Be Happy. Shop at REI.
The rest is just details.
My dearest readers,
I can’t thank you enough for reading what I’ve written here on Substack.
I’ve always wanted to become a writer, especially a popular science writer. For most of my life my writing has been reserved for my voluminous journals, love letters to my wife, funny emails to the Princeton University Mountaineering Club, Christmas cards, peer reviewed articles (especially supplemental information, where I was less edited), and other venues. Only recently, here on Substack, have I felt like my writing has enough traction in a broad audience to generate the internal reward cycles that keep me writing more. The engagement, reposting, and even paid subscriptions to this blog have been a great honor - I hope you all have enjoyed this as much as I have.
Today, I’m bowing out and leaving the stage indefinitely. There are no hidden motives - as all who read me know, I wear my heart on my sleeve & speak my mind, even if that does get me into trouble sometimes. Having paused paid subscriptions indefinitely, I now wish to clarify my reasons for exiting stage left. Understanding my reasons will require understanding me & the things that typically motivate me, so I apologize ahead of time for what is a rather autobiographical post, and not your typical intellectual piece focusing attention on some impersonal issue du jour to be surgically dissected on a table for all to see. Today, I put myself on the table.
It’s a tragedy that my writing has only became widely read during the most contentious times, because those who know me ought to be able to share with you the enduring levity, absurdity, and joviality that defines my demeanor. I started writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when circumstances shoved me unwillingly into the seat behind the lever for trolley problem after trolley problem, crisis after crisis. My COVID odyssey has taken me on a journey through most of the largest scientific and political battles of the pandemic, from outbreak forecasting and public health policy to censorship and the origins of SARS-COV-2. As the cyclops, the sirens, and other horrors fade away into the more distant past, they approach a horizon line where all of my life before me is visible, where a series of events in a row converges to a single point in the distance, and such a long view on life before today focuses my attention on a similarly long view of life after today.
I had a life journey before the COVID odyssey, I had a point of origin and a trajectory, a direction guided by a spiritual compass. While everything was thrown into disarray during the tempest of the past 4 years, I’m now aboard my life’s ship in calm seas, the monsters have been slain or their lairs fled, and I look down at my compass, wondering where I’m going.
Life Before COVID: “Be Happy and Shop at REI. The Rest is Just Details”
In college back in Albuquerque, people would ask me what I’d do with a degree in mathematical biology and I told them, sincerely, “Be happy and shop at REI. The rest is just details.” I always romanticized Thoreau’s transcendentalist dreams of “simplify, simplify”, breaking life down to its bare necessities and not, when I came to die, discover that I had never truly lived.
I didn’t particularly want to get a PhD.
While I did well in school, I was more inspired by the unwritten story of my life, the empty pages of my time on Earth that I could fill with adventure, and I had (and have) little interest in prestige, career, and other societal lures. Yogi Bera once said “if there’s a fork in the road, take it”, and so when it came to grad school I told myself that I wished to take a fork and put it in the road. I’d apply to the most prestigious programs I could, go if there was a suitable program that accepted me, and if I didn’t get in then I would follow my dreams and go off to Alaska in pursuit of simpler things. I got accepted nearly everywhere, and, a stubborn man of my word, I accepted the outcome of the fork I put in the road & attended Princeton.
It may not surprise you to hear that, at Princeton, I was never drawn to the social capital, the power, and the fame that tempted hearts and minds in the Ivy League. I never felt like I really fit in with success-oriented fellow students who were drawn to prestige. Instead, I became the social chair of the mountaineering club and wrote emails luring undergraduates, grad students, postdocs, and professors into the mountains, away from societal temptations. If anybody can obtain the records from Princeton University, I’m sure there is a treasure trove of writings from me during that period.
While I was relatively untethered to society knowing that I could always run off to Alaska if push came to shove, I found that many students at Princeton were distraught by the awesome burden placed on their shoulders, the chains that shackled them to careers, and I cared about these students tethered to societal expectations. Their parents sacrificed so much to pay enormous fees for their education, yet the eating clubs showed an often unobtainable opulence that confused good, innocent, and pure hearts of young students with social pressures, socializing them to think and feel that only by working on Wall Street could they pay back their parents, only by becoming wealthy could they be respected, valued, and good in the eyes of their peers. For these students, I sought to be a different kind of peer. I wrote letters reminding them of simple joys, of grander goals than wealth, lovelier things than fame, more beautiful things than power. I took many of them climbing for their first time, created a supportive community outside the social pressures of Princeton, and hosted comically absurd parties, like a “Moderation in Moderation” party (“… everything in moderation - tonight is the night for excess.”). I emailed funny tales of magically realistic adventures like the time I donated all my clothes to a Goodwill Fairy who emerged from a crack high up on a cliff in upstate New York.
I later learned the Princeton University Mountaineering Club listserv had swelled to become one of the largest email groups on campus, so my rants and ravings and love letters had a far larger audience than the few dozen or students who frequently climbed with us. As the listserve blew up to intimidating sizes, I was tempted to stop writing and one student receiving a PhD in English wrote me once saying my letters were “the most human thing at Princeton. Don’t ever stop”. Prior to learning the size of the listserv, I had sent the image above, a picture a Princeton graduate student nude on a section of cliff aptly named “The Dangler”, without knowing the image would reach a large fraction of the school. Many coworkers who had never attended a climbing event stopped me in the hall to laugh a little about the email and inhabit a safe space of absurdity in an otherwise far too serious world. A distinguished professor studying string theory (Steve Gubser) approached me and said “Wait a minute, aren’t you the guy from The Dangler??” From that point on, Steve and I became dear friends. We climbed many cliffs and frozen waterfalls, spending the time in road trips and on belay ledges discussing various transformations one may use when analyzing partial differential equations and some of the arts of mathematical sciences that Steve found most beautiful in his studies of high energy physics. Tragically, Steve died in a mountaineering accident in 2019, just months before SARS-CoV-2 emerged, leaving behind his wife and daughters, and many mathematical insights immortalized in his work.
After Princeton, I felt the call of the wild and, once again, I dreamed about running west and north, simplifying life. I didn’t see any place I really wanted to go in society, certainly no place more comfortable and exciting than the middle of the wilderness or the top of some menacing, distant peak.
My call of the wild was tamed when I came across a job advertisement by a wild, western woman who was a professor at Duke University. Diana Nemergut was as kind as she was strong, as quick as she was creative, and so I put yet another fork in the road, this one leading either to Duke University or off into the wild. Within minutes of meeting Diana, I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t study with her. She was brilliant, unbounded by disciplines, passionate about her hobbies, and kind to everyone she met, even the janitors. I could easily survive two more years of academia if I had company like hers.
As I packed my bags for Durham, North Carolina, Diana called with horrible news. She was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a particularly dangerous brain tumor, and she said she would understand if I didn’t want to come to Duke. I told her that fate had already decided it for me: I would come to Duke, because even if we only had a few months together then those were months doing science with her that I was destined to have. If she makes it through, which I knew she could, then I wanted to be there to celebrate it with her and move on to the next great discovery.
I started work at Duke in September 2015. Tragically, Diana passed away December 31, 2015. The extraordinary stardust that converged to form Diana left behind her husband and their daughter. In the months from the beginning of my postdoc to her untimely passing, Diana had worked with Duke University to allocate her startup funds to her postdocs in the event of her passing, ensuring we could continue our studies. I refer to this source of funding as Diana’s “Phoenix Grant”.
The two other postdoctoral orphans - Jennifer Rocca and Tiffany Prest - and I continued doing science together. In Jenny’s Microbiome Stress Project, we uncovered a central principle of microbiome data analysis that not just microbial abundances but also changes in abundance are relative, like the velocity of objects in space is relative, and this necessitates the specification of microbial reference frames. We discovered things, together, and it was delightful.
I used Diana’s Phoenix Grant to explore the Rocky Mountains. I borrowed a truck and a trailer from my fiance’s mom and set off into the wilderness to study the microbiomes of elk and whether or not they changed in regions where elk were terrorized by wolves. My journey would take me from the Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico all the way north to Glacier National Park in Montana. As I planned this adventure, I learned of a woman - Raina Plowright - who in 2015 had received a DARPA Young Faculty Award to study pathogen spillover from bats to people. I reached out to Raina in the earliest days of 2016, told her of my circumstances as a postdoctoral orphan with funding until 2017, and that I’d love to chat science when I passed through Bozeman.
I gallivanted through the wilderness collecting elk poop, crashing my fiancé’s mom’s truck and trailer along remote forest service roads, and doing math in crashed trailers in remote areas with the company of good whiskey and my even better dog Jack. In the crashed trailer in the Gila, I discovered some new math for how to analyze microbiome data, and that ended up being one of my greatest discoveries to date (it’s impact on how we think about biological data is still not fully appreciated, but these things take time). My whimsical elk poop adventures came to an end, however, as my partner dislocated her shoulder and required medical care that we couldn’t quite afford. In the summer of 2016, we eloped. We invited two of her friends, two of my friends, and my dog Jack to rendezvous in Wyoming where we became The Fellowship of The Ring, hiked 13 miles into the Wind River Range wilderness, and got married on the summit of a spire off a path less traveled by, in a basin I will only tell you about in person.
Needing medical care and staring down the prospects of medical bills, I no longer had the luxury of living in a trailer, collecting elk poop and looking for wolves. We moved to Durham where my wife could get her shoulder fixed by the prestigious doctors who fix the shoulders of MLB pitchers and NBA quarterbacks. I looked for additional employment to cover the costs, and I found an opportunity to do alternative data analysis for a quant hedge fund, building off my work at Princeton where I studied stochastic portfolio theory in the context of economics and evolution.
In late 2016, as my wife wore a shoulder brace recovering from her surgery and I hustled two jobs to keep us afloat, I received a surprise email from Duke thanking me for working with them and preparing for my accounts to close in two weeks, over 6 months prior to the date when I thought my Phoenix Grant would expire. I didn’t have follow-up employment arranged, so we were going to suddenly lose health insurance and salary needed for rent. I activated my network to seek employment, fast. The hedge fund would be interested in bringing me aboard if only I could move to New Jersey or New York, a group in San Diego expressed an interest in having me work in a prestigious microbiome lab if only I could move to dense suburbs of California. I reached back out to Raina and expressed an interest in working with her in Bozeman. Raina’s offer in Bozeman paid the least of the three. My wife and I agreed: the skiing would be much better in Bozeman, so we went to Montana where I would study pathogen spillover from bats to people in early 2017.
Raina had been unable to hire people for her Young Faculty Award from when I reached out to her in early 2016 until she finally hired me in 2017. The $40K annual salary was a pittance compared to the cost of living in Bozeman, but thankfully I was able to keep consulting for a hedge fund to pay the bills. I helped Raina recruit her other postdoc and a soon-to-become grad student to this same work. Her hiring difficulties vanished with charisma and the vision we formed for this work.
In early 2018, after a successful year working with Raina and the new team we assembled, we heard of the DARPA PREEMPT call, a grant opportunity to preempt pathogen spillover by predicting “jump-capable quasispecies” of zoonotic viruses and immunizing wildlife against these human-infectious variants, thereby protecting the human population by immunizing animal reservoirs from which pathogens spillover. We recruited many scientists to a ranch in Montana with the dual purpose of fulfilling Raina’s Young Faculty Award promise of a symposium and to plan future work that would be contained in a DARPA PREEMPT proposal. I helped write part of our DARPA PREEMPT grant, and the large team assembled by Raina received $16 million from DARPA to preempt the spillover of bat henipaviruses.
As fate would have it, EcoHealth Alliance submitted their DEFUSE proposal to the same call. DEFUSE proposed to modify bat SARS coronaviruses in a way that would enhance cell-entry and broaden their host range, and then create a vaccine against these synthetic “jump-capable quasispecies”. This work enhancing the transmissibility and host range of bat SARSr-CoVs would take place in Wuhan.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, as EcoHealth proceeded with its collaboration in Wuhan, I studied methods to forecast pathogen spillover, developed methods to assess the relative risks of various lineages of pathogens or the reservoirs in which they’re found, I studied the peculiar case of filoviruses like ebola and an insertion they acquired which differentiates them from their close relatives, the pneumoviruses. I developed frameworks to attribute pathogens to various wildlife sources and documented the statistical challenges of both forecasting pathogen spillover and bioattribution (these problems are each others’ inverse, as forecasting requires going from many sources & scenarios to a future incident, and bioattribution requires going in reverse from a particular incident attributed to one of many sources & scenarios).
I had no plans of becoming a professor and had no need to think far ahead. I had a vibrant scientific consulting career, I was doing fun work, and, most importantly, I was rock climbing, ice climbing, skiing, fishing, hunting, and otherwise living the dream of a life full of adventure and time in the wilderness.
COVID
In early January, 2020, I first learned of a novel SARS coronavirus causing a pneumonia of unknown etiology not from the spillover community I did research with, but from the hedge fund. The hedge fund required an honest assessment of the situation because not only was I working on analyzing and forecasting the returns of Chinese equities that faced risks from this Chinese outbreak, but if it were to spread beyond China then global markets faced risks as well, and the hedge fund wanted to ensure it was positioned well to brace for whatever impacts may lie ahead.
I’ve covered the COVID odyssey elsewhere, so I’ll race through the bullets here. The DARPA PREEMPT team I was on didn’t want me getting involved with a coronavirus, even though my skills were relevant. I estimated surges in NYC by March/April 2020 at a time when most epidemiologists thought the outbreak would be successfully contained. Because what I was saying was different from what Harvard or Oxford epidemiologists were saying, my former DARPA PREEMPT teammates didn’t want to listen to me. The hedge fund listened, we shorted the market, colleagues and I (not on the PREEMPT team) published papers documenting millions of US infections in March 2020, media coverage surged, politics exploded.
Public health policy debates during the pandemic relied on accurate estimates of pandemic burden. If burden was higher, stronger interventions were worth the risks. If burden was lower, then a lighter policy touch may best reduce all-cause mortality and morbidity in the years ahead. My own estimates of pandemic burden supported lighter-touch mitigation policies like those proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration, and that was controversial. My later findings pointed towards natural immunity ending outbreaks in the Fall of 2020 and waning immunity evident by the Alpha wave in the spring of 2021, calling into question the wisdom of vaccine mandates (why mandate something that provides only short-term protection and isn’t a lasting strategy for preventing outbreaks?). Raina requested I not share my Fall 2020 findings as she was working on a project that was only really warranted under outbreak forecasts which conflicted with my own. Believing my own forecasts, and feeling the need to share them, I left the DARPA PREEMPT team in late 2020. I consulted managers & helped other clients make more money forecasting outbreak events with a theory of remarkable predictive value. By the time Omicron hit, the world was so far along its belief in a theory with poor predictive value, the theory of higher burden that motivated vaccine mandates, studies like the ones Raina and colleagues conducted on students at universities, lockdowns, and other policy mistakes. The world had so little awareness of alternative theories like my own implying lower burden from Omicron despite its immunoevasion, I bought a bunch of life insurance stocks and made a lot of money based on a scientific theory within my expertise that most people didn’t know about.
With enough money to fund my own sabbatical, I floated down rivers in Montana in 2022. I fished, I hunted, I hiked, I climbed… I was happy, I shopped at REI, and I continued to pay attention to science. One particular area of science within my expertise bothered me: the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I investigated, and I wrote about what I found here on Substack.
The literature claiming to have established a zoonotic origin was suspiciously bad, it deviated from pre-COVID standards of evidence in the field. Colleagues and I wrote one paper illustrating the statistical challenges of inferring a zoonotic origin based on the early outbreak evolutionary tree, and this put a target on my back. The main proponents of the zoonotic origin theory began to attack me and my colleagues at any opportunity, seeking to delegitimize me by claiming I’m not an expert or oversimplifying my COVID outbreak forecasting or public health policy perspectives. Apparently one of them wrote Raina, my former employer, goading Raina to write me an email requesting I never mention our collaboration, her name, or my own work on the DARPA PREEMPT team whose grant I helped write. Needless to say, I didn’t feel it was ethical to hide my research history, especially not given its relevance to a critical issue today, so here I am, mentioning all of the above with no expectation that I will receive a letter of recommendation anytime soon.
I continued examining the evidence. Valentin Bruttel, Tony VanDongen and I documented a piece of evidence consistent not only with a lab origin, but with a synthetic origin implying that the virus didn’t just originate in a lab, but the lab knew it. Our findings suggest that this may not have been caused by a bat-catcher unknowingly infected by a bat, but instead synthesized from a genome on a computer, suggesting not just a lab accident, but also a coverup.
I have attempted to popularize the evidence pointing to a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. As a scientist who lived in this field since before COVID, I did my best to report on the academics who lobbied on behalf of risky research enhancing potential pandemic pathogens. I’ve covered the sausage factory of peer-review, and why you can’t trust surveys of peer-review as representative of scientific truth given the political forces that can and do suppress science in peer-review. I’ve looked back on the path of heterodoxy that brought me to where I am today, and penned what I might call a love letter to support heterodox scientists who follow this path in the years ahead. My involvement came at great cost.
My media participation started during this paradigmatic information warfare. Zoonotic origin proponents had the advantage of connections with the heads of NIAID, NIH, the Wellcome Trust, and others who either funded the DEFUSE co-authors or were DEFUSE co-authors themselves (DARPA, to their lasting credit, did not fund DEFUSE). Scientists who came to believe a lab origin, on the other hand, had the more enduring strategic advantage of evidence, truth, and integrity. We just needed to get our message out, so I wrote.
I regret to inform you all that science, at least in this field of COVID-19 origins, has devolved to information warfare. Proponents of a zoonotic origin pushed a narrative - that lab origin theories are “conspiracy theories” - and weaponized their institutional power & media connections to suppress dissent by attacking anybody who suggested otherwise. Little did most know, these scientists were writing on behalf of those who most likely caused the accident to begin with, thus they were covering for their friends and their industry. After engaging in unethical conduct, these scientists began to attack anybody uncovering information that shines light on their conduct.
The scope of western scientists’ unethical conduct and abuses of authority needs to be reconciled with. Daszak himself, beside his funder Jeremy Farrar, called lab origin theories “conspiracy theories” in The Lancet, an article later parroted by Jon Cohen in Science. Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes (and lesser antagonists Garry, Rambaut, and Lipkin) ghostwrote Proximal Origin on behalf of funders of Wuhan’s labs, falsely claiming a lab origin is “implausible” at the time when, privately, even Kristian Andersen himself knew a lab origin was “so friggin likely”. Science Magazine has abandoned research ethics with “Crooked” Jon Cohen forwarding whistleblower complaints to Andersen and Holmes saying “this is what people … are saying behind your backs”.
Just recently, Andersen, Holmes, and their coterie of highly conflicted scientists with a track record of unethical research conduct have written a letter to Rutgers attempting to silence their critics. The letter was picked up by none other than a former NIH employee now at Science Magazine, and by Andersen & Holmes’ media hit-man at the LA Times. Andersen and Holmes have ghostwritten for funders of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a violation of research ethics that ought trigger investigations in any unbiased academy eager to maintain its integrity, so they attack and intimidate the critics who are calling out their bad conduct, and they seek media connections to amplify their attacks. They have pushed to NYT and Guardian headlines irreparably flawed papers with bad statistics (Worobey et al), buggy code (Pekar et al), and cherry-picked samples (Debarre, Crits-Cristoph et al).
