation. Meanwhile, I wrote many times to beg the Biden admin to diversify their COVID advisory committees. Living in New Mexico, I could see that all the people from the East Coast had no idea how people lived out here and it risked lives and made the people advising the president look completely tone deaf in the worst way.
Anyway, that's my take on it after many decades as a scientist.
There’s quite a bit in there I disagree with but I’ll note the scientists who led the charge to throw cold water on the lab origins hypothesis (think Daszak, Farrar, and the Proximal boys) did so long before Trump or the media weighed in. In my view, it was their efforts themselves that caused the media to weigh in.
Thank you for your clear and important writing on this topic. Have you tried getting your comments beyond scientific journals and Substack, and into The New Yorker and other such media? You have the cred and you write in a way that nonscientists can understand. (Well, for the most part. You’d need a good nonscientist editor, haha.)
I did try and fail to get things published in the Washington Post and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
I have little cred except perhaps with the Bulletin, where I published an article almost 30 (edit, more like 40. oy) years ago on our pledge to boycott Reagan's Star Wars program, around the time Barbara Boxer nominated four of us for a Nobel Peace Prize. That and $6.75 will buy a cup of coffee until the tariff effects really kick in.
I think some of what you write is exaggerated. I'm especially concerned that you are very likely to be overstating the downsides of the vaccines and leaving out the downsides of long covid, which seems to be pretty common even in younger cohorts.
I'm also a bit uncomfortable with words like "conclusive and irrefutable evidence" in this context. The odds are high, but it ain't the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Other than my brief, cute little JRSSA paper on collider stratification bias in the case locations, I haven't contributed anything original to the field. My big often-updated Bayesian blog is just a systematic summary of what others (e.g. Valentin Bruttel) have found. I got into it mostly from addiction to the Bayesian approach and frustration with exchanges of mere verbalisms.
Our odds estimates on the origins seem pretty similar though we choose different words.
On the RNA-based vaccines, it should be possible to estimate how much clotting they cause vs. their incremental reduction in clotting caused by the disease. I don't know how that works out for different demographics. Covid causes a lot of non-clotting-based problems as well.
It would be nice to see a good dispassionate comparative estimate of the different effects. We won't get it from institutions run by the lunatic RFK, who does not believe that HIV causes AIDS, etc. Maybe some studies from other countries will come in.
My personal guess (based partly on things Michael Lin from Stanford has written) is that for most purposes after the initial emergency a Novavax-style vaccine is better than the mRNA ones. It's a bit ironic that this low-side-effect vaccine happens to have been the first caught in the RFK purge. I'm furious because due to being immunocompromised I need to keep boosted and Novavax has been the best option.
I agree that there's no sharp line between pseudoscience and science. That still allows some things to be far on one side or the other of the fuzzy line.
RFK Jr says and writes many things that are crazy and which in practice have deadly consequences. That's more important than semantics.
Thank you for this report. As a scientist, I never understood why random immunologists, including friends, would blow up at the idea of a lab leak. I would ask why they were so adamant and they either wouldn’t say or intimated they knew more about evolution than I did.
Untangling the MAGA politicization from the research (much of which seems to have been suppressed) by honest researchers investigating the lab-leak theory from the apparent System I thinking of immunologists who’d only ever experienced zoonotic infections is a big job. It reminds me of the Craig Venter - NIH (Francis’s Collins) war over the human genome that, as I recall, took Bill Clinton to resolve. Sadly, we don’t have such enlightened leadership.
Hopefully, when all the cards are on the table, we can move to the next step. When there is another virus released that is adapted to humans and rapid human to human transmission, what rapid measures can we take or invent to protect us.
Western scientists circled the wagon and insisted the respiratory Anthrax infections were caused by a natural phenomenon in a similar way after the Sverdlovsk leak in the Soviet Union. That's a very instructive episode to understand what's happened in the last 5 years.
I think it has something to do with funding worries and preserving the global prestige of science.
In my experience, the loss of bipartisanship for science started in 1994, when the Tea Party came into power. Gingrich shut down the government and shut down NSF and NIH. The Tea Party reps went to NIH and found any grant that included the word minority and demanded they change it. That began the cat and mouse game of changing program names and broadening who was included that persisted until the anti-DEI moment, which is a disaster for US innovation and education. The politicization of climate change, endangered species, and the various attacks on faculty by groups like Turning Point and the Professor Watchlist also contributed to this kneejerk response of scientists to what seemed to be an anti-science program on the right.
