In re: Two nice links (np) longish (876 words)

[Michael Bailey]

Hi,



The MIT link is quite fascinating
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/


This is an MIT house organ. (-ish)

Disinformation would be pulling a couple inflammatory tidbits out, adding a
bunch of - well, we all know the drill.

We would never engage in that here, it’s boring & unpleasant.


IJS, the article, taken on its own merits & attentively perused, limns
quite a nifty tale.

I’m drawn in immediately:
“ In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a
meeting.

 Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his
credit,

and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been
discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano,
Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of
the two closest relatives to the original SARS virus, but her team had not
been able to culture it in the lab.”

And so forth.


On one hand, friendly scientific links between US & China. Lot of upside to
that.

On the other hand, offshoring repugnance w/r/t safety level -

“ Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly
shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety
level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.”



The underlying science is even more interesting.
They want to (technical term) fuck with the virus in order to make better
vaccines.


Faced with a contingent who raised holy heck about Obama’s Dijon Mustard,
how hard would it be to go public & honestly say “we cheaped out on the
biosafety - it’ll never happen again”?

Rilly, rilly hard.*

 Especially when - as mentioned - there’s no proof (afaik)

- no proof -

- no proof - (which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen)

that Covid-19 came from a lab, rather than from the bat caves (frickin’ bat
caves! This story’s got everything!) where Shi and her team had already in
2013 been discovering coronaviruses “by the fistful.”



(Fauci couldn’t bring himself to a mea culpa about “hey, we were wrong,
masks work,” before, during, or after his volte-face on that topic either)

(Which is also a fascinating read:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
)


No proof of origin, but also, too long of a chain of custody - it wasn’t a
direct grant, but came from the organization mentioned in the other link:

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2414

BMJ is a “peer-reviewed journal published by the British Medical
Association”


EcoHealth Alliance is a nonprofit recipient of US grants to research
viruses for pandemic preparedness. They shared some dough with our science
buds in Wuhan.

(Why they can’t fund it directly? Anti-science senators from Proxmire on?)

(Why they can’t do it here? Penny-pinching on safety measures is more
difficult to get away with?)

The article talks about how the Lancet ended a task force designed to
scrutinize the origins of Covid-19 because some of its members had close
ties to this EcoHealth Alliance.

Why they wouldn’t kick those ones out & get new ones to continue the study?




Interesting articles. Thanks for those. I’m not inclined to draw panicky
conclusions, though, or defend disinformation.

Rather than “shut up, peasant”, isn’t tagging something as disinformation
more like “hey, fact to bloviation ratio is low, rabble-rousing quotient
high, ulterior motives are evident, & presence of patent untruths is
non-trivial?”

All of which are assertions easily verifiable for any text!

————


* Rilly, rilly hard - remember how Fauci’s many true statements, sullied by
his initial deprecation of masking, eg, drew loud hatemongers drawn to any
chink in research requiring specialized knowledge?

- as bad as that kerfuffle about a bit of fudged climate data** giving aid
& comfort to all sorts of denier dipsticks a few years back.

** still, those climate researchers shoult‘dn have done it.

&, w/r/t to Wuhan Task Force - “Daszak had not always been forthright about
his research and his financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak now faces increased scrutiny from scientists, the media, and members
of US Congress.”

Which, unlike a true disinformation practitioner, he finally did step down,
and doesn’t go around soliciting donations to balance his books.

Bet he’s kicking himself now. That virus & pandemic preparation work is
important & should get more support, not less.

Can you imagine the gyrations necessary to get any lab work going while the
Trump Administration was dismantling anything redolent of common sense?


 It’s appalling that they skipped a step on safety, though. Whose decision
was that anyway?

task force ought to:
1) compare every virus Wuhan worked on to Covid

2) specify decision-making on safety levels going forward

3) seek Covid among bats, etc

4) not misstate potential conflicts of interest

5) produce a clear executive summary

6) and reams of fascinating detail for anoraks (-;

The Lancet has passed the buck to US govt &
WHO. It’s like, hey, there are some what John Kerry used to call
“disingenuous” statements among people we trusted. “Maybe this is too big
for us, we’re only The Lancet.”

They have a point. They can’t compel access, for one thing.


Back to Pynchon, who never disappoints.
Hey, can we get him on the task force? He’s no stranger to technical
writing.