Dr. Anthony Fauci ran NIAID since before I was born. During that time, he overturned the moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern, normalizing the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens in universities and labs worldwide.

He also appointed some people to positions overseeing research or other NIAID functions, such as Dr. Fauci’s deputy, David Morens. Today, the Covid Select Committee investigating the public health policy response and origins of Covid-19 brought Morens before the committee to testify regarding his undeniable destruction of federal records, with Morens bragging about deleting emails he didn’t want to appear in FOIA’s, telling EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak about FOIA’s to NIH involving EcoHealth Alliance, and helping Daszak craft his letters to NIH.

The mess of conflicts of interests and unethical conduct is appalling, and Morens at one point confessed “I don’t even know what the ethics office does.” It doesn’t surprise me to learn that such a serially unethical person wouldn’t know what the ethics office does, nor that this is the person Dr. Fauci chose to be his deputy.

What did surprise me, however, was hearing some Democrats on the committee claim that this committee has brought another scientist before them without advancing our understanding of Covid origins. It’s strange to hear Congressman Raul Ruiz MD (D-CA) open for the Democrats by saying that the committee’s Democrats believe both zoonotic and laboratory origin scenarios must be taken seriously only to later be undercut by Congresswoman Debbie Dingell’s (D-MI) claims that the committee and investigations of scientists has not advanced our understanding of Covid origins. After all, to take the lab-origin theory seriously, as Dr. Ruiz proposes, one must investigate scientists who conducted relevant research and have bypassed transparency or federal records retention requirements.

Labs are not made up of cattle we test for H5N1, camels we test for MERS-CoV, civets we test for SARS-CoV-1, mosquitoes we test for dengue, or flying foxes we test for Nipah. Labs are made up of scientists, scientists write grants, grants are managed by program managers and risky research is managed by people like Dr. Fauci, the head of NIAID who overturned the moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern in 2017, whose office funded Dr. Peter Daszak’s gain-of-function research of concern on bat SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan, and whose deputy was actively colluding with Dr. Daszak on how to break federal records laws and potentially defraud the US government. The nature of labs means that a lab-origin theory must investigate the thoughts and actions of scientists, funders, and everyone in-between, and so to take a lab-origin theory seriously Congress must recognize its unique role and responsibility in this scientific inquiry.

I’m writing this article to provide some independent consultation for the committee on how investigations into scientists, including those aided by the Covid Select Committee, have indeed advanced our scientific understanding of Covid origins and brought us closer to the truth of knowing where SARS-CoV-2 came from. As uncomfortable as it is to disembowel scientists’ thoughts and grants and unethical actions before the world, these investigations are uncovering real insights of scientific value.

Proximal Origins

Let’s go back in time to 2020, when Kristian Andersen first believed a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 was likely, “80-20” in Eddie Holmes’ estimation, and the authors contacted Dr. Fauci. Independent journalists, empowered by FOIAs, were the ones who learned that Andersen et al. first believed a lab origin was likely and told the NIAID official whose reputation would be undermined if gain-of-function research of concern funded by his agency caused the pandemic. We learned from FOIAs that Dr. Fauci emailed his other deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, after midnight to instruct Hugh that he had many important things to do the next day and needed to keep his phone ready.

We learned that Drs. Fauci, Collins, and Farrar - all funders who advocated for gain-of-function research of concern - didn’t notify then-CDC director Robert Redfield, who opposed gain-of-function research of concern, but they did invite Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, and others in an academic lobbying group that advocated for gain-of-function research of concern. For those of us scientists who know these scientists involved, the actions of funders on that fateful Feb 1 call sent a clear signal that he was interested in huddling with lobbyists who also faced significant risks to their reputations if this virus came from research activities they all advocated for.

DEFUSE

Then, of course, there’s the DEFUSE proposal. The DEFUSE proposal is a cornerstone of the lab-origin theory of SARS-CoV-2 that wasn’t voluntarily released by researchers but rather was obtained against the will of the researchers by Charles Rixey and Major Joe Murphy collaborating with a group of internet sleuths called DRASTIC. The 2018 DEFUSE grant by Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Linfa Wang, Shi ZhengLi, and others proposed to modify bat SARS-related coronaviruses in precisely the ways SARS-CoV-2 is an anomaly among bat SARS-related coronaviruses, thus providing a very clear research program for lab-origin theories.

Once DEFUSE was released, the lab-origin theory morphed from mere geographical circumstances of a bat SARS-related coronavirus emerging near a bat SARS-related coronavirus lab to something far more significant. The DEFUSE grant focused lab-origin theories to a very concrete set of viruses collected by a clear set of researchers using methods specifically proposed to modify SARS-related coronaviruses in ways that we could test.

For example, the DEFUSE grant proposed to insert a “proteolytic cleavage site” inside a bat SARS-related coronavirus, and while no other SARS-related coronavirus has a proteolytic cleavage site, SARS-CoV-2 does. Second, DEFUSE proposed to resurrect viruses from their genome sequences on a computer and develop ‘reverse genetics systems’ to modify the viruses under study. If researchers wanted to insert a furin cleavage site, they’d need a reverse genetics system, or basically a DNA copy of the RNA virus.

Colleagues and I examined a strange pattern of cutting and pasting sites in the SARS-COV-2 genome consistent with a reverse genetics system. “A strange pattern” is an understatement because we estimated 1 in 50 billion odds of seeing this pattern in nature, yet the pattern is entirely consistent with laboratory methods for resurrecting coronaviruses for downstream modifications, like swapping Spike genes as Hu et al. did in 2017 or adding a furin cleavage site as proposed in DEFUSE. Even more shocking to us, we found the molecular scissors making these scratches in the genome - BsaI and BsmBI - had only ever been used once before on a coronavirus infectious clone, and it was in 2017 by Ben Hu, Peter Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi ZhengLi.

In other words, the pattern of cutting and pasting sites in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with methods proposed in DEFUSE and it triangulates to the same set of authors who (1) were unique in using these specific enzymes and used them as recently as 2017 and (2) who proposed in 2018 to insert the other site also found in the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the furin cleavage site.

Lab Origin Predictions: 2023

There’s more science on the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, such as the lack of zoonotic evidence we ought to have obtained by now, followups of important zoonotic-origin studies finding their methods biased, flawed, and wrong, and other niche debates that all continued to tilt the scales towards a lab origin. Many argued that “DEFUSE wasn’t funded” under the assumption that if one agency doesn’t fund work then every other agency will follow suit, yet the DEFUSE PIs who had never before all published a paper together were all together in 2019 on an NIAID call - and grant - studying bat SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan.

In other words, it was possible NIAID may have funded this work. In 2023, when the DNI released its unclassified assessment on the origins of Covid-19, lab-origin theory still had some predictions up its sleeve that could only be corroborated or refuted by opening up lab notebooks of researchers involved in this DEFUSE-related program, and all signs pointed towards NIAID.

Unfortunately, efforts to FOIA NIAID have been obstructed by a remarkable lack of transparency from NIH and the NIAID FOIA office. First efforts to FOIA these agencies resulted in hundreds of pages of redactions, followed by lawsuits to provide unredacted versions, followed by unredacted versions that were more embarrassing for NIAID while also revealing the original reasons for redactions were unjustified, such as Fauci’s emails acknowledging that NIAID funded gain-of-function research of concern on SARS-related coronaviruses and that researchers informed him that they believed a lab origin was likely. The poor transparency from NIAID prevented us from learning about the research they were funding in Wuhan in 2019, but it didn’t stop us from continuing the science and forensics of making predictions about what we might find if we could get a glimpse at researchers’ communications from this time period.

First among the lab origin predictions of 2023 relates to discussions of the furin cleavage site. The furin cleavage site technically wasn’t mentioned as a “furin” cleavage site in DEFUSE. Rather, DEFUSE mentions “proteolytic” cleavage sites and there are more proteolytic enzymes of interest than just furin. Additionally, DEFUSE didn’t mention where the furin cleavage site would be inserted, yet SARS-CoV-2 has the furin cleavage site precisely in between the S1 and S2 subunits of the Spike protein, so lab-origin theory following the DEFUSE thread would predict there exists communications between researchers in this group discussing insertion of “furin” cleavage sites in the S1/S2 junction of the S gene.

Additionally, our finding of the “BsaI/BsmBI” map of SARS-CoV-2 being anomalous among wild coronaviruses yet consistent with a reverse genetics system lent itself to predictions. The cutting/pasting sites in SARS-CoV-2 allow the virus to be assembled in 6 segments, so under the lab-origin theory we would predict researchers studying SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan to have communications discussing “6-segment assembly” and mentioning the specific enzymes producing such an Frankenstein-looking pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

Finally, researchers in the “DEFUSE wasn’t funded” camp also pointed to the statement of work in the finalized DEFUSE grant saying that insertion of furin cleavage sites would be conducted in Ralph Baric’s BSL-3 lab in UNC, far from Wuhan, where SARS-CoV-2 emerged with a furin cleavage site. Under a lab-origin theory, we’d predict some discussions to do this work in Wuhan, not UNC.

Now, if only NIAID had ethical public servants, we could examine their communications with the DEFUSE collaborators in 2019 and either corroborate or find communications inconsistent with the lab-origin theory. The lab-origin theory needed more data, and that data would come from scientists’ closely guarded lab notebooks, hard drives, and email inboxes.

DEFUSE Drafts

In early 2024, a miracle of science occurred whose full statistical significance is not easily appreciated by people who are not being provided impartial consultations on Covid origins. Emily Kopp at US Right to Know obtained a draft of DEFUSE via a FOIA that wasn’t evaded by NIAID officials because it was a FOIA of USGS collaborators listed on the DEFUSE grant. Without Fauci’s FOIA lady to enter typos and redact critical sections, we finally obtained a more immediate and unfettered, transparent look into the minds of DEFUSE researchers as they made the DEFUSE grant and conceived the research they wanted to do.

In this draft of DEFUSE, all three lab-origin predictions mentioned above came true, resulting in overwhelming corroboration not only of the general non-natural origin theory, but also the specific theory that whoever made SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 had read DEFUSE, and Occam’s razor might suggest it would also be the people who wrote DEFUSE, who wanted to do this work in 2018, and who had NIAID funding in 2019 (in addition to Chinese Academy of Sciences funding and other sources).

The drafts of DEFUSE specifically mention “furin” cleavage sites and propose to insert them in the S1/S2 junction of the S gene, or a narrow few-dozen base-pair window in a 3,600 base-pair gene, exactly where the furin cleavage site is found in SARS-CoV-2. Manhattan is about 262 blocks from N to S, so probabilistically what happened with DEFUSE specifying precisely where to insert this furin cleavage site would be like finding a big blue building on the 120th block of Manhattan and then finding a proposal to make a big blue building on that exact same block. Clearly, the proposal and the product are connected, even if we don’t know who was holding the paintbrush during construction.

Additionally, the drafts of DEFUSE propose “6-segment assembly” and include order forms for the enzyme BsmBI. Out of the thousands of restriction enzymes that could’ve been listed, the researchers listed precisely one of the two generating the synthetic-looking pattern in the genome of SARS-CoV-2. For those who criticized our work as cherry-picking BsmBI, how do they explain Daszak and colleagues then ordering precisely this enzyme, BsmBI, in the drafts of DEFUSE? The blue building has mahogany floors, and in this same draft of a grant, we also have an order form for mahogany floorboards.

Finally, in a comment on the side of the grant, Peter Daszak highlighted text of key research methodologies and told Ralph Baric and Shi ZhengLi:

Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team…Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…

While some claimed plans for the blue building with mahogany floors on the 120th block could’ve been referring to either Manhattan or Los Angeles, the comments on the blueprint specify Manhattan, so these plans correspond exactly, in every way we can verify, to the anomalous thing whose origin we were investigating.

The finalized DEFUSE grant Peter Daszak and colleagues sent to the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency said they would do risky research in safer UNC labs on US soils, but Daszak’s intentions during the drafting of the proposal, which he knew would make DAPRA uncomfortable, were to allocate more of the assays to Wuhan.

In this slow epistemological pot set to boil, it’s easy to be the frog that never notices how much things have changed. In January 2020, we saw mass media dissemination of a paper calling a lab origin “implausible” and amplified by Fauci, Farrar, and Collins without disclosing their involvement in the paper or their funding of Daszak’s DEFUSE collaborators whose 2018 grant is a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2. Daszak and Farrar went further to publish a paper in the Lancet calling lab-origin theories “conspiracy theories” and Daszak obstructed at least three official investigations into the origins of the virus by not recusing himself and by appointing similarly conflicted friends onto panels of “independent experts.” We also had Fauci et al. encourage the US government to censor mentions of a non-natural origin of Covid as disinformation.

Then, in 2021, Major Joe Murphy and Charles Rixey obtained DEFUSE, the grant proposing to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2, and SARS-CoV-2 was consistent with a research product of DEFUSE-related work in every way scientists could check at the time, so we made predictions while investigative journalists filed lawsuits and FOIAs to get documents and test our theory. While the NIAID racket was violating federal records laws we continued searching from every angle available to a motley crew of scientists, journalists, and citizens. This lab-origin research, completely unfunded by NIAID and NIH, battling groups like Andersen et al. heavily funded by NIAID and NIH and closely tied with Fauci, guided the investigations of journalists who were brave enough to investigate scientists. Sure enough, FOIA’d drafts of DEFUSE contained highly specific methodological details, precisely those predicted by the lab-origin theory.

My, how the temperature has changed. The epistemological pot is now at a full boil and evidence overwhelmingly suggests SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab. To take a lab-origin theory seriously is to become acquainted not just with the many pieces of evidence, but their statistical significance or weights. There is no smoking gun, or if there was it was DEFUSE, but instead there are many many straws that broke a camel’s back long ago, and now there’s just a massive pile of evidential hay presumably with a camel buried underneath.

Covid Select Committee’s Hidden FIPV Gem

There’s even more insight and corroboration gained from recent testimonies than many may realize. The specific furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is comprised of the amino acid sequence PRRAR, which early (now rebutted) efforts to shut down a lab-origin theory called a “non-canonical” furin cleavage site, claiming a different sequence - RKRR - is more “canonical.” However, these claims of canonical-or-not overlooked that the specific furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 is also found in a highly specific type of feline coronaviruses (FIPV).

That’s odd, because the DEFUSE PI Ralph Baric, in his transcribed testimony to the Covid Select Committee, gave some clarification about their thinking in writing DEFUSE. It was curious that DEFUSE proposed inserting a furin cleavage site in a SARS-related coronavirus because that had never been seen before - why make something that’s never been seen before in nature? As DRASTIC member Yuri Deigin pointed out on Medium, in Ralph Baric’s testimony before the Covid Select Committee, he was comfortable and frank, and Dr. Baric said the group found inspiration from the FIPV coronaviruses - the exact group of coronaviruses previously found to have PRRAR.

So no longer is the specific sequence in the furin cleavage site “non-canonical,” as a DEFUSE PI has admitted in Congressional testimony that they were inspired by FIPVs, the same tiny clade of viruses known to have this exact sequence of furin cleavage site.

A famous quote in biology says that “everything in biology makes sense in light of evolution,” but that only applies to the Origin of Species not engineered by man. Everything about the unusual genome of SARS-CoV-2 makes sense in light of DEFUSE.

Taking Lab-Origin Theory Seriously Requires Opening Lab Notebooks, Comms

From the S1/S2 placement of the Spike’s furin cleavage site or the PRRAR sequence found in feline coronaviruses purring in the mind of Ralph Baric, to the New England Bioscience order forms for the enzyme “BsmBI” and off-the-record discussions to offshore work to Wuhan, lab-origin theory has made significant advances in our understanding of Covid origins by further investigating the activities and communications of a very small group of researchers who proposed all of these things in 2018 and received funding from NIAID in 2019 before the head of NIAID obfuscated the evidence of a lab origin in 2020.

Taking the lab-origin theory seriously requires becoming familiar with the lines of inquiry of lab-origin theory, and those lines of inquiry of lab-origin theory focus on very specific research programs and proposals, researchers and their preferred methods, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and any signs of unnatural or anomalous features that are incidentally found in research proposals, and more. Rather than focus on the migrations of birds with highly pathogenic avian influenza or the movements of bats with Hendra virus, lab-origin theory focuses on the movements and funding and proposals and actions and reagents of researchers.

When we combine all of these pieces of evidence using methods from forensics, methods also commonly employed in theoretical ecology and evolution to examine the Origins of Species besides SARS-CoV-2, it is overwhelmingly likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the lab. That, again, is an understatement if we’re looking at the raw numbers. By most analytic standards, we would use the language “nearly certain” to describe the estimated likelihood that this virus originated from a lab inspired by DEFUSE. Evolution does not read grants or select ideas from the literature, and so evolution would never care to make a virus in 2019 so perfectly described by researchers’ 2018 goals.

Just because the virus is overwhelmingly likely to have originated in the lab, however, doesn’t mean all scientists everywhere are all equally aware of what was happening and equally guilty of a coverup, and that’s what we need help disentangling both to know the truth and to clear names and preserve larger scientific institutions. There is still a lot we don’t know, a lot we can learn, and a lot of scientists whose names we can clear off the list of research-related suspects with proper investigations, yet ironically our efforts to clear names and preserve institutions are being obstructed by a group of co-conspirators affiliated with NIAID.

For example, it’s possible David Morens doesn’t actually know what Peter Daszak’s colleagues did in Wuhan. Morens may act out of loyalty to Peter Daszak and trust in his friend’s version of events without actually knowing relevant details that would lead a subject matter expert like myself to believe a lab origin is overwhelmingly likely. Morens is clearly an idiot, but he may just be a loyal idiot and nothing more. Or, he may know what Daszak was doing in 2019 and be a witting accomplice in the biggest conspiracy in human history, and only his deleted federal records could help us uncover that.

It’s even possible, although with low confidence I find it unlikely, that even Daszak himself didn’t know what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing. It’s possible the PLA saw the DEFUSE grant and went ahead with it in a classified venue that Daszak would never hear about, or it’s possible the WIV collaborators Shi ZhengLi and Ben Hu proceeded with the work’s first steps but hadn’t had time to report back to Peter Daszak by the time the outbreak exploded - after all, lab work takes time, and labs don’t typically tell their collaborators abroad everything they do every day but rather wait until they have some results to trigger a discussion.

Daszak not knowing what happened wouldn’t explain his uncommonly unethical behavior, from his failure to turn in his 2019 progress report on time to his marginalizing publications calling lab-origin theories “conspiracy theories” to his obstruction of Covid origins investigations left and right. However, some people are furtive and untrustworthy even when they haven’t done anything wrong, so we have to leave open the possibility of Daszak’s innocence. There are other possibilities as well, yet all of these possibilities originate from the common ancestor of somebody reading DEFUSE, most likely somebody who also helped write DEFUSE.

These are all really uncomfortable questions about the innocence or guilt of specific colleagues in an accident that killed 20 million people, their witting or unwitting participation in a coverup to protect the reputations of NIH, NIAID, and Wellcome Trust leaders, and their assisting the Chinese government’s efforts to sow doubt about the origins of the virus. These are uncomfortable questions, but they are precisely the questions we and our representatives have to ask if we are to take the lab-origin theories seriously.

Contrary to what some Democrats on the Covid Select Committee said today, investigations into scientists and science funders have led to unparalleled advances in our understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The findings of the plans for a figurative blue building with mahogany floors on the 120th block of Manhattan came from searching for blueprints, not sampling animals. Along the trail of evidence paved by DEFUSE, we have found glowing pieces of the Covid origins puzzle, and each of these pieces was found by turning over stones of researchers’ emails, communications with funders, grants, and more.

We’ve even found one piece - the FIPV inspiration purring in Baric’s mind - by bringing a scientist to testify before Congress. We’ve found additional evidence of a conspiracy to evade federal records laws, and that has been the main obstacle to continuing our research to a possible lab origin. NIAID has funded others to sample animals, but they unlawfully refuse to let us sample federal records, not to mention they refuse to find this line of research.

In addition to specific questions on the forensic trail of SARS-CoV-2 origins, the biggest question on my mind for the purpose of oversight and policy is why this investigation is being left to sleuths like Charles Rixey, Major Joe Murphy, DRASTIC, unfunded researchers like myself and my colleagues, investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs, and now Congress using subpoenas and Congressional testimony to learn about the inner feline mind of Ralph Baric. While researchers at the heart of Covid origins may feel like they are sheep being eaten alive by an anarchic pack of investigative wolves, and their feelings are accurate as we devour their gmails and uncover their secrets, the real question is why were there no formal criminal investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 that could allow this task to be completed by trusted and qualified professionals.

When the qualified professionals at the FBI have moderate confidence in a lab origin, why is the DOJ not pursuing this further not just to uncover the truth but also, equally important, to formally clear the names of researchers who cooperate fully with investigations and for whom the full powers of the FBI’s investigators privately reading through communications and other information could yield no evidence consistent with the researchers’ knowledge of or participation in the creation of SARS-CoV-2? Is there not a more civil way to do this, or has the incivility of NIAID’s unaccounted-for unlawful efforts to defraud the US government, possibly other agencies’ investigative teams, made this barbaric consumption of researchers’ records and life histories an inevitability to unbottle the inescapable truth?

This historic task is left to all of us investigative wolves. While we try to be polite while blood drips from our fangs and we sniff through emails for organs of insight, the sad reality is that a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, if taken seriously, involves a lab, a lab run by scientists, scientists funded by governments and non-profits and private industry, and these people hold immense institutional power and influence in the world that they appear to be using to obstruct our hunt.

Many of these scientists, government and non-profit leaders, and others have not been providing impartial and honest accounts of the evidence on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 or even their own research activities in 2019. If taken seriously, a lab-origin theory implies that Congressional investigators may someday uncover emails that, if read by an impartial scientist like myself, unbottle more historic pieces of evidence implicating US-funded (and China-funded) scientists in creating a virus that killed 20 million people. That is the most likely scenario, by large margins, so proceed with courage, caution, and impartial consultation.

I encourage Congressional Democrats to live by the words of Dr. Ruiz and take the lab origin as seriously as the evidence warrants, and to understand how Congressional investigations of scientists connected with NIAID are necessary to uncover the truth as well as clear names. The first step is for these officials to acquaint themselves with the current front lines of lab-origin theory and find impartial scientists who can provide testimony about the probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Congress needs an impartial insider, a scientific Pocahontas, who can help them traverse these treacherous lands. As someone who studied pathogen spillover, helped write a DARPA PREEMPT grant for the same call to which DEFUSE was proposed, became acquainted with lab-origin theory, helped produce some evidence consistent with a lab origin now showing up in Dr. Baric’s testimony, and has helped managers without science degrees navigate Covid as a pop science writer and impartial consultant, I’m eager to fulfill my civic duty and help out where duty calls.

Republished from the author's Substack

When I started studying pathogen spillover in 2017, I thought it would be a great way to do ecology and study pathogens without having to worry about the politics of medicine. My Princeton PhD studying “Quantitative and Computational Biology”, focused on theoretical ecology and evolutionary biology, seemed so perfectly esoteric and unreachably interdisciplinary that I envisioned myself living a life of quiet irrelevance with plenty of time to be happy & shop at REI.

Now, studies of pathogen spillover, wildlife virological research, and gain of function research of concern are all emerging topics of hot discussion, congressional investigations, and oversight into the activities of researchers and science funders. Even theoretical ecology and evolutionary biology, the field combining evidence to evaluate competing theories about the origins of species and how their interactions (e.g. bats and CoVs, or human researchers and CoVs) trigger evolutionary events, is suddenly relevant for a forensic case concerning the deaths of 20 million people worldwide. In pursuit of esoteric peace, I’ve found myself at the epicenter of an historic controversy in science, and now all the esoteric squabbles and gossip and absurdities are spilling over into the broader public.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Peter Daszak was known as a shady and untrustworthy person in the field of disease ecology. We rolled our eyes at his absurd claims of being able to predict the next pandemic, even while those claims netted him millions of taxpayer dollars, because that was the name of the game in science - advertise your bold idea, and may the best salesman win. Now, as Daszak testifies before Congress over his dishonest answers and pattern of deceit, there’s a dire need to bury snake oil or bat-CoV salesmen and uncover trustworthy scientists capable of providing impartial answers on the critical topic of whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab conducting dangerous gain of function research of concern on wildlife coronaviruses. Of course, who should be the experts on this topic except precisely the people doing this research? How does the public navigate the dishonesty of experts obfuscating their esoteric turf?

