Nicholas Wade on the Deficiencies of Science Writers on Covid By Brian Simpson

Nicholas Wade is a leading science writer, who should be credited with being one of the first mainstream science writers to objectively, and with balance, put the case for the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, which he evaluated in the context of the then prevailing animal origin hypothesis. He has some more recent material elaborating on this case. But what he deals with in even more penetrating detail is the lack of objectivity and balance in most science writers in this field, who may have held to the lab origin hypothesis in private, but proclaimed it as a conspiracy that would damage China, in public. What this campaign did was obscure and create a smoke screen in the early period, making the search for the origin of Covid, a cold case. Still, as I see it, in the end, the truth may out, and many will need to be taken to court, some to jail.

https://www.city-journal.org/why-science-writers-do-not-report-objectively-on-covids-origins

“The worldwide toll of deaths from Covid-19 has just hit 6 million, nearly 1 million of which are in the United States. Few science stories are more important than understanding where the Covid virus came from. Yet the science writers’ section of the press corps has proved strangely incapable of telling the story straight.

Two hypotheses have long been on the table. One is that the virus jumped naturally from some animal host, as many epidemics have done in the past. The other is that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, where researchers are known to have been genetically manipulating bat viruses in order to predict future epidemics. Both hypotheses are plausible but, so far, no direct evidence exists for either.

The rule for covering such a story is obvious: write about both possibilities as even-handedly as possible until the truth emerges. But science writers have consistently trumpeted any developments favoring natural emergence while downplaying or ignoring those pointing to a lab leak.

Press reports have abounded in the last few days about new studies claiming to prove that all early cases of Covid were associated with a wet market in Wuhan and hence that the virus must have jumped to people from an animal there. “Two new papers make the case robustly,” ran the credulous headline in The Economist, typical of many articles implying that the case was closed. “The lab leak theory is dead,” declared The New Republic, with great exaggeration.

But the new papers are mere preprints, unpublished drafts that have not yet been exposed to the rigors of peer review. One, from an American group led by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute, claimed the wet market was the source of the epidemic. The second paper’s group of authors—headed by George Gao, director of the Chinese CDC—had every incentive to back the Andersen claim but did not do so. They said only, as was already well known, that “the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day”—in other words, the crowded, closed atmosphere in the market helped the virus spread from person to person, but the epidemic didn’t necessarily begin there.

“Scientists who weren’t involved in the research papers are calling the new data ‘very convincing’ and a ‘blow’ to the lab-leak theory,” asserted NPR. In fact, the data don’t detract in any way from the substantial evidence favoring a lab leak. They also offer no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 ever existed in nature, the key to proving that it emerged naturally. Not a single animal tested in the market bore the virus. That being so, it’s surely more economical to assume the many positive environmental samples from the market were contaminated by infected people, not infected animals.

Here are three flaws in the new papers that most science writers ignored.

First, even if all the early cases originated from the wet market, as the Andersen paper contends, there is no way of telling whether the virus was carried into the market by an animal or by a person whose infection came from a laboratory. That leaves the debate at square one.

Second, the Andersen group is looking at the wrong time period for determining the virus’s origin. The epidemic probably started somewhere between September and early December 2019. But the cases analyzed in their paper date from mid- to late December 2019, when the epidemic was probably well-entrenched and its origin already clouded. “These authors are trying to close the case using only mid-to-late December cases and this is unlikely to lead to any scientifically robust conclusion of how or when the outbreak began,” says Alina Chan of the Broad Institute and coauthor of Viral.

A third flaw is a probable error in the authors’ statistical assumptions. It has long been known that many of the early cases of Covid occurred in people who had no known association with the wet market, which would seem to rule out the market as the source of the pandemic. The Andersen group has plotted the mid-to-late December 2019 cases on a map, showing that the spatial distribution of those with no known link to the market is very similar to that of the market-related cases. This shows, they say, that even the apparently unassociated cases probably had hidden chains of infection with the market, which is therefore the sole source of the epidemic.

The argument is ingenious. Its fatal flaw lies in assuming that the non-market cases chosen for study were selected at random by the Chinese authorities. In fact, as Chan has noted, one of the authorities’ criteria was closeness to the market. The spatial pattern of non-market cases reflects this selection bias, not a hidden chain of infection to the market. “Since their assumption of no ascertainment bias is most likely incorrect, their analysis is therefore also meaningless,” Chan says.

