Munster, Kwe, Rasmussen

viruses, fascism, democracy and all that

Angie Rasmussen has written a long, emotional, sprawling defense of virologist Vincent Munster and his postdoc, Claude Kwe. The two were recently charged with crimes for trying to bring inactivated Mpox into the US without declaring it to Customs and without a certificate of deactivation. Rasmussen claims that this is a trivial crime whose significance has been greatly overblown for political purposes. I don’t ordinarily agree with Rasmussen but in this case her basic point seems obviously sort of right.

Munster and Kwe should have followed the rules. Customs should be able to know what comes in and whether it’s hazardous, even if that involves a little irritating paperwork. The next time someone brings an undeclared sample in it might not be so innocuous- people have been known to insufficiently deactivate viruses. Still, this is a minor bureaucratic violation, not front-page news. [One of the Comments below has a link that shows that Munster probably lied to Customs about the specific contents when they asked for more details, which is a really dumb thing to do and doesn’t inspire trust.]

Some of my co-thinkers who agree that Covid almost certainly came from a lab have jumped on the latest charges as evidence of the perfidy of virologists. Some virologists may be perfidious, but this ain’t the evidence. [Although it’s evidence of being dishonest and overconfident, not great traits in people handling pathogens.] Rand Paul claims it’s an indicator of Munster’s more general recklessness but if so that hasn’t been established and some or all of the points he raises look innocuous.

The main problem with Rasmussen’s case for the defense shows up as she goes on to the big background issue- the question of whether Covid may have leaked out of a virology project. She gives a video clip of a bitter exchange between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci, which she describes by “Paul demonstrably does not understand (or pretends not to understand) how virology works.” In the exchange Paul describes prior research making viruses that can infect human cells by modification of viruses that couldn’t. He claims that research of that sort could have created SARS CoV-2, which I think is highly probable. For several years prior to the pandemic prominent institutions and individuals had been warning that research of that sort could start a pandemic. Fauci’s repeated defense is that the published research describes viruses too different from SARS CoV-2 to be used as starting points in making SARS CoV-2. Paul repeatedly agrees with that but says it’s not relevant to his point since no one says those particular published sequences were the ones used. I have no idea how Rasmussen can think Fauci came out on top of this exchange.

Rasmussen then goes straight to her repeated claims that Covid almost certainly came from wildlife. She describes “our papers showing repeatedly that the pandemic began via two zoonotic spillovers at the Huanan Seafood Market due to the wildlife trade”. This shows an off-scale indifference to actual science. Their much-hyped paper showing the “two zoonotic spillovers” was riddled with errors in both coding and basic mathematical logic. Without even worrying about the quality of its data or its models, simply fixing those errors using their general technique and their simulations shows that the human cases probably came from just one successful spillover. The other papers Rasmussen refers to contain multiple errors, but they don’t boil down to a single simple logic error. Overall, there’s strong evidence that the “zoonotic” part of the claim is also wrong.

Rasmussen declares histrionically “If virology research is so dangerous and causes lab leaks all the time, ban it. But other types of research are dangerous too. We should also ban that.” (The Delta defense.) Virology research is obviously important because viral diseases are important. New anti-virals can be developed, as can new vaccine modes. What needs to be banned is the practice of making new potential pandemic pathogen viruses. Lab leaks are ubiquitous but if there aren’t any novel pathogens in a lab then there won’t be any to leak. There’s enough work to do to fight the viruses that are already around.

The blog displays a sort of science narcissism that is not useful in communicating with the public. After much discussion of her warm personal relations with Munster and other virologists, she describes what the current attacks on him and Fauci amount to: “It is about sticking a knife into the heart of American democracy.” The Trump administration is indeed sticking knives into the heart of American democracy: slush funds for violent insurrectionists, roaming gangs of deadly brown shirts, plans for armed thugs at polling places, etc. Virology, however, is not “the heart of American democracy.”

To the extent that scientists have some excuse for portraying ourselves as important it is not that we are the heart of democracy. It’s that we have collective methods for getting to objective truths. Rasmussen is not good at that. Early on in the pandemic, she was among the innumerates who reassured people that it was less worrisome than the flu, an indication that she knew nothing of epidemics or exponentials. That view supported deadly policy errors by Trump and others. Then when the mode of transmission was being debated she was among those who held that aerosols were not likely to be important. That view also led to deadly policy mistakes, and to some extent still does.

These scientific failures do not justify ridiculing her passionate defense of democracy as a citizen. I hope that people who are aware of the sloppy tendentious work from Rasmussen and her friends don’t all jump at the opportunity to fight for the prosecution of Munster and Kwe. It won’t help win friends among wavering scientists and it shouldn’t. Just as nature provides enough viruses to battle without our adding to the problem, virologists have done enough reckless acts for us to oppose without our having to get worked up over a trivial relatively minor matter.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.