Daszak, as we all know, wrote a grant to the DARPA PREEMPT call in 2018 proposing to modify bat SARS-related coronaviruses in precisely the ways SARS-CoV-2 differs from wildlife bat SARS-related coronaviruses. He proposed to do this work with a variety of foreign nationals like Linfa Wang and Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists, along with another US scientist, Ralph Baric. Daszak, Baric, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s grant was wisely rejected by DARPA due to its risk of causing a pandemic.

As someone in the epicenter, the DARPA PREEMPT grant I helped write was accepted, allowing me to develop methods for attributing pathogens to the reservoirs whence they came (including a real case study of prioritizing Nipah surveillance in Kerala, India following a Nipahvirus outbreak there). Daszak and his merry band moved on, as Daszak had other avenues of funding that were well known to people in the field, so he and his colleagues certainly had the means to continue with their DEFUSE proposal to modify a bat SARSr-CoV in a way that could very well have produced SARS-CoV-2. It would cost less than one year of a postdoc’s salary for these researchers to engineer SARS-CoV-2, so clearly this bold and terrifying idea was within their grasp.

As I watched Daszak sitting in a chair before the Covid Select committee, balding from the stress of his own deceit, sweating from the heat of the questions, and stammering in dishonest indignation, a small part of me died inside: the part of me that grew up with scientists of integrity who cared deeply about honesty, truth, and the well-being of civilization. As I read Ralph Baric’s interview, I was somewhat refreshed by what seemed like a greater degree of honesty and independence from Baric, but when Dr. Baric began talking about what matters - whether or not SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, and whether or not it is consistent with a research product of DEFUSE-related work - I was saddened to see a scientist brandish their expertise and wave big words & fancy but made-up numbers around to pull the veil over the eyes of Congress, leaving them with an impression that is not accurate and does not reflect an unbiased assessment of the evidence of SARS-CoV-2 origins one gets from using numbers that are not made-up.

DEFUSE PI’s Guide to Overestimating SARSr-CoV Spillovers

For example, Baric made an argument about prior probabilities that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of spillover versus a lab leak. To make this argument, Baric cited a paper estimating there are over 50,000 SARS-CoV spillover events annually. Dr. Baric did not mention some key details. That paper was written by DEFUSE PI’s Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, and Shi ZhengLi, among others, so there is considerable potential for scientific deception given the conflicts of interest, and that paper didn’t actually find evidence of 50,000 spillovers a year. What did they find?

A paper by Baric’s collaborators, and the precise group of scientists under investigation for a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, introduces a very significant possibility of scientific deception, of grand claims overestimating the rate of spillovers with intended effects of making people think SARS-CoV spillovers happen all the time, sowing doubt on a lab origin by precisely the line of reasoning Baric presents - if there are more spillovers every year, then our prior beliefs about SARS-CoV-2 being a spillover, all else equal, will be higher. A scientist seeking to deceive needs only to estimate a sufficiently large number of spillovers to inflate away all evidence inconsistent with a natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2, and that is precisely what seems to be happening with the 50,000 number.

What did the paper actually do, and is there any evidence of dishonesty or methods that clearly bias their estimates? How did they estimate over 60,000 spillover events a year? Bear with me here, because like Proximal Origins, a paper that immediately smelled funny for independent experts, Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi ZhengLi also made a rotten fish of a paper and it takes some careful scrutiny to find the source of bad smells. The researchers hid the secret sauce of their estimate underneath some fancy methods that, upon close inspection, do not support the claims of their paper and clearly overestimate the rate of spillover without transparently revealing the reliance of their estimate on bad numbers and bad assumptions.

To make it simple, the authors did the following:

1. Estimate bat + SARSr-CoV prevalence from field samples of bats
2. Estimate where bats lived
3. Estimate where humans overlapped with bats
4. Estimate human infections from bat-human interactions

The rate of spillover is then estimated as the product of these estimates - bat density, CoV prevalence in bats, bat-human overlap, and human infections given an interaction with a bat. Incidentally, this approach is a special case of the methods I developed for this problem in 2018, so I’m quite qualified to chime in on the sensitivity of this procedure to various inputs.

The first three steps above are pretty trivial and inconsequential for the main result of their paper. Nobody is arguing that bats have CoVs, that bats live in some regions and not others, and that bats live in some places where humans also live. We can estimate the high prevalence of CoVs in bats, where bats live, and where humans overlap with bats without affecting the results much because these estimates are all reasonable and the main barrier to human infection and spillover is not overlap with bats but rather virological barriers to entry: receptor binding and cell entry of a bat SARSr-CoV in a human cell, resulting in a human infection.

To build intuition, when we swim in the ocean we encounter billions of viruses, yet rarely do people get infected by viruses in the ocean because viruses in the ocean can’t enter into human cells. We snuggle our dogs when they have kennel cough and we don’t get sick because that pathogen also can’t enter our cells. We play with animals all the time, we have people watching bats fly out of Carlsbad caverns, and people have been eating guano for thousands of years, yet we haven’t had any documented SARS-CoV pandemics except for the ones in 2002 and 2019, suggesting the barrier to infections and pandemics is not bat-human overlap, since overlap is common and relatively constant over history, but rather characteristics of the virus that may enable it to enter humans. Some virus variants may be more capable of making the jump, and indeed this is why the DARPA PREEMPT call sought “jump-capable quasispecies” and the preemption of this narrow range of jump-capable variants from entering humans.

So, the main crux to estimating SARS-CoV spillovers is to identify SARS-CoV cases in humans. We see with the current H5N1 outbreak that influenza cases in people can be detected fairly easily, especially when there is a large outbreak in animals, and heck we’re even able to detect these pathogens in our animals, so we have a lot of evidence that avian influenza and the bovine lineage circulating in American cattle today can enter humans due to some mix of receptor binding (the receptor influenza binds in birds and cows is slightly different, but not as different, as the human receptor) and large doses of virus to farm workers exposed to cows and poultry. 

What about SARSr-CoVs? Why haven’t we seen many SARS-CoV spillovers before? How did the authors get around this absence of spillover evidence to estimate over 60,000 SARS-CoV spillovers annually?

This is where it gets a bit outrageous and one starts to gain the cynicism of a diligent scientist who realizes why most published findings are false.

Before diving into any scientific paper, it’s worth asking: how would you estimate the number of people infected with SARS-related CoVs annually? Ideally, we might randomly sample people, either PCR-tests of patients seeking care with a certain chief complaint or perhaps serosurveys providing immunological evidence of past exposure in a representative set of people in the population. Ideally, the serosurveys would be highly specific and done in a way to reduce the likelihood of false positives from other coronavirus exposures, as serosurveys can react to things that aren’t the target we’re looking for, and so we need to adjust for these false positives.

It also really does have to be a coronavirus because viruses vary markedly in their ability to infect people upon contact and the ways people come into contact with the viruses. Choosing the appropriate species for comparison is always an art of the biological sciences, but agreeable choices are found by focusing on the fundamental ecology (including molecular virology) of the species or ecological interaction of interest. Dairy farmers are being exposed to influenza because they are working with cows all day, poultry farmers are being exposed to influenza because they are working with chickens all day, and these human-animal interactions leading to influenza spillover don’t have an analog in bats because we don’t have domestic bats and influenza virology is very different from SARSr-CoVs.

Nipah cases are exposed to Nipahvirus by drinking date palm sap that gets infected because fruit bats try to drink the surgery sap - this also isn’t a good analog because SARSr-CoVs are found in small, insectivorous bats that don’t contaminate human food by chugging buckets of sap all night long. MERS cases are exposed to dromedary camels by a unique sort of contact people have with camels in Saudia Arabia, again not appropriate for wild, small, nocturnal, insectivorous bats.

Ebolavirus cases happen mostly due to exposures from bushmeat and other people during one of the several large outbreaks of ebola - the bushmeat angle may be more appropriate, after all SARS-CoV-1 first emerged in an animal trade network where civets served as intermediate hosts, but the virology of Ebola is very different from the virology of bat SARSr-CoVs so we need to be mindful of this limitation and ensure any serosurvey is conducted in a way that is less likely to be impacted by the many large Ebolavirus outbreaks with significant human-human transmission. All of these human ecological interactions and routes of exposure vary, and the viruses causing these cases vary markedly in their baseline ability to infect humans given contact, so I’d personally avoid using these other viruses as a comparison and instead estimate SARS-related coronavirus infections, avoiding samples they may have been infected by human-human transmission, to properly estimate the annual rate of SARS-related coronavirus spillovers.

Okay, great, so we’ve thought about how we’d do this if we were being good and honest. What did the DEFUSE PI’s do? Below is the meat of their methods, hidden in Supplementary Table 4 for most people to overlook.

They didn’t do PCR tests of clinical samples. Instead, they combined seroprevalence studies of a variety of bat viruses. The specificity of the serosurveys is unknown or somewhere from 94-100%, and with this 94% specificity test for Nipahvirus they get 3-4% seroprevalence - in other words, we really don’t know if those 3-4% seropositive cases are actually seropositive or just false positives from a test that’s not very specific. In addition to Nipah not being an ecologically appropriate comparison to SARSr-CoVs, the serosurvey with 7 positive samples out of 171 or 227 samples can’t conclude that the 7 positives aren’t the false-positives we’d expect from a test of such low specificity.

Along this same line of criticism, the researchers also sampled 199 people in China for SARSr-CoV, HKU10-CoV, HKU9-CoV, and MERS-CoV seropositivity, and despite testing 199 people for 4 different viruses they found only a flicker of two serology tests that were positive. When you run 796 tests and only 2 tests are positive, that is also within the margin of error for false positives from serology tests that are well-known to have the limitation of imperfect specificity. I guarantee you that Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi ZhengLi are all aware of this limitation, yet they don’t mention it in their paper or adjust for it in their methods.

Every example of seropositive cases starts to look more suspicious the more we critically examine this table. They estimate 6.5% seropositivity for of a Malaysian virus found in fruit bats - again, very different bats ecologically & evolutionarily from those small insect-eating bats that host SARS-related CoVs - and that estimate comes from people eating fruit that was partially eaten by fruit bats, an ecological interaction that will never happen with insectivorous bats.

Peter Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi ZhengLi et al. claim a study estimated 14% seroprevalence of ebolavirus in a 2015 study in Congo. However, if you read the actual study, the authors don’t report 14% seroprevalence - they report 0.5% seroprevalance for Marburg from 809 samples (again, inconclusive of any positives for a serology test) and a 2.5% seroprevalence for Ebola in a region that has experienced 14 ebolavirus outbreaks with human-human transmission since 1976. In other words, it’s not clear how many of the 2.5% of ebolavirus seropositive cases were actually derived from spillovers as opposed to human-human transmission, and we can’t use human-human transmission events to estimate bat-human spillovers.

The last & greatest seroprevalence is where it gets most absurd. The highest seroprevalence the DEFUSE PI’s estimate - and used in their model to estimate the rate of bat SARSr-CoV spillovers - comes from a serosurvey of SARS-CoV-2 AFTER SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic. Like the ebolavirus serosurvey in Congo (which the authors over-estimate by a factor of 6-7 compared to the original paper), one can’t tell what fraction of these SARS-CoV-2 seropositive samples were due to spillover from bats and what fraction of these SARS-CoV-2 cases were due to human-human transmission. I would bet nearly all my money that these 3 SARS-CoV-2 serospositive cases out of 12 samples are more likely people exposed to the virus circulating in a global human pandemic than 3 independent bat spillovers.

To recap, the authors' estimates of bat SARSr-CoV spillovers come from serosurveys of many other bat viruses that spillover due to very different ecological processes (e.g. fruit dropped by fruit bats, bushmeat consumption for Ebolavirus, date palm sap consumption for Nipahvirus). The serosurvey results are a mix of either indistinguishable from a reasonable false positive rate of serology tests, over-reported compared to the literature cited without justification, or very likely due to human-human transmission like their serosurvey of SARS-CoV-2 and not due to independent bat spillover events.

There were 31 seropositive tests, total, from around 1,500 serology tests run, or 2% seropositive humans with tests whose specificity is less than 98% on bat viruses whose spillover is driven by completely different ecological interactions that SARSr-CoVs.

From these 31 seropositive tests of dubious relevance to SARSr-CoV spillover, the authors estimate 60,000 SARSr-CoV spillovers a year. If we adjusted for false positives from unspecific tests and removed viruses whose emergence is due to interactions that never happen with insectivorous microbats, the resulting estimate would be less than 1 SARS-CoV spillover a year as we have no empirical documentation of such spillovers except for one outbreak in SARS-CoV-1 and the Mojiang miners infected with a virus related to RaTG13. Careful examination of the data suggests any numbers crunched from the serosurveys above will profoundly overestimate the rate of SARSr-CoV spillovers - actual infections - in the human population every year and the truth is we don’t have evidence of 60,000 spillovers a year. That number is made up by a stack of methods tracing back to an inappropriate complication of serosurveys unadjusted for low specificity and different ecological drivers of infection.

From that paper, written by DEFUSE PI’s with significant potential for deception and, sure enough, with glaring methodological limitations buried in supplementary table S4, Ralph Baric testifies to Congress claiming that there are 50,000 spillovers a year for 20 years, so 1 million spillovers, and so, therefore, it’s a million times more likely SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab. Daszak et al. know that if they could inflate the rate of spillovers, it would lead scientists down the road Baric traveled.

Dr. Baric’s numbers are wrong. He hasn’t done due diligence to study the limitations of the numbers he used when providing what seems like expert opinion to Congress but which instead is a superficial reading of the literature written by scientists with a massive conflict of interest and parroted by someone who also has every reason to willfully believe the numbers reported by his colleagues who proposed to modify bat SARS-related CoVs in Wuhan in 2018.

As you can tell, I try to do my due diligence by carefully examining the methods AND supplemental information of papers I’m citing. Sanchez et al. (2021) claims to estimate 60,000 SARSr-CoV spillover events a year, but underneath the giant stack of methods the results derive entirely from serosurveys that don’t contain any information about SARSr-CoV spillover rates. When I see people like Baric repeating these numbers without having read the papers closely or considered limitations of the statistical methods (methods I helped develop!), repeating these claims as if they are sound, unbiased, without the potential for deception from people with the most to lose in the event of a lab origin, and predictably use these overestimates to inflate-away evidence of a lab accident, I can’t help but voice concern that this member of the National Academy of Sciences, a body established to provide impartial scientific assessments to policymakers, is not providing impartial scientific assessments to policymakers.

Forgive me, but even in my position of not having any membership in any scientific society except SACNAS, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, I feel a civic duty to report the numbers honestly and not play scientific telephone parroting numbers from people under investigation for likely causing a pandemic.

There’s more, too.

“Biostatistical BS”

Dr. Baric is one of the fathers of a technique called “efficient reverse genetic systems”, or methods for efficiently synthesizing RNA viruses from scratch so you can modify them later. Valentin Bruttel, Tony Van Dongen and I examined the methods people used to synthesize coronaviruses from scratch before Covid, looked at the genome of SARS-CoV-2, and came to the judgment that the “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2”. Personally, my preferred title was that the fingerprint is “consistent with” a synthetic origin, and that’s how I’ve attempted to communicate it here and in the paper, but “indicates” was preferred by the group, it’s a fair word, and I didn’t think this was my hill to die on, so “indicates” is used the same way a canary dying in a coal mine “indicates” the presence of toxic gases but doesn’t “prove” it since canaries also die from other causes.

Anyhoo, for a pop-science recap: synthetic viruses are made by gluing together similarly-sized chunks of DNA with special cutting/pasting sites. Researchers look at a genome, and add/remove cutting/pasting sites using silent mutations that change the DNA sequence to yield these similarly-sized blocks without affecting the resulting virus. The resulting viruses often have regularly spaced cutting/pasting sites left in their genome and these sites differ from closely related coronaviruses by exclusively silent mutations. SARS-CoV-2 has regularly spaced cutting/pasting sites, like Frankenstein stitches attaching arms and legs at predictable junctures, and these cutting-pasting sites are filled with silent mutations.

We examined the genomes of other coronaviruses to quantify the wild-coronavirus odds of the unusual spacing of cutting/pasting sites (1/1400 odds in wild coronaviruses) and the hotspot of silent mutations (1 in 20 million odds in wild coronaviruses). These odds are low enough that we wrote a paper documenting this pattern and contextualizing it as consistent with pre-Covid methods for making reverse genetics systems.

Baric was asked about our paper in his congressional testimony:

Baric had some strong opinions about our work. 

First, Dr. Baric says that we wouldn’t expect to find these sites present in other bat strains. However, below is the last reverse genetics system made by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rWIV1 - they used several pre-existing sites (4387, 12079, and 27352) to make their infectious clone, otherwise they knocked out one site (1571) and added four more (8032, 10561, 17017, and 22468). Reverse genetic systems use the pre-existing restriction map and modify it minimally to create a suitable product. For SARS-CoV-2, with the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI, the hypothesized progenitor likely had the highly conserved restriction sites, most CoVs have too many BsaI and BsmBI sites that prohibit efficient synthesis, and in our theory, the researchers removed a few of them with silent mutations to generate the pattern observed in SARS-CoV-2.

Baric claimed we wouldn’t expect to find these sites in other CoVs, but prior work contradicts his claim. Baric went on:

Baric claims the smallest fragment is too small for his comfort. He says it is about 300 base pairs. In reality, it’s 652 base-pairs, over twice as long as Baric claims. Baric then says he wouldn’t make a clone like that, it would irritate him. This is an argument akin to seeing a drawing of a stick figure and saying it couldn’t have been drawn by a human because the disproportionate arms or unequally sized legs would irritate you. However, more empirically, look back at the rWIV1 genome - that contained a very short segment, segment C2, and segment C2 was 1500 base pairs long, admittedly longer than our segment but small segments are manageable, especially if they contain regions of the genome you don’t intend to tinker with so they can be used as a final link to construct the full virus. Baric also claims the first segment is too small, but the first segment is 2,188 base pairs long, longer than rWIV1’s fragment C2, and almost as long as rWIV1’s fragment C1. 

When evaluating whether/not a particular genome is a research-related product, it helps to evaluate prior work and determine if this would help researchers accomplish stated aims. In other words, suppose this was a research-related product, what could you do with it? Does it make some kinds of work easy and other kinds of work hard or impossible? In rWIV1, the researchers didn’t initially make segment C2 until they realized segment C was toxic to bacteria when they tried to mass-produce it, so they had to cut segment C into two pieces in order to fulfill their experimental purposes. In DEFUSE, researchers wanted to swap Spike genes and insert edits, like furin cleavage sites, inside the spike gene. Could the restriction map in SARS-CoV-2 permit such work?

In prior work by familiar names Ben Hu, Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, Shi ZhengLi et al. (2017), researchers used the restriction enzymes BsaI and BsmBI to swap spike genes. Hu et al. (2017) was the only time pre-Covid when researchers used this pair of restriction enzymes - BsaI and BsmBI - on a coronavirus infectious clone, and, incidentally, these are the exact two restriction enzymes for which we find the anomalous spacing of restriction sites AND the hotspot of silent mutations in SARS-CoV-2. The restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 would allow the researchers to swap Spike genes and insert furin cleavage sites using the exact same methods they used in 2017.

Additionally, the small segment is the only segment flanked by different enzymes - all other segments can be flanked by exclusively BsmBI or BsaI, simplifying digestions and enabling the same insertion methods used by these authors in 2017. Heck, the authors could use the exact same Spike genes flanked by BsmBI used in 2017 to replicate their study on a new infectious clone - this reverse genetics system in SARS-CoV-2 is perfectly suited for their research program.

Baric’s testimony to Congress on the topic of our research involved him using made-up numbers (300bp) and subjective claims (an irritating small fragment) in an attempt to rebut our paper’s 1/1400 anomaly of a strange pattern of fragment lengths. Like many others, he avoids commenting on our 1 in 20 million anomalies of hotspots of silent mutations in these same cutting/pasting sites used by DEFUSE PI’s in 2017 which generate the anomalous fragment lengths in SARS-CoV-2. The silent mutation pattern is an essential piece of the puzzle as it is a far more significant result and one can’t explain how we got so lucky to find so many silent mutations by focusing on these restriction sites yielding a pattern of regularly-spaces sites that looks artificial and statistically is anomalous among coronaviruses.

Baric called our work “biostatistical BS”, but our numbers were estimated empirically with wild coronavirus genomes, standard methods, and reproducible code. If there was any biostatistical BS, it may be Daszak et al. hiding bad serosurveys in supplemental table S4, Baric citing their 60,000 spillovers annually without due diligence, and Baric’s own “BS”, for lack of a better word, bullshitting on the actual empirical numbers of fragment lengths in relation to prior work or BSing that a fragment being irritating to Baric implies the reverse genetics system wouldn’t be useful for the research programs underway in Wuhan.

When Scientists Mislead Congress

Congressional oversight committees are currently investigating a very serious matter of the likely research-related origin of SARS-CoV-2 that may be a result of research funded by the US taxpayer through Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance subcontracts to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I have to emphasize every time I discuss this that 1 million Americans are dead. 20 million people worldwide are dead. This is not a laughing matter, this is not the time for ego and mediocrity and scientific bullshit. The existence of many pieces of evidence pointing towards a research-related origin all triangulate to the collaboration between Peter Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi ZhengLi.

How curious, and unfortunate, that it is scientific estimates by these same serially conflicted and untruthful researchers that Baric is relying on for his own estimation that a lab origin is unlikely. Of course, a research-related accident should involve researchers, and those researchers continue to obfuscate the science by publishing papers that mislead the world about the facts of the matter. Their expertise, our journals, and the media’s trust in experts following a pandemic are all being weaponized to mislead the world.

A part of me dies on the inside when I see these scientists mislead members of Congress with fraudulent numbers. Numbers are the heart and soul of science, the reproducible units of measurement we must communicate faithfully to ensure others can compare their findings to ours.

A part of me dies on the inside when bad numbers parroted to Congress and other managers representing the will of the people were published in a Nature journal, a conglomerate of scientific narrative-manufacturing journals that receives a significant amount of its revenues from China, a subsidiary of Elsevier, another company that receives a significant amount of its revenues from China, a subsidiary of RELX Corp, another company that receives a significant amount of its revenues from China and employs former Chinese government officials in its upper ranks. The core institutions we rely on for science, for communicating numbers, did not seem to read the numbers in supplementary table S4 or force the authors to evaluate the suitability of their estimates. These same journals refuse to publish articles popularizing evidence consistent with a lab origin.

A small band of scientists may have caused a pandemic, and they are using science - numbers and estimates and their own expertise granting authority to comment on methods - and science institutions like our journals and Academies to sow doubt in the potential roles of their colleagues and their funders in this research-related accident. By not resisting such abuses of science and scientific institutions, by not combating such unethical behavior, many academic virologists are increasing the distrust of their discipline, raising the stakes of the issue by increasing the collateral damage this small band of researchers and their funders will cause.

A part of me dies on the inside because I became a scientist precisely to cut through bullshit and arrive at the truth, and I thought our institutions were designed to support that, I thought other scientists were courageous enough to speak up, yet here are scientists bullshitting in congress, obscuring the truth with bad science, publishing bad numbers in big journals, and the majority of other scientists have gone silent in a pandemic of scientific cowardice.

The truth is that we don’t have reliable estimates of SARS-related coronavirus spillovers. The truth is the absence of prior pandemics suggests that some combination of a low rate of spillovers and/or low odds of highly transmissible SARS-related coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-2 is an anomaly and we have no evidence to suggest that SARS-related coronaviruses spill over regularly. The only well-documented SARS-related coronavirus spillover we observed before Covid was SARS-CoV-1, an animal trade outbreak resulting in many spillover events over a geographically broad animal trade network, with both contact tracing and serosurveys identifying early infections concentrated not just in animal handlers but in civet handlers specifically, with 25 animals sampled and 7 testing positive (mostly civets) with progenitors 99% similar to the virus found in humans. All pieces of evidence telling a consistent story for SARS-CoV-1 emergence were collected without requiring a precedent, because is easy to trace SARS-related coronavirus outbreaks, like other zoonoses, to their source with modern knowledge and methods.

Since SARS-CoV-1, there were at least 6 lab accidents in China, so of the 7 prior documented SARS-CoV emergence events only 1 was a spillover event due to an animal trade outbreak and 6 were lab accidents. We do not have data otherwise - the 60,000 spillover events mentioned by Baric never happened, they are nebulous numbers conjured into print by a stack of methods built on a hidden, rotten foundation of unadjusted false-positive SARS-CoV-2 serosurveys, Nipah serosurveys, ebolavirus serosurveys in regions with human-human transmission and published seropositive rates far less than those used under the hood in models by Daszak, Wang, and ZhengLi.