Good science and reason forms a harmony in the mind, and there is beauty in the music of solid science. Far from playing such a tune, virologists are in fact hiding the true tune of a lab origin by clashing symbols and blowing airhorns in the ears of anyone walking by and blaring hideous, discordant propaganda from busted sound systems duct taped to motorcycles. I have never heard such inelegant scientific sounds coming from people claiming to be scientists, nor did I think the media would stoop so low to amplify their strategic noise.
At the same time they have relentlessly pushed a false narrative to the media, undermining science and those in the media who carry water for these conflicted scientists, they have misled the world about the evidence of a lab origin, claiming there is “no evidence” without mentioning DEFUSE. At the same time these scientists push hollow work and attempt to silence their critics with letters of intimidation to their employers, they claim our own findings of a synthetic origin are “kindergarten molecular biology” or “confected nonsense”… yet they say nothing when drafts of DEFUSE are obtained containing detailed methods proposing to do the exact types of synthesis for which we find evidence in the early genome of SARS-CoV-2.
Such is the current, sad, and disgusting state of affairs caused by a failure to hold scientists accountable for an accident that caused a pandemic. Those who have power played some role in the accident, and they still cling desperately to power to avoid accountability or regulations of their work.
It is a travesty to see scientists debase science, to see members of the media pick and choose paradigms that suit their narratives. Not only are they misinforming the world about the critical question of why millions of our fellow humans died, but they are also disfavoring and sometimes crushing the careers of those who discover the truth, thereby evolving the population of academics into credulous wimps by selecting against the courageous, independent scientists among us. They wonder why trust in their institutions is declining, yet never do they do the hard work of introspection to examine what they have done to sow distrust by engaging in what can rightfully be called a disinformation campaign about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
And yes, is “disinformation”. The authors know it is not true, they know how to make scientific music, yet peddle this without disclosing the conflicts of interest of the funders of Wuhan’s labs who they peddle this for; it is on par with oil companies disinforming the world on climate change to avoid regulations. Half of science is peddling, the other half is back-pedaling, and humanity is all the worse for it. Academia does nothing to hold the peddlers accountable for unethical conduct, while academic-associated outlets amplify their intimidation tactics seeking to silence those of us who call out unethical conduct. The acquiescence of many academics and their journals to the grotesque behavior of these few, heavily conflicted and compromised virologists may have a devastating effect on the academy, unless more can find the courage to put down their dusty tomes and speak up for the epistemological ethics that ought to distinguish the academy from a church whose pastors are drunk with power and desperate to avoid accountability.
COVID-19 outbreak forecasting revealed to me that inefficiencies in the dissemination of information or insight, such as the insight I had about an oncoming pandemic with 2-3 day doubling times in prevalence, could have significant negative impacts on our society. In earl 2020, there were intimidation letters telling me not to share my findings, or else I would be “minimizing” COVID and I could be responsible for the deaths of millions. Most do not know how much these academic pressures play a role in suppressing scientific discourse, yet now at least anybody who enters this space with an open mind can find the paper trail. We saw - and are still seeing - asymmetries in the diffusion of information or insight depending on whether such information or insight points towards a lab origin or not. As a consequence of imbalanced institutional power, intimidation, and diffusion of information & insight about COVID origins, there is an enduring uncertainty in the minds of the public about just how confidently one can and should believe the lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.
As a consequence of this manufactured uncertainty, peddled by an industrial lobby of academics bound to risky research and its funders, we are marching towards the enduring policy of mismanaging risky research by underestimating the likelihood of catastrophic lab accidents from research enhancing potential pandemic pathogens. It’s within the realm of possibility that our inaction, motivated by these scientists’ disinformation campaign and intimidation efforts, could lead to the next research-related pandemic, and such a pandemic has a non-zero chance of upending or possibly ending human civilization.
