Who should we blame for the Covid-19 global pandemic?
Should we blame Peter Daszak? Or Ralph Baric? Or Chinese scientists? Or Dr Fauci? Or President Trump?
This article in Vanity Fair gives a good overview of the history of the research that lead to genetic mutations being done with a virus that might have gotten out of the Wuhan virus laboratory. But there are a few things about this article that are a bit biased. Out of several hundred emails in which scientists debated the possibility that Covid-19 was developed by humans, they quote just one that says “This genetic sequence could not have developed by normal evolution.” That leaves the reader with the impression that the virus must have been developed by humans. But there were hundreds of other emails where other scientists said “Yes, this could happen naturally” and so the scientific consensus leans toward the idea that this virus evolved naturally. But the article does not quote any of the emails that argued that the virus could have evolved naturally.
It’s an interesting topic for discussion, and I’m sure in 5 years we will have a better idea of what the truth is. But for now, let’s go against the scientific consensus and simply assume that someone deliberately created this virus, and therefore there is a person we should blame. Who is that person?
From the article:
In 2014, Fauci’s agency had issued a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to predicting and helping to prevent the next pandemic by identifying viruses that could leap from wildlife to humans. The grant, titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, proposed to screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge the risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was a key collaborator to whom EcoHealth Alliance gave almost $600,000 in sub-awards. But the work there had been controversial enough that the NIH suspended the grant in July 2020.
As it happened, EcoHealth Alliance failed to predict the COVID-19 pandemic—even though it erupted into public view at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a short drive from the WIV itself. In the ensuing months, every move of EcoHealth Alliance, and its voluble president Peter Daszak, came under scrutiny by a small army of scientific sleuths and assorted journalists. What, they wanted to know, had really gone on at the WIV? Why had Daszak been so cagey about the work his organization had been funding there? And were Fauci and other officials trying to direct attention away from research that the U.S. had been, at least indirectly, financing?
The dispute over COVID-19’s origins has become increasingly acrimonious, with warring camps of scientists trading personal insults on Twitter feeds. Natural-origin proponents argue that the virus, like so many before it, emerged from the well-known phenomenon of natural spillover, jumping from a bat host to an intermediate species before going on to infect humans. Those suspecting a lab-related incident point to an array of possible scenarios, from inadvertent exposure of a scientist during field research to the accidental release of a natural or manipulated strain during laboratory work. The lack of concrete evidence supporting either theory has only increased the rancor. “Everyone is looking for a smoking gun that would render any reasonable doubt impossible,” says Amir Attaran, a biologist and lawyer at the University of Ottawa. Without cooperation from the Chinese government, that may be impossible.
…In 2018, Daszak had appeared on Chinese state-run TV and said, “The work we do with Chinese collaborators is published jointly in international journals and the sequence data is uploaded onto the internet free for everyone to read, very open, very transparent, and very collaborative.” He added, “Science is naturally transparent and open…. You do something, you discover something, you want to tell the world about it. That’s the nature of scientists.”
But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese government’s commitment to transparency turned out to be limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient cases, or participate in any further international efforts to investigate the virus’s origin. And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
…By 2009, bats had turned into big money. That September, USAID awarded a $75 million grant called PREDICT to four organizations, including Daszak’s. It was “the most comprehensive zoonotic virus surveillance project in the world,” USAID stated, and its purpose was to identify and predict viral emergence, in part by sampling and testing bats and other wildlife in remote locations.
The $18 million over five years awarded to what was then Wildlife Trust was a “game-changer,” Daszak told his staff in an ecstatic email sharing the news. “I want to take this opportunity (despite 7 hours of drinking champagne – literally!) to thank all of you for your support.”
The money transformed the ragged nonprofit. It increased its budget by half, ending a yearslong operating loss; began a long-deferred rebranding, which led to the new name EcoHealth Alliance; and spruced up its headquarters, even fixing its chronically broken air conditioner. Over the course of the grant, it allocated $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, USAID recently acknowledged in a letter to Congress.
…But the 2015 research paper Daszak cited was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)
This gain-of-function experiment, which had begun prior to the moratorium, was so fraught that the authors flagged the dangers themselves, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies…too risky to pursue.” The paper’s acknowledgments cited funding from the NIH and from EcoHealth Alliance, through a different grant.
If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”
This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:
“You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”
By July 7, the NIH agreed to Daszak’s terms, which relied entirely on mutual transparency: Shi would inform him of any concerning developments involving the lab-constructed viruses, and he would inform the agency. Daszak replied enthusiastically to a program officer, “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”
The gain-of-function work was done by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, with some participation from the scientists at the Wuhan virus laboratory. The dangerous research was not supposed to be repeated in Wuhan, but it is possible that the scientists at Wuhan decided to move forward with the work on their own, borrowing from what they knew that Baric had done.