Bad Scientists Undermine Science

Congress and other investigators desperately need honest quantitative biologists, ideally those with knowledge of ecology and evolutionary biology, molecular biology, mathematical modeling, and statistical methods used to study pathogen spillover. Sadly, such scientists are rare. I was in the first class of Princeton’s Quantitative and Computational Biology program, I was the first in my class to graduate, and I am the only one I know of who also studied pathogen spillover.

Quantitative literacy is rare in biology because biology, historically, has been a discipline engaged in fieldwork - catching bats, surveying elephants - and lab work - making buffers, aliquoting samples, designing primers, etc. It’s not common for someone to know the molecular methods for bioengineering, the protocols for epidemiological estimates of disease incidence (e.g. bat SARSr-CoV spillover), field methods for sampling bats, evolutionary methods for estimating the evolution of furin cleavage sites, and forensic statistical methods for evaluating competing theories.

From my rather lonely vantage point of interdisciplinary excellence applied to a controversial issue, I’ve looked down the mountain to see powerful scientists desperately clawing their way to my perch, trying & failing to discredit our work. In their efforts to discredit fair work and amplify bad work, we’re witnessing a very dangerous pattern of scientists abandoning the objectivity, honesty, and humility that motivates trust in science. We’re seeing scientists abandon their civic duty to provide impartial consultations to managers like Congressional representatives.

Baric just made up small numbers to Congress regarding the restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 when smaller numbers boosted his arguments, and he utilized made-up bigger numbers from Daszak and ZhengLi without indicating where those numbers came from because the bigger numbers boosted his arguments then. The obvious effect of allowing scientists to play fast and loose with numbers is that the true numbers for estimating the likelihood of a lab accident will be obscured, the public unfamiliar with scientists’ methods won’t be able to tell which numbers are right, and doubt will fester where greater certainty ought to be.

Science has always had its snake-oil salesmen and ludicrous arguments. Daszak was a well-known snake-oil or bat-soup salesman pre-Covid, peddling oversold arguments that he could predict the next pandemic to secure millions in PREDICT funding, that sampling random animals all around the world would make us safer to secure millions in CEPI’s Global Virome Project funding, that SARS-related coronaviruses are poised for emergence to secure millions in NIH/NIAID funding. Pre-Covid, we all rolled our eyes at the peddlers although some, like me, felt a civic duty to do the back-pedaling and counter absurd claims or unfounded theories. When half of science is peddling and the other half is back-pedaling, science comes to a halt and the millions of dollars wasted as they are granted to unworthy recipients with bad ideas based on bad statistics, bad logic, and bad faith.

Scientists everywhere need to take the issue of Covid origins far more seriously and start doing their part to be far more objective, far more excellent, and far more humble to distance ourselves from the abomination of science on parade in front of Congress these days. Our scientific institutions, their credibility and their funding, rely on our objectivity. The list of transgressions from famous scientists is growing longer and their grifting is growing more visible, posing a serious threat to science and our society. There is no Anti-Science movement, the greatest threat to science is from within. We dishonest scientists to sulk into obscurity so that more ethical scientists can rise in prominence. We need to show the world what good science looks and sounds like.

Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes published a paper saying a lab origin is “implausible” when Andersen believed it was “so friggin likely”, failing to acknowledge that the funders of dangerous coronavirus work in Wuhan prompted, edited, and promoted their work. When testifying under oath, Andersen claimed he didn’t have an NIH/NIAID grant under Fauci’s review, yet he did - Fauci could’ve rejected Andersen’s grant but instead, after Andersen published a paper claiming a lab origin from a lab Fauci funded is “implausible”, Fauci gave Andersen millions of dollars in NIAID funding.

That behavior undermines trust in science.

Fauci parroted Andersen et al’s paper on national television without disclosing the funding his agency provided to Wuhan, and his role in prompting the paper, all while pretending he didn’t know who the authors were. Fauci then lied under oath that he never funded gain of function research of concern in Wuhan, yet now we have receipts that NIH provided gain of function funding waivers to Ralph Baric to study chimeric WIV coronavirus constructs, NIAID is listed as a funder of Ben Hu et al’s 2017 research making unnatural coronavirus chimeras with the goal of finding something more infectious, and even Ralph Baric confessed to Congress that Daszak’s 2018/2019 progress report to NIAID on coronavirus work in Wuhan was gain of function research of concern.

That behavior undermines trust in science.

Daszak withheld DEFUSE when a virus looking like a DEFUSE research product emerged in Wuhan, the same place he planned to make such a virus. When he was appointed to be the US emissary to the WHO investigation, or lead the Lancet Covid Origins investigation, or contribute to the National Academy of Science’s letter to OSTP claiming a lab origin is implausible, Daszak did not disclose DEFUSE but, instead, seems to have picked all his friends to vote alongside him in these scientific committees and reports. Daszak lied to the US government about the risks of his research and he lied to Congress about his plans to conduct this work in Wuhan.

That behavior undermines trust in science.

I could go on, but the point is that I care a lot about science and the biggest threat I see facing science as it spills over into congressional investigations is that many prominent scientists have been dishonest and unethical without consequence, and that needs to change. I care so much about science that I’d rather be the one who tells the world my work is wrong than let the world believe incorrect science is right, while these people would rather peddle lies to protect their reputations even if it undermines all of science.

A part of me dies inside when I see scientists undermining public trust in science - ironically, all while parroting claims that their detractors are “Anti-Science” (as Peter Hotez does, without disclosing that he, too, was subcontracting risky virological work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology)! I’ve never seen such an abomination of science before in my life, the festering rot of bioscience grift enabled under Fauci’s tenure at NIAID is now being exposed to light, and that light may reveal weaknesses in the foundations of science funding, publication, and means of career advancement leading to the selection of peddlers at the expense of honest back-pedalers. A small number of highly conflicted scientists are abusing science, their appointments to scientific positions of power, their credibility as experts, and their publications in journals with the clear intention and effect of misleading the world about the probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Science has always been an epistemological warzone with ground rules, but with Covid origins it seems many of the ground rules have been abandoned. Scientists are publishing bullshit about an “implausible” lab origin, that lab origin theories are “conspiracy theories”, that there are “60,000” SARS-related coronavirus spillovers annually, a Wet market outbreak as “dispositive” evidence of a natural origin, buggy code claiming two branches in the SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary tree is evidence of two spillovers, a single read of SARS-CoV-2 among 200,000,000 reads (a minute fraction of which were raccoon dogs) hailed in The Atlantic as “the strongest evidence yet” of a natural origin, and more. The festering abomination of science behind why most published findings are false is spilling over into Congress, and in the process, the arrogance of a small number of extremely vocal and powerful yet heavily conflicted scientists is doing immense harm to the reputation of academic science.

I refuse to participate in such a system. I’m doing everything in my power to counter bad science in this field. That’s why I read Ralph Baric’s arguments and evaluated them closely with sharp pencils to ensure his numbers add up and his probabilities multiply appropriately. That’s why I read Proximal Origin, Worobey et al., Pekar et al., Crits-Cristoph + Debarre et al., Daszak et al., and other papers first with an open mind and then, after excusing myself to vomit and cry a little, with a desire to back-pedal.

At some point, we need the scientists doing the back-pedaling - often without National Academy posts, NIH/NIAID connections, or alignment with the profit motives of Elsevier - to be given the full opportunity to write the science they see and tell the science as it is without having to be filtered through the congressional testimony of the peddlers. If only Congress could hear what science really sounds like, what careful examination and impartial judgments form qualified experts in the field look like, if only they could find an unbiased scientific consultant eager to help them arrive at the correct answers in this epistemological warzone, we can rescue the credibility of science and apply the necessary intelligent heat to the unethical scientists, funders, publishers, and other scientific bodies that have abandoned their civic duty to help society learn the truth.

It sucks to watch a more mature scientist give a congressional testimony full of rudimentary mistakes and evidently superficial grasps of the data and probabilistic methods for theoretical reasoning, as Ralph Baric did, and it sucks to see lies from Peter Daszak permeate discourse. It sucks that when I have other things I’d like to do with my time to aid civilization I find myself defending our findings indirectly, bickering with scientists’ congressional testimony through my Substack because journals are too conflicted to publish scientists’ competing views and Democrats on the Covid select committee appear to be successfully misled on the evidence & sound methods pointing to a lab origin.

More than anything, it sucks to spend my whole life trying to be the best scientist I could be, only to learn that NIAID prefers foot soldiers and fools willing to peddle lies to cover up the obvious truth that NIAID funded gain of function research of concern in Wuhan, that such research may have caused a pandemic (or this may have been a PLA project and scientists are providing cover fire nonetheless). It sucks that scientists as a whole are not rising up to defend the truth, but instead, the systems of power in modern science seem to have interests of their own. The US will continue to fund the health sciences, so even if NIAID is reformed science will go on, but we have an obligation to ensure the science that goes on is a safe and efficient use of tax dollars.

As science spills over into Congress, I’m disappointed that the world gets to see this modern state of science, where most published findings are false, where risks are mismanaged, where funders like Fauci, Collins, and Farrar are Popes able to label inconvenient theories disinformation with the backing of US government censorship, where scientists make up numbers and other scientists parrot their numbers without understanding how they were calculated, or what the true numbers are.

Many scientists bemoan disinformation, but few critically examine the quality of information coming out of scientists. We to clean up our scientific system before casting stones. If most published findings are false, then why do we fund science? Why don’t we fund metascience for a few decades first to develop better ways to ensure scientists publish the truth & funders manage risk + fund productive ideas?

One hopes the “good guys” win in the end, but that is never a given. If we want the good guys to win and if we want science to be all it can be for society, we need to push back against dishonest grifters like Daszak, bad numbers from Baric, publication biases in Elsevier, funding biases in NIAID, excessive influence in science from leading health science funders, and all the other social malignancies that undermine science.

Republished from the author's Substack

The history of the Covid-19 pandemic started long before 2019.

If I were to put a start date on the series of events leading to Covid-19, I’d start in 2011 when the Dutch scientist Ron Fouchier and his team at Erasmus University acquired a highly pathogenic avian influenza, bred the virus to be more infectious in mammals, and then opted to publish his findings in a scientific journal with global reach.

At many points in the series of events, Dr. Fouchier had other options. I’m also a biologist, I’ve also thought of terrifying things one could make by a mix of genetic engineering and breeding, but unlike Dr. Fouchier I did not act on those horrific impulses, let alone share these ideas in the public domain.

After breeding a potentially pandemic pathogen with ease, Dr. Fouchier had the option of reporting his findings to the Dutch defense and intelligence community in a non-public venue, raising their awareness of a threat without popularizing his handbook for bioterrorists worldwide, thereby increasing the threat itself. Instead, Dr. Fouchier published what one might call a bioterrorism cookbook, complete with a cartoon showing how you can cause a pandemic:

Many scientists were outraged at the dangerous exhibitionism of Dr. Fouchier and his team of researchers at Erasmus University. Are citations and grants and fame really worth the risk of causing a pandemic and killing millions of people?

Most members of the public were not aware of the rhetorical scientific warzone caused by Fouchier’s actions. The bitter debates over risky research that could cause a pandemic happened outside the public eye. Yet, in order to understand the history of the Covid-19 pandemic, a pandemic most likely caused by risky research, it’s important to learn the history of scientists’ disagreements over gain-of-function research. The debate was so acrimonious, the bitter echoes can still be heard in the halls of the academy.

The dividing ethical line that split the field in twain is still there, a 2014 chasm of unreconciled disagreement that splits the fragments of the community and seems to determine their views on 2023 Covid origins. On one side, there were scientists with very good reasons to be concerned that such risk-taking, with no tangible benefits, could cause a pandemic that kills millions of people.

On the other side, there were researchers who received fame and funding for their scientific stunts enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens, researchers who claimed that this risky work could potentially lead to insights even if it hasn’t yet, and there were funders who were able to increase the size of their portfolios by pointing to the threats conjured into existence by the scientific minds they funded. The more fear scientists could inspire in the hearts of managers by publishing thoughts which threaten global health, the more funding they could request to “mitigate” the threats of ‘bad actors’ doing exactly what they did.

There is, of course, irony that the US biodefense research led by Fauci started after the anthrax attacks, as the anthrax attacks were carried out by a scientist with a position making it easy for them to acquire anthrax. What could happen if Dr. Fouchier had a bout of cynical depression and decided to tip a vial out of spite?

Opposition to gain-of-function research of concern recruited many diverse scientists from many diverse fields of study, all of whom could do the obvious arithmetic to see risks » benefits.

The lack of benefits needs to be emphasized. There are no countermeasures or vaccines developed by enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens. While there were questions about whether the H5N1 influenza strain that Fouchier bred could become transmissible in mammals, finding that it could become transmissible when forced into a scientists’ breeding regime did not answer the question of whether it would become transmissible in mammals in its natural setting.

Whichever strain of influenza starts circulating in humans, whether from swine, birds, or other animals, the virus will be countered by broad-spectrum countermeasures like nucleoside analogs or protease inhibitors that we can improve upon without enhancing pathogens, and we can prevent infections and/or reduce severity with vaccines targeting the same-old H and N antigens we know our immune system recognizes to fend off the flu. Fouchier created something not found in nature; something that took him less than a month to breed has not arisen despite avian influenza circulating for decades, infecting many chicken farms, mink farms, and more, all without actually causing the pandemic pathogen Fouchier made.

The risks, meanwhile, are nearly infinite. The avian influenza Dr. Fouchier started with had a 50% infection fatality rate, over 100x as severe as SARS-CoV-2. Fouchier did not know what would happen with the infection fatality rate at the end of his experiment, only that his breeding program would increase transmissibility in mammals. If a virus like that escaped the lab, it could kill 30% of humanity from infections alone. Such a virus could overwhelm healthcare systems, and as people struggled to breathe and their family members died without being able to seek care, our medical system could shut down, all our economic systems would suffer catastrophic failures from absenteeism, triggering an economic catastrophe affecting the distribution and humans’ ability to acquire food, energy, and other critical supplies.

Should one country with nuclear arms come to believe the accidental release of an enhanced potentially pandemic pathogen was an act of war, whatever their logic, whether mistaking the agent for a weapon or the outbreak such a severe harm to their national security they feel the need to retaliate, it’s not inconceivable that it could trigger a nuclear conflict. Best-case scenario from an unmitigated release of an enhanced potentially pandemic pathogen is something like SARS-CoV-2: the virus, by sheer luck, is far less severe (e.g. SARS-CoV-1 had a 10% infection fatality rate, SARS-CoV-2 1/10-/30th that). Millions die, and if the accident becomes known - which by all accounts it should be for the sake of accountability - then it will leave an historic stain on this small subfield of science studying potentially pandemic pathogens.

Benefits: nothing yet. Risks: from 20 million dead (a relatively benign scenario) to the largest mass casualty event in human history and possibly the end of human civilization. Hence, many reasonable scientists said “No, thank you” to the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens.

If these arguments in opposition of gain-of-function research of concern sound eminently reasonable, it’s because they are. As a quantitative biologist, my job is to estimate the likelihoods of events and the severity of events given they occur. There is no data suggesting this work can reduce the severity of a pandemic. Meanwhile, there are clear data and reasons why this work increases the likelihood of a pandemic and increases the severity of a pandemic caused by a research-related accident if researchers are making pathogens more transmissible and more virulent than those found in nature.

Who opposed such simple arguments against the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens? Why? Who funded their work? What systems in science were able to overcome such simple arithmetic to support the risk-taking side with so few rewards?

To understand this pre-history of the Covid-19 pandemic, one must know about “Scientists For Science” and their role as an academic lobby for the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens.

“Scientists For Science” - The Pathogenic Academic Lobby

Ron Fouchier’s 2011 work was published in 2012 in Science, the official journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and one of the largest journals in the world.

As debate raged on about the ethics of Fouchier’s stunt, did scientists pause their work to wait for some resolution? No.

Instead, in June 2014 a group of scientists led by the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Yoshihiro Kawaoka created a virus like the 1918 Spanish Influenza virus in the lab. The 1918 virus killed about as many people as WWII. At this fork in the road, researchers saw a signpost pointing towards “1918 Spanish Influenza” - why on Earth would someone take any path in research that leads towards those horrors? Why are these pathogens being created in our universities?

The researchers claimed an avian influenza virus circulating in birds was similar to the 1918 Spanish flu, so they did the influenza virus a favor, made it even more similar to this extinct influenza strain that killed 50 million people, and asked “does that make it worse?” I know there are not any dumb questions, but if there were, then this is would be a dumb question.

Obviously, if you have one pathogen that was extremely bad, take other pathogens and make them more like the extremely-bad pathogen, that should be expected to make the not-so-bad pathogen worse. Not surprisingly, the 1918-like avian influenza had intermediate transmissibility, and giving these avian influenza viruses parts of the 1918 influenza increased the severity of illness in mice infected with these unnatural chimeric viruses.

Kawaoka published his paper in June of 2014. Like Fouchier’s stunt, Kawaoka’s exceedingly risky work sparked outrage among scientists observing this work. Making a potentially pandemic pathogen more like a pandemic pathogen had the obvious consequence of making the potentially-pandemic pathogen worse. No countermeasures were developed, no vaccines were developed. Nothing of industrial value was made, but rather there were academic accolades for Kawaoka, publications, citations, and grants, and perhaps this work piqued the academic interests of others.

The net risk incurred by humanity shot up during the period of time Kawaoka tasked his grad students and post-docs with handling these unnatural pathogens. In a parallel universe, whether from an accident or a disgruntled student who failed their qualification exams, we could have experienced a surge of influenza-like illness in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014 prior to a pandemic that resulted in historic loss of life.

Thankfully, we didn’t. Nor did we learn the lessons of 2011 and 2014. Why not?

In July of 2014, a group of scientists deeply concerned by Kawaoka’s experiment spoke up. The Cambridge Working Group brought together many scientists from many institutions and many fields of research who signed a consensus statement discouraging the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens. The Cambridge Working Group pointed to incidents involving smallpox, anthrax, and bird flu in even the top US laboratories as evidence that the risks of this research could never be reduced even in the most secure environments, and the consequences of a single mistake could be truly catastrophic. In their words, they petition:

Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches. A modern version of the Asilomar process, which engaged scientists in proposing rules to manage research on recombinant DNA, could be a starting point to identify the best approaches to achieve the global public health goals of defeating pandemic disease and assuring the highest level of safety. Whenever possible, safer approaches should be pursued in preference to any approach that risks an accidental pandemic.

Shots fired. Immediately afterwards, a group sprung up to oppose the Cambridge Working Group. This group called themselves “Scientists For Science.” As the name suggests, they were effectively the “boys will be boys” of science calling to let scientists do science.

Scientists For Science claimed, without evidence, that they were confident risky research could be conducted safely, that such work is essential for understanding microbial pathogenesis, prevention, and treatment, yet they provide no justification for those claims, no counter to the empirical evidence that such research has led to accidents and no concrete countermeasures or preventions. They claim the benefits are unanticipated and accrue over time - in other words, they admit they can’t anticipate the benefits of such work, and they just need more time to demonstrate these nonexistent, unanticipated benefits. It was for academic interest and unanticipated benefits that they wished to resume work that endangered humanity.

It’s worth reading the language of Scientists For Science closely, as it reveals the rhetorical origins of language that became familiar - and anathema - to the majority of the public during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did Covid-19 public health policy mirror Scientists For Science’s unusual cost-benefit analysis where benefits were assumed and costs ignored, but it also centered the careers and desires of academic microbiologists who built their careers doing dangerous work at the expense of the broader public. Scientists For Science argue:

If we expect to continue to improve our understanding of how microorganisms cause disease we cannot avoid working with potentially dangerous pathogens. In recognition of this need, significant resources have been invested globally to build and operate BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities, and to mitigate risk in a variety of ways, involving regulatory requirements, facility engineering and training. Ensuring that these facilities operate safely and are staffed effectively so that risk is minimized is our most important line of defense, as opposed to limiting the types of experiments that are done.

In this passage, Scientists For Science conflate research on potentially pandemic pathogens with research enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens. Nobody is saying “Don’t study Ebola”, we’re saying “Don’t make Ebola any worse than it already is!” There are no federal laws against mining uranium - after all, it exists in trace amounts in many commonplace soils and rocks - but there are very strict laws against enriching uranium.

After conflating studies of natural pathogens and the enhancement of pathogens to make non-natural biological agents, Scientists For Science proposed that risk can be mitigated by giving them more funding for state-of-the-art equipment and more staff, as opposed to limiting the types of experiments that are to be done. Let Scientists be Scientists, Boys be Boys - don’t draw red tape around enrichment of uranium or enhancement of civilization-ending pathogens, just give academic scientists more funding and freedom despite the lack of industrial or defensive benefits and the astronomical risks of such work.

Scientists For Science claimed that existing regulations are already adequate without addressing the regulatory gaps, let alone considering the geopolitical consequences of a single accident, let alone an accident that may be misinterpreted as the use of a biological weapon. They close by calling their opponents’ positions dogmatic:

Scientists for Science have a range of opinions on how risk is best assessed. However, maintaining dogmatic positions serves no good purpose; only by engaging in open constructive debate can we learn from one another’s experience. Most importantly, we are united as experts committed to ensuring public health is not compromised and the reputation of science in general, and microbiology in particular, is defended.

Here, we can see the foreshadowing of language that rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. “We are united as experts” introduces the argument of authority and disciplinary turf wars that defined Covid-19 science and public health policy deliberations, including claims of a “scientific consensus” on pandemic policy. These experts were committed to “ensuring public health is not compromised”, and “the reputation of science … is defended.”

Scientists For Science were not connected to industry. While they were nominally supported by biodefense funds, they would publish the horrors they made in the public domain thereby introducing the threats instead of merely making our defense or intelligence communities threat-aware. The banality of their esoteric, academic motives is equal parts tragic and comical - had their lobbying efforts failed and our system of science discouraged such dangerous work, we could have laughed.

Hence this is a pathogenic academic lobby and not a pathogenic-industrial lobby. They just wanted papers, grants, fame, esoteric understanding on the mechanisms of disease without direct application to biodefense. We could’ve had a conversation about biodefense, about the biological weapons convention, the offensive biological weapons programs of Russia and North Korea, but that wasn’t the conversation.

The conversation was about letting public universities make agents capable of causing geopolitical catastrophes…because some scientists wanted terrifying papers that catapult them to fame, and more funding for cooler tech, more staff.

Scientists for Science During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Defend science. Call people who disagree Anti-Science. Let Scientists be Scientists.

The history of debates over gain-of-function research of concern helps us contextualize contemporary rhetoric, understand who’s who and why they’re saying what they’re saying in Covid-19 origins debates. Every scientist involved in the acrimonious debates from 2011-2019 was affected by that research ethical battle. The academics behind Scientists For Science were forged in the fires of debate, they formed research cartels defined by shared beliefs, and they despised the people who tried to regulate them back in 2014.

Who do we find among the co-founders of Scientists For Science but Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka? Joining their ranks are names worth mentioning given their role in our predicament today: Christian Drosten, Vincent Racaniello (advisor to zoonotic-origin bully Angela Rasmussen), David Morens (NIH/NIAID), Cadhla Firth (now at Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance), Stephen Goldstein (co-author of flawed Worobey and Pekar et al.), Ian Lipkin (Proximal Origin author), Volker Thiel, Friedmann Weber, four additional scientists at Erasmus University who are close collaborators with Marion Koopmans, and more. As we go forward in time, I’ll write in bold the names of Scientists For Science and their close colleagues.

The Cambridge Working Group won the battle and secured a moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern in 2014. However, Scientists For Science, including the 7 NIH/NIAID members in their ranks, continued to lobby officials at NIH and NIAID. Eventually, the head of US biodefense spending, Anthony Fauci, worked with the head of NIH, Francis Collins, to redefine “gain of function research of concern.” They changed the definition by saying it’s not “enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens” if you enhance potentially pandemic pathogens with the goal (or hope) of making a vaccine. In 2016, Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance (where Cadhla Firth now works) thanked his program officers at NIH and NIAID for removing his gain of function funding pause.

Scientists could do science once again!