There are so many things that could be better in the scientific world, and the reliance on and empowerment of heirarchy is one of them. I have many stories about this in my career - all I can say is it never serves a scientist well, especialy in anything related to biology - to be absolutely sure about something or not be open to the value of new data. There is always an outlyer or some exception. I also think that immunologists and others were freaked out because they owed so much of their careers to NIH and Tony Fauci, they always looked up to him, and they could see him struggling with Trump. The level of emotion was high, they were scared with the body bags, and the scientific journals publishing the market story all the time, and the idea of people actually swallowing bleach, that they lived in a System 1 world, where they couldn't discriminate between political attacks and honest scientists just asking questions. They were dealing with so much at the lab and clinic level, it created a huge dissonance for them to reconsider origins, especially if it meant negating the heirarchy's narrative and aligning themselves with MAGA.
Also, at another level, there was a desire on the part of US Public Health to keep one message, so anything that deviated from that message was attacked by the heriarchy of scientists. That was such a mistake because citizens didn't learn how science worked real time, changing approaches as new information becomes available, and it made the public distrust science even more. (This was of course, exacerbated by the RW media, whose reporting on science was never without political overtones.)
The covid advisors to Biden were generally an East Coast in-group that seemed hermetically sealed and were very empowered and, from teh outside, sure of themselves. They were oblivious to what they were missing by not having broader representation. Meanwhile, I wrote many times to beg the Biden admin to diversify their COVID advisory committees. Living in New Mexico, I could see that all the people from the East Coast had no idea how people lived out here and it risked lives and made the people advising the president look completely tone deaf in the worst way.
Anyway, that's my take on it after many decades as a scientist.
There’s quite a bit in there I disagree with but I’ll note the scientists who led the charge to throw cold water on the lab origins hypothesis (think Daszak, Farrar, and the Proximal boys) did so long before Trump or the media weighed in. In my view, it was their efforts themselves that caused the media to weigh in.
You disagree with what I wrote? You probably weren’t part of the network I worked with nationally and saw other aspects of the history.
Thank you for your clear and important writing on this topic. Have you tried getting your comments beyond scientific journals and Substack, and into The New Yorker and other such media? You have the cred and you write in a way that nonscientists can understand. (Well, for the most part. You’d need a good nonscientist editor, haha.)
I just thought of a good non-scientist editor!
I did try and fail to get things published in the Washington Post and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
I have little cred except perhaps with the Bulletin, where I published an article almost 30 (edit, more like 40. oy) years ago on our pledge to boycott Reagan's Star Wars program, around the time Barbara Boxer nominated four of us for a Nobel Peace Prize. That and $6.75 will buy a cup of coffee until the tariff effects really kick in.
$6.75!! what the hell kind of coffee do you drink?!
Aha- I should have said $2.75. Another of my failures to fully research a key technical point.
I don't except at home. I see prices at the airport and then probably mis-remember them.
I think some of what you write is exaggerated. I'm especially concerned that you are very likely to be overstating the downsides of the vaccines and leaving out the downsides of long covid, which seems to be pretty common even in younger cohorts.
I'm also a bit uncomfortable with words like "conclusive and irrefutable evidence" in this context. The odds are high, but it ain't the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Other than my brief, cute little JRSSA paper on collider stratification bias in the case locations, I haven't contributed anything original to the field. My big often-updated Bayesian blog is just a systematic summary of what others (e.g. Valentin Bruttel) have found. I got into it mostly from addiction to the Bayesian approach and frustration with exchanges of mere verbalisms.
Our odds estimates on the origins seem pretty similar though we choose different words.
On the RNA-based vaccines, it should be possible to estimate how much clotting they cause vs. their incremental reduction in clotting caused by the disease. I don't know how that works out for different demographics. Covid causes a lot of non-clotting-based problems as well.
It would be nice to see a good dispassionate comparative estimate of the different effects. We won't get it from institutions run by the lunatic RFK, who does not believe that HIV causes AIDS, etc. Maybe some studies from other countries will come in.
My personal guess (based partly on things Michael Lin from Stanford has written) is that for most purposes after the initial emergency a Novavax-style vaccine is better than the mRNA ones. It's a bit ironic that this low-side-effect vaccine happens to have been the first caught in the RFK purge. I'm furious because due to being immunocompromised I need to keep boosted and Novavax has been the best option.
I agree that there's no sharp line between pseudoscience and science. That still allows some things to be far on one side or the other of the fuzzy line.
RFK Jr says and writes many things that are crazy and which in practice have deadly consequences. That's more important than semantics.
p.s. I disagree with Woit and Smolin.