If we want to blame someone, there are a few targets here:
Ralph Baric, who did the gain-of-function work
Peter Daszak, who advocated for this project and promoted it
Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab who might have recreated the gain-of-function work
The NIAID Program Officer who approved the grant, despite doubts
These were all the people who were directly involved in the work. Some people want to escalate the blame, suggesting that we should go after someone higher in the government hierarchy, and they settle on Dr Fauci, even though Dr Fauci was not directly involved in any of this. The argument in favor of this shifting of the blame would be the concept of “command responsibility” which is to say, the person in charge should take the blame for work done by an organization. But I’m curious, if we want to follow that rule, why would we settle on Dr Fauci? When the final grants came through in 2017, Donald Trump was president, he was in charge of the whole government bureaucracy, he appointed the people who were now overseeing the NIH. Why wouldn’t we blame President Trump for this? If the blame does not attach to the people directly involved, but instead attaches to the person at the top of the hierarchy, then wouldn’t that mean that President Trump is to blame? More so, at any time, President Trump could have fired Dr Fauci, but instead President Trump kept Dr Fauci in his role, and when asked, President Trump said that he trusted Dr Fauci. Since Dr Fauci had the full endorsement of the President, if we’re looking for the person at the top who appoints people to their job, then Trump would be the person to blame for anything Dr Fauci did. President Trump was President for the first 12 months of the USA pandemic, and President Trump did not fire Dr Fauci during that time.
So clearly, either we blame the people directly involved in the work, or we blame President Trump. I can’t think of any principle of leadership that wold cause us to elevate the blame to the level of Dr Fauci, but then no higher than that. The situation would be different if Trump had fired Dr Fauci, as that would be a decisive act in which Trump indicated a lack of faith in Dr Fauci, but Trump never did any such thing.
But there is another way to think of this:
Master Kong was my favorite cat ever. He lived at the music studio that my co-founder and business partner had, back when I was working with Monkeyclaus from 2002-2008. Sometimes I would go for a walk in the woods, and Master Kong would come along with me, a bit like a loyal dog. Sometimes in the office I would be writing code and Master Kong would curl up near the window, absorbing the sunshine. We shared many long days together. Yet one day I went out to the porch to eat my lunch, and Master Kong was asleep there, and when I went to scratch behind his ears, he lashed out annoyed, and cut me on my hand. The next day my hand was red and swollen. I had to go get antibiotics to get my hand back to normal.
How many people own cats? How many people own dogs? How many people get scratches?
There are roughly 1 billion families on the planet Earth that still live on a farm, interacting every day with pigs, cows, goats, camels, horses, snakes, crocodiles, frogs, snails, ducks, chickens, quails, and so much more. Every day there are a million scratches, sneezes, head bumps, rubs, touches. Every day there are a million moments when a pathogen can move from an animal to a human. Is that the appropriate defense permitter for the human race? Should we ban all contact with animals? No human is ever allowed to contact anything from the natural world? How exactly would that work?
Assume some gain-of-function virus was kept at the virus lab in Wuhan and injected into bats. One day, one of the women working there needs to take a blood sample. She reaches towards a bat with whom she’s always had a friendly relationship. “Come here, Little Won,” she says. But the bat is in a bad mood, and surprises her, just like Master Kong surprised me. She ends up with a small scratch. A quick rinse in the sink and then she forgets about it, it is not serious. She is wondering: what about dinner? She needs to make dinner for her husband and child, but what should she cook for them? Perhaps they would like some fish. Yes, that would be perfect. So after work she walks to the Wuhan wet market. A fishmonger has some good fish, she leans in and points at the one she wants. Some cash is exchanged, the fish wrapped up, and she accepts the bundle. As she does so, she coughs, and when she coughs, she initiates a global pandemic which then kills 6 million people.
Again, is that the appropriate defense perimeter for the human race? Is it practical? If we decide to blame this woman for the global pandemic, does that help us stop the next global pandemic?
Obviously, blaming her would be ridiculous. There were so many other failures:
Why did China take down its database of viruses?
Why did China punish the doctors who first reported a new kind of pneumonia?
Why didn’t China lockdown Wuhan sooner?
Why didn’t Europe block international travel sooner?
Why didn’t America block international travel sooner?
A woman goes to buy some fish to cook dinner for her family — this cannot be the level where we try to stop the next pandemic. A serious effort to protect us from the next pandemic has to happen at a higher level: there needs to be better monitoring, better reporting, more transparency, and every government needs to be faster to go to lockdown.
Finally, there is one more group that we should at least partly blame: you and me. For the last 20 years, there have been many articles warnings of a global pandemic. There were dozens of good articles written after the MERS Pandemic came out of Saudi Arabia in 2012. And in 2015 Bill Gates delivered a great TED Talk where he warned of a coming pandemic. How much did you or I do about it? Did we pressure politicians to make this a priority? If not, then we must take some of the blame. And this applies to the next pandemic too. What are you and I doing, right now, to protect the world from the next pandemic? Are we pushing for better systems of warning? More transparency? The ability to go to a faster lockdown? The emergency measures that were taken in March of 2020 were chaotic but they offer an idea of what we will need to do when the next pandemic arrives. Are we pushing politicians to formalize this? Can we standardize our pandemic response? Right now there is widespread pandemic fatigue, which we need to get over so we can have a rational conversation about how we should build a system to protect us from future pandemics. We all have a role to play, especially in the fight against pandemic fatigue. The time to start standardizing our pandemic response is right now, even if people don’t want to think about it.