Unlike most journalists, science writers seldom consider the motives of their sources. Few or none remarked on Andersen’s deep personal interest in the result he was trying to prove. He and his colleagues concluded on January 31, 2020, that the Covid virus did not have a natural origin. But Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, immediately decreed this view to be a conspiracy theory that will do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.” Not to mention to his own reputation and that of his lieutenant Anthony Fauci. Both have long advocated for gain-of-function research—enhancing the infectivity of natural viruses—and they funded such research involving bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Technology.

No scientist wishes to get on the wrong side of NIH administrators, the major funders of biomedical research. If Collins said the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, why then, so it must be. A mere four days later, Andersen changed his mind and derided lab leak as a conspiracy theory. No one in his group has provided a convincing explanation for this 180-degree reversal. Andersen’s new paper, if true, would go a long way to justifying his otherwise unsupported second take on the issue.

Why are science writers so little able to report objectively on the origin of the virus? Innocent of most journalists’ skepticism about human motives, science writers regard scientists, their authoritative sources, as too Olympian ever to be moved by trivial matters of self-interest. Their daily job is to relay claims of impressive new discoveries, such as advances toward curing cancer or making paralyzed rats walk. Most of these claims come to nothing—research is not an efficient process—but science writers and scientists alike benefit from creating a stream of pleasant illusions. The journalists get their stories, while media coverage helps researchers attract government grants.

Dulled by the advantages of this collusion, science writers pay little attention to in-house problems that seriously detract from the credibility of the scientific research enterprise, such as the astounding fact that less than half the high-profile findings in some fields can be replicated in other laboratories. Fraud and error in scientific papers are hard to detect, yet nonetheless some 32,000 papers have been retracted for various reasons. The reliability of scientific claims is a formidable problem but one of strangely little interest to many science writers.

If the Covid virus should be found to have indeed escaped from a lab in Wuhan, a tidal wave of public rage may shake the temple of science to its foundations. It’s in reflection of their sources’ interests—though political polarization is also involved—that science writers jump on any evidence favoring natural emergence and ignore everything that points toward a lab leak.

Science writers need to decide whether their duty lies to their readers or to their sources. One choice makes them real journalists, the other just unaccredited PR agents for the scientific community.”

 

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-origin-conspiracy

“From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.

The story begins with a January 31, 2020, email to Fauci from a group of four virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 had been published three weeks before, giving virologists their first look at the virus’s structure and possible origin.

Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.

We knew this much already from emails obtained in June 2021 by a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as from the fact that a teleconference took place the following day (February 1, 2020) to discuss the virologists’ conclusion. But something remarkable happened at the conference, because within three days Andersen was singing a different tune. In a February 4, 2020 email, he derided ideas about a lab leak as “crackpot theories” that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”

Andersen and his colleagues then prepared an article, published on March 17, 2020, in the journal Nature Medicine, that declared flatly, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The article was highly influential, persuading the mainstream press not to investigate lab-leak theories. That paper, along with an earlier letter in the British medical journal The Lancet, froze into silence any dissenting voices from the scientific community. The Lancet letter was signed by Jeremy Farrar, a powerful research administrator in London who convened the February 1 teleconference.

What happened at the February 1 teleconference to make the virologists change their minds so radically? It was impossible to tell from the emails released in June 2021 because almost every word in them was redacted. The House Oversight and Reform Committee was allowed to view the emails only in camera, meaning members weren’t given copies, but staffers are allowed to transcribe them by hand while viewing them.

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”

Another member of the Andersen group, Farzan of Scripps Research, apparently felt much the same way. “He is bothered by the furin cleavage site and has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” the House committee’s letter says of his remarks. Farzan noted that viruses can acquire elements like furin cleavage sites when grown in cultures of human cells, so “instead of directed engineering . . . acquisition of the furin site would be highly compatible with the continued passage of virus in tissue culture.” Both routes— direct insertion of the cleavage site or tissue culture—would mean that the virus came from a lab.

The conferees were clearly aware of the possibility that the virus had originated in the Wuhan lab. “So I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together,” Farzan wrote, “whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature—accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40,” meaning he thought lab origin considerably more likely than not.

You might think that the senior administrators present at the conference would have rushed to investigate the startling inference that their expert advisers had drawn. But just one day after the teleconference at which his experts explained why they thought the virus seemed manipulated, Collins complained about the damage such an idea might cause. “The voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony,” he wrote on February 2, 2020, according to the new emails.

Even after the March 2020 Nature Medicine article, which made the natural-origin theory the mainstream view, Collins still fretted that the lab-leak idea had not been sufficiently suppressed. “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” he emailed Fauci on April 16.