In 2016, Daszak helped the Wuhan Institute of Virology make a novel infectious clone, rWIV1. In 2017, Daszak helped Ben Hu and colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology swap Spike genes in bat SARS-related coronaviruses, ultimately increasing their transmissibility (gain-of-function research of concern). In 2018, Daszak proposed to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-COV infectious clone. In 2019, the group Daszak assembled for precisely that work enhancing SARS-related CoVs in Wuhan was all receiving support from NIH and NIAID. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, walking distance from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, containing a furin cleavage site never before seen in a SARS-CoV, leaving no trace in animal trade networks, emerging with remarkably high affinity for human receptors, and containing unusual stitches in its genome consistent with an infectious clone.

In January 2020, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes came to believe a lab origin was most likely. They contacted Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Fauci organized a call.

At this pivotal point in history, who did Dr. Fauci invite to this call?

Dr. Fauci invited the head of the Wellcome Trust, Jeremy Farrar. Some context is that the Wellcome Trust is one of the largest health science funders in the world that supported CEPI, CEPI supported the Global Virome Project, and Daszak was treasurer of the Global Virome Project. Farrar was not an expert in forensics, he was someone with financial conflicts of interest connecting him to the Wuhan labs. The three funders in the room all had ties directly to the researchers whose gain-of-function research of concern may have caused the pandemic.

Fauci and Collins were acutely aware that Daszak’s research included gain-of-function work in Wuhan on SARS-related CoVs, and they were aware that they, in 2017, sided with Scientists For Science and used their official positions of power to overturn the moratorium on this risky research. If Andersen and Holmes were right, then Fauci, Collins, and Farrar, the funders and organizers of the call, could be subjects of investigations and oversight hearings, and history could even hold them responsible for this outbreak.

At the pivotal moment in history, who did these conflicted funders invite?

They invited Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, Fouchier’s Erasmus University colleague, Marion Koopmans, Wellcome Trust’s Paul Schreier, and a few others. Noteworthy absences on this call include (1) US forensics experts in the FBI, (2) US director of CDC and gain-of-function research of concern opponent Dr. Robert Redfield, and (3) anybody from the Cambridge Working Group. After the call, Proximal Origin was written and published, ghostwritten by Jeremy Farrar, and co-authored by Ian Lipkin.

About this same time, Peter Daszak began organizing the Lancet letter calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories.” Daszak conpsires to organize this “Statement” with Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang (two co-authors of the 2018 proposal) without signing it. The list of signatories is below:

Let’s break down these authors.

Hume Field is EcoHealth Alliance’s science and policy advisor for China, William Karesh is EcoHealth Alliance’s executive vice president for health and policy, and Rita Colwell served on the EcoHealth board of directors since 2012.

Suffice to say, EcoHealth Alliance was well-represented in this paper.

We also see Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust who played an instrumental role in prompting, drafting, ghostwriting, publishing, and popularizing the Proximal Origin Manuscript. Beside Farrar, we can see the distinguished final author, Mike Turner, is the Director of Science at the Wellcome Trust. In other words, on the Proximal Origin call in early February, Farrar brought his brand new (2019) COO Paul Schreier to hear hushed communications about a probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a few weeks later Farrar brought his brand new (2019) Director of Science Mike Turner to sign Daszak’s statement.

Farrar used his clout as head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest health science funders in the world with ties to Daszak’ research in SE Asia, to call lab origin theories “conspiracy theories.” Nowhere does he list the connection between WellcomeTrust funding EcoHealth Aliance nor EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan in 2018, and having funding from NIAID in 2019.

The following authors of the paper were also Scientists for Science:

• Ronald Corley
• Christian Drosten (from the Proximal Origin call)
• Josie Golding
• Alexander Gorbalenya, Declared past/ongoing collaboration with coronavirus researchers in China.
• Gerald T Keusch
• Peter Palese
• Kanta Subbarao

The remainder of authors on this paper also have stories, most of them scientific stories overlapping with critical funders, researchers, and research at the heart of lab origin investigation. A quick view of who’s who on the Lancet paper:

• Charles Calisher, a past collaborator of Daszak and Field.
• Dennis Carroll, leader of the USAID’s Global Virome Project, the same project receiving Wellcome Trust funding through CEPI and the project on which Peter Daszak was the treasurer.
• Luis Enjuanes, a past collaborator with Christian Drosten, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, and even Ron Fouchier. Declared past/ongoing collaboration with coronavirus researchers in China.
• Bart Haagmans, a collaborator of Drosten, Koopmans, and Fouchier.
• James M Hughes, a longtime collaborator of Peter Daszak
• Sai Kit Lam, a Malaysian virologist and longtime Daszak collaborator
• Juan Lubroth, science and policy advisor of EcoHealth Alliance
• John S Mackenzie, science and policy advisor of EcoHealth Alliance who declared past/ongoing collaboration with coronavirus researchers in China.
• Jonna Mazet, chair of the USAID PREDICT project collaborating with coronavirus researchers in China at the time of writing.
• Stanley Perlman, Declared past/ongoing collaboration with coronavirus researchers in China.
• Leo Poon, Declared past/ongoing collaboration with coronavirus researchers in China.
• Linda Saif, longtime collaborator with Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, and others.

Lawrence C. Maddoff and Bernard Roizman were two authors that had no obvious connection to Daszak, Baric, Fouchier, Drosten, China, or Scientists for Science that I am aware of.

The USAID PREDICT project shows up a bit here. While PREDICT is in our short-term memory, there’s another communication worth revisiting. Shortly after publishing the Lancet letter, Daszak wrote his PREDICT colleagues at UC Davis, urging them to not publish China Genbank Sequences, as “having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”

To recap, Daszak organized a letter calling all lab origin theories “conspiracy theories,” and on that letter are Daszak’s funders such as Dennis Carroll and Joanna Mazet (USAID) and Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust), as well as seven co-founders and signatories of Scientists For Science.

As I said, the chasm dividing scientists on this risky research pre-Covid defines us. Contemporary research cartels are formed by shared beliefs, and one side of this chasm secured allies in the heads of the largest health science funders in the world - Fauci, Collins, Farrar (and USAID). That network of scientific allies became a web of conflicts of interests, corrupted scientific power used in unethical ways to push a false claim that a lab origin is “implausible,” that lab origin theories are “conspiracy theories.”

History Reveals What the Public May Have Missed

Most may have missed this historical context when learning about the February call and reading these papers in early 2020. Proximal Origin was presented to the public as putting “conspiracy theories” to rest, and the paper appeared independent because Andersen et al. did not disclose the roles of Daszak’s funders at NIH, NIAID, and Wellcome Trust prompting, promoting, ghostwriting the manuscript, and recruiting the historically conflicted Scientists For Science as their ‘independent’ experts on the call. The people tied to Wuhan’s labs misrepresented the science to claim a lab origin is implausible - by many accounts, such ghostwritten reporting and motivated reasoning, coming from people who knew a lab origin was “so friggin likely” can be viewed as a disinformation campaign.

Acting as the head of NIAID, Dr. Fauci gave momentum to the disinformation campaign by presenting Proximal Origins on international news, saying he didn’t know who the authors were, thereby giving the illusion the authors were independent of Fauci. However, Dr. Fauci knew Ian Lipkin well enough to email Lipkin a congratulatory remark when Lipkin received a scientific award from China. Dr. Fauci knew Andersen well enough to call Andersen when Jesse Bloom uncovered deleted sequences complicating our assessment of the early outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.

Everybody knew Eddie Holmes; even the People’s Liberation Army and Wuhan scientists knew Eddie Holmes as Holmes was the first Westerner to publish the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and Holmes helped Chinese scientists characterize the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 the WIV has published. I don’t believe Dr. Fauci for a second when he claims he didn’t know who the authors were.

It takes a scientist in the field to understand just how obvious this dishonesty is, and when one is familiar with the history they can immediately know why. Fauci sided with Scientists For Science in 2014, he overturned the moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern, and NIAID funded Daszak’s DEFUSE colleagues for work in Wuhan in 2019.

Dr. Fauci immediately worried a lab origin could point to his own agency’s programs as, after hearing Andersen and Holmes claim this could be a lab leak, Fauci forwarded a Baric paper to Hugh Auchincloss after midnight saying there are urgent tasks that needed to be done (Baric was one of the DEFUSE PI’s). Fauci brought a network of highly conflicted funders together, they brought a network of highly conflicted scientists together, and Drosten, Fouchier, Koopmans et al. used the call to pressure Andersen, Holmes, Lipkin et al towards claiming a lab origin is “implausible”.

After the call, Andersen receives a $9 million grant singed by Fauci’s pen.

Members of the public may have read the Lancet letter without knowing seven co-authors were Scientists For Science who lobbied in 2014 for the work hypothesized to have caused the pandemic in 2019. Many other co-authors of the Lancet paper either worked with the organization that proposed making a virus like SARS-CoV-2 in 2018 (EcoHealth Alliance), were funders of this organization (Wellcome Trust, USAID), were collaborators on relevant work (PREDICT), or were closely tied to this network.

The trail of literature by scientists with similar names and histories continued. Every paper claiming a zoonotic origin received massive international media coverage. If I had to guess, I’d wager some mix of official recommendations by health science funders to cover this work and incumbent advantages from media connections granted by Proximal Origin work and Fauci’s blessing, played a role in the imbalanced media coverage of this area of science. As academics compete over narratives, there is no power greater than reach, and zoonotic origin papers had a reach that exceeded their grasp more than any other science papers I’ve seen.

The warzone of Covid-19 origins science contained many familiar names. Naturally, Stephen Goldstein would go on to become a co-author of the critically flawed zoonotic origin pieces, along with Fouchier’s close colleague, Marion Koopmans and Vincent Racaniello’s student, Angela Rasmussen. In 2021, while coordinating against “the latest line of attack” David Morens instructed Proximal Origin authors, Stephen Goldstein and others to contact him via gmail and not his NIH/NIAID email address to reduce the risk of these official NIH/NIAID emails being obtained by FOIA.

When Valentin Bruttel, Tony VanDongen, and I published our paper discussing how the BsaI/BsmBI map is unusual among wild coronaviruses and consistent with an infectious clone, who would rebut our claims except Scientists For Science like Friedmann Weber, who misrepresented our work by falsely claiming type IIs enzymes can only be used for No See’Um assembly, missing their documented role in the assembly method we propose pre-Covid as well as even No See’Um techniques often requiring the modification of restriction maps. For what it’s worth, Dr. Bruttel signed the consensus statement of the Cambridge Working Group. Who do you suppose are the peer-reviewers, editors, or board members of journals overseeing the review of Bruttel et al.? That’s a juicy story for another day.

When Jonathan Latham showed up at a major coronavirus conference and sought to present materials on his own theory of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, Volker Thiel was a conference organizer who refused Dr. Latham permission to share his work.

As a pandemic infected the world, most members of the public were desperate for safety and security. Fauci became “America’s Doctor” without disclosing his conflicts of interest, a small network of academic scientists presented themselves as scientific saviors in the midst of a global crisis their colleagues may have caused, and this highly conflicted set of scientists from one side of the 2014 chasm used their reach to “defend science” and “defend public health” by organizing “devastating take-downs” of diverse views and suppressing the very credible theory that the research they lobbied for may have caused the catastrophic accident everyone warned them about.

The Pathogenic Academic Lobby

History is long, and any story is incomplete. Aristotle preferred Homer over Hesiod, I’m told, because while Hesiod would begin stories from the beginning of the universe, Homer would cut to the chase and present only the facts relevant to understand the story at hand. There are more facts, more history, than the story I’ve presented here, and there is history that traces further back, decades into the past.

The art of history is compressing the lessons in a way that is short enough to remember. The short, compressed version of this history is that some scientists conducted risky research with a positive feedback loop: the greater the risks taken, the more they scared the crap out of managers, the more funding they would receive. The academics conducting risky work enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens acquired institutional power, including connections at the head of the Wellcome Trust and at NIH/NIAID all the way to the top. They successfully lobbied Fauci and Collins to overturn the moratorium on their work not for clear benefits, but for fame, funding, and other non-industrial, academic wants.

After the moratorium was overturned, funders ranging from NIH and NIAID to USAID, Wellcome Trust (through CEPI) and the Gates Foundation (again through CEPI) supported this work, creating a complex network of conflicts of interest when a pathogen emerged at the doorstep of a lab receiving funding for this work. They also created norms in this field of science that publishing cookbooks for dangerous pathogens was not just acceptable, but it could make you famous and well-funded. These norms rippled around the world as academic labs all over the globe began trying their hand at stunts similar to those of Kawaoka, Fouchier, and Baric.

As evidence mounted of a laboratory origin, Fauci and Collins recruited to the room some of the most conflicted researchers in the world, the heads of the Pathogenic Academic Lobby, co-founders of Scientists For Science like Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, and their (and Daszak’s) close colleague Marion Koopmans. These funders masked their roles prompting, ghostwriting, and promoting publications claiming lab origin theories are “conspiracy theories.”

These funders used their positions of power to expand the reach of papers they helped write, from Fauci presenting Proximal Origin on national television to Farrar writing editors at Nature, bringing Wellcome Trust affiliates onto Daszak’s “Statement,” and using his position as head of one of the largest health science funders in the world to promote papers he helped ghostwrite, papers calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories,” a lab origin “implausible,” all without disclosing the Wellcome Trust’s ties to Daszak and the labs in question. Proximal Origin author Kristian Andersen received a $9 million grant from Dr. Fauci’s NIAID shortly after writing the paper Dr. Fauci prompted.

Andersen’s grant had been reviewed, but it had not yet been accepted by the time of the February 1 call - it was within Fauci’s power to reject Andersen’s grant, and that is something Andersen would know as he’s sitting in the room with Fauci, Farrar, and Collins, getting berated by Fouchier, Drosten, Koopmans et al.

Outside this web of conflicts of interest surrounding the Wuhan labs, independent scientists stepped up to document evidence consistent with a laboratory origin. Scientists For Science, Daszak, and other colleagues began to use their network (e.g. Racaniello and Rasmussen), their control of scientific positions of power (e.g. Thiel), and their media connections (e.g. Holmes, Andersen et al. positioning papers in the Guardian, New York Times, and beyond) to suppress dissent, bully opposition, and mount a disinformation campaign of unprecedented academic reach.

Most of the world entered into the room of virology in 2020, unaware that this field was in the midst of a war over the risks of their research since 2011. At the time of SARS-CoV-2 emergence, the risky research was being funded by Fauci’s NIAID, Collins’ NIH, Farrar’s Wellcome Trust, and more. The risky research was being conducted by Fouchier, Drosten, Thiel, Daszak, and others who established themselves at the helms or in the boardrooms of scientific nodes of power.

Most of the world did not know the acrimony and struggles for institutional power that started before Covid-19. Unaware of this history, most of the public was not aware that a pandemic caused by the exact research hypothesized to create SARS-CoV-2 would lead to an historic stain on the reputations of all those who lobbied to “let scientists be scientists.” Scientists For Science, meanwhile, were clearly aware of the reputational risks they faced.

I was not personally involved in these debates - I was busy doing my PhD in 2011-2014, studying evolution and competition at Princeton down the hall from Eddie Holmes’ colleague (and our mutual friend), Brian Grenfell. I heard about the debates from close friends working in Grenfell, and we all discussed the ethics of this work in small venues, in dusty rooms with esoteric mathematical books on the wall. By 2017, I was working on a DARPA YFA on bat virus origins, emergence, and outbreak forecasting, and by 2018 I was helping write a grant for the same DARPA PREEMPT call to which Daszak proposed his DEFUSE grant.

As someone who is aware of the debate but didn’t stick his neck out then, I feel a civic duty now to contextualize the present by educating the public this important, esoteric, academic history that defines our modern debates. When I heard Fauci and Farrar invited “Fouchier, Drosten, and Koopmans” to the room, I immediately knew what that meant - it meant they brought in three of the most conflicted scientists in the room, scientists whose reputations would fall and whose funding would plummet in the event of a laboratory origin.

There’s some interesting sociology at play when people like Peter Hotez go around claiming there is an “Anti-Science” movement, because science is so much broader than microbiology, let alone the small subset of microbiology studying potentially pandemic pathogens, let alone the miniscule subset of that which actually seeks to enhance potentially pandemic pathogens. Scientists For Science attempted to center themselves as “Science,” and in so doing they are attempting to create a false solidarity with other fields of science that have better managed their risks, or fields of science like climatology whose entire purpose is understanding and mitigating risks they couldn’t possibly engineer. Hotez, while not a Scientist For Science, was subcontracting virological work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time of SARS-CoV-2 emergence.

This narrow minority of highly vocal virologists is all bound together in conflicts of interest, reputational risks from past efforts to lobby on behalf of risks for the pathetic benefits of funding and fame. Before Covid, they lobbied against regulations and today they still lobby to be trusted to oversee their own research. They are aware that laboratory accidents can affect their funding and fame, and given their conflicts of interest in this matter they cannot be trusted by the average citizen to make decisions that are right for everyone, or even our nation, or even our world.

They are Scientists For Science, a self-interested academic lobby whose careers will plummet if working with a microscopic organism capable of ending human civilization should require so much as a background check, or a breathalyzer before entering the lab.

As a consequence of their successful lobbying and jockeying for power, they got what they wanted - their research was heavily funded, their labs staffed, and the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens proliferated without requiring so much as the background check the same scientists demand for a handgun.

We should not let scientists be scientists. We should establish ethical guidelines on the publication of dangerous findings. We should consider laws that don’t let scientists entirely externalize the risks of their risky research, formally establishing scientists’ duty of care when handling potentially pandemic pathogens. We should welcome oversight from independent bodies capable of pausing and stopping research whose benefits don’t outweigh their risks, and the funding for the groups involved in stopping risky research should not depend on the risky research itself. The Cambridge Working Group lost the Battles before Covid as Fauci and Collins used their power to turn the tide in favor of gain of function research of concern.

Will scientists who stood athwart risky research shouting “Halt!” receive reinforcements from the public, now that the public is aware? Or will Scientists For Science continue to use their incumbent advantage in media to mislead the public on the true risks of their research? Will we be able to recruit a mobilized public to the task of managing work, or will Scientists For Science use their incumbent advantage in academic circles to secure nodes of power within virology, suppress open scientific discourse on the probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, evade accountability, and succeed in their efforts to lobby for more funding, more staff, and more academic research enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens?

Will we prevent the catastrophic lab accident that has the potential to end human civilization, or will members of the public fear experts enough to avoid this debate, will they Follow The Science and “let scientists do science”, even if these particular scientists could doom us all?

By learning the history of the pathogenic academic lobby, my sincere hope is the public can engage on this topic and see the urgent need to intervene. Science is awesome. I love science. However, science, like religion, was a beautiful thing before people got involved. The people involved in this particular miniscule niche area of science have created an unaccountable system with misaligned incentives that undermine national security and global health.

Any policies aiming to reduce the risks of lab accidents must contend with Scientists For Science and the system they created, whereby some scientists publish and widely disseminate dangerous work and protocols for the enhancement of pathogens to scare people, use the ensuing fear to boost their funding, use their funding and fame to secure nodes of power within academic communities, and use their power to avoid accountability and oversight.

Republished from the author's Substack

I had previously made the case that the totality of circumstances surrounding SARS-CoV-2 origins is sufficient for probable cause to believe the virus originated in a lab. In addition to the circumstances surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence we lack for a zoonotic origin makes our case even stronger.

Outside the narrow lens of mainstream media outlets unable to cover this globally pertinent forensic case, the biggest scientific murder-mystery of the century is being solved.

New evidence has emerged to strengthen the lab origin case. The flawed papers claiming a zoonotic origin have been revealed as even more hopelessly flawed - while those of us independent subject matter experts could see this from the beginning, now it is becoming more obvious even to the lay public. Additionally, the lab-origin theory has made remarkable predictions about the contents of recently FOIA’d drafts of the DEFUSE grant.

The case for a lab origin is now clear enough that not only can we see the lab origin beyond reasonable doubt, but we are starting to accumulate evidence consistent with a cover-up, that this research-related accident was known to some who knew they funded the work, who knew they subcontracted the work, and who knew they did the work.

Let’s recap what we already knew, what’s new, and what we can reasonably deduce about who knew what and when.

The Fall of the Zoonotic Origin Papers

SARS-CoV-2 is a bat sarbecovirus that emerged in Wuhan far from the hotspots of wildlife bat sarbecoviruses, in a city without bats, at the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the largest repository of bat sarbecoviruses in the world.

The outbreak started sometime in October-November 2019, well before the Huanan Seafood Market outbreak. While Worobey et al. claimed “early” cases were centered around the wet market, they failed to account for earlier cases preceding the wet market outbreak, the Chinese government’s order to destroy early cases or the ascertainment protocol that required a connection to the wet market, and a study of social media data indicated the earliest surge in care-seeking terms was not near the Huanan Seafood Market, but across the river at hospitals nearest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

New: Michael Weissman, a quantitatively sharp physicist who has been estimating the likelihood of lab vs. zoonotic origin theories, made a simple observation that shows Worobey et al.’s own analysis disproves their own assumptions and conclusions. Worobey et al. report that the average distance to the wet market from “unlinked” cases was lower than the average distance to the wet market from cases linked to the wet market. This is a statistically significant indication of sampling bias - if there were no sampling bias, no preferential ascertainment of cases based on proximity to the wet market, then these distances should be the same, or unlinked cases perhaps farther.

Worobey et al. made conclusions based on the assumption that unlinked cases were ascertained at random, but their own analysis disproves that assumption and thereby reveals what we’ve said all along: these early cases are a biased view of the early outbreak provided by the Chinese government. Cases preceding the wet market, surges of care-seeking terms near the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the statistically proven biases of the wet market dataset all but disprove the wet market hypothesis, leaving us with no evidence supporting a natural explanation for why a bat sarbecovirus arose in a city without bats, but with a lab specializing in bat sarbecoviruses.

Pekar et al. also tried to claim the early evolutionary tree of SARS-CoV-2 is highly unlikely to have occurred by chance under one introduction, and they estimated a Bayes Factor of 60 for the two large branches at the base of the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny (i.e. they estimated the evolutionary tree we observe is 60 times more likely under a zoonotic origin than lab origin).

Colleagues and I showed this paper did not justify its conclusions in many ways: (I) their model of evolution was inaccurate (they used a model for HIV evolution instead of SARS-CoV superspreading) and this model made big-branches less-likely (II) their model of case ascertainment, like Worobey et al (written by the same group), was wrong and biased case-ascertainment through contact or location tracing would make two-big-branches more likely, and (III) there are SARS-CoV-2 sequences that meet the authors’ inclusion criteria but which were excluded without cause, and these sequences suggest there aren’t two big-branches but instead intermediate lineages, completely undermining the empirical premise of Pekar et al.

New: An anonymous poster on X (formerly Twitter) examined the code in Pekar et al. and found they had a bug in their code. The authors fail to estimate the likelihood of two-big-branches under alternative scenarios and consequently their estimated Bayes Factors are not actually Bayes Factors. This bug in the code, alone, drops their not-a-Bayes-Factor of 60 to a Bayes Factor of 3, which is within the realm of noise, and that’s not accounting for the additional biases, model inaccuracies, and statistical challenges colleagues and I identified.

The end result is that the evolutionary tree of SARS-CoV-2 does not provide any evidence of multiple spillover events. This end result is important evidence in favor of a lab origin. We have seen a single SARS-CoV spillover in 2002 when an animal trade outbreak led to an infection of civet handlers across a vast geographic scale of Guangdong Province. The viruses circulating in civets were genetically diverse and consequently the evolutionary tree of viruses infecting civet handlers had many branches, one for each spillover event, and those branches differed by more than just 2 mutations that separated the two big branches at the base of the SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary tree (which could occur in a single human-human transmission event).

An animal trade network is the primary way a bat sarbecovirus with close relatives in faraway Yunnan Province could get to Wuhan, but animal trade outbreaks leave footprints. Animals are housed together and in close contact with animal handlers over many miles and across many cities. Like other outbreaks along food-distribution networks (think: salmonella on lettuce), the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak infected people across the entire distribution network of the food or animals. Civet handlers became ill in separate spillover events across all of Guangdong Province. SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, did not leave a trace between Yunnan and Wuhan, the Chinese government only locked down Wuhan yet there were not reported outbreaks outside of Wuhan or Hubei province.

