From Origin of Covid — Following the Clues by Nicholas Wade. Nicholas Wade was the science reporter of the New York Times for years before becoming one of the early victims of Critical Race Theory and Social Justice cancel culture. They really went for the jugular when he had the effrontery to publish A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, a review of the rapidly emerging evidence around human evolution. The interplay of evolution, genes and culture is always red meat for the savage social justice zealots. While they go some denunciation support from academics, actual readers and experts in the field were far more willing to the arguments being made.
After his New York Times career was closed out for following the science, he has continued to write on other platforms. I came across a recent article in Medium, linked above.
As I have said through most of the Covid-19 folderol, no one really knows what is going on. Our measurements and data sets are simply too ambiguous and unreliable to provide a good basis for forecasting. Which is why we have had so many dreadfully wrong forecasts from so many experts.
He lays out the purpose of this long article.
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.
In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.
By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.
The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.
I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.
And that is what he does, steadily navigating his way through all the issues and the degree to which we can be more or less confident in either the data or the conclusions drawn from the data.
The two theories are that Covid-19 emerged from a natural transmission on a Chinese wet market. The second theory is Covid-19 was an unplanned release or escape from a research facility of a human modified strain.
Both are plausible but there is little yet in terms of conclusive proof. And given that the Chinese government is all in for proving that it was a natural wet-market evolution, there is a good chance the evidence may never be conclusive.
He sifts the evidence and finds the preponderance is towards the man-made argument but emphasizes that that is not proven and likely cannot be proven.
But as he makes his way through the evidence, his research reveals just how big a gap there is between real world reporting and actual truth. For example:
From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.
Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”
The public was deliberately lied to by experts.
This is not dissimilar to the Global Warming fiasco. Scientific experts finding the evidence necessary to keep the research grants flowing.
A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.
This is the useful and honest kind of reporting we used to have and now miss in its absence.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment