With over 20 million people dead, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the largest mass-casualty events in human history.
The Black Plague killed 75-200 million people. The Spanish Flu 50 million, World War II (excluding the Holocaust) ~45 million people, World War I killed 20 million, and the Holocaust 6 million people. In terms of lives lost, COVID-19 ranks 4th among the largest singular catastrophes mankind has ever experienced (in fairness, in terms of the percent of people dying, it is lower, since the population has grown over time).
How did this happen? What is the single causal event that precipitated this crisis, and what causes preceded & caused that event? How do we prevent the next COVID-19?
Evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose as a consequence of gain-of-function research in a virology lab in Wuhan. While we don’t know exactly which researcher was patient 0, we can still imagine the human errors and institutional problems with the Wuhan Institute of Virology that caused the pandemic. Maybe an untrained grad student was bit by a mouse, maybe the mouse sneezed, or maybe they dropped a vial. The HEPA filters at the WIV needed to be fixed, so maybe there wasn’t a clear human-error but maybe aerosolized viruses floated from cracks in the seams of poorly sealed cages of infected mice or bats, through the air filtration systems, and into the upper respiratory system of researchers. I don’t know. Barring cooperation from China (and everything about the Chinese government suggests we will never get cooperation from China), we may never know. Not knowing the exact event doesn’t mean we can’t conclude a lab origin: one doesn’t need to know the murderer to know a murder most likely occurred.
Assuming there was a lab origin, we know enough about the surrounding events to begin assessing the systems that created such a pandemic.
While it’s tempting to desire more information on the first days, hours, minutes, and seconds of lab leak leading to a pandemic, a pandemic was not like the Big Bang where science is limited to getting fractions of a second closer to “the event”. There were events that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic. The events preceding the pandemic created the circumstances for such an accident to occur in the first place. The gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology took place in the context of gain-of-function research all around the world, and that gain-of-function research took place in the context of our global systems for science funding, science communication, and science itself.
Even if we found a grad student who dropped the vial and became patient 0, I personally can’t stomach punishing that grad student, as they likely had no malice but rather were pushed and pulled into this research by superiors who were writing their letters of recommendation and made their careers doing this kind of research. Even Zheng-Li Shi, the lead coronavirus researcher at the WIV, exists in a system of government that pressured her to produce more research without providing the necessary funding to fix their HEPA filters, and she existed in a system of colleagues around the world who collaborated with her, wrote grants proposing to do this work, paved the way for this research to be funded, and mentored her on how to conduct this research. That global network of colleagues includes EcoHealth and its alliance, including gain-of-function proponents Ron Fouchier & Marion Koopmans, Ralph Baric, and more, and this global network of colleagues coordinated with global leaders of health science funding like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins to overturn the moratorium on gain-of-function research, paving the way for their risky coronavirus research in Wuhan to be funded. There is not one virus in one bat in one lab. There are human systems as far as the eye can zoom out.
When we zoom out beyond the broken vial, we see a far larger problem than an unlucky grad student, necessitating a far larger solution than retributive justice concentrated at a few scapegoats. Focusing too much on scapegoats risks distracting us from larger, systemic failures that need fixing. Scientists exist in a social & financial system that provides the means, motives, and opportunities for scientific innovation as well as science-caused catastrophes. This system needs to be examined, and any “solution” to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic must be proposed in light of the human system of science that made SARS-CoV-2 possible.
Every single scientist involved in this GoF sub-system of science had good intentions. In the greatest irony of any mass-mortality event in human history, they all wanted to cure disease. These scientists imagined all the horrors nature could throw at us and, in a testament to the power of human imagination, they created horrors that existed nowhere in nature. These biosafety horrors were supposed to stay in a secure lab, but in the rush for fame, glory, and perhaps critical collaborations to enable study animals in China (a big part of SE Asia where the natural horrors exist), these scientists and funders cut corners and overlooked kinks in the armor of Wuhan’s labs. They ran ahead in the arms race to create dangerous viruses & vaccines against them, and they tripped, spilling the vial so to speak, resulting in millions of deaths.
The scientists conducting this specific work were not alone.
The funders like Dr. Fauci & Collins overturned the moratorium on gain-of-function research, allowing this research to be funded. Some funder somewhere provided the means to conduct this experiment. Scientific journals like Nature, Science, and Cell all published gain-of-function research for decades, glorifying researchers who created new horrors and incentivizing the creation of more horrors, providing the motive. Scientists had different opinions on the debate of whether or not to open Pandora’s Box, and we debated. Some sided with the GoF researchers and thought the risk was worth the reward, actively creating space for this work to proceed. Others disagreed with GoF work but stayed silent to not rock the boat & incite the ire of powerful colleagues (Fauci & Collins being some of the most powerful colleagues in the world), and these silent scientists passively allowed space to be created. Failing to speak up is a far lesser fault than those actively creating space for dangerous work, but a role we must nonetheless examine to ensure that future risky research is not able to stifle dissent, to create a safety culture where future scientists feel that if they see something, they can say something without retaliation.