The Chinese government limited PCR tests to travelers coming from Wuhan, and focusing testing on such a narrow area is a strange public health policy for any country trying to contain an animal trade outbreak with a geographically broad precedent. Another strange public health policy was the CCP ordering the destruction of early cases. If there was an animal trade outbreak, then we should test widely along the entire network and fear additional spillover events in geographically disparate locales getting animals (e.g. raccoon dogs) from the same trade network.

In such a geographically broad outbreak across a trade network with the potential for multiple spillovers, earlier cases are exponentially more valuable for the information they contain about the cause of spillover, the animals infected, the particular lines of animal trade networks to monitor, and how we might bottle up the leak from animals to people.

The Strengthening Case for a Lab Origin

All of these anomalies of SARS-CoV-2 emergence, SARS-CoV-2 evolution, and CCP outbreak policy, however, make perfect sense if the leak was not from animals to people, but from the world’s largest repository of bat sarbecoviruses in the same city, walking distance from both the wet market and the hospitals at the heart of earlier surges in care-seeking terms.

The lab-origin theory examines the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from a lab, and to fully understand a lab-origin theory one must examine the research being conducted by the lab. It just so happens that there is a bat sarbecovirus lab in the same city where this bat sarbecovirus emerged; the specificity of the connection between the virus that emerged and the lab is so high it’s like finding a tiger roaming around the town walking distance from a big cat sanctuary in Germany, so knowing there is a sanctuary drawing in big cats from around the world provides critical context for the big cat roaming the streets nearby.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was a leading institute for studying wildlife coronaviruses. These researchers would catch all manners of animals and even sample animal trade networks in search of new viruses. They would take these wildlife viral samples back to Wuhan for further study, and in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance they would import wildlife viral samples obtained by external, US-based parties.

The wildlife virological work in Wuhan is important context, but the single most important thing to know about the lab-origin theory is a grant written in 2018 - the DEFUSE proposal. The DEFUSE proposal was pried from the unwilling hands of EcoHealth Alliance by DRASTIC, the group of independent sleuths investigating a lab-origin theory since 2020.

DEFUSE was submitted to the DARPA PREEMPT call. By pure happenstance, I have intimate knowledge of this call because I helped write a successful DARPA PREEMPT grant, I was working on a DARPA PREEMPT team for 2 years pre-Covid (and a DARPA YFA on bat viruses since 2017), and I attended the meeting in DC where we got to hear from other DARPA PREEMPT teams. Consequently, I can read DEFUSE and put it into context of the grant call and other contemporary work in the field, and I can quickly identify the characterizing features of DEFUSE revealing the unique research goals and intentions of the authors that differ from broader wildlife virological work.

The DARPA PREEMPT call aimed to preempt pathogen spillover. The call sought proposals to identify “jump-capable quasispecies,” a rather new term that referred to strains of pathogens with an increased ability to jump the species barrier, especially those with an increased ability for onward transmission in humans that could cause a pandemic. Then, to preempt spillover, the call sought proposals aiming to somehow prevent wildlife from acquiring these jump-capable quasispecies and/or interventions that reduced the risk of humans overlapping with wildlife at times and places when they had these jump-capable quasispecies.

To give you an example of a DARPA PREEMPT grant, let me share a bit about the grant I was on. I was part of a team studying bat henipaviruses like Hendra, Nipah, Cedar etc. We proposed to have a vast international team catch bats across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia, sample bats for henipaviruses, and characterize when and where we find infected bats as well as the genetic diversity of their henipaviruses.

The most important barrier to entry for most wildlife viruses is a step in the virus life cycle called “receptor-binding,” or latching onto the receptors of new hosts, so we would focus our studies of quasispecies phenotypes by having labs make the receptor-binding proteins of henipaviruses in the lab (not the whole viruses) and test their ability to bind human receptors. For a small set of jump-capable quasispecies, we would try to culture the viruses in a BSL-4 lab (the highest possible biosafety level), and we would develop vaccines against these quasispecies identified from the wild.

DEFUSE proposed to sample bat sarbecoviruses in SE Asia, but they didn’t propose to examine the extant variation of sarbecoviruses in nature, instead they were searching for a highly specific genomic feature that has never been seen before in sarbecoviruses: a furin cleavage site (FCS). This, alone, is highly unusual - why would they bet a $15 million grant on searching for a feature that had never been observed in nature before?

Furin cleavage sites had been documented in very distant coronaviruses such as MERS-CoV, feline alphacoronaviruses, or some endemic human coronaviruses, and across the board it was recognized that the FCS enhances the ability of a virus to bind receptors and enter the cells across a wider range of host receptors and cells. DEFUSE proposed to search for furin cleavage sites and if they found one, insert the FCS inside more-abundant strains to test their transmissibility. The viral assays and work with humanized mice (e.g. testing transmissibility of a virus with an FCS) would occur not in Buenos Aires, not it Atlanta, not in Cape Town or Sydney, not even in Beijing…it would occur in Wuhan. Finally, these researchers would construct a vaccine against such a sarbecovirus and vaccinate bats to preempt spillover.

Kudos to the grant’s focus on receptor-binding and cell entry, but their identification of a never-before-seen motif is highly unusual. None of the other PREEMPT teams proposed to make things not found in nature. The proposal to search for something never before documented and swap it around other viruses in hypothesized recombination events is not the direction evidence flows in wildlife virology. Wildlife virologists look at what we find in wildlife, and study what we find in wildlife; we don’t use our imaginations to make unnatural chimeric innovations not found in wildlife and then conjure these horrors into existence.

SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with a furin cleavage site never before seen in a sarbecovirus. It needs to be emphasized that, to the best of our global knowledge, “sarbecovirus with furin cleavage site” did not exist in nature before 2020, but it did exist in a grant proposal to make something not found in nature, and that biological novelty was proposed to be made in Wuhan. The exact furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 is found in another protein, a protein called alpha-ENaC found in humans and studied heavily at the same university (UNC) as one of the PI’s of DEFUSE.

New: Drafts of the DEFUSE grant recently obtained by Emily Kopp at US Right to Know found several pieces of evidence strengthening the connection between DEFUSE and the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2. First, the leader of DEFUSE, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, mentioned in a comment that, while they would propose to do some of their riskier work in the BSL-3 labs of UNC, after acceptance of the grant they could offload that work to the BSL-2 labs in Wuhan.

These comments amount to a conspiracy to deceive and defraud the US DoD in their grant and cut corners in biosafety to cut costs, conducting more risky work not in Buenos Aires or Raleigh or Amsterdam, but in Wuhan. Second, the drafts contain more specific mentioning of “furin cleavage” than the final grant - the final grant hedged bets by emphasizing “proteolytic” cleavage sites, but the drafts fixate on furin, increasing the specificity of the connection between DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2. Finally, and most importantly, the authors propose a specific location in the genome where they will insert these furin cleavage sites: the S1/S2 boundary, a narrow window in a 3,600 nucleotide gene, and SARS-CoV-2 has its furin cleavage site at exactly the location proposed in these grants.

The furin cleavage site alone should be enough for probable cause given the lack of precedent of this feature in 2018 when DEFUSE was written and the specificity of their proposed insertion matching exactly that seen in SARS-CoV-2. Daszak shows an awareness of the biosafety regulations and intentions of US government agencies, and he conspired to bypass these rules and regulations to cut costs once he received US taxpayer funding for his work.

However, there’s more.

In order to insert a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2, researchers would need to have a DNA copy of the RNA virus. In order to make a DNA copy of an RNA virus, they would construct a “reverse genetics system.” Even the submitted version of DEFUSE mentions that they will use reverse genetics technology to rescue viruses from genome sequences on a computer, swap spike genes, and insert the furin cleavage sites inside these DNA clones to make modified viruses. Two of the three leaders in the field of coronavirus reverse genetic systems were on the DEFUSE grant: Ralph Baric and his former student, Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli.

In 2022, Valentin Bruttel and Tony Van Dongen noticed an unusual pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Two of the most popular bioengineering scissors used to make reverse genetics systems - BsaI and BsmBI - appear to cleave the SARS-CoV-2 genome into 6 segments, and this would make for a highly efficient reverse genetics system. SARS-CoV-2 appears to a bioengineer like an IKEA virus, as if someone had already put time into making sure it could be easily assembled with readily available tools.

We quantified the odds of this pattern appearing in nature and wrote a paper documenting the endonuclease fingerprint in the genome of SARS-CoV-2. Not only is the spatial arrangement of these cutting/pasting sites highly unusual, but the mutations that move them around are exclusively the mutations bioengineers used in prior work, and the concentration of these “silent” mutations is 8-9 times higher within these moved-around stitching sites compared to the rest of the genome. This analysis led us to our theory of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 by 6-segment assembly, using the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI. The IKEA virus can be ordered in 6 parts and using only the screwdriver of BsaI and allen wrench of BsmBI, you can put the parts together with ease.

New: The same drafts of DEFUSE mentioned above detailing FCS insertion in the S1/S2 boundary also contain more details about their proposed methods to rescue and modify wild viruses from bat samples. Specifically, after EcoHealth shipped bat samples to Wuhan, they proposed to sequence the samples and rescue bat sarbecoviruses using reverse genetic systems assembled with “6 segments” and in this context they include cost-estimates for the enzyme BsmBI.

The highly precise methodological details contained in the drafts of DEFUSE are exactly the details predicted by the theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated as a research product of DEFUSE-like work.

DEFUSE-like work has been the dominant lab-origin theory, and it’s misleading for people to say that lab-origin theories would originate in any city with a lab because there was only one city with the lab that proposed this highly specific research - this was not proposed to take place in Lima or Mexico City or Alberta or Paris, but in Wuhan. We have evidence Peter Daszak was willing to cut biosafety corners to cut costs and conduct the riskiest work proposed in DEFUSE, exactly the kind of work that could generate SARS-CoV-2, in Wuhan’s BSL-2 labs.

The odds of the alignment between a grant in 2018 and the unnatural, unprecedented genome of a virus in 2019 are nearly zero under a natural origin. My work on the DARPA PREEMPT grant was to forecast the evolution of viruses, so I can state with the confidence of my expertise that the biogeography, epidemiology, public health policy, and genomic anomalies of SARS-CoV-2 are not what you would expect from the natural evolution of a zoonotic virus. The connection between DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2 is nearly impossible with our 2018 knowledge of wildlife virology and the evolution of wildlife viruses, unless DEFUSE was used as the blueprint, a letter of intent to make a highly specific biological novelty that we found later in the same city where these authors proposed to make it.

DEFUSE was wisely rejected by DARPA, and this has been a common counterargument. However, the DEFUSE PI Daszak had many other sources of funding, including tens of millions of dollars from USAID’s PREDICT program, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, and even NIAID.

In fact, not only did NIAID fund Daszak through the grant “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence,” but this NIAID grant also expanded to include all the PI’s of DEFUSE in 2019. The email below from October 2019 contains the primary players of DEFUSE who had never all collaborated and co-authored a document before DEFUSE nor collaborated since (ouihaagendazs is the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Ben Hu and gnyny0803 is Li Guo). The authors are jumping on an “NIAID SARs-CoV call” on Wednesday, October 30th, suggesting the DEFUSE PI’s whose only known research product is DEFUSE were actively collaborating through NIAID at the time of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence.

Evidence of a Cover-Up

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a database of hundreds of sarbecovirus genomes and spike genes, but that dataset was deleted in September 2019. The Chinese government ordered the destruction of early cases and sequences, and deleted sequences from NCBI’s servers have been recovered by Jesse Bloom, shining more light on the early outbreak, complicating the evolutionary and epidemiological story of the Huanan Seafood market (what are the odds that sequences deleted corroborate the wet market story vs. complicate it?).

The Chinese government only allocated PCR tests to patients in Wuhan with connections to the wet market or travelers coming from Wuhan with connection to known cases in Wuhan, and only Wuhan was locked down, a policy that makes little sense under the SARS-CoV-1 precedent of a geographically widespread animal trade outbreak in SARS-CoV-1. Of course, since SARS-CoV-1 there were 6 lab leaks of SARS-CoV-1 in China, and that could have been the precedent guiding Chinese public health policy.

Peter Daszak, the leader of DEFUSE, did not disclose DEFUSE as a conflict of interest when he was elected to be the US emissary to the WHO’s Covid origins investigation in Wuhan, nor did he disclose DEFUSE when chosen to lead the Lancet’s Covid-origins investigation.

Daszak went even further. He coordinated with DEFUSE colleagues Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang to write an article to the Lancet calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories." Not only did Daszak not disclose DEFUSE as a COI, but the email also indicates Daszak’s intent to ghostwrite the article, hide conflicts of interest, all for the purpose of distracting the Lancet’s audience from DEFUSE PIs’ central role working with the lab at the heart of the lab-origin theory to design a biological novelty matching the specs of SARS-CoV-2. If the organism described in DEFUSE were patented, SARS-CoV-2 would be an infringement of their patent.

The subject line of Daszak’s email reads:

“No need for you to sign the ‘Statement’ Ralph!!”

Daszak and Linfa Wang agreed that he, Wang, and Baric should not sign the statement they wrote and are organizing “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Baric replied, “I also think this is a good decision. Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”

Below, we also have an email in which Daszak wrote his colleagues of USAID’s PREDICT program in April 2020 with subject line

RE: China Genbank Sequences
Importance: High

All - It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point.

As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH.

… Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.

Cheers, Peter

The terminated grant in question was the same NIAID grant which brought DEFUSE collaborators together in 2019. What were these China Genbank Sequences of high-importance? Why would these sequences connected to the DEFUSE PI’s NIAID grant bring unwelcome attention?

If these sequences were natural bat sarbecovirus sequences and if SARS-CoV-2 were a natural bat sarbecovirus, then China Genbank Sequences would reinforce the evolutionary history of sarbecoviruses, helping us see more clearly that SARS-CoV-2 were a natural virus. If that were the case, few would have a greater incentive than Daszak to disclose these sequences, but instead he chose to withhold them.

If SARS-CoV-2 were a laboratory product of DEFUSE-related work, then it makes sense the NIAID grant connecting DEFUSE collaborators would be terminated and sequences associated with this grant would bring “very unwelcome attention” to those who published the sequences, because somebody like me would look at the sequences and realize they provide even stronger evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was a product of DEFUSE-related work, that the suspects had the genomes on their computers prior to the emergence of this virus.

It would make sense that Daszak would not disclose DEFUSE nor China Genbank Sequences because he would have a consciousness of guilt. It would make sense he would assert himself as the US emissary to the WHO’s investigation and the leader of the Lancet’s Covid origins investigations without compromising his position by disclosing his conflicts of interest because he has an existential need to ensure investigations come to believe this is a natural virus, even if it is not.

There has remained the possibility that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have proceeded with DEFUSE-related work without the consent of Peter Daszak. However, that seems unlikely when we examine the way the scientific community operates. Daszak was a ring-leader of a massive global alliance, EcoHealth Alliance, capable of acquiring tens of millions of dollars from USAID’s PREDICT project, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation’s CEPI-funded Global Virome Project, NIAID’s grant “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence,” and more.

EcoHealth Alliance was such a powerhouse that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have been able to publish such work without including DEFUSE PI’s - any attempt to publish such work would be flagged as failing to credit DEFUSE PI’s and that peer review battle would be a research ethics scandal that alienates the WIV from their most powerful and well-connected colleagues, greatly limiting their ability to have an impact in wildlife virology for years afterwards.

The WIV had published prior reverse genetics systems (Peng et al 2016) and chimeric CoVs (Hu et al. 2017) with Daszak. He was a close and valued collaborator of the bat sarbecovirus team at the WIV, he was closer in-network at the WIV than Ralph Baric, and the WIV had every incentive to conduct this research with Daszak to boost the reach of their work through his vast global network of wildlife virologists.

It’s possible the Chinese government could have proceeded with this work in a classified setting, but that wouldn’t explain Daszak’s own refusal to disclose DEFUSE, the “Statement” Baric did not have to sign, the China Genbank Sequences withheld.

Closing Remarks

Papers claiming a zoonotic origin have all been debunked.

The DEFUSE grant proposed a highly specific research program in 2018 that would create a virus like SARS-CoV-2, from the furin cleavage site never before documented in a sarbecovirus to the BsaI/BsmBI restriction map anomalous among wild CoVs and consistent with a reverse genetics system assembled with 6 segments. The only time BsaI and BsmBI had been used on a CoV before Covid was when Ben Hu, Peter Daszak, and Shi Zhengli made chimeric bat sarbecoviruses in Wuhan.

Lab-origin theory made several predictions about the specific research methods that would lead to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, and recently obtained drafts of DEFUSE contain precisely those methods to astonishing detail, from the S1/S2 insertion of a furin cleavage site to the 6-segment assembly with order forms for BsmBI. The drafts of DEFUSE also reveal Daszak’s awareness of DoD’s biosafety concerns, and his willingness to defraud the DoD at great risk to humanity by claiming to conduct risky research in UNC’s BSL-3 labs but intending to actually conduct the work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s problematic BSL-2 labs.

The authors of DEFUSE are a unique collaboration. They had never all written a paper together before DEFUSE. They were all on a call with NIAID discussing SARs-CoVs in 2019. Included on the 2019 call was Ben Hu, the exact scientist who was unique in using BsaI + BsmBI on a coronavirus pre-Covid. After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, Daszak coordinated with Baric and Linfa Wang to author a “Statement” but not sign it to not look self-serving, and Daszak wrote a high-importance email ordering his UC Davis colleagues to not upload China Genbank Sequences that were part of the recently terminated NIH/NIAID grant connecting DEFUSE PI’s.

The evidence we have suggests not only beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, but that the unique collaboration leading us to believe a lab origin beyond reasonable doubt had NIAID support, had sequences they withheld with knowledge the sequences could bring unwelcome attention to whoever uploaded them, and proceeded to mount what can legitimately be called a disinformation campaign calling lab origin theories “conspiracy theories” while conspiring to not sign their own statements to mislead readers into thinking such statements came from independent, unconflicted scientists.

Over 20 million people have died. Over 60 million people faced acute hunger. Over 100 million children were thrown into multidimensional poverty. Trillions of dollars were lost as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic was an historic catastrophe that originated by researchers who had DEFUSE in hand and who willingly bypassed ruled and regulations to conduct risky work the authors knew would enhance a potentially pandemic pathogen, as the purpose of PREEMPT was to preempt pandemics by focusing on potentially pandemic pathogens.

The authors who wrote DEFUSE behaved with a consciousness of guilt once the research product proposed in their grant began circulating around the world, and both our scientists and science-funding institutions have withheld critical information that reveals the nature of research proposed, and conducted, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the support of the US taxpayer.

Time, forensic analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and further evidence has only strengthened the case for a lab origin. We can further strengthen the case with more evidence, but with information in the public domain we already have enough evidence to justify probable cause to investigate DEFUSE PI’s, preponderance of evidence in civil suits of DEFUSE PI’s, and beyond-reasonable-doubt confidence that SAR-CoV-2 emerged from a lab even if we don’t know who held the pipette. I’ll let lawyers figure out if bypassing biosafety safeguards and accidentally killing 20 million people constitutes negligence, if causing a global pandemic is a crime.

The forensic scientific case of SARS-CoV-2 origins is like the case of a close network of friends who were all in a room together in which someone died, we have a proposal by these friends to kill that specific person with the specific bullet, in that specific room, at that general time when all of these researchers were in the room together. While the statement wasn’t funded, it should be read as a revelation of the intentions of the group. We may not know who pulled the trigger, but we know a murder occurred and every author of the letter is a suspect who knows more than they are currently sharing with the public.

It’s past time for impartial investigations that force the retention of documents by all parties found at the scene of the crime.

We can separate this research-related incident from our society and from all of science only once we separate the scientists and their funders and compel them to provide a full account of their activities in Wuhan in 2019. Only then can the world have truth, reconciliation, and hope for proper regulation of risky research and the scientific systems that made a lab-created pandemic possible.

Republished from the author's Substack

Mercy is a missing ingredient of our modern society.

As we fire 280-character social missiles, learn the necessary aim and outrage for maximum effect, update, and reload to fire again into the volley, I worry we might be forgetting about a world without constant cross-cultural conflict and the moral courage it takes to make peace.

COVID sucked. In case a pandemic wasn’t bad enough, we also had to live through the warzone of pandemic discourse between people afraid of a virus, conservatives afraid of an authoritarian bureaucracy of The Scientists, liberal scientists afraid of Trump, climate change, and securing tenure, and all manners of other aggrieved parties desperate for acknowledgement of the validity of their points.

Now, cases wane and subsequent outbreaks lead to diminishing medical demand and mortality burden (as predicted by my 2020 forecasts and corroborated by our analysis of Delta and Omicron outbreaks). As the dust settles and our battle-hardened souls soften amidst the social wreckage wrought by our battle, it’s understandable to thirst for the divine drink of peace. I, too, thirst for peace. While I’m grateful to see people apologizing for lockdowns, apologizing for harming kids, and so on, there’s still some unsettled dust we need to discuss before the balm of mercy can be applied.

For an anecdotal exercise, consider Professor Scott Galloway calling for COVID amnesty and apologizing for his advocacy of school closures to Bill Maher. The data now shows that school closures were harmful to kids and in a highly inequitable way. We pursued school closures despite many of us (myself included) having laid out all these anticipated consequences, and yet those of us who saw this trainwreck coming don’t have the reparations nor do we see the grace from school closure proponents that would make mercy easier.

Not only did school closures harm kids, but massive inequalities in our media, corporate, academic, and social media ecosystems permitted the harm of people who spoke up to oppose school closures and other harmful pandemic policies. Jennifer Sey lost her job at Levi’s for opposing school closures, I left my academic position because I didn’t want to use taxpayer funds to model quarantines in college kids, and countless others experienced significant professional consequences from engaging in the public health policy process by speaking their sincerely held views.

The Great Barrington Declaration authors were ostracized in the academy for merely reminding the world’s doctors of their Hippocratic Oath and the simple medical ethics of not harming patient A to help patient B. Vinay Prasad is cancelled at medical conferences.

As those who anticipated the harms to kids suffered professional harms, those who used their bully pulpit to push for school closures rose to prominence. Andy Slavitt was an obscure McKinsey bro until the pandemic hit, McKinsey consulted the Cuomo team during the March 2020 NYC surge, and Slavitt centered himself as a thought leader. This thoughtless thought leader called kids vectors of disease, and as a consequence of his intolerant fear mongering he was awarded a position on the Biden administration’s COVID task force.

Countless other epidemiologists who centered their ethnocentric perspectives as “The Science” saw their Twitter followings explode, and they used this new bully pulpit to block young scientists - myself included - who brought diversity into the room by speaking our independent beliefs.

For me, personally, the reason I opposed school closures was because I grew up in the school-to-prison pipeline of underfunded public schools in Albuquerque. I had friends whose dads beat them, whose parents were alcoholics, one friend whose parents did meth and cut the heads off of chickens in front of all of us while laughing, whose home lives were not conducive to remote learning. I brought these friends with me in my heart to academic discussions on school closures.

I also grew up with a profound hearing loss and I’ve always relied on lip-reading to survive (not to mention to succeed and get a PhD from Princeton), so at times I articulated the competing risks of mask mandates in schools by advocating for hard-of-hearing students.

For all their talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, many white, liberal, and privileged academics have a lot to learn about tolerance. The response to my personal advocacy was not tolerance, curiosity, understanding, and compassion, but rather call-outs from people who grew up in private schools and a persistent blocking and bullying from leaders in the field, including people like Gregg Gonsalves at Yale, Gavin Yamey at Duke, Peter Hotez, Kristian Andersen, Angela Rasmussen, and others who have risen to prominence because of their bullying, because of their shots fired at people with different views.

When I hear these people call for COVID amnesty, while I remain blocked and shunned by people with immense power in our academic institutions, while my reputation is dragged through the mud with lies and mischaracterizations about my truths and my character, forgive me but I have a difficult time being merciful. When I see someone on MSNBC or Bill Maher calling for amnesty despite having obtained the privilege of being on international news outlets because of their wartime hostilities and intolerance, I see a problem. While they call for mercy to safeguard the social capital of people who were wrong, whose behavior caused harm, they have done nothing to elevate the voices - and the people - they suppressed.

I remain blocked, bullied, and shunned by academics who used their tenure and institutional power to exclude diverse views from the room. Jennifer Sey remains unemployed by Levi’s. Prasad remains cancelled by medical conferences. The Great Barrington Declaration authors remain ostracized and mischaracterized by those who determine science funding, conference committees, and other bottlenecks of academic opportunity and power. These are just a few examples and there are countless more of us who suffered in this social warzone, fighting for our sincere beliefs in a courageous act of public health participation.