The path ahead
Why, in the midst of this battle with such high stakes, am I pausing my Substack?
There are personal reasons, and there are professional reasons, and then there are the far more important gut feelings that drive my big life decisions.
The personal reason for pausing my Substack is that COVID was never what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be happy and shop at REI, but COVID was a tragedy in which I couldn’t do nothing. By grace, the triage period of COVID is over. The outbreaks have faded away into endemic background burden, and while some may continue to study the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, and I will continue to read their papers, there is no longer any urgent need for me to be involved.
The battles for COVID origins continue, but as of now the evidence is all there in the public domain, not just the evidence pointing towards a lab origin, but the evidence building the case that a set of scientists has been engaged in highly unethical research conduct, they have weaponized their media connections to devolve science into narrative warfare, and they have done all of this with the apparent goal of protecting their funding sources & lines of work from investigations into the possibility that they may have caused a pandemic. The funding sources include Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, a branch within Francis Collins’ NIH, and their colleague Jeremy Farrar at the Wellcome Trust all of whom advocated on behalf of research enhancing potential pandemic pathogens before they funded Peter Daszak and his DEFUSE colleagues in 2019 (The Wellcome Trust funding Daszak et al through CEPI and its Global Virome Project). The funding sources that require investigation also include the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and other Chinese-based funding sources like the People’s Liberation Army.
Scientists like Eddie Holmes are not just heavily funded by NIAID, but Holmes is also heavily networked in the Chinese Academy, he has published papers with PLA members, and he has not been forthcoming about the extent of his knowledge of research activities in Wuhan. Holmes published the paper calling lab origin theories ‘implausible’ without disclosing his own role helping the Wuhan Institute of Virology characterize bat SARS-CoVs like RaTG13, yet that is such a massive conflict of interest deserving of more outrage and inquiry. Even Peter Hotez, on his crusade against the hallucination of “Anti-Science”, refuses to acknowledge that he subcontracted risky coronavirus research to Zhou Yusen and others at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Andersen seeks to conduct similar research on filoviruses, and so does the zoonotic origin’s toxic bully Angela Rasmussen. This industrial lobby of academics doing risky work seeks to protect itself from inquiry, investigations, and regulations disruptive to their pursuit of fame & fortune.
There is an urgent need to investigate the scientists who studied SARS-CoVs with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, their funders, and the media outlets peddling with extreme bias the narratives of these scientists & their funders. None can be trusted. I could continue to stand in an online picket line until the day I die, holding a sign saying “Investigate Wuhan Virology et al.” and “Gain of Function Research May Kill Us All”, and it’s possible nothing would happen. I could waste my whole life saying the same thing, walking in the same circles outside NIAID, and accountability may never come if the powers that be wish for accountability to be avoided. I will always be happy to support others in this struggle, to provide water and food to those in the picket line, and provide unbiased scientific expert opinions on evidence in this matter.
However, I have a new professional affiliation that is giving me new cause for optimism, hope, and excitement, and a new way to spend my scientific energy for the greater good. I’ve begun working at Sandia National Labs doing exciting science at the intersection of many important problems facing the world today (all opinions expressed here, on Twitter, and elsewhere are my own and do not represent the views of my employer etc.). For example, I recently had the opportunity to work on forecasts of nuclear severe accidents like what happened in Fukushima and develop protocols for mitigating risks during such accidents. I’m doing some work on Artificial Intelligence and other exciting topics concerning new & sometimes risky technology. My new coworkers are brilliant, I love them dearly, and there is important work that needs to be done. From climate change and AI to alternative energy sources and more there’s no shortage of big problems to work on, and I’ve found a place full of admirable colleagues where I can give it my all to make the world a better place. I’ve found Atlantis - why look back?