Fauci was less concerned. “I would not do anything about this right now,” he replied the next day. “It is a shiny object that will go away in times.” For many months, it did just that. Natural emergence remained the only possibility on the table in the scientific establishment and mainstream media.

But the lab-leak theory gained in plausibility as more facts emerged about the research NIAID was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The program followed a debate among virologists as to how far one should go in enhancing a virus’s abilities in the lab in order to study its properties. Collins and Fauci were proponents of “gain-of-function” research, as it is blandly known. “Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” they wrote in the Washington Post in 2011.

Some virologists questioned whether the possible gains were worth the substantial risks. But Collins and Fauci prevailed over the doubters, and in 2014 they began supporting a program of manipulating SARS-related viruses in Wuhan. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, managed the program, using NIH money to fund Shi Zhengli, the chief expert on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As we know from EcoHealth’s grant applications to the NIAID, Shi collected many types of coronaviruses from wild bats and took them back to her lab. There she manipulated the viruses, principally by taking the gene for the spike protein of one virus and inserting it into the genome of another. The stated goal of this research was to find out how close the wild viruses might be to jumping to humans. To this end, she tested the novel viruses in humanized mice—animals genetically engineered to carry in their airways the proteins that the virus targets. The process adapts the virus to be capable of attacking live humans, even though this is not the intent.

Besides adding novel spike proteins, Shi’s manipulations may well have included insertion of a furin cleavage site. EcoHealth applied for a grant in 2018 for research that proposed to “introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like coronaviruses. Though this grant application, submitted to an agency of the Defense Department, was turned down, Shi’s research team was clearly aware of the technique and may well have conducted such experiments with other funds. It’s common practice for researchers to test out experimental techniques before applying for the grant in which they will be used.

The Andersen group’s detection of the furin cleavage site on January 31, 2020, was a plausible basis for suspecting that SARS-CoV2 was not a natural virus. It’s an enduring puzzle as to why they then ruled out this possibility a mere four days later. There is thus far no counterargument in the public record. Farzan, the one member among Andersen and his three colleagues who did not sign the Nature Medicine article, declined an email request to discuss the episode.

However, Garry said in an email response that his remarks about the furin cleavage site in the emails discussed in the House committee’s January 11 letter were just arguing a position and were taken out of context. “I favored the natural origin and had so for weeks, but the furin cleavage site was hard to rationalize.”

The Andersen group’s change of mind, Garry said, was not precipitate and had developed over several weeks for scientific reasons, not political pressure. A principal factor was “extremely important and compelling” data posted on January 23 about a coronavirus found in pangolins. The pangolin virus’s receptor-binding domain, a critical feature that recognizes a target protein on the cell surface, was almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2. This was a “big deal,” Garry said, because “if this feature was natural then very likely the whole virus was natural including the furin cleavage site.”

The argument is a little difficult to follow. Just because one part of the virus is natural, why does that show that someone had not inserted a genetically engineered furin cleavage site in another part? Garry replied that engineering such a site would be a “very expensive, labor intensive, multiple month” process, and that in any case the Chinese researchers wouldn’t have used a virus so different from SARS1, the cause of a 2003 epidemic and their primary known focus of interest. But this is a hypothetical, not a clinching argument. If the Andersen group heard compelling new information about the virus’s origin between January 31 and February 4, Garry seems unable to say what it was.

So what induced these virologists to such a radical change of view? “The February 1, 2020, telecon sent a clear message to participants that Fauci and Collins regarded discussion of the lab leak possibility, even though plausible on scientific data, to be politically unacceptable and something that had to be blocked,” says Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a molecular biologist and a leading critic of gain-of-function research.

Fauci oversees a large portion of funds available for virology research in the U.S. It is not unreasonable to suppose that virologists keen on continuing their careers would be very attentive to his wishes. Both Garry’s and Andersen’s labs receive large sums of money from the NIAID. “Telecon participants with current and pending grants controlled by Fauci and Collins could not have missed or misunderstood the clear message,” Ebright says.

The repudiation by Andersen, Garry, and Holmes of their original conclusion, expressed in the January 31, 2020, email was of enormous benefit to Collins and Fauci. Though primary responsibility for any lab leak would rest with Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with Chinese regulatory authorities, Collins and Fauci could share a portion of the blame for having funded gain-of-function research despite its obvious risks and then failing to ensure that grant recipients were taking all necessary precautions.

If there really was a conspiracy surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Congress should search for it—first, in the still-closed records of the National Institutes of Health and the EcoHealth Alliance. Congress then needs to ask scientists free of outside pressures or conflicts to reassess the probable origin of a virus that has now killed some 5 million people worldwide.”