Harry Marks wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture? K&D Sirotkin explore the suggestion that the COVID 19 virus was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan. The journal is
BioEssays, published by Wiley online. The comments below are fully referenced in the article.
I really am in no way qualified to evaluate this evidence. It is interesting, I tend to trust Wiley to run a careful process, even in an on-line journal, and I certainly trust you not to distort the evidence.
Thanks very much Harry. My post was from 27 August, so it is already buried in the thread. Direct link is
https://www.booktalk.org/post174110.html#p174110
The more I study this topic of virus origins, and the related question of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a treatment, the more perturbed I get about the political culture across the English speaking world and the failure to apply an evidence based approach to study of the pandemic. It is obviously very hard for most scientifically-minded people not to feel holier than Trump, but this has generated a presumption that everything he says is automatically wrong. That looks dangerous in this case.
The article ant linked on HCQ is from Epoch Times, the Falun Gong outlet that is virulently pro Trump and anti red China. The author Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a right wing Canadian climate denial think tank funded by the Heartland Institute. This article is very well written in my view, but these political links mean that many people will reject it out of hand. Its source, C19study.com, is reportedly an unreliable amateur effort to collate scientific papers. C19study.com has been banned from reddit as fake news, but as the Epoch Times article argues, there appears to be systematic censorship of HCQ advocacy across social media.
So all of this material is hotly contested. I appreciate your trust in my motives here. In my previous post I have tried to just summarise Sirotkin’s journal article, which I think presents some very alarming evidence on virus origins.
You may recall that Trump and
Pompeo called for an independent inquiry into the virus origins. When Australia supported this call, the Chinese stomped on us, imposing punitive agricultural tariffs after their ambassador to Canberra unleashed an unprecedented diplomatic onslaught of threats. He effectively said China is the new rising empire and Australia should kowtow to the Middle Kingdom. That savage response only reinforced the worry about what China have to hide in their genetic engineering laboratories in Wuhan with their long history of bat virus gain of function research.
Before people dismiss that as a conspiracy theory, they should look at the references in the Sirotkin article. I also found the
articles written by Sellin on this topic persuasive, such as his comment that “unless true origin of coronavirus is identified, another Chinese pandemic is in the offing.” Sellin says “it is understandable -- given the traditional trust in the objectivity and altruism of science -- for people to not easily accept the determination that a highly infectious and deadly virus was man-made and released from a laboratory. Nevertheless, now more than ever, we must strive to ascertain the true origin of the pandemic by carefully examining the veracity of the conclusions drawn from scientific data, precisely because the stakes are so high.” Sellin goes on to make what looks like a tragically perceptive
comment on the politics: “For many, the thought of a highly infectious and deadly man-made virus being released from a laboratory is too psychologically horrible to contemplate -- not to mention its catastrophic political and economic ramifications.” We don’t want it to be true, so we ignore any evidence that supports it. ‘A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’, as the bard wrote.
One of the key themes in my philosophy masters thesis was that logical analysis of assumptions should be a general ethical principle. I try very hard to be aware of my own prejudices in order to form an objective view based on evidence. Of course objectivity on complex political questions is ultimately impossible, since no one can tell if they bring unconscious prejudices and values to bear on their own perceptions. At least I am alert to this possibility and actively try to minimise it. That means that I do not sit easily within the tribal cultural boundaries that now polarise modern culture. So yes, my motive in drawing attention to these unpopular claims is just to encourage open dialogue and analysis, as the best way to debunk any untrue presuppositions or conspiracy theories.
Harry Marks wrote:There have been other bits of evidence out that suggest the possibility of bioengineering behind the Covid 19 virus, but this is the closest I have heard of to an actual evidenced analysis. I also know that "possibility" work gets published that sometimes turns out later to have been off target. This is "above my pay grade" as we used to say in Washington - let the CIA decide, or at least the CDC.
The Sirotkin paper argues that COVID is so genetically different from any other virus that it must have been engineered. This claim is generally rejected by virologists, for example
here,
here, and
here.
Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California is quoted in the last of these links from Nature as saying “it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was made or manipulated in a lab… We have a lot of data showing this is natural, but no data, or evidence, to show that there’s any connection to a lab.” Sirotkin pulls together a bunch of circumstantial evidence, such as the location of the world leading bat virus lab in Wuhan, the longstanding complaints about the ethical basis of viral engineering, and the severe difficulty of suggesting a natural evolutionary path for this Frankenstein bug due to several major differences from any other related virus.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/ is a 2016 article on the ethics of dual use gain of function viral research, with potential for benefit and harm. Reading it gives me the sick feeling that the covid virus arose from a horrible mistake that was foreseen but ignored.
That is all enough to say that knowing the real origins should be a political and scientific priority, not something for a shrug of indifference. If Covid was man-made then the regulation of similar research deserves much more scrutiny, and this knowledge could affect strategies to combat the pandemic. Virologists are obviously concerned about the truth, but they also know that if this horrible idea is true then things could become far more difficult for their research. We could understand if they desperately want the virus to be natural and this produces a conflict of interest in their opinions.
Harry Marks wrote:
On the other hand, I no longer trust the President of the United States to let the evidence fall where it may. I don't trust him not to bully the scientists evaluating the stuff, or to let further facts decide an ambiguous case.
The Trump problem is exactly the dilemma. With both this virus origin question and the HCQ debate, the sheer fact that Trump has endorsed views leads most scientifically-minded people to assume the exact opposite must be true. That is how badly he has destroyed his reputation for trustworthiness.
Harry Marks wrote: On the environment, for example, he has consistently pushed counter-factual conclusions and short-circuited any process of evidencing conclusions, even though huge numbers of lives will be affected.
Trump and the climate denial community see the vast momentum and scale and value of fossil fuels as absolutely requiring construction of a Big Lie in opposition to science, even while many of them have convinced themselves that their impudent falsehood is honest. That Modus Operandi comes back to bite them when they claim to advance evidence-based policies on the pandemic. And his range of idiot comments about the virus as a hoax and refusing to wear masks etc have shredded his credibility.
Harry Marks wrote: Maybe there should be a debate among lay people. But given the penchant of even academics to shed more heat than light, can we really trust lay people to handle the evidence with care?
It is really amazing that the planetary community finds it impossible to mobilise a trustworthy review of the pandemic. Whoever is nominated will face charges of hidden political agendas. As with climate change, even the scientific community is widely suspected of prejudicial agendas. With the climate there is reasonable debate on the feasibility and worth of rapid emission cuts. When someone like Lomborg points this out he just gets smeared as a denier, with his valid substantive points ignored. The covid debate is similarly political.
Harry Marks wrote:In the accounting profession they learned to pull down the shades and answer "How much do you want it to be?" when asked what 2+2 is. The result eventually was the fall of Arthur Anderson, but in the meantime billions of dollars of ordinary people's money was lost. That's why there has to be a paper trail. If I was setting up policy to deal with this sort of ethical issue, I would start with a public, accountable paper trail.
The 2+2 example is too blatant and hard to conceal. With my work in international development I heard assertions that multilateral banks would manipulate rate of return analysis for loan projects so that politically desirable but economically dubious activities would get funded. Such corrupt fudges are easy when the decisions involve a level of complexity and judgement well above the level of simple arithmetic.
With sunlight as the best disinfectant, it remains a concern that the government of China will not allow transparent review of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.