Best of all, I’m now living out west with the ability to Be Happy and Shop at REI. The only thing I’m missing what I hear in Thoreau’s echo: “simplify, simplify…”
That leads me to my gut feeling. My gut feeling is almost always the real reason why I do anything in life, as few things can synthesize the confluence of feelings, motivations, and possibilities better than my gut. The gut feeling led me to my dog Jack, to Princeton & its mountaineering club, to Diana and her Phoenix Grant, to Raina and her PREEMPT team, to predicting a Black Swan event, shorting the market, and uncovering evidence consistent with a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Today, my gut is telling me that my mind is needed elsewhere, that I should carefully allocate my time and energy to the most important tasks before me.
My gut tells me I should not write many small articles (for now), but instead write several chapters, bind them together and make the chapters into a book. I have no idea who will publish it, only that I will write it. I hope you all will read it when it’s ready!
Today, my gut is telling me that I need to get in better shape, to run harder, hike farther, and climb more distant peaks in remote mountain ranges in Canada, because you only live once, there are mountains out there waiting to be climbed, and good friends to climb them with.
Today, my gut is telling me that a snowball has been rolled down a hill, the cat has been let out of the bag, the evidence of misconduct by Andersen, Holmes, Fauci, Farrar, Daszak, Cohen and many others is clear and easily found by those who look for it. The evidence of a lab origin is adequately documented to have confidence beyond reasonable doubt in a lab origin, and any who care to study this topic impartially will find the evidence, alongside the disconcerting behavior of scientists who sought to hide it. The onslaught of congressional investigations, lawsuits against EcoHealth Alliance, open source research, and other avenues of investigation will continue, and they may break the dam. As intimidation letters fly and lawsuits bubble up, you can taste the desperation of zoonotic origin proponents in the air, you can feel the cannonballs of lab origin evidence zip past your head as they fly towards the dam. My gut is telling me to quietly walk away from the dam and seek higher ground.
I may blog again in the future, but I have no plans for it at this time. I have no idea where my journey ahead will take me. I’ve indefinitely paused all paid subscriptions and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for supporting me during this chapter of my life. I’ve always wanted to become a writer, and for a brief period of time during COVID I’ve felt like one. I would write again if it could help me be happy & shop at REI, so if anybody knows of a publisher who would be interested in publishing a book or two by me, please put us in touch!
In the meantime, I aim to be difficult to find. If you do find me, you’re likely to find me foraging deep in the woods, smashing ice picks into frozen waterfalls, swimming up splitter cracks on desert walls, basking in high-altitude sun while breathing in bitter cold alpine air, or dancing on granite ridges above a sea of glaciers, simplifying life to the bare necessities of love, happiness, and adventure. A conservative philosopher at Princeton met me at a bar once and in his first impression he joked that I was a “Desert Father”, or one of the pre-stoic philosophers who felt that the purpose of philosophy was to live it, not just to study or write about it. As Marcus Aurelius said, “what better life for the practice of philosophy than that which you are currently living?” My path forward is a path of philosophy, a love of wisdom, lived and not just written. May we cross paths again, who knows where.
Be kind to others. Stay curious about everything. Hold power to account if it causes harm. Help our world navigate these thorny issues by cutting out a path of compassion. Encourage academia to rediscover the power of integrity. Support voices who are telling difficult or costly stories. Help us all reduce global temperatures and avoid devastating consequences of catastrophic truths.
Be happy. Shop at REI.
The rest is just details.
Sincerely,
Alex Washburne, PhD
Great story of your life. Love to hear about incredible minds like yours. And even better that you appreciate what’s really important and follow your gut.
One line I hope you'll reconsider though: “Help us all reduce global temperatures …” Look toward the sun and the pole shifts and Earth’s weakening magnetic field. These forces of nature and the scientific truths behind them have everything to do with the changes we are experiencing. We humans have much less influence than we imagine. More like: “Help us prepare for the inevitable changes coming our way.”
Enjoy your next adventures. You have much to contribute to this world. Thank you.
Going to really miss you — your heart, your brain and your courage. All the best to you always.