Trump on Covid Lab Leak
the shit hits the fan
Trump weighs in
The Trump gang has just replaced the covid.gov website with a declaration that Covid came from a lab leak, along with a rudimentary argument and a collection of politicized comments. No detailed evidence is included. A misleading claim about the lack of efficacy of masks was tossed in for bad measure. The New York Times (representing, I think, most of the liberal commentariat) has responded with a long article denouncing the whole idea as an unsupported conspiracy theory.
This foreseeable conjunction is approximately the worst possible outcome, one that I’ve spent a lot of the last two years trying to help head off. It combines a loss of useful public health information, a misleading claim about public health measures, and a failure to provide any actual further information on origins. Much of the scientific community and nominal friends of science have seized the opportunity to respond with some combination of dishonesty and dim-witted authoritarianism, as if the overwhelming majority of the population had not already rejected their story. We’re left with an increasingly openly fascist administration telling a crude approximation of the truth (and being believed by most of the population) while most of the scientific establishment in the U.S. and their followers push nonsense. (In contrast, the French establishment, i.e. the National Academy of Medicine, recently adopted a report making it clear that the current evidence is more supportive of a lab leak than of zoonosis.)
Covid Origins
Here I’ll try to go over at least an evaluation of the key points of the announcement concerning Covid origins. Each point on the origins is followed by my evaluation. The supporting material for these comments is in my long blog on the origins. (“Trump” here means the current administration, not the illiterate person.)
Trump: “The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.”
This is exaggerated. The furin cleavage site (FCS) is found in nature though not in other sarbecoviruses. Given selection constraints, i.e. that having the FCS makes it much more likely that we would notice the virus because it causes a pandemic, the presence of an FCS provides only weak evidence for a lab leak.
Trump: “Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.”
The data do show that a single successful spillover is more probable. We fortunately don’t have enough cases of new pandemics to say that the probable single spillover is strong evidence against natural zoonosis, although it certainly looks atypical and thus provides weak evidence for a lab leak.
Trump: “Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.”
This one is true. It’s somewhat understated since it could be substantially strengthened by description of the known research plans of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), based on grant proposals.
Trump: “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”
Perhaps there’s some classified information that makes this claim useful, but based on the unclassified information it isn’t. We have no idea if there’s meaningful evidence that whatever illnesses happened were Covid.
Trump: ”By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”
That’s unspecific and oddly phrased but essentially true. The absence of any detected prior hosts, the lack of cases among wildlife vendors, the negative correlation between potential host mtDNA and SC2 RNA on market swabs, and the lack of normal post-species-spillover rapid evolution of the amino acid sequence add up to providing significant evidence against natural zoonosis and thus supporting a lab leak.
Several other lines of evidence, especially the close resemblance of the restriction enzyme segment pattern to the prior WIV plans for making synthetic chimeras, also support a lab-leak picture.
Other Claims
The site goes on to make a series of charges against various institutions for their failures to respond effectively to Covid and especially for their general dishonesty. The idea is supposed to be that it was all the Democrats fault. The problem with these claims is what they omit.
For the first year after the pandemic started, the President was Donald Trump. Trump is the one who undid Obama's nominal ban on dangerous gain-of-function work in 2017. Trump is the one who led the origins coverup for about a year, boasting of the great trade deal he was getting with Xi Jinping as he praised how well Xi handled the situation. Trump tried to shut down testing to hide the evidence that the pandemic was spreading. He assured us that the pandemic would be over by April 2020. He repeatedly advised taking ineffective drugs, and suggested looking into injecting bleach or pushing UV lamps up our butts. Meanwhile, when Trump got sick he took real drugs- Remdesivir and a new monoclonal antibody that was not available to the public.
Public Health Measures Then and Now
The most important claim for practical purposes on the new site is “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.” That is technically true but seriously misleading. It’s hard to gather “conclusive evidence” without large randomized trials. Well-fitted N95 masks do an excellent job of blocking aerosol transmission, which is why they are used by infectious disease doctors. The experiment of providing good-quality masks with good advice on how and when to use them was simply never tried. Trump never used the Defense Production Act to make good masks available.
The most obvious cost-effective method to reduce the disease burden while allowing most normal activities to resume was and remains to install air purifiers and/or UV-C lamps in public spaces including all medical facilities, schools, airports, etc. Trump did nothing along those lines. Although he told Bob Woodward (on tape) that he knew Covid was airborne, he didn’t bother to tell the public. Biden didn’t do much better.
We now have an administration whose health policy is led by the lunatic RFK jr, who cannot bring himself to acknowledge that AIDS is caused by HIV or that a vaccine is the reason that measles is almost gone. The NIH is now headed by the well-spoken ideologue economist Jay Bhattacharya, who opposes almost all public health measures. My colleagues who think that Bhattacharya will be an important voice for sanity seem to have forgotten that he spoke at a rally for RFK when RFK was a fringe candidate.
Looking Back
We're paying for the cowardly silence of most scientists by handing something like truth-telling on the big question of Covid origins over to the fascists, for reasons on which I’ve speculated. Overall the scientific community (outside France) has failed to present a realistic picture of the evidence on Covid origins, for a variety of reasons on which I’ve briefly speculated. That failure has allowed the fascists to take on the role of truth-tellers, after their own crude fashion. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it “Fewer own goals would be a good idea just about now. But if a few outspoken people once again pretend to speak for “Science” and thus cause even more public trust to be lost, it would be a predictable but tragic continuation of the last few years.”
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Thanks for a badly needed corrective to what is already a bad situation. Some here will quibble with points but the main thrust of what you said is right and in a very important way.
I understand that this post is likely your heartfelt opinion so I also understand that the "We're paying for the cowardly silence of most scientists by handing something like truth-telling on the big question of Covid origins over to the fascists" part is an expression of your frustration. However, this statement is inaccurate: the small subset of scientists (maybe 100 or so) actively working on this question have been far from silent on this topic. For example, their dismissal of the various odds ratios you used in your probabilistic analyses have been quite actively expressed on various social media platforms and in commentaries of your publications on this topic. You are now even referred to quite regularly (and unfairly) as some variant of "that physicist guy who doesn't know how far out of his lane he has strayed."
The reality is that ~80% of the slightly bigger (but still minute) subset of scientists actually capable of contributing meaningful opinions (maybe a few thousand virologists, epidemiologists and others with appropriate skillsets) think the balance of all the evidence (not just the hard data) leans in favor of a natural origin. I'm not sure it is fair to call these scientists cowardly if this is what they actually think. Most of this larger subset talk openly about their leaning in favor of the natural origin hypothesis while at the very same time appreciating that there is still insufficient data to exclude the possibility of a lab-leak being the ultimate source of the pandemic. How is this cowardly silence? How many more publications, commentaries, podcasts, social media posts etc need they make for their opinions to be considered non-silent.
Also, despite the negative connotations of fence-sitting among the general population, fence sitting is the default stance that scientists are supposed to take when confronted with too little data to decide. It is not at all cowardly to say "I honestly don't know." How many times do undecideds need to say that they do not know for what they say to be considered non-silent.
It is genuinely brave of you to argue (very well in my opinion) against the consensus opinion of other scientists working on the origins question. I assume, however, that you appreciate that the consensus of most of the general population is that the lab-leak hypothesis is more plausible. I assume therefore that you also realize that people on the "other side" who are analyzing all the available hard data and are sticking with their conclusions that the natural origin hypothesis is more plausible are also bravely arguing against a consensus. I would argue that in most materially relevant respects the people who have come down on the natural origin side are even braver than you are in that the consensus that they are arguing against is one that wields far more power than the one you are arguing against.
It seems like a misstep on your part to describe these scientists as cowards. As irritating, wrong-headed or awful as you might think some (or all) of their arguments are, and as rude, arrogant and vicious as you might think they are as people, I think you will eventually find that they are some of the most fearless academic adversaries that you have ever encountered. Whether their fearlessness is an expression of bravery or an expression of foolhardiness is up to you to decide. Surely you can see though that it is not cowardice.
Last point: Nobody handed "truth-telling" over to anyone. Blaming scientists for what is happening seems odd to me. The vast majority of the minority of people who think they believe in the scientific method haven't a clue what it is. In their everyday lives they believe in a whole bunch of stuff that is far less plausible than either the lab leak or natural origin hypotheses. Most of the rest just believe whatever their parents and other authority figures have told them to believe. Scientists are only tolerated because the adults in charge know that they create imbalances in information that can be exploited for financial/military/nationalistic/health/production/whatever gains. All the other stuff scientists contribute in the form of dissenting opinions that run counter to the interests of powerful adults (the earth is not the center of the universe, humans evolved from ape-like creatures, we are incapable of free-will, the coral reefs are dying, smoking causes cancer, overuse of fossil fuels is changing the climate, our population is being poisoned by the food we eat) have been, and will continue to be, actively disparaged by those powerful adults.
Justifiably or not, finding yourself on the same side as the powerful adults with respect to a consenting scientific opinion (the natural origin position is in fact the dissenting opinion), shouldn't make you feel guilty if you actually believe that the consensus is correct (i.e. that the lab-leak is more probable than a natural origin). Just own it. Definitely push back on the misuses of your work by the powerful adults. Just saying that is seems really odd and misguided for you to now heap all the blame for the misuse of your work on the people who were arguing against the validity of your work. Heap the blame instead on the people misusing your work.
As always, maximum respect to you for putting in the effort to look at this issue.