The dust that settles too early contaminates our open wounds. The kids remain harmed, those who harmed them remain centered as thought leaders, and those who had the courage and insight to anticipate these harms remain excluded from the information bubble that caused this harm in the first place.

From my heart of hearts, I don’t hate the people who caused us harm in order to exclude us from the public health policy process and cause further harm to kids like the friends I grew up with. I understand that they were afraid, that they grew up with vastly different circumstances, that they, like me, are products of circumstance, and that they just happened to control the cannons and mortar shells when I only had a Swiss army knife.

I would be overjoyed to drop my knife if only they would yield control of the cannons, stop firing from their positions of power, help us heal the wounded, and help us glorify the heroes who were right all along.

Why don’t they hand the microphone to us to learn more about who we are as humans and how we were able to anticipate these harms? If they feel bad about being wrong, why not share their social capital with the people they excluded from the room?

Until we have meaningful reconciliation, amnesty will merely cement the incumbents’ hold on academic, media, and narrative power, all but ensuring we repeat the failures of pandemic public health policy. Thus, for those of us who anticipated the harms to kids, we can further anticipate the harms of granting mercy to those whose trembling, intolerant hands still hold the cannons.

Republished from the author's Substack

Sometimes it feels as if we’re living in a dizzying house of narrative mirrors and anyone sincerely interested in walking the true path through the world risks being unable to see the true path as they get trapped in our horrific hall of insincere reflections.

The truth of any given matter, the objective facts and consilient theories, seems to matter less than the ability of an idea or narrative to reflect back to people what they wish to see. Our marketplace of ideas incentivizes manufacturing narrative mirrors that provide epistemological narcissists an opportunity to view themselves in a favorable light and secure a foothold in media outlets that have devolved from curators of our frontal lobe to antagonists of our amygdala.

Speaking of epistemological narcissists and narrative mirrors, let’s talk about Peter Hotez and his narrative of a growing “Anti-Science” movement.

Peter Hotez self-identifies as a scientist and appears to spend most of his time running around predominately liberal media outlets, using his stature as “The Scientist” to misrepresent, demean, and cry “disinformation” on information, worldviews, and even scientific theories that differ from his own. Any scientist who disagrees with Dr. Hotez and his outrageous, inhuman, insensitive, and irrational proclamations is blocked and ridiculed. While truth may bounce off Hotez like bullets off of Thanos, it appears our disagreements have successfully penetrated the armor of Dr. Hotez’s ego and a new ego-defense is materializing. 

Now, Dr. Hotez claims that there is “an Anti-Science movement,” a cultural and political boogeyman that is out to undermine science and target scientists. I have little doubt he would love to snap his fingers and make what he views as “Anti-Science” people, beliefs, and institutions disappear in an act of anti-heroic benevolence for the world.

The whole notion of “Anti-Science,” however, is a narrative. It is not a physical object like “anti-matter” or “antigen” nor is it a process like “antibody maturation” nor an objective and diagnosable clinical condition like “antisocial personality disorder.” “Anti-Science” is nothing but an attempt to name a thing that Hotez sees, but he views our political world from a far-off silo and lives in a hall of mirrors of his own design. As a consequence of Hotez’ distance from the people and patterns he’s labeling “Anti-Science,” the thing he sees is not a thing that exists in our shared, objective universe.

To understand what Hotez sees, why he sees it, and why it’s not a thing in our universe, we have to provide, to the best of our ability, a minimal and objective set of historical facts that can reproduce what he sees. I hypothesize one can synthesize Hotez’ toxic worldview by following the 7-step recipe below:

1. History of Scientists-Being-Right: Have serious scientific issues over which there is a legitimate consensus, like climate change or evolution, become politically divisive flashpoints.
2. Socially and Politically Siloed Scientists: Slowly, imperceptibly, increase the political biases of the composition of scientists while having scientists spend more and more time in their social circle.
3. A Scientific Emergency: Introduce an emergency that requires scientific interpretations to decide effective public policy (COVID-19 pandemic), resulting in an unprecedented surge in the political power and influence of scientists.
4. Scientists with State Power: Have some scientists in unelected positions of power (e.g. Fauci and Collins) use the power of the State to silence critics and preferentially amplify the theories, papers, and implied policies they prefer.
5. Uncritical Media: Have media with a long mutualistic history of using scientists to certify narratives and manufacture consent in exchange for providing scientists expanded narrative reach, and, through a mix of market forces and established social norms, have these media “trust the experts” and give them relatively uncritical coverage. 
6. History of Disinformation: Record a true history of disinformation, especially concerning scientific issues like oil and gas companies sowing doubt about climate change (while privately acknowledging it’s true).
7. Diversity of Belief and Freedom of Speech: Have all of the above occur in a society that safeguards civil liberties, allowing people to speak up, criticize those in power, and advocate for their own position in public fora.

If these seven criteria are met, I believe someone like Peter Hotez will be a nearly inevitable social consequence. The simple explanation is that the criteria above polarized scientists (1) without them knowing they are polarized (2), gave them an opportunity (3) to exercise somewhat unchecked State power (4), and gave them media power (5) to suppress dissent by calling it “disinformation” (6).

The first six steps of this recipe create an authoritarian ethos in scientists - Trust the Science, Follow the Science - and compel them to act on these politically ethnocentric and authoritarian impulses with few checks and balances except for popular discontent. Inevitably, the siloed and politically biased composition of scientists will result in policies that sow massive discontent (lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates). When we add the 7th ingredient of the recipe, people exposed to an authoritarian bunch of scientists brushing aside their humanity, their political rights, and their distinct value systems will express their discontent. The people expressing discontent will correctly identify the scientists as the people and groups of scientists as the syndicate that corrupted the public policy process through unfair, undemocratic, and intolerant tactics, and the people will speak their minds at these scientists - like Hotez - in public fora.

The Hotez's will need to be fermented in this social and media concoction of authoritarianism within grasp hindered by legitimate public criticism for some time. Eventually, they will need a narrative to brush away that public resistance so they will create an ego-defensive narrative that positions them as heroes, Scientists as Saviors (scientific saviorism). Hotez and others have somewhat of a manic pixie dream scientist view of themselves - the scientists who are apolitical heroes of infinite cultural latitude exist only in their imaginations to serve their fantasies of grandiosity and benevolence. They sincerely believe that if science says X is effective at reducing one disease then all of society ought to Follow the Science to adopt X, mandate X, do whatever it takes to make X ubiquitous and thank scientists for X. Of course, the tricky thing about society is that it is comprised of humans, a vast anthropological mosaic of beliefs and value systems, and there are other beliefs and value systems that believe we ought to do Y.

Science has become a central pillar of the Saviors’ self-identity and so they don’t distinguish between science (the objective and often messy process of fairly evaluating many competing ideas) and the authoritarian actions of scientists. As the Toxic Hotez nears completion from cooking in a vat of legitimate public criticism for their scientific ethnocentrism, they will conceive a global conspiracy targeting science and scientists, a monstrous “Anti-Science” that demands even more power and legal protection of scientists, even stronger measures to police disinformation. As they look at the restored image of Scientists as Saviors in this narrative mirror, they will descend even further into madness.

Indeed, it is madness because what Hotez views as “Anti-Science” does not exist, it is not a good reflection of reality but rather a story told from pride and ego-defense. Hotez, a set of scientists closely connected with the heads of the NIH, NIAID, and other global health science funders (none of them democratically elected), and even the funders themselves ate the forbidden fruit of authoritarianism. Many before Hotez have tasted authoritarianism, and the results are predictable. The Scientists who grabbed the reigns of society during the pandemic and steered it with insensitive ambition are experiencing not a novel monstrosity but an age-old and dignified human response called “Anti-Authoritarianism.”

Some - not all - scientists acted like authoritarians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some - not all - scientists rallied around models from the most powerful and well-funded scientific groups at the start of the pandemic, even if their models were clearly wrong. When some scientists like John Ioannidis spoke up about the shortcomings of models that were guiding policy, the politically siloed scientists reacted with vitriol and social power that could crush careers in scientific institutions. The informal social control of scientists suppressed diverse views and resulted in science not shared.

So some - not all - scientists became very vocal in advocating for lockdowns despite the policy being inhumane and a clear violation of civil liberties, such as when fellow scientists Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) arguing that lockdowns were likely to cause harm and that all-cause mortality and morbidity could be reduced by focusing our protection and helping those with high risk of severe outcomes receive the best preventative support and treatment we could muster. The GBD was an alternative policy proposal that was also grounded in science and it differed in its moral calculus and focus on all-cause mortality. The GBD was assisted by a group whose beliefs aligned with the policies and ideas therein - the American Institute for Economic Research. That group was said to be a libertarian think tank.

There was just two problems with the Great Barrington Declaration: it was supposedly aligned with a group whose political preferences are anathema to many liberal scientists and it conflicted with the policies preferred by major science funders. A difference of political opinion also grounded in science and reason shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but for some reason it was. Major science funders, most of all the head of NIAID Dr. Anthony Fauci and the head of NIH Francis Collins, strongly believed that a better policy was to contain the virus - not mitigate its impacts - and hold off infections until vaccines arrived. The cost-benefit analysis of Fauci et al. differed from the GBD in that it prioritized only COVID mortality; costs were ignored and benefits assumed. Science, however, can’t decide which policy is better. The choice of what we ought to do is a problem as old as humanity, it is ethics and politics, religion, and morality. Thankfully, that’s why our system of government has a constitution and system of laws that provide us procedures for choosing policies even when equally good people disagree.

Constitutions and procedures be damned.

Drs. Fauci and Collins, both unelected and consequently not able to be unseated in an election, demanded a “devastating take-down” of the Great Barrington Declaration. They used their positions of immense scientific power to prod and poke and goad scientists who depend on Fauci and Collins for funding into action, generating a flurry of articles and media appearances calling the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe” and thereby imposing even stronger informal social control on scientists than that displayed during Ioannidis’ chapter of this saga. If you agreed with the GBD, you too were considered “fringe,” you were considered a “far-right Trump-supporting Libertarian.” That shouldn’t be a dis-qualifier in a sane scientific society, but such an accusation carries significant career costs in our politically siloed body of scientists.

After lockdowns, there were mask mandates and vaccine mandates. If you spoke up against vaccine mandates, whether your reasoning was scientific, religious, or political-philosophical, many scientists believed your speech should be labelled “disinformation.” Scientists, with the immense narrative power granted to them during this emergency, succeeded in labelling a great deal of information as “disinformation,” including scientific information such as early findings that immunity to COVID - including vaccine-induced immunity - may wane.

So some - not all - scientists did indeed fight too hard in our democratic society and their insensitive need to have everything their way risked tearing the delicate fabric of our society. They tried to force policies on people that conflicted with people’s beliefs, values, or even constitutional rights. Many people are predictably not happy about that. People spoke up and advocated for their beliefs as they are free to do in our society.

Some scientists tried to push back harder by saying that masks, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures were what The Science demanded. People, including many scientists like myself, then focused their criticism at this small band of authoritarians calling themselves The Science and interfering with our country’s representative and more inclusive policy process.

As people revolted to these Scientists’ undemocratic policies, our elected officials took note. Our democratic republic of states was a checkerboard of policies where not everyone Followed the Science, exactly as our laboratory of democracy was intended to be, but many scientists share the political belief that states’ departures from One Policy was immoral and unscientific (one and the same, in the ethical doctrine of The Science) and that the federal government should decide most things. Incidentally, the federal government is also a hub of scientific power with science-led agencies like the CDC, NIH/NIAID, and so concentrating power in the federal government would benefit scientists whereas letting states chose policies would put the decisions about public health closer to the people and their local elected representatives..

There was tension between the people, our local representatives, our federal representatives, and the Scientists. There was litigation challenging scientists’ suppression of speech, including Missouri v. Biden where plaintiffs include GBD authors were claiming Drs. Fauci and Collins infringed upon their freedom of speech by censoring these scientists and their sincerely held scientific and science-policy beliefs. There were court cases about masks on a plane that challenged the federal government’s deference of public health policy authority to unelected scientists. There were arguments aplenty, and scientists like Drs. Fauci or Hotez who felt they were lionized during the pandemic, who underwent an apotheosis to scientific authoritarianism in their pursuit of scientific saviorism, are now being bombarded by criticism from people, counties, states, elected representatives, and even scientists.

To make matters worse, one of the most consequential conflicts of interest in human history lurked beneath the surface. The virus that triggered the emergency was most likely a laboratory accident from a laboratory that received funding from these same heads of health science funding, Drs. Fauci and Collins. In fact, Peter Hotez himself subcontracted work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It’s within the realm of possibility the NIAID money Hotez sent to Wuhan could’ve bought the exact pipette or restriction enzymes that caused the pandemic. That’s a conflict of interest when it comes to deciding policies to mitigate the harms of this likely research-related accident.

Even without knowing the virus emerged from a lab, the mere fear they could be responsible for a global pandemic causing millions of deaths could reasonably be sufficient to cause scientists like Fauci and Hotez to exert undue influence on science and public health policy. Fears of a lab origin could explain why lab origin theories were branded as “conspiracy theories” with support from Drs. Hotez, Fauci and other health-science funders and the scientists close to them (Andersen, Holmes, Garry, etc).

Fears of a lab origin could explain why this syndicate of scientists prioritized reducing COVID mortality through extreme measures like lockdowns instead of drawing on decades of public health science by acknowledging competing risks, encouraging participation from anthropologically diverse people whose policies are being decided, and managing the more conventional all-cause mortality and morbidity instead of implementing a myopic focus on COVID. 

The latter policy, incidentally, was that proposed by the GBD, none of whose authors were engaged in risky virological work in Wuhan and all of which had clear heads and sound arguments. Fears of a lab origin could plausibly lead scientists, concerned of their moral failings in possibly causing a pandemic, to desperately need a scientific saviorism success story like vaccines to balance the scales saving as many millions of lives as the millions of deaths they may have caused, leading them to label scientists’ divergent views on costs and benefits of vaccines as “disinformation.” The Wuhan COI could easily affect the observed irrational need to censor opposing views.

When we look at the pandemic history and our post-pandemic society from a more objective, less conflicted lens closer to the bodies of us innocent and diverse people Hotez labels “Anti-Science” from his siloed distance, we don’t see anything like “Anti-Science.” Instead, we see scientific authoritarianism and a predictable bipartisan anti-authoritarian response that even many scientists (including liberals like myself) support. Drs. Hotez and Fauci were authoritarians and now they are being challenged by the indomitable public that is reminding everyone who is in charge. As these authoritarians amongst us are being unseated from power, they create all manners of conspiracy theories and alternative narratives in a desperate effort to find purchase. If they can’t secure their newfound power, at least they may protect their reputations by casting their opponents as evil.

“Anti-Science” is thus not a real thing, nor is it sufficiently widely observed to warrant the dignity of being called a social construct. Anti-Science is an ego-defensive figment of Dr. Hotez’s authoritarian imagination, it is an effort to recenter The Science - the syndicate of scientists who attempted to center their own scientific paradigms and their own policy perspectives as if they were universally true and not merely political beliefs or value statements, possibly heavily conflicted ones - as deserving of power, sympathy, defense, and trust. Dr. Hotez is staring at the narrative mirrors the public uses to show him the monster he’s become, he is seeing a horrific - and true - reflection of scientists like him during the pandemic, and he is desperately trying to restore the image of himself from the current fallen general of an epistemological banana republic, back to the lionized Science and the Scientific Saviors we Followed. Hotez uses Anti-Science as an armor and an excuse to bypass a critical self-examination of the possible insensitivity and undemocratic behavior of he and his scientific savior colleagues during the pandemic.

The best way to assess whether a thing is objective or subjective is to ask different people if they see the same thing. That’s science. Of course, for things that hurt people like micro aggressions and the likes, it may help to ask the victims if it exists as they should experience the concentrated effects of the thing. I am a scientist, I was involved in both science and public policy during COVID, and yet I don’t see any horror of “Anti-Science” along my path in this narrative house of horrors.

Sure, I’ve seen disagreements in the public melee. I remember the history of disinformation on climate science, tobacco, and even Russian disinformation on all things, but that is not the thing Hotez describes and there isn’t generality other than institutions protecting their self-interests not because they are “Anti” anything but because they are “Pro” self and sometimes science reveals information that hurts a business’s bottom line. I’ve also seen companies act the same way when competitors enter the market, so past conflicts have nothing to do with science specifically. I’ve even been attacked, and even attacked for my science, but mostly I’ve been attacked by other scientists (including Hotez) who disliked the political implications of my findings. The Scientists who attacked me all form a relatively small, insular network of people closely connected with NIAID, NIH, or EcoHealth Alliance. While I was a researcher in the same wildlife virology community as EcoHealth Alliance, I didn’t conduct gain-of-function research, I didn’t subcontract work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and I have maintained objectivity by critically evaluating the facts of the matter even where they inconveniently point to scientists’ mismanagement of risks. I’ve found flaws in Science papers and used my expertise to uncover evidence consistent with SARS-CoV-2 being a research product of EcoHealth Alliance’s pre-COVID research proposals.

I critically examined early case data, found evidence of large pools of unascertained cases consistent with a lower-severity pandemic and was told that my science risked “upsetting public health policy.” I argued otherwise, helped in part by my brilliant wife who has a PhD in public health policy. I argued that the only way sincere science and rigorous analyses could "upset public health policy” would be if public health policy were unscientific, if scientists were usurping the public’s seats in the policy process, centering Scientists, their belief systems, their value systems, and their institutions at the expense of decentering a larger, more diverse public. I found evidence that corroborated the Great Barrington Declaration’s cost-benefit analysis, and I shared that evidence privately with policymakers without grabbing the reigns and forcing them to choose any one policy.

As a scientist who maintained independence, who presented evidence without invading the deliberative jury or the policy process, I see scientists who became intolerant, petulant authoritarians; I don’t see “Anti-Science” as anything other than a reflection of Hotez grappling with the legitimate criticisms of his and his colleagues' improper authoritarian scientific conduct before, during, and after the pandemic.

Far from being "anti-scientific,” the anti-authoritarianism unseating Hotez as one of the hallmarks of a true scientist and it is a hallmark of the people our republic. You don’t have to be an expert historian or anthropologist to recall that Americans went to war with the British because my ancestors despised authoritarians ruling without representation.

Throughout the pandemic, many members of the public have been better scientists than many prominent scientists. Members of the public and independent scientists have resisted convenient explanations when the data did not support them, such as the claim that lockdowns are indisputably wise policies when the public knew that lockdowns carried costs that were not being considered by scientists like Hotez on MSNBC.

Members of the public and independent scientists have rightfully questioned the efficacy of masks, and only years later are their hunches about the low efficacy or possible inefficacy of masks as a public health policy becoming known by scientists.

Members of the public and independent scientists questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, especially at reducing the risk of infection in the long term, and slowly, only after being labelled as “disinformation,” we are obtaining evidence of myocarditis, vaccine evasion in Provincetown, and more. Our citizenry has proven brilliant and remarkably agile, and predictably anti-authoritarian.

Hotez calls anyone - even scientists - assessing possible costs and estimating the true benefits of vaccines as “anti-vax.” It’s not “anti-vaccine” to err on the side of caution, to help doctors maintain their Hippocratic oath by ensuring benefits of a treatment or vaccine exceed the risks on a case-by-case basis (in science, we call this “individualized medicine”).

On the contrary, supporting systems that shake down and test hypotheses of vaccine safety and efficacy is one of the most pro-vaccine things we can do as it will inspire trust in vaccines that survive the gauntlet of scientific cross-examination. It is both pro-vax and pro-science to question the safety and efficacy of treatments, even those that have passed clinical trials, because that process of shaking down the answers gives us more confidence in the treatments we use and the science we’ve settled on. How many treatments have passed clinical trials only to be later discovered to have intolerable side effects? Would Hotez prefer “science” not uncover such later-discoverable complications?

Similarly, it is not “Anti-Science” to question the policies recommended by scientists or to investigate the possibility that scientists cause a pandemic. What Hotez calls “Anti-Science” is the core of science itself: an independence of mind, a diversity of perspectives, and an anti-authoritarian proclivity that conflicts with the interests of authoritarians masquerading as scientists. It is this independence and anti-authoritarianism that inspires confidence in science as well as democratic society, not the toxic ramblings of a scientific authoritarian as he’s unseated from power.

Republished from the author's Substack

Why have we not discovered intergalactic alien life yet?

Enrico Fermi posited that a series of events need to occur for such advanced civilizations to emerge. Life must exist, Life must evolve to sufficiently complex organisms without going extinct, those complex organisms must form a civilization, that civilization must become sufficiently complex without going extinct, and so on.

When we multiply the products of these probabilities, we get the probability of any given planet having a civilization of that threshold level of complexity. There is an astronomically large number of planets in the universe, yet we have not encountered any extraterrestrial life, raising the possibility that perhaps one of these probabilities is a pinch point in the ascent of civilizations.

Here we sit, chatting on the internet as a civilization of hominids that spans the globe and has advanced technology capable of sending signals to the stars. Yet, there is no indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life, and so while we wait for reassurance that civilizations can be made sustainable with high probability, it’s worth evaluating our own world for possible weaknesses.

Nuclear weapons seem like one such weakness. After we advanced science to the point of splitting atoms and releasing extremely large amounts of energy in nuclear reactions, our world of primates did what primates tend to do: we made weapons. We hominids are notoriously tribal - it’s a blessing and a curse. Tribalism is a blessing as our tribalism helped us form groups that formed societies, but it is also a curse in that at some level we inevitably seek differences, draw lines in the continental or social sand, and succumb to our proclivity towards distrusting people on the other side of the line. Countries developed nuclear weapons and pointed them at each other in an act of deterrence, letting other countries know of their mutually assured destruction in the event somebody crosses the wrong line.

Nuclear weapons have been around for a brief 80 years, and thankfully we seem to understand their consequences well enough to be sufficiently deterred from using them. These remain a significant threat to human civilization, but it’s possible they are not the answer to the Fermi paradox.

Another possible answer is less operatic, more tragic: disease.

In nature, all populations of all organisms everywhere are finite and bounded by common constraints that ecologists know and study well. Some organisms deplete their resources or pollute their environment, resulting in an inhibition of conspecifics that limits their population sizes. Famine. Others, especially top predators like lions and wolves, are competing over resources but often that competition is more brutally lethal and animals die in acts of intraspecific aggression. War. Lastly, some organisms have abundant resources and relatively little aggression towards conspecifics, but as they become numerically abundant so too do their pathogens. Pestilence.

Trees in the tropics are an example of a community whose populations are believed to be regulated by disease. If find an old growth tree in a tropical rainforest, look around your feet. Below is an old kapok tree that my friend Jacob Socolar and I stumbled upon while running vegetation transects in remote stretches of the Peruvian Amazon.

An old kapok tree like the one above has probably been alive for hundreds of years, and each year the tree reproduces and drops a rain of seeds onto the forest floor below. When you look at the floor, you can find a carpet of seedlings - tiny, baby kapok trees that are attempting to grow larger and reach the canopy. However, almost none of these seedlings are likely to survive. Why not?

It turns out, the old tree harbors an entire assemblage of species-specific arthropods and fungal pathogens. As the seeds rain down from the canopy so too do the species-specific arthropods and pathogens. While the parent tree might have discovered productive soils or aspects of a hill to which the species is well-adapted, seedlings of the same species of tree face an uphill battle as they try to reach the canopy while being bombarded with pathogens from their parents.

Humans are not trees, but nor are we lions and wolves. It’s not Malthusian to consider the frictions our population faces and will face as we continue to advance our civilization. Rather, I consider it a preemptive step towards civilizational security to consider the risks we face. Historically, human populations have been affected by all of the major mechanisms that mediate the abundances of species in nature. As cities rose, so too did infectious diseases until the aquifer exported feces from our towns, increasing the capacity of our cities. The Black Death killed one-third of Europe but slowly we learned to eradicate rats and mice from our homes. There have been famines from droughts and changes to the climate, there have been wars, and there have been diseases.

However, I’ve always felt that humans are reasonably good at knowing the importance of food and fresh water, and fearing the consequences of war. Most importantly, major aspects about the management of our food, water, and risk of war is in the hands of our nation’s leaders who explicitly consider the game theoretical consequences of their actions. The science of disease, meanwhile, is a game whose players often lack the self-awareness of their little game, and whose little game is not aligned with the larger games of national security.

Enter Drs. Ron Fouchier, Anthony Fauci, and Francis Collins, stage left.

At a time in 2011 when bird flu was not causing a pandemic, Dr. Fouchier thought it would be impactful to breed the bird flu to be better able to infect mammals, thereby creating a mammalian infectious bird flu capable of causing a pandemic. Of course, that bird flu pandemic of 2011 never happened, so all Dr. Fouchier really did was conjure into existence a variant of the bird flu that risked killing millions. There were no treatments, no vaccines, no positive benefits really of any kind that resulted from this work, except Dr. Fouchier receiving attention, fame, tenure, and funding to do more research. Other scientists saw the fame of Dr. Fouchier, published in Science magazine and beyond, and they hatched research strategies to make other pathogens more infectious to secure their own media cycle and the payoff it provides.

Our civilization has been very generous in its funding of science and in its deference of the regulation of science to scientists. Drs. Fauci and Collins sat at the heads of NIAID and NIH, respectively, as Dr. Fouchier endangered us all for some citations that advanced his scientific career. In 2014, the Obama administration, representing the public interest, saw major risks in this ‘gain of function research of concern’ and consequently paused its funding. The moratorium was no fun for scientists who had plans to make other dangerous viruses and draw our attention with their own harrowing daredevil stunt in which virologists built a bomb that didn’t exist for the purposes of later learning how to defuse it (if all goes well). 

Some of these scientists, like Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, coordinated with NIH and NIAID while lobbying to overturn the moratorium. Such was a rational strategy, in some sense, for scientists like Daszak who were less risk-averse and more drawn to jackpots of fame and fortune. Daszak and others like him succeeded in lobbying for policy changes that overturned the cautionary moratorium from an elected official and opened the taxpayers' funds to support science that benefited the scientists. Drs. Fauci and Collins used their authority as heads of NIAID and NIH to overturn the moratorium in 2017 with truly strange definitions enabling this research to continue. Translating their virological language to explosives, Drs. Fauci and Collins would not be considered “funding the construction of novel explosives” if the research was intended to learn how to defuse the nonexistent explosives or make armor against explosives. In other words, “funding novel explosives” isn’t done even if one funds novel explosives, insofar as there are other things we hope to test with those novel explosives.

I wish I were kidding, but that’s actually how scientists carved out space to keep playing their game. It was ludicrous at the time, but scientists who called this ludicrous were ostracized by the heads of health science funding.

People like Dr. Peter Daszak were delighted! Dr. Daszak wrote a proposal to make a new virological bomb: they would insert a furin cleavage site inside a bat SARS coronavirus, thinking (correctly) that such a modification can increase the host range and make these wildlife viruses better at infecting humans.

They would do this with the intentions of making vaccines, obviously, so by the language of Dr. Fauci it wasn’t “gain of function research of concern” (GOFROC). Why be concerned about a novel bomb if it’s being made to test currently undeveloped bomb-defusing scissors? Calm down, civilization, scientists would say. Peter Daszak believes he can create the scissors to defuse the civilization-threatening bomb he’s creating, and we’ll be sure to give him all our attention, citations, awards, and fame once he’s done!

In just two years after the moratorium on GOFROC was overturned, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan as a novel bat SARS coronavirus containing a furin cleavage site found nowhere else in the sarbecovirus evolutionary tree. After years of looking in bats, pangolins, raccoon dogs, and cats, the only place we have found a furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus is in the 2018 DEFUSE proposal conjured up by the remarkable imagination of Peter Daszak and colleagues.

Daszak’s colleagues were not in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Sydney, Georgia, or Amsterdam. No, they were researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where SARS-CoV-2 emerged. As most who read this may know, my own research corroborates the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 as we’ve documented evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 genome is far more consistent with an infectious clone than a wild coronavirus.

In other words, it appears as if the bomb of Daszak’s imagination was made, but the scissors to defuse it were not. The bomb went off.

As foretold in the arguments against GOFROC, a harrowing 20 million people died, 60 million people faced acute hunger, and 100 million kids were thrown into multidimensional poverty like seedlings underneath a Kapok tree suffering from the rain of their forebears. The only bright side in these dark times is that SARS-CoV-2 was a relatively benign pathogen compared to other pathogens out there that were also studied in this context.

Assume for the moment that it is a fact that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab as a consequence of normal pre-COVID vaccine ‘bomb-defusing’ research (a very good assumption, in my estimation). This research began in 2011, stopped in 2014, resumed in 2017, and by 2019 it caused the worst pandemic in a century. In other words, that research has been conducted by academics for only 5 years and it already caused a historic pandemic that, had it been merely twice to thrice as bad, could well have overloaded our medical systems to the point where people die in the streets and we run the risk of societal breakdown.

Such is the catastrophic risk management of scientists stuck in a Nash equilibrium of their scientific games, where any unilateral deviation from the strategy of harrowingly risky research will yield the board to other scientists with fewer ethical guardrails. I don’t believe the risk of societal breakdown was discussed candidly in Daszak’s DEFUSE grant. Nor do I believe the heads of NIAID or NIH considered the possibility that a biological agent made by GOFROC could be misinterpreted as a bioweapon and that nuclear-armed countries that believe they are attacked by a biological weapon may respond with nuclear force. The narrow set of risks and payoffs considered by scientists in their management of GOFROC reveals how the games that scientists play differ materially from the games civilizations play.

We live in a civilization where science has created technology of such remarkable power across different disciplines that the slightest mistakes in one discipline risks triggering disasters from other disciplines’ technology and sending civilization tumbling backwards to disorder or even destruction. Fermi’s paradox looms large. The only guardrails against scientific mistakes are laws that often can’t keep up with the science, and science funders who are also caught up in the game for scientific fame.

A civilization capable of traveling across the galaxy, if it is physically possible, must surely be capable of even more severe accidents, misunderstandings, or misguided escalations than we are. If that civilization allows its scientists to take risks in a scientific system that rewards scientists in an almost Jackass-like fashion, allocating fame to whoever survives the most uncomfortably foolish stunt, then that civilization is not long for its world. We need science, but we also need assurances that science is aligned with the longer-term goals of humanity and not inevitably going to stumble upon Pandora’s box with the incentive to open it for fame and glory.

I believe we should widely fund basic and applied scientific research, and I also believe we should regularly evaluate novel technologies to assess their risks to our civilization. Whenever the risks exceed a threshold of local “oopsies” and become capable of killing people or, worse yet, introducing threats to national and global security, such research should be more closely monitored, regulated, and perhaps conducted only by people in institutions that have national security mandates. Neither Fauci nor his deputies at NIAID were qualified to assess whether or not the biological research they funded could trigger a nuclear response, and yet they were granted the deference to fund research capable of causing a world war or collapsing our society. Follow the Science? No thank you. Not without oversight.

We lucked out with SARS-CoV-2. Only 20 million people died. Cases peaked in unmitigated outbreaks at a population fatality rate and hospitalization rate that most medical systems could just barely withstand; any higher rates of hospitalization or fatality and we would’ve had people dying in wait of hospital beds creating unknown social and political instabilities. The virus has not (yet) triggered a more severe response other than skepticism, public outrage, and investigations. Our civilization remains intact despite a few ambitious scientists’ egotistical gamble to win fame and fortune at the risk of ending human civilization.

Rather than soft language about managing pathogens from all causes without attributing the laboratory origin of this one, I believe we’re wiser to stare down the laboratory origin so intently and somberly that we learn the critical lesson and never let this happen again. We’ve had 100 years of natural spillover that has not created a pandemic as bad as this one. We’ve had 80 years of nuclear weapons and have not had accidents like this. Not only should there be no (zero) laboratory accidents capable of ending our civilization, there should also not be systems of science funding and research that make risky research such a viable and alluring possibility.

SARS-CoV-2 leaves us no choice but to more closely regulate science and not leave to scientists alone these decisions that affect all of humanity. The Fauci Paradox tempts us to allow scientists to regulate science, to Follow the Science and Trust the Experts, but trusting the experts can lead us to our doom as scientists are so prone to short-term ambitions and so limited in their knowledge of other human affairs and longer-term objectives of civilization that, given the opportunity, they are likely to open Pandora’s box if it might result in an impactful paper or a Nobel Prize. I say this as a citizen and a scientist, as someone who studied wildlife virology in the same field as Peter Daszak pre-COVID, and who had a rude awakening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The game theory of science and scientists is too small-minded and narrowly focused compared to the game theory of nation states. While nation states stare down the calculus conflict of escalation and mutually assured destruction, scientists chase their personal ambitions of fame and fortune in an effort to one-up prior work.

The Game of Science will inevitably pick the strategy to open Pandora’s box if it has some chance of rewarding an individual desperate for fame, and that strategy in the microscopic game of science can upend the macroscopic games of civilization. Rebutting Fermi’s paradox with a thriving civilization may require more clearly aligning the games, strategies, and payoffs of scientists with those of the taxpayers and nations that fund them.

Republished from the author's Substack

Science is probably not what you think it is, and that’s okay.

As we can still love our parents when we stop seeing them as infallible God-like “adults” and learn about their full humanity, we see science as a messy process and still love it as beautiful and capable of revolutionizing our society.

Most people learn about science in school as a compendium of facts about the universe. Heat causes liquids to boil and turn into gases. Electric currents can move along a copper wire. DNA encodes the information that makes living organisms what they are.

While many of those facts are true (or more accurately, there is no evidence yet giving reason to doubt them), viewing science as an encyclopedia is misleading; it prevents the public from interfacing with the front-lines of science, and thereby inhibits the ability of science to inform the public in a time of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Science is anything but constant and monolithic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public saw inside the sausage factory of modern science and puked. Did masks work, or did they not? Were school closures effective at saving lives or not? Did vaccines provide long-lasting protection against infection? Did SARS-CoV-2 emerge in a lab? What was sold to the public as The Science one day became misinformation the next, and vice versa.

Many members of the public are understandably disoriented at best, revolted at worst. “Distrust” in science skyrocketed among conservatives and “trust” in science rose among liberals. By presenting science as a monolithic belief system, a compendium of facts to be trusted and not questioned, we created a science-policy interface that policed emerging science as misinformation and misled the public about the nature of science itself, all but guaranteeing a partisan response by prohibiting public participation and engagement in the scientific process.

The truth is easy to say: scientists working on the front-lines of science hold different views. We disagree. We read some papers and say “Cool! I want to take this idea to the next level.” We read other papers, say “This is garbage!!!” and consider whether it’s worth the time and effort to publish the reasons for our distaste. In the process of thousands of people in any one niche field of science reading papers, agreeing with some and disagreeing with others, replicating some results and disproving others, the collective body of knowledge slowly whittles down to a set of reproducible experiments and theories that have yet to be disproven. The long arc of science bends towards truth, but only if we preserve the integrity of the process by which we disagree and discuss evidence.

Throughout COVID-19, there was considerable effort encouraging people to “follow the science.” The mantra, “Follow the science,” was often weaponized in public discourse to suggest “The Science” implied one side’s policies were “right” and the other side’s policies were “wrong.” In reality, throughout the pandemic scientists read the literature, had different assessments of every one paper, and engaged in science by planning and publishing their next work. Whoever came up with “Follow the Science” greatly underserved the public, and we further misrepresent science by asking whether or not folk “trust” science.

Science is not a belief system, so it’s not something to be trusted. Science is a social process which anyone can join, it is a conversation with evidence to be examined, discussed, questioned, and tested. Science is not limited to Ivory Towers and people with PhDs. Anyone, no matter how anonymous or weird they are (in our idiosyncratic views of “weird”), can examine a paper, question some results, discuss them, and change our perspectives. Or at least, that’s how it should be.

A personal example of open, public participation in science occurred in some of my own work during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, Justin Silverman, Nathaniel Hupert, and I suspected confirmed US COVID cases were undercounting the true extent of the pandemic. We counted the number of patients visiting medical providers with influenza-like illness (ILI) in March during previous years and compared it to the number of patients with ILI in March of 2020. We found a significantly higher number of patients with flu-like symptoms in March 2020 than previous years. We combined the number of ILI patients per provider with the number of providers in each state to estimate of the number of ILI patients in each state. We estimated over 20 million people could have been infected across the US in March 2020. More infections, with the same number of deaths, meant a lower probability of dying given infection - this potential good news could dramatically change how we forecasted upcoming COVID-19 surges across the US. People would still die, but maybe medical systems and society would not collapse in states like South Dakota or Florida, where managers opted out of containment policies.

We shared our pre-print on Twitter, it got picked up by data visualization experts at The Economist, and overnight our notifications exploded. Tens of thousands of people read our abstract, and it would’ve been easier to drink out of a firehose than to make sense of that mayhem at that scale. Back in April 2020, saying that COVID might not be as bad as previous estimates (e.g. >1 percent infection fatality rates) was seen by many scientists as equivalent to saying “COVID is a hoax” but, to me, as a statistician, it was important to share estimates and not bias them based on who said what is a hoax.

Many scientists clamored rather unconstructively, saying our paper was garbage, not for any real reason but, rather, because they thought it was “dangerous” or upsetting to public health policy (specifically, the public health policies they preferred - that’s not quite a scientific judgement). We looked out for critiques, and found only critics, until suddenly a person named Seth Stevens-Davidowitz chimed in with a comment deep inside a thicket of threads. Seth’s comment was a good comment.

Seth was not anyone we knew, nor did he present himself as an epidemiologist, nor were we aware of any fancy pedigree. However, Seth pointed out that our approach for scaling up ILI patients per-provider to a state-level, when applied to the whole country, implied many more patients visited the hospital across the US in a year than other reliable measurements suggest. Our results implied too many patients, and we needed to reconcile this. Technically we didn’t “need” to reconcile this - maybe we could’ve squeaked past peer reviewers, since Seth’s comment didn’t go viral, but we believed Seth was right and we were wrong so we felt an ethical obligation to correct our work in light of Seth’s good point.

We didn’t ignore Seth nor tell Seth he was unqualified, we didn’t block Seth on Twitter and assert that we were the experts. In fact, Seth didn’t even need to be Seth Stevens-Davidowitz for us to hear the soundness of his point - if an account named RoboCat1984 made the same point, we would’ve heard it all the same, because it was a good point. As scientists, my colleagues and I were eager to keep open minds.

We ultimately agreed with Seth. We realized that the providers giving data to the CDC tended to be large medical providers, so we adjusted our method to scale up ILI visits to the state level in a way that implied our total patients in the US equaled the total patients in the US estimated by other, more reliable methods. Our final paper estimated over 8 million people were infected - still a lot more than the 100,000 cases at the time. Some scientists hated us still. Some said our “flip-flopping” showed how bad we were at science, or that we were dishonest and trying to support Donald Trump. For me, that was just another day in science. We were trying our best, and staying humble, incorporating feedback from smart randos on Twitter who made good points.

I stayed involved with COVID-19 forecasting all the way through BA.5, with many other stories I could tell you, but there’s a more important story to focus on today. After forecasting medical demand, I returned to my pre-COVID roots of pathogen spillover to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2, feeling rather accomplished in the battles over COVID outbreak forecasting like King Richard returning from the Crusades. I expected calm reading by the fire in my castle. I read the literature claiming a lab-origin of SARS-CoV-2 is “impossible” or “implausible” or “improbable,” that the furin cleavage site insertion is “illogical,” that evidence for a zoonotic origin was “dispositive,” and, despite initially believing a zoonotic origin, I had reasons to believe all of that work was garbage.

For example, take Worobey et al.’s analysis of early case data claiming to have found “dispositive” evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the wet market. The paper was entirely within my skillset, and I immediately felt its conclusions were unsound. I believe, as many others have detailed, that the spatial locations of early case data could not determine the origin of an outbreak because (1) the spatial biases in how we collect early cases are impossible to correct for absent transparent background surveillance systems we don’t have in Wuhan (2) the data Worobey at al. used excluded earlier cases with no ties to the wet market, (3) the spatial smoothing of environmental testing misrepresented the relevant granularity, such as surfaces under animal traders being as likely to test positive as surfaces under vegetable traders, (4) Gao et al. tested animals in the wet market and not one animal tested positive, (5) we can’t blindly trust China to provide accurate, unbiased data given the possibility unbiased data, under a lab origin, would reveal their fault in the pandemic, and more reasons. Despite not just Twitter objections but published papers and many pre-prints, the authors have not addressed any of these reasons, nor have they made amends in the community for using the very overconfident “dispositive” language. Instead, Worobey himself continues broadcasting his work without acknowledging limitations or representing the objections of many scientists like myself. Seth would surely be ignored by this crew, no matter how good his point was.

I read this group’s other preprint - Pekar et al. - and that paper, too, fell within my wheelhouse. That paper, too, has such severe methodological limitations that I could have zero confidence in the conclusions. You simply cannot conclude the origins of a virus based on the structure of the virus’ evolutionary tree, certainly not with the models they used to model how viral evolutionary trees grow in early outbreaks, and there’s even strong evidence suggesting the empirical premise - their tree itself - was wrong. I wrote the authors private emails raising my concerns, and they never wrote back.

So, I tweeted about it and eventually colleagues and I wrote a paper detailing our reasoning. We shared the paper on Twitter, and the authors attacked us by saying we weren’t “The Experts.” Many proceeded to block me and there was hilarious shit-talking aplenty. With my King Richard armor from years in the COVID warzone, these tweets bounced off me like bullets off of Superman.

Just another day in science.

In my scientific due diligence on the origins question, I read careful assessments of the other theory about a lab origin. Lab-origin assessments came from mostly anonymous accounts who feared being called racist conspiracy-theorists by the high-follower accounts policing this issue on Twitter (including some working with fact-checkers to call lab-origin claims “misinformation!”), and a handful of brave, exceedingly brilliant non-anonymous people with obscure institutional affiliations and who, it seems, have yet to be found by the world. Diamonds of scientific human capital in the rough, so to speak, at least that’s my assessment from talking with these people. Some lab origin possibilities were unfounded, some were loony, and some were indeed racist, yet it’s my job as a scientist to find the signal in the noise and make it known.

So, I studied the evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab and the many scenarios being considered for a research-related origin.

I saw a significant lack of zoonotic evidence that is easy to obtain, evidence that would reject a lab origin, evidence that we even looked for yet couldn’t find. Technically, we still don’t *know* there are no aliens on the moon, or even here on Earth, but we’ve looked for them with methods that should be able to find them if they’re there, and we haven’t found them so they’re probably neither here nor on the moon. Same with the missing zoonotic evidence. In addition to the missing zoonotic evidence, I found the evidence suggesting a lab origin to be very compelling. Most compelling was the constellation of evidence surrounding the DEFUSE grant proposing to insert a human-optimized furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV infectious clone in Wuhan. Scientists believing SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab pointed out that, exactly as DEFUSE spelled out in 2018, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with a human-optimized furin cleavage site.

What are the odds of that?

Quite low, it turns out. If we had the DEFUSE grant in-hand in January 2020, when the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was released from Wuhan, we could immediately see the FCS and its human-optimized codon. The odds of such a human-optimized FCS in a SARS-CoV in Wuhan alone (i.e. excluding the infectious clone part) is around 1 in 30 million or so.

However, the puzzle wasn’t complete. Additional evidence could change that number.

Was there any evidence SARS-CoV-2 was an infectious clone? In seeking answers on this issue, I stumbled across tweets by Valentin Bruttel and Tony VanDongen, two internet randos who I’d never heard of before, yet these two random people were evidently quite intelligent and making truly brilliant points. Valentin’s Avatar looked like it could be the front of a heavy metal album, and Tony’s anonymous-looking avatar of his eye and part of a mask would strike fear in the hearts of lesser men. However, Valentin and Tony were being kind and saying smart things, so I listened.

They noticed that infectious clones are commonly assembled with a known method called “type II directional assembly,” and they visually observed that SARS-CoV-2 appears to have the fingerprint of that exact method. I got in touch with Valentin and Tony and we collaborated to turn this evidence into a paper, with them being awesome bioengineers and me helping quantify the odds of seeing such strong evidence of infectious cloning in a wild coronavirus. 

We wrote our analysis up in a paper, I wrote a pop-science article explaining what we found, and we tried to use careful language saying SARS-CoV-2’s restriction map is “consistent with” an infectious clone. Language matters a lot in science - we did not say SARS-CoV-2 “is” an infectious clone nor that it “disproves” a natural origin, yet it does suggest a theory that SARS-CoV-2 has a synthetic origin, a theory we encourage people to test, and we believe SARS-CoV-2 is a reverse genetics system, or basically an IKEA virus (whether natural or not).

The Economist picked up the story, and the whole world erupted into battle once again. The Economist article and the Telegraph beautifully document the intensity of scientific discourse on this topic. The language was colorful, to put it delicately. To the best of our ability, we responded kindly to the rather hostile discourse by clarifying who we are and what our intentions are. 

We listened through the rancor, as I’d done previously to find Seth’s insight on the ILI paper, and we felt this global melee of discourse uncovered some valid points for future research. We acknowledge the scientists who brought up those good points, yet we also felt those points don’t undermine our results inasmuch as they provide additional hypotheses for alternative explanations and future research. Science goes on! After drinking the firehose of rowdy rhetoric and finding some needles of insight in the haystack of hate, we debriefed on this global engagement in a statement that we believe our synthetic origin theory of SARS-CoV-2 still stands.

Another day in science.

As someone who studied and forecasted spillover pre-COVID, my scientific journey has led me to believe SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in a lab, and the most important piece of evidence contextualizing the rest of evidence suggesting a lab origin is the DEFUSE grant. If you were forecasting the genomic and geographic features of a SARS CoV pandemic using pre-COVID methods, I estimate a roughly 1 in 56 billion chance of a SARS-CoV emerging in Wuhan with such a human-optimized furin cleavage site & type II restriction map with such strong resemblance of an infectious clone.

If you were forecasting the genomic and geographic features of a lab leak from someone conducting the work in the DEFUSE grant, the virus would emerge in Wuhan and look exactly like SARS-CoV-2 in all of these ways in which SARS-CoV-2 is anomalous among natural coronaviruses. The weight of this evidence is overwhelming. I’ve been around the block and seen a lot of arguments in my days in science, I’ve seen a lot of unresolved issues, yet I have never seen such strong evidence so cavalierly dismissed as zoonotic origin proponents are doing when they say “all the evidence” suggests a zoonotic origin and “no evidence” exists for a lab origin.

Science should not be trusted in general, but we need to be especially diligent in acknowledging science as suspect when the science of the matter concerns the possibility that scientists, health science funders, and managers overseeing science in labs in Wuhan, played a role in killing 18 million people. Such an investigation is ripe with conflicts of interest and reputational risks, as prior to a science-caused accident there will be many coteries of scientists who played some role in encouraging, conducting, funding, and/or overseeing the research that caused harm.

Yet, despite the massive body of evidence making a spillover-scientist like me believe SARS-CoV-2 did not spillover, the zoonotic origin proponents continue to use their media access to broadcast their papers without giving some time or fair consideration to objections to their papers. Rather than engage with the public, they block any scientist, let alone member of the public, who disagrees with them. They claim they, alone, are The Experts, and when someone raises an objection they simply talk louder to more media outlets and more followers. They greatly misrepresent the evidence of the matter in outlets as widely read as the Washington Post and the LA Times, corrupting the interface between science and society, misrepresenting both science as a collective process with multitudinous views, and repeatedly misrepresenting in a reliably biased way the facts of the matter during ongoing congressional investigations. The authors repeatedly claim to be summarizing “all the evidence,” yet nowhere do they discuss the severe, mathematically provable limitations of their work, the objections of other scientists they’ve blocked, or the many pieces of evidence suggesting a lab origin.

Nowhere in “all the evidence” do they mention DEFUSE or the many features of SARS-CoV-2 shockingly consistent with DEFUSE.

Yet, they want the public to trust them, to follow their science.

To me, these scientists’ promulgation of their flawed work and their willful (or oblivious? which is worse?) biased exclusion or misrepresentation of the evidence of a lab origin is one of the worst research ethics violations in human history that I am aware of, second only to creating the virus itself. There is the crime, and there is the coverup putting media-grabbing scientists who misrepresent the facts of the matter in league with the researchers who conducted the work on CoVs in Wuhan and refuse to share their lab notebooks or databases. These scientists are asserting themselves as authorities while brushing aside credible objections to their work irrespective of who raises them. In the middle of congressional investigations on SARS-CoV-2 origins, these scientists are writing op-eds that mislead the public and managers on the probable research-related cause of over 18 million deaths worldwide, using their expertise to obfuscate an historic truth and obstruct the investigations we need to make our world safe from dangerous research.

My scientific journey studying SARS-CoV-2 origins has led me believe that a small coterie of scientists are, in fact, responsible for creating SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. They, their funders, and many scientists connected with them and the funders, and many scientists who championed doing this risky research are all reliably abusing their status as experts to misrepresent facts of the matter. The researchers studying CoVs in Wuhan are refusing to share their research. Peter Dazsak refused to share his DEFUSE grant or admit conflicts of interest of working on CoVs with labs in Wuhan when writing letters to the Lancet calling lab-origin theories “conspiracy theories,” Funders at NIH, NIAID, and the Wellcome Trust prompted, edited, and pushed a paper claiming baselessly with overconfident language that lab-origin theories are “improbable” or “implausible.”

As recently as yesterday, and during our desperately needed congressional investigations on SARS-CoV-2 origins, this clique of scientists is still running media campaigns claiming “all of the evidence” suggests a natural origin without ever mentioning DEFUSE. The relationship between science and society is a delicate one, and it’s one we’re still figuring out, yet clearly something is wrong with this picture. It is beyond unprofessional and unethical for scientists to run mass-media campaigns that misrepresent the evidence of the matter during Congressional investigations into the possibility that the scientists they are connected with created a virus that killed three times more people than the Holocaust. Assertions that they are experts to be followed misrepresents science and its consultations (not leadership) of society, and their efforts to obstruct investigations into their own syndicate should be seen as comparable to oil companies muddying the science about climate change, or tobacco companies muddying the science about lung cancer. Scientists who staked their reputations to risky research that likely led to millions of deaths are today muddying science itself.

Science should not be trusted. I say this as a scientist. Science has always been a rebellious act, a foray into battle with narratives that be. Richard Feynman described science as “belief in the ignorance of experts.” Science is not about the answers, per se, it’s about questioning the answers and trying to disprove the theory du jour, it’s about the longer-arc of the social process by which we share evidence and evaluate competing ideas. In times of crisis, science is not to be followed - it is to be examined, discussed, questioned and, for managers, incorporated alongside myriad other factors such as anthropological variation in folks’ beliefs, capacities, and wills to act.

While we learn about science in school as an encyclopedia of facts, the reality is that science is an epistemological war zone with ground rules, and we’re continually updating those ground rules as we go. The ground rules need to be revisited in light of the probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the actions of many scientists misrepresenting the evidence of the matter during WHO and Congressional investigations of a potentially science-related catastrophe.

There is a high likelihood that scientists amidst us, who fought beside us in this epistemological war zone, in a frenzied rush to get funding and fame, created a virus that leaked from a lab in Wuhan and resulted in over 18 million people dead, over 60 million extra people facing acute hunger, over 100 million kids thrown into multidimensional poverty, and an endemic curse of outbreak cycles that will infect our kids, our grandkids, and every generation as long as contemporary science can foresee.

The gravity of the situation should make all of our hearts sink. It should lead us to have a moment of silence every day. Instead, we see scientists claiming “all the evidence” suggests a natural origin in mass media outlets. Indeed, all the evidence can say anything you want it to once you omit all the evidence suggesting otherwise. I worry these conflicts of interest, biased representations of evidence, and gross imbalances of media power can corrupt the social process of science.

We are living through an unprecedented crisis. Throughout history, science has battled over paradigms and slowly the long arc of science has bent towards Truth, but none of those paradigm shifts pertained to science itself, least of all to the possibility that preeminent scientists with unprecedented mass-media reach played a role in an unprecedented atrocity. Compared to what science is capable of, SARS-CoV-2 was a petite Pandora’s jewelry box in an Amazon warehouse of larger possibilities, and some scientists are abusing their authority and expert status to obstruct investigations that could inspire policies that stop scientists from opening other, bigger boxes in the Pandora’s Warehouse of modern biotechnology.

Please, do not “trust” science and do not blindly trust scientists, least of all those who exhibit a pattern of misrepresenting the entire facts of the matter on SARS-CoV-2 origins (the truth, the *whole* truth). Love science and scientists, even those with whom we disagree in glorious epistemological combat, but do not trust us.

Keep an open mind that even scientists like me can and will make mistakes. As someone members of the public view as “a scientist” I pledge to listen for good ideas no matter where they come from and do my best to update my thinking in light of new evidence. I will correct my mistakes and acknowledge whoever helped me see the light. Engage, question, discuss, and test science. Please, don’t stop there. For the love of future generations, please manage science, because we have failed to manage our own. Only by democratizing the skeptical essence of science and welcoming everyone to this epistemological battlefield with ground rules can we learn the mistakes of COVID-19 and collectively bend the long arc of science towards Truth.

Please, let’s improve the interface between science and society for the benefit of both.

Republished from the author's Substack

Before the Battle of Bunker Hill, my ancestors Benjamin and William Brown stood beside their countrymen, looked at their limited supplies of ammunition, and received instructions to not fire “until you see the whites of their eyes.” Firing more bullets is better in a world of infinite supplies, but the constraint of finite ammunition motivates withholding fire for maximum effect. 

Previously, the Biden administration provided hundreds of millions of tests for the United States and required providers and health plans to reimburse Americans for at-home COVID tests. Standing together, we looked at our pile of ammunition and felt a sense of infinitude but, in our country of 340 million people these 500 million tests gave less than two tests for each American. 

Today, as Congress weighs whether to continue allocating billions of dollars to tests, some scientists call for more tests.

Tests, however, aren’t silver bullets. They are valuable ammunition in the battle against COVID, but they are costly. In a world where costs matter, it’s important to maximize the benefits relative to costs. To do so with tests, we should consider the lessons of great generals past on how to maximize the effect of limited ammunition and ask whether we’re using our current ammunition in the most effective ways before raising taxes or national debt to buy more ammo that goes to waste..

As we welcome the diagnostic ammunition in our battle against COVID, we need to educate ourselves on how to be better marksmen with these COVID tests. PCR tests tell you if you’re infected, and rapid at-home COVID tests tell you if you’re at risk of infecting other people. The value of a test doesn’t come from learning that we’re infected or infectious, but from what we do in response to that information.

To learn the value of a test, imagine you only had only one bullet, just one test for the next year. What would you personally do with this test? What could our generals, our public health officials, do with one test?

If you tested yourself on a random day when you had no symptoms, your one test would probably say “You’re Negative,” and that wouldn’t change your behavior at all. Such a negative test used with a low pretest probability of being positive is like firing a bullet haphazardly into the fog, long before you see the whites of your enemy’s eyes with a low pre-shot probability of hitting anyone. 

In a world of infinite tests, we’d of course love to rain down barrages of tests, testing ourselves every day before we go to work, testing your kids before they go to school, and testing your dog before taking it to the park. Heck, it could even spark joy to test your cat or cow for curiosity. However, we live in a world of finite resources, including finite tests, and we can’t be wasteful. We must maximize the value of every test.

To maximize the value of a test, we must focus on the behavioral changes that can result from a test and maximize the likelihood a test changes our behavior for the better. While some argue that tests can be used to understand the prevalence of disease, there are other, cheaper tools to do this, such as just counting the number of patients visiting doctors with COVID-like illnesses. Some also argue that we need genomic surveillance, but I’m not convinced this can’t be done cost-effectively by randomly sequencing 10 US samples a month instead of the millions we’ve sequenced to date.

As a statistician, my recommendation for genome surveillance to understand SARS-CoV-2 is to focus less on data quantity and more on data quality, on fewer yet more-representative samples. It’s also not clear how whole-genome sequences change public behaviors - knowing the full genomes of novel variants has not helped us predict outbreak duration or cumulative burden, but careful forecasting of case growth rates and cumulative mortality has.

There are, however, some indisputable places where tests can change behavior and make an indisputable difference in public health, and they come from focusing on the two major behavioral changes we can do in response to a positive test. If a patient tests positive, that patient can take care to reduce downstream transmission by using high-quality masks, refraining from close contacts with others and more. Additionally, if a patient tests positive, they can receive early treatments to reduce their risk of severe disease.

By identifying how we’d change our behaviors before we fire our tests, we can know when to fire. If you use your one test before meeting a young and healthy friend at the park, your test might stop you from infecting a young friend, but that friend has a low probability of infection anyway because you’re outside, and they’re less likely to be harmed by COVID because they’re young. 

Far preferable would be to get tested before going to Karaoke night in a densely packed nursing home – such a test would be able to stop an event with a high probability of transmission in a population of people with a higher risk of being harmed by COVID. Tests that change our behavior to reduce transmission have more value when used prior to more risky transmission events, and focusing our protection in this way can increase the cost-effectiveness of our tests to save lives.

The availability of treatments increases the value of a test. Thanks to innovative biotechnology companies, oral antivirals have been developed in record time and are effective at reducing the risk of hospitalization from COVID. However, these antivirals target viral reproduction, and viral reproduction slows down over the course of infection. Consequently, these antivirals are likely more effective the earlier they’re administered in the course of infection. Most Americans seek care about 4 days after the onset of symptoms for the flu - if we delay seeking care, we delay our tests, delay our treatments, and reduce the value of our tests.

Because most Americans can’t test themselves every asymptomatic day and identify an infection before the onset of symptoms, it would make the most sense to save a test until you are feeling symptoms. As soldiers on Bunker Hill waited until they saw the whites of the Redcoats’ eyes, there’s value in waiting until you feel the scratch in your throat, the congestion in your nose, and especially an inability to smell grandma’s cookies. 

If you’re planning on firing your test at the onset of symptoms, it’s also prudent to (1) get a primary care provider and (2) check with your primary care provider beforehand to see if they’d be able to prescribe an antiviral following an honest account of a positive test. Ensuring medications are available contingent upon a positive test ensures that your test activates treatment options as soon as possible, allowing treatments to have their greatest effect early in the course of infection.

Testing positive immediately after symptom onset and getting antivirals that day would be a good use of a test. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes kept things simple for my great-great-great-great grandfather Benjamin Brown; to keep things simple for Americans, I propose: don’t test until the second you feel sick, or until the hours before you visit a nursing home or have close contact with someone at high risk of severe COVID.

The strategy of allocating bullets differs depending on if you’re a soldier waiting on a hill or a general deciding where piles of ammunition ought to go for the greatest tactical advantage. We’ve covered how Americans – the foot soldiers in our battle against COVID – can use tests for maximum effect. Now, let’s talk to the generals, the federal, state, and local public health officials aiming to assist the population at large.

While I am a mathematician, I can’t pretend to have any optimal solution for allocating tests in the population at large – heck, after years of trying I still haven’t figured out the optimal way to drive to the grocery store (I think about this every time I drive). However, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and so absent an optimal solution we can see the value of heuristics. 

Whether one is managing federal, state, local, or household outbreaks, preferentially allocating tests to the most valuable settings with the greatest risk-reduction triggered by behavioral changes in tests can lead to greater reductions in mortality and morbidity from COVID than simply sending every person a test or two in the mail. 

Giving everyone an equal number of tests may seem fair, but equality of testing opportunity can lead to inequality in health outcomes. If we care about equitable health outcomes, it’s wise to provision tests in proportion to the amount of risk reduced by a test.

Testing asymptomatic kids before school, for example, can waste limited tests. You’re free to do this with your kid and your school, if you have the money and if your acquisition of tests isn’t depriving others of using tests in more valuable settings, but many cash-strapped public schools can’t afford that, and the transmission chains being prevented are in pools of low-risk kids. 

Where I went to high school, we didn’t even have enough money for soccer jerseys. To raise money, we had to sweep the bleachers after college football games – should we be required to sweep bleachers to test ourselves every day? Such test-to-stay policies are not practical for poor public schools funded by property taxes in struggling neighborhoods like the ones I grew up in, and so test-to-stay in school is not the hill I’m going to die on. 

On the other hand, sending rapid tests to nursing homes would be a very good utilization of tests. Nursing homes accounted for over 30% of COVID deaths by June 2021. Tests in nursing homes have extra value because they can trigger both behavioral changes we’d hope for from a test: you can stop transmission events in high-risk pools through test-to-enter rules, and during an outbreak in a nursing home tests can expedite treatment of residents with a high risk of severe outcomes from COVID.

By popular demand, the Biden administration opened the vaults and provided ammunition to our country, and the success of their policy depends on what we do with these tests. As we consider how much epidemiological ammunition we need every year, we need to ensure we’re not being wasteful with the ammo we’ve been given. If we waste our tests, it will be for nothing, whereas if we work together and use our tests wisely we can save lives and may be able to obviate more costly interventions.

Yet, even 500 million tests was not a lot of tests per-capita per-outbreak in our country of 340 million capita facing Omicron outbreaks and, now, a BA.2 outbreak. Because tests cost resources, it’s prudent that we avoid being wasteful with the tests we have by becoming better marksmen and holding our fire until our tests can have the greatest impact.

As consumers, we can educate ourselves and our neighbors about the tests we buy and how to use them for maximum effect. As citizens and soldiers in the battle against COVID, we can also kindly support public health professionals by appreciating their tactical considerations should they preferentially allocate tests to high-risk settings for maximum advantage. 

The value of a test comes not from surveillance, for which we have substitutes and can do far cheaper with better sampling designs, but from a test’s potential to reduce transmission and expedite treatment for disease. If we use our tests wisely, they can help us all participate in our public health, keeping our communities healthy and hospital doors open, and defending our hospitals and our neighbors like Revolutionary soldiers in the Battle of Bunker Hill.  

I am not a gambling man.

As an investor, financial data analyst, and rock climber, I may appear on the surface to be a massive risk-taker, but in fact I see myself as a proactive risk-manager. It’s critical to know the stakes of the game, and to manage all the risks we can. Sometimes, that means keeping money in bonds or REITs, taking my rock-climbing gear for a hike to the cliff and back without ever climbing rocks, and choosing to stay inside instead of skiing on unstable snowpack.

Meanwhile, the CDC, goaded by a community of epidemiologists firing tweets from their armchairs, is proving to be quite the gambler, going so far as to take a loan on our administrative state in its latest game of public health policy roulette.

The world’s epidemiologists first displayed an uncanny appetite for gambling when they manufactured consent for the containment of COVID in 2020. At the time, we had vaccines in development that were positioned to undergo phase 3 trials, but we had no proof that these vaccines would work. The prior history of vaccines for coronaviruses was not promising. Despite decades of monitoring strain evolution and developing real-world vaccines, our influenza vaccines averaged ~30% effectiveness at reducing infections, and we had never before seen a coronavirus vaccine make it through phase 3 trials.

The stakes of the vaccine gamble were extraordinarily high as containment policies carried massive costs. From just our brief lockdowns, and the whack-a-mole lockdowns occurring sporadically throughout Europe, it was clear that tens of millions of people predominately in Africa and Asia would be severed from our contracting global trade networks, and these people would starve.

Up to 120 million people were at risk of facing acute hunger if we pursued aggressive containment policies through all of 2020, and thankfully (or tragically, if your not a gambler and your bleeding heart still beats), only >20 million people were thrown into acute hunger and >100 million kids thrown into multidimensional poverty.

The vaccine gamble didn’t quite break even. While vaccines were shown to be safe and effective, the world’s control groups - South Dakota, Florida, Sweden, among others - already saw their pandemic COVID outbreaks come and go prior to the arrival of vaccines, with much lower mortality than estimated by vaccine gamblers had estimated. It’s not clear vaccines saved “millions” of lives in the US. They clearly saved many during the Delta wave, but there’s no solid evidence they saved “millions” in the US, whereas entering into this gamble with containment policies clearly sent tens of millions into hunger, over a hundred million kids into poverty, caused millions of kids to drop out of school, caused a mental health crisis in children, and more.

Just when we thought the pandemic was over, and epidemiologists would retreat to sharing fantastical compartmental models in dusty journals, the CDC has croaked back into our lives with yet another high-stakes gamble. Instead of gambling on vaccines, this gamble is on masks on planes, a slightly more important topic of public health than Snakes on a Plane. Slightly. Like the vaccine gamble, the stakes of the Masks On A Plane gamble are much higher than the gamblers are letting on.

To bring you up to speed, amidst the vaccine gamble the CDC issued a rule requiring travelers wear masks on planes, trains and automobiles. As vaccines became widely available in the US at the expense of vaccine availability in low-income countries, and after Pfizer and Moderna pocketed billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ hard-earned money, the mandate was set to expire.

Then, in April 2022, almost a year and a half after cases peaked in South Dakota, but following a series of outbreaks driven by novel variants capable of evading immunity from vaccines, the CDC extended its masks-on-a-plane order.

Meanwhile, the Health Freedom Defense Fund had filed a case against Joseph Biden in his capacity as President, arguing that the CDC exceeded its statutory authority when requiring masks-on-a-plane. The plaintiffs didn’t like masks, arguing that their anxiety and other conditions aren’t included as exemptions in this mandate, and so the plaintiffs have standing because the CDC imposed a legal obligation for these people to wear masks on the plane despite the plaintiffs not liking masks and having decent reasons for not liking masks.

A Florida district court judge sided with the Health Freedom Defense Fund, arguing the CDC exceeded its statutory authority. Like any 59-page ruling, there’s a lot going on in the judge’s ruling. If you zoom in with the same myopia with which we zoomed in on COVID at the expense of poverty and hunger in 2020, you see the judge’s argument against the CDC’s definition of “sanitation”. As everyone talked exclusively about COVID in 2020, now pundits talk exclusively about “sanitation”, saying the ruling’s definition of sanitation is too narrow.

Sanitation seems important because under the ancient Section 264 of the Public Health Services Act of 1944, the CDC the power to enforce regulations that “in its judgement” are necessary to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. Specifically, this section “informs kinds of measures that could be necessary: inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals and articles." 

So, now everyone’s talking about sanitation, and in their serial myopia they’re missing a bigger picture. Athony Fauci, the head of NIAID and controversial figurehead motivating the vaccine gamble of 2020 while coordinating with the head of NIH to orchestrate devastating take-downs of people who didn’t like that gamble, argued that “the court overruling a public health judgement… is a disturbing precedent.” In part goaded by a field filled with myopic gamblers, the CDC appealed the Florida district court’s decision critiquing the definition of sanitation.

The CDC’s briefing, in efforts to defend its broader definition of “sanitation”, appeals to the next topic of serially myopic media coverage, monkeypox, saying this law is used “to prohibit the capture, distribution, or release of certain animals to prevent the spread of monkeypox.” Of course, that action is well covered under “pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals”, and not at all related to “sanitation”, but who cares about the specifics at this point? There’s another scary virus made scarier by massive media coverage, and public health authorities want more public health power.

What the magicians are distracting us from in this act, however, is that the stakes are much larger than the definition of “sanitation." While some argue the stakes are so high because “sanitation” is so important, the stakes are, in fact, even higher. Sanitation is the topic of parts 1 and 2 of section A of the Florida judge’s ruling. What about part 3? That part is titled “Chevron Deference”.

Part 3 starts off noting “the government invokes Chevron deference, arguing that even if its reading of § 264(a) is not the best one, the Court should adopt it anyway." That’s a pretty good summary of Chevron deference which, broadly, says that courts should take agencies’ words for it whenever agencies interpret their own powers. Congress passes a law saying something like “The CDC has the power to clean things” and the CDC gets the benefit of the doubt when interpreting what “the power to clean things” means.

Let’s zoom out even further, beyond COVID, beyond sanitation, and beyond the CDC. Our federal government regulates an increasingly complex society filled with risks ranging from pollutants and complex financial derivatives to foods and toys and, yes, diseases. The complexity of our society seems beyond the reach of any one person, so Congress usually sets up agencies to be filled with people devoted to specific problems. The FDA regulates food and drugs, the SEC regulates securities and exchanges, the EPA regulates all things “environment” from endangered species to pollutants, the CDC regulates diseases, and so on.

Executive agencies, at their best, have proven adept at managing our complex society. Staffed with subject matter experts for the problems under the purview of their statutory authority, executive agencies stay up-to-date on the latest developments in a way Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi can’t. Rather than pretend ol’ Mitch is an expert on cryptocurrencies and Web3 despite the fact that he probably still uses AOL and a blackberry, the US Treasury Department is staffed with experts to ensure the financial security of the United States, and these experts are staying up-to-date on cryptocurrencies, DeFi, and so on.

Rather than requiring Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi chime in to legislate on e.g. how to regulate novel cryptocurrencies or how to ensure financial security of DeFi credit networks, we usually “defer” to the experts in their best efforts to interpret their own “power to clean” whatever crazy innovation society cooks up and whatever mess it’s about to make. Chevron deference is the legal precedent that makes it all happen.

It’s well known that some members of the Supreme Court don’t like Chevron. Chief among them is not-Chief-Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh sees Chevron deference as an abdication of the court’s responsibility to interpret what Congress meant by “the power to clean”, including the court ruling that congress was not sufficiently clear. Maybe “the power” is too broad, or “clean” too ambiguous. Maybe “sanitation” is too murky. I’m not a gambling man, but I’d bet that Kavanaugh, and the majority of current Supreme Court justices who tend to side with Kavanaugh, would be as happy to overturn Chevron as they apparently are to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Zooming out, it’s easier to see the massive stakes of the CDC’s Masks-on-a-Plane gamble. While they’re focusing on “sanitation”, at stake is the very real possibility of the SCOTUS overturning Chevron. While myopic pundits talk about how a narrow definition of “sanitation” can make it difficult for the CDC to “sanitate” in other contexts, they have not disclosed to the public the other part of the Florida ruling, that the judge basically said “F*** Chevron Deference, I’m a judge and I get to decide what a law says” and that ruling is now going up the chain towards the Supreme Court. If the myopic appeal ends up trickling through to Kavanaugh’s desk, it’s reasonable to expect he will ecstatically also say “F*** Chevron Deference” and Chevron v. NRDC will be as dead as Roe v. Wade.

At stake will be the EPA’s ability to interpret its own statutory authority to regulate pollutants, and many extractive industries will surely capitalize on this to say the EPA’s reliance on Chevron deference is no longer sufficient to determine what “clean air” means or what an “endangered species” is. Pharmaceutical and other companies may object to FDA’s interpretation of “safety” in our food and drugs. And so on. No longer will experts in executive agencies be given the deference to decide what “the power” they were granted is.

Kavanaugh isn’t evil, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to dial back agency deference, since we’ve clearly seen in COVID that, sometimes, experts are wrong and other times experts are unrepresentative of the will of the American people. The “Endangered Species Act” is still an act passed by congress, so the real question will be to debate what “endangered” means and what a “species” is, and that may mean grizzly bears in Montana are not “endangered” and the Mexican gray wolf of New Mexico is not a “species”, and so these cornerstones of our ecosystems and cherished environmental icons may die at the hands of ranchers who don’t like them and hunters who want to shoot them while they lap water from a stream and taxidermy them in menacing poses.

However, it’s also clear that our Congress is inept at representing the will of the American people. While some believe passing the statutory ball back to Congress can jolt them back to deliberative life, that, too, is a gamble.

Yet that gamble is down the road, and will only be taken if some stubborn executive agency imposes regulations people really don’t like and gives the Supreme Court an invite to the poker table. The CDC, by appealing the ruling overturning its masks-on-a-plane mandate, is moving us one step closer to a world without Chevron.

That is a gamble I’m not comfortable with. Yet, ironically, it also reveals the limits of executive agencies. They are making a gamble unrepresentative of the will of the American people, they believe they have the statutory authority to do so, and at stake is the whole idea that agencies beyond the CDC, including agencies that have been more or less representative of the will of the people, have the power to do so.

To paraphrase Jim Jefferies, our laws are made to regulate the lowest common denominator. While Jim is great at speeding, one guy speeds and kills a family of four, and then we have speed limits. While Jim’s takes cocaine like a champ, a few people die of overdoses or get withdrawals and rob stores, and cocaine becomes illegal. While the EPA may be moderate in its reliance on agency deference, the CDC may have taken things too far with Masks-on-a-Plane mandates.

By forcing mandates that many people don’t like, and by myopically sending an appeal arguing about “sanitation” towards a SCOTUS able to overturn Chevron, the CDC is nominating itself as the lowest common denominator of our executive agencies. Over a silly definition of “sanitation”, the CDC appears willing to gamble a pillar of our modern society’s constitutional law, a legal cornerstone of our executive agencies, and perhaps, should the CDC lose, its willingness to gamble will be precisely the reason why we can’t have that nice thing of Chevron deference.

Republished from the author's Substack