Purely By Coincidence

Remnant regular Matt Ridley is back to discuss the origins of COVID-19. Did the virus ...

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Remnant regular Matt Ridley is back to discuss the origins of COVID-19. Did the virus emerge from a lab? What would that mean for virological research? And how can we prepare ourselves for future pandemic? Broader scientific discussion is also mixed in on subjects ranging from climate change to mask-wearing. Lukewarm listeners are in for a treat.

Show Notes:

– Matt’s previous Remnant appearance

– Matt’s new book, Viral

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jim Tung

    Ridley said that drug repurposing (especially a specific anti-HIV drug) was successful for COVID medication. As someone with 10+ years experience in the development side of the pharmaceutical industry and someone who's followed the COVID drugs from a professional and personal interest, I don't think that's accurate. Not a particularly key point in the discussion, but I judge it incorrect nevertheless.

    (There are a lot of worthwhile studies of various drug repurposing in general, and especially with COVID. None of it has been particularly successful.)

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    BrandonAlleman

    Developed countrues are reforesting but they should not use that as a reason to cut old growth forests or exploit undisturbed public lands. Not all forests are equal and the biodiversity, biological, and scientific value in undisturbed forests and public land are just as relevant in the US as the Amazon and developing countries.

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    Gene Godbold

    This was a good discussion. I've got a take on gain-of-function in bad bugs in the following minireview in Infection & Immunity: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34780277/.

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    Kevin

    "There's a lot of motivated reasoning going on..."

    This quote from Matt Ridley seems to be an excellent summary of this episode. I was very disappointed, because I think understanding the origins for the SARS-CoV-2 is important and was hoping for a nice summary of what is known and not known currently. Instead, there were a lot of questionable presentation of facts and rhetorical tricks that were meant to indicate that a lab leak is by far more likely than a zoonotic origin, when the actual best current evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, strongly indicates the opposite.

    It would be really important to know if SARS-CoV-2 did escape from WIV, because it would be so unusual. All previous lab escapes except for one have been from known viruses that were researched because they were known to infect humans. The one exception with a novel virus is Marburg, but that outbreak is also not great support for the lab leak theory. That outbreak came not from viruses researched in that lab but from lab workers exposed to tissue from infected imported monkeys. So it is more analogous to infection from animals brought into a market than escaped viral research. Interestingly, how and where those monkeys were infected (in Uganda or during transport to Europe) was actually never determined, and no future cases have been identified in that species. This further illustrates how hard tracing the origins of zoonotic infections can be and why it is not particularly unusual that we have not yet found the direct natural source. The lack of an identified natural source is often used as evidence that the virus came from WIV. But previous experiences suggest it is easier to identify the source of laboratory outbreaks than natural sources. The continued uncertainty about the origin is more consistent with previous experience with zoonotic origin than a lab origin.

    On that note, Jonah joked about the WIV being across the street from the market. The WIV is actually across the Yangtze and pretty far away from the Huanan market, especially the lab where coronavirus culture occurred. The known early cases clustered north of the river and near the markets with no cases clustered near the WIV. And, again, despite aggressive contact tracing of early cases no epidemiological linkage to workers at the WIV was discovered. Yes, if there is an outbreak of chocolate related illness in Hershey, PA you would rightly be suspicious about the Hershey factory. But if all the early cases were associated with the local farmer’s market selling homemade artisanal chocolates on the other side of the town, and no cases were near or associated with the Hershey factory, that would strongly suggest a need to shift your suspicions.

    The situation is actually even worse with the WIV, as not only is there no epidemiological linkage to the WIV there is also still no compelling explanation as to how they could have had SARS-CoV-2 to leak. Ridley simply elides this point by hand waving at them doing coronavirus research as though it is natural that would yield SARS-CoV-2. However, the closest virus they had in their catalog was RaTG13, which is not considered a possible progenitor for SARS-CoV-2. They also only had the sequence from that virus, not isolated or cultured virus. Not only is there no evidence that WIV had a likely progenitor for SARS-CoV-2, the features of SARS-CoV-2 are not consistent with the techniques they were using to culture or manipulate viruses during research at the WIV. For WIV research to be the source of SARS-CoV-2, you need to believe that they possessed a previously unknown coronavirus, that they decided to keep it secret and not publish the isolation and sequencing of this virus, and then they decided to subject this secret virus to some novel method for amplification or gain-of-function that they had also not previously published or used, and then it somehow escaped the lab, and then all of the contact tracing and epidemiological study of initial SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan could not identify any connection to the WIV.

    Having enjoyed Ridley’s last appearance, I was really hopeful for a well researched discussion of our current understanding of SARS-CoV-2 origins. I am very open to hearing any new information that changes the possibility it emerged from a lab. Certainly the Chinese government has acted in very bad faith throughout the pandemic and well deserve all the extra suspicion generated. But instead this discussion was full of motivated reasoning and misinterpretation that seemed to be intended to use people’s natural affinity for conspiracy theories (another common subject on this podcast) to sell books.

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  5. Isaac Demme

    On the subject of what is and isn't a "conspiracy theory":

    First off, being a conspiracy theory doesn't automatically make a theory false but it does mean we should approach it more skeptically. The essential nature of a conspiracy theory is that it assumes there was a conspiracy to hide the evidence, so the lack of any direct evidence is often reinterpreted as "evidence" that there was a conspiracy. We know that real conspiracies to hide facts do in fact happen, but they are usually very ineffective and don't manage to hide the facts for very long, particularly if they involve large numbers of people who all have to keep their mouths shut.

