2021-03-17

Science Made Covid

Covid is Science's Chernobyl

This bit gets to what I have been saying for the past year, that nobody in official capacity really wants to find the source of the problem, that altering virus and infecting humanized mice with them is a bad idea. And the next step the public would jump to: call into question fundamental biological reseearch because playing with the genetics of any organism can have wildly unpredictable outcomes. But of course, trying to make deadly viruses more deadly and more infectious in the name of science is in a class by itself.

If Soviet dissidents thought about Chernobyl this way, they would still be debating the conspiracy theory that the Pripyat pangolin attack “never happened,” that the nuclear plant was destroyed by a “research accident” rather than a pangolin assault team, and that the exclusion zone is meant to “keep civilians out”—not pangolins in.

These wild theories and more would be tirelessly debunked under #Conspiracy_theories at the Great Soviet Encylopedia entry for “Pripyat Pangolin Attack,” with a talk page longer than Trotsky’s rap sheet. Of course the “Chernobyl truthers” would seethe with intellectual discontent, pointing out a thousand inconsistencies in the mainstream pangolin theory—pangolins never attack, there are no pangolins in the Ukraine, and other total red herrings—the famous “Gish Gallop,” as perfected by ‘80s creationists.

No one ever would have dreamt that Chernobyl meant nothing, really, of itself—that what it meant, really, was Belshazzar’s feast for the USSR itself.

So when we assume Covid was a Chinese lab accident—or even just conclude, in retrospect, that experimenting with humanized bat viruses was a terrible idea—and move forward from there, what do we learn about the world we live in? And if the world could read and understand that writing on the wall—what would it do?

The right question for Covid, just as for Chernobyl, is what fundamental errors of human governance caused this accident. Even if we assume that Covid was leaked by a Chinese lab, we cannot even say that the ultimate cause of the accident is in any way Chinese.

In fact, I assert, it was not Chinese. True: the accident should cause us to think less of Chinese lab-safety procedures. I for one had not thought much of them at all. I think the CCP leadership had not thought much of them either. Now, I think, they have. I’m sure Mikhail Gorbachev has not yet lost his deep distaste for graphite-core reactors.

But the Chinese scientists doing this work were not (even while working at Chinese institutions) following a Chinese research program—but a Western research program. The Wuhan Institute was even funded by US tax dollars. Is this China’s Chernobyl? Or—is it ours?

Infecting humans with bat viruses is Unit 731 shit, but it’s not a war crime if we infect special mice with a humanized ACE2. (Passaging viruses in ferrets is also common—SARS-CoV-2 loves ferrets and other mustelids, and has taken out whole mink farms.)

No wise decisionmaker, knowing either what we know now or what we knew ten years ago, would choose to fund this research. Unfortunately, wisdom is not any part of the science funding process; and any sort of simple, obvious irrelevance is irresistible to it.

Paging Dr. Fauci!

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