In examining the human systems behind another mass-casualty event, Hannah Arendt wondered how Nazis could do such evil things. Were they all driven by evil motives? In studying a Nazi who murdered many people, Arendt illuminated the banality of evil - the subject was not consumed by an insatiable desire to exterminate people, but rather was unable to think for himself, was thoughtlessly following orders, falling in line, and failing to consider their actions from the perspective of the people most impacted by them.
Nazism and science are morally incomparable, and we should not invoke iconography of the Holocaust to rally support for any political aim. However, the Holocaust was a mass-casualty event caused by a singular social system, driven mostly by people who were thoughtlessly following orders and failing to understand the consequences of their actions on other people. We have to study precedent to understand how human systems can screw up and cause millions of people to die, because that’s what likely happened with COVID-19. The banality of science complicates any moral impugnation of scientists - these scientists were not evil like Arendt’s subject, Eichmann. Yet, the behaviors of scientists thoughtlessly advanced a global system of gain-of-function research that failed to consider the potential impact of its actions on others and, ultimately, unleashed a virus that killed more people than the Holocaust. These scientists were working overtime with good intentions. They wanted to save the world. EcoHealth popularized the idea of “One Health”, that the health of humanity and the health of nature are tied together - they wanted to save both humanity & nature with the truly best intentions, and proposed that inserting a furin cleavage site inside a SARS coronavirus in Wuhan would be the best way to do good.
Where did this system of good intentions go wrong?
Paving our roads with good intentions is clearly not how we create heavenly systems capable of doing only good. Modern science puts an unprecedented amount of power into the hands of modern humans, such that any inefficiencies or immoralities in our scientific system risk causing unprecedented harm - a single virion invisible to the naked eye has the potential to kill 18 million people. We need science to solve the problems civilization faces, yet blindly funding science to save civilization can lead to an even larger, more tragic irony than pandemic-prevention causing a pandemic.
After we swallow the pill that SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab, and as we criticize China for poor transparency & unsafe labs, I believe we need to examine our global scientific system, and not one grad student or lab. As an aggregate, our system failed to use the great power of modern science with great responsibility.
Scientists were just doing their jobs. They were following their passions, reading articles in Nature, and trying to get their own articles in similar journals by building on the work of scientist who came before them. They were publishing or perishing. They were placating colleagues & building collaborations to expand the impact of their work, and, when trying to expand their networks, it was rather indelicate to claim that another person’s proposed research was immoral or of unacceptable risk, as this sounded like an accusation that the scientist was immoral or incapable of managing the risk. So, many who saw problems felt it was a bit indelicate and against the grain of one’s career to voice their concerns. While others argued intensely about gain-of-function research, at the end of the day there is a large network of health science funders with no obligation to follow the same rules. So, if one health science funder decided to go-ahead with the risky work and they got the vaccine that saved humanity, it would leave other funders in the dust. Thus, funding risky research was the Nash Equilibrium of the scientific funding game where any unilateral deviation from this strategy risked making the funder’s portfolio obsolete.
Editors at major journals were accepting papers and looking after the bottom lines of their for-profit journals. They saw papers from Ron Fouchier breeding a bird flu capable of airborne transmission between mammals and, while the editors briefly paused the research to discuss, they ultimately chose to publish the work. By publishing the work, the editors generated high volumes of attention & prestige - their journals, not their competitors, contained the paper that everyone was talking about! By publishing their work, they did the scientific equivalent of a Jackass hold-my-beer stunt posted to YouTube: they created incentive for others to take the stunt one step farther in hopes of getting even more views, even more citations, even more scientific funding and fame.
There was no evil in COVID-19. If the likely lab origin is proven true, there was just a shocking banality of science with the great power to cause great harm by creating a tiny virus smaller than a mote of dust, 1/10,000th of a millimeter in diameter, capable of killing 18 million people. Systems with such power cannot afford the banality of thoughtlessness or lack of consideration for the risks of research.
I was a scientist immersed in this system, about as close as one can get to EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal at DARPA’s PREEMPT program without actually working with EcoHealth. I helped write a section of another, successful DARPA PREEMPT grant studying, forecasting, and aiming to preempt the spillover of bat viruses. I worked with a large network of colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds, from field ecologists catching bats and immunologists running serosurveys to virologists studying the pathophysiology of viruses and statisticians (like me) incorporating subject matter expertise into the analysis of everyone’s data. The team I worked with wisely decided against doing gain-of-function work. The team I worked with acknowledged GoF work on these viruses was risky and unnecessary, that we could learn enough about spillover by catching bats & studying wild viruses without making viruses that didn’t exist in nature. There were very strong guardrails - anything that could even remotely be considered gain-of-function work was flagged for discussion and rejected if it were GoF (thankfully, I never witnessed the team bumping into those guardrails). DARPA, after all, rejected DEFUSE because DEFUSE proposed to conduct GoF work and enhance the transmissibility of SARS CoVs. Good scientific systems and guardrails existed, but the research creating SARS-CoV-2 found funding from other, ambitious funders who lacked these guardrails.