    Relevant to China and SARS-CoV-2 there are three conspiracies to conceal evidence that we do know happened and which are widely documented. The first is the 2003 SARS outbreak where the CCP denied that there was an epidemic for the first four months, despite the rest of the world knowing all about it for at least three of those months. The second is in the initial outbreak in Wuhan in December 2020 where the local officials spent the first couple of weeks denying that a new coronavirus had been discovered and that it was spreading in Wuhan. Again, the rest of the world knew about it right away thanks to individuals in Wuhan (including at least one doctor) who were posting about it online right from the start. The central government (possibly learning from the mistakes of 2003) was very open about the pandemic right from the start, but starting in March of 2020 Chinese intelligence services started actively promoting alternative theories online, including the claim that it was a US bioweapon genetically engineered by American scientists and that it had been present in Europe for months prior to the Wuhan outbreak. From April onward the CCP has also cracked down on cooperation with foreign investigations into the origins of the virus, although it is still allowing research by Chinese scientists. According to our own intelligence services this is mostly because the central government in Beijing isn't certain where the investigation will lead (and is worried that there might be evidence of incompetence that will embarrass them), but it's also fair to say that any other country (including the US) would undoubtedly also refuse foreign requests to audit our biotech labs and public health records.

    Anyway, there are many different theories being lumped together as "lab leak" theories but almost all of them are fairly described as conspiracy theories because they assume a significant conspiracy to hide evidence and use that to explain the lack of positive evidence for the theory.

    The only "lab leak" theory that is *not* a conspiracy theory is the supposition that a researcher based out of Wuhan might have unknowingly been infected in the field and carried the virus home, then infected others. This is statistically improbable but not impossible, and the only real evidence against it is that none of the people researching animal coronaviruses became sick enough to go to a hospital and get tested. This doesn't rule out asymptomatic transmission, however, and it doesn't require a conspiracy to hide the evidence. Arguably this is actually a "natural origin" theory except for the assumption that the first human infected was a researcher rather than a hunter, farmer, or animal smuggler (which again is improbable since there are so many more of the latter than the former interacting with bats and other animal hosts in and around Wuhan).

    The next-most-plausible (but still unlikely) conspiracy theory is that the WIV was in fact studying an immediate ancestor virus but hadn't published anything about it yet and at some point after the outbreak they scrubbed all mention of it from the lab records and managed to convince all their employees and researchers to keep silent about it. On the one hand it's entirely believable (especially in an authoritarian state) that people might want to hide their mistakes out of shame or fear of losing their jobs. On the other hand it is extremely implausible that anyone could convince a significant number of scientists to keep total silence about something like this for more than a few weeks or months, especially when sharing information about the ancestor virus could save hundreds of thousands of lives both in China and abroad (note for example how quickly the Wuhan hospitals leaked the news of the outbreak).

    The least plausible group of theories involve a much larger conspiracy that assumes that researchers at the WIV and elsewhere (including in the US) were jointly conducting GOF research, that they created a virus which then accidentally escaped, and therefore that thousands of people around the world knew in advance about the virus before the outbreak even happened. I find it difficult to square that kind of conspiracy with either the motivations or the actions of the people who would be necessary to do the research and keep the secret, or the fact that none of these supposed conspirators has leaked anything in over 23 months since the outbreak.

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    Adicesa14

    This was an excellent, informative and thought provoking conversation, thank you.

    Except for one factoid, it’s reasonable that COVID-19 was not a malevolent Chinese government tactic. However, the spread of the disease may be a different story if the early report of forbidding flights between Wuhan and other Chinese cites but allowing them between cities outside the country were true. What could possibly be the reason for this policy other than to maintain a status quo with the rest of the world by spreading the pain?

    No matter the source of COVID-19, every potential source should be examined to determine deterrence, not blame.

    Regarding global-warming and environmentalism in general, that the proponents of existential disaster would rather have the problem than a solution is a particularly prescient assertion. It ought to be ‘shouted from the rooftops.’

    “The science is settled” is the most ridiculous refrain ever. Those that employ this nonsensical mantra are morons.

    Nuclear power is expensive because of activism. The early strategy, which continues, is to constantly intervene, accept no reasonable reply, and force design, site selection and construction to absurd lengths and costs. Of course, government, at the behest of the nuclear opponents, pitches in to make matters worse.

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    OK Steele

    I’m compelled by the idea, at least in the short term, that nuclear power is the answer to a range of climate and pollution issues.

    However I seldom hear anyone mention regenerative agriculture which I also found convincing as an option that both restores natural habitats, sequesters carbon and gives us the opportunity to harvest the land. Was listening to see if it was brought up both by Ridley and Jonathan Adler a few months back, when they started discussing climate.

    Curious if I’m just misinformed and it’s not a realistic proposal.

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  8. Fudrock

    I did appreciate the common refrain of nuclear power being the de facto and only solution to climate change, from the perspective of energy generation, coupled with an expressed impulse to avoid building more nuclear plants because it’s too expensive. But also don’t build wind power either; it’s just dreadful. 🤦‍♂️

    I agree that if a Democratic Congress is proposing $500 billion in “climate change mitigation” it should take $100 billion of that and build 10 nuclear plants, but try passing that on reconciliation and see if Joe Manchin is anymore enthusiastic about that than wind farms. If they shirked the hardline environmentalists in the party that are reflexively opposed to nuclear energy and bought a bill to the floor that aggressively funded new construction and refit and repair, would a critical mass of Republicans join in passing it?

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    BrettH

    Enjoyed that one immensely, thanks.

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    Kevin Johnson

    Fantastic podcast. Thanks.

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