Irreal

In a nice coda to yesterday’s post on origin of COVID-19, Erik Hoel has an excellent Substack essay on the lab leak hypothesis that isn’t a just rehash of the known evidence but instead considers the larger question of how we got here. In yesterday’s post I made the point that regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak or not, an accident of that type was bound occur. Hoel agrees but fleshes the argument out by explaining why such an accident was inevitable.

Hoel’s article, Publish and Perish, looks at the broken incentive structure behind almost all scientific research. It results, he says, in scientists playing the “science game” rather than doing science. The science game is the constant competition for funding and the publishing of studies of often dubious value.

He considers the matter generally but as applied to virology it boils down to this: There are a finite number of natural viruses to study but if you can make new ones, you can generate an infinite number of research projects. Except, of course, you’re playing with dynamite. When you engineer viruses to be more infectious to humans, you run the risk that the virus will escape. Despite being a trope in end-of-the-world novels, such accidents are actually quite common and have resulted in deaths.

The conclusion is immediate and obvious: we have no business doing gain of function experiments. The risks are existential and the putative benefits have proved to be illusory. The only thing they’ve accomplished is to generate funding and advance the careers of those doing it. The canonical man on the street might not think that’s such a good bargain.

Over at Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban has a very well researched article on the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19. She interviewed more than 40 people and reviewed hundreds of pages of government internal memos, meeting minutes, emails, and other documents. Whatever the origin of the virus, the article paints a damning picture of the US Government, the Chinese Government, and a large number of the scientists involved.

The major takeaways from my first post on the matter were that

• There are sound reasons to believe that a lab leak is a reasonable hypothesis that needs to be investigated.
• No scientific argument against the lab leak hypothesis was adduced. Instead, those disparaging it settled for calling it ridiculous and a conspiracy theory. In other words, the objections were political not scientific.

Eban’s article provides further evidence for both those conclusions. There’s still no smoking gun to say that yes, the virus came from a lab leak but there’s overwhelming evidence that there was systematic obfuscation and covering up on the part of government officials and researchers.

When you look at those at the forefront of opposition to the lab leak hypothesis, they turn out to be either officials who supported the funding of gain of function research or the scientists doing the gain of function research. The fear on the part of these folks is neatly captured by a quote from Jamie Metzl:

“If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”

The virologists and the bureaucrats whose careers were built on funding them were terrified about what would happen if the truth about what was going on got out. This is true whether or not COVID-19 was the inevitable accident that this type of research virtually guaranteed.

To me, the saddest thing about this is not that politicians lied—we expect that—but that scientists lied and did everything they could to short circuit research into what happened. Color me naive but I hold firm to be ideal that science is the search for truth. The heroes of this story are the scientists who risked their careers and public approbation to state the truth as they knew it. The same goes for those in the government who refused to be silenced and kept looking for that truth.

Eban’s article is long and packed with facts and some of the original documents but if you care about this story, it’s well worth your time.

Afterward

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that discusses a May 2020 classified report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that concluded the lab leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation. More evidence that the government always knew the origin of the virus was far from a settled question.