Science can be done responsibly. The engine of innovation may be fine, but it’s the holes in the ship that sink it. Reforming our system requires studying the entire system and filling all the holes. We must see the systemic problems and not focus on a single researcher, lab, or funder. Our global system of science is full of many science funders, journals, research institutions, labs, and researchers all just following passions, mentees following orders, trying to get by, everyone publishing or perishing.
We’ll never be able to stop scientists from identifying Pandora’s Box. We will continue to stumble upon Pandora’s Boxes as long as we do science. We may, however, be able to manage the risk by reducing the number of labs conducting risky research, allocating more resources to those few labs to improve their safety, creating moratoriums on risky research that stay in place unless a representative global supermajority of policymakers (not scientists) believes it’s worth the risk. We can create penalties for journals or other entities that publish blueprints for making dangerous biological agents. We can require all pathogens under study be registered immediately on a decentralized database that can’t be deleted, enabling us to identify a lab origin immediately should a virus get out. We can incorporate our discussion of COVID into research ethics classes of young scientists (rather than our current model of calling a lab-origin theory a racist conspiracy theory). We need to cultivate our fora for scientific debates so that, if there are risks, we discuss them fully, without retaliation, and establish procedures of letting the public & managers know about potential risks of scientific research. We should not fund science in any entity (including any country) that doesn’t follow global standards for biosafety, including standards for transparency on research.
If these solutions were implemented on the heels of Ron Fouchier creating an airborne transmissible, mammalian-infectious bird flu, I believe we could’ve saved 18 million lives and counting.
There are many other solutions we must consider, including probably many I’m not thinking about. Notice, however, that none of these solutions I propose are focusing on punishment of a single scientist. I don’t mean to imply any scientist found responsible for aiding, abetting, or conducting this work will avoid accountability - I trust the courts to work that out, as some people who have suffered injury have a right to file charges and courts will hear their cases. What I worry about is not the punishment of a few negligent researchers, but whether we myopically focus our energy on the few researchers that we forget to change the systems that created this catastrophe in the first place.
By examining the banality of science, and the causes preceding the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may be able to save tens of millions of lives from future research-related pandemics. Such systemic reformations can enhance science and have a positive effect on our civilization comparable with the UN and the rules-based international order that has followed WWII. We study the horrors of history to learn their lessons & never repeat them. If we learn the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can prevent these horrors from happening again.
What better diamond gifts can we make from this filthy coal of a pandemic than an honest and whole account of the pandemic, and reformed systems that prevent this from happening again?
Your reference to good people with good intentions is apt, (I rec Raul Hilberg, Noam Chomsky, Milton Mayer and Norman Cohn for more on this, though I suspect you read their works before you were 16).
Good people with good intentions, and many other people following along in passive compliance out of concern for careerism and convenience, as noted by Chomsky in Great Vocations, The Intellectual talk. (circa 1985, Harvard Divinity School).
Good people going along is an old story.
Now, after the lab leak, it's the shocking number of lies, defamation and gas-lighting in a desperate attempt to drown out truth. I guess, in some ways, that I find so fetid.
Self-conscious lies after the fact are more contemptible. I doubt seriously appealing to decency in some of the people against even thinking about lab leak, even now, will work.
Thx. Alex - once again! -
- Seen from a psychological angle, your claim about the good intentions of the thousands of scientists that were involved in this case are - a bit too much of good will, I'd say.
You have to know a person well to be able to talk about their motives. - That's what dramas are about and novels. Jonathan Franzen has written two very insightful novels about the will of scientists, media people and environmentalists to do good and how it resonantes in persons and their characters / souls: Freedom and Purity - and it turns out it is very complicated to find / disentangle the motives of those willing to do good. We love to say we are doing good, but deep down inside...
So to put it bluntly: The presupposition about scientists as good people is misleading.
It is already clear that the covid story has millions of links to Governments and - agencies. Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi showed that with the Twitter files. And there are tight connections between those manipulations of the discourse and science and scientists. These hard social facts seem to be the focus of the dark underbelly of the Covid story - and there are millions (!) of scientists, media pros, doctors, managers, economists, politicians, administration employees... and all other kinds of people intertwined with this dark and wrong part of the Covid story which is not least about science as part of the modern world powerplay. The dominant forces are those of the superpowers (I count China in here) - and thus science is - - - not a pawn, but an officer in this game. It has some freedom to maneuver, but by and large politics rules and science goes with its imperatives - for the better or worse.
The structures that enable the conflicts between science, society and politics that we dabate here, have long been known and debated. Science - as progress in general, has its pros and cons. We have to keep that in mind and soldier on - as good as we can.
My Covid bottom line is: The free speech violations/ hinderings /censorship in the name of science and in the name of medicine were never justified and - wrong from the start and were the main obstacles to handle this virus in a reasonable way.
Bottom line II: He who has not understood/ known before how important free speech is in complex modern societies has a huge case study right in front of his eyes now that proves - again! - how important this basic insight is to come to grips with the complexity of modern life. Free speech is the necessary link between human failures and societal needs to cope with them. - None of the two we can escape. Not now and not in the future - as we have never been able before too. Humans failures are inescapable and free speech is the most civilized and reasonable tool to handle this existential truth that we have at our hands - if we are willing to make it happen (without this will, free speech is no reality).