The "Fog of War" concerning the origins of SARS-CoV-2

 

The following essay is converted from an 18 part twitter thread I posted on December 30, 2021. I have converted this semi-telegraphic thread to more familiar prose, but I'm not at this stage, anyway, proposing to write it up more formally. I might add more links, in future. The original thread can be found here.

 

This morning (December 30, 2021) I listened to two consecutive radio programmes on Australian Radio National. The first was a convincing story about the deliberate release of smallpox in the colony of NSW, 1789, in order to assist with British colonisation and Indigenous depopulation. The second was the "Health Report", a conversation between Dr Norman Swan and Prof Peter Doherty, an immunologist awarded the Nobel Prize. It concerned the origins of SARS-CoV-2. A transcript of this conversation is available at the ABC website, where you can also hear the broadcast. (Not sure if this is available outside Australia.) I remember hearing this episode when it was first broadcast [July 12, 2021] and I probably tweeted about it then.

 

However, even if I did tweet about this interview in July, I have more knowledge and new ideas today. 

 

First, I have enormous respect for Prof Doherty. He and I are each scientific advisors for Doctors for the Environment Australia. That is one of my most prestigious honours, but probably one of Prof Doherty's top hundred. In comparison (to Prof Doherty) my last grant, an Australian Research Council "Future Fellowship" was awarded in 2011. Since 2016 I've only held honorary (unpaid) academic positions. 

 

To add to my obscurity, I've never been interviewed by Dr Swan, who (as it happens) is also a scientific advisor for Doctors for the Environment Australia. However, I have spoken with Prof Peter Doherty, for over an hour, in 2019 (pre-pandemic). Our conversation was mostly about climate change, but we also discussed infectious diseases, especially my paper from 2012 called "Infectious disease emergence and global change: thinking systemically in a shrinking world".

 

In this ABC interview, Norman Swan raised the issue of "gain of function". Norman seemed a bit more sceptical, on rehearing today, than I had appreciated in July. Peter, on other hand, seemed a little more agitated than I recall, almost shrill at times.

 

My second main point, therefore, is that Norman Swan should have interviewed someone for balance - not me; perhaps Prof Richard Ebright (@R_H_Ebright), or Prof Simon Wain-Hobson, (Pasteur Institute, Paris) whose essay "Britain MUST lead the way in banning disturbing lab research that could have created Covid-19, says virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint for AIDS" was published in October 2021.

 

At the time of the original broadcast Prof Doherty had just co-authored a review of the origins of SARS-2 in Cell, a high ranking journal. More recently, a letter to Cell (in response) by a group of authors including Prof Jacques van Helden, Richard Ebright, myself and many others was rejected. It is available here, but as a non-indexed comment.

At the time of the interview (July 2021) a long (over 1000 word) letter to the Lancet by van Helden et al and 13 co- authors (including myself as second author) was in limbo. It had been submitted in January 2021, but rejected alsmost immediately; for no good reason. You can read it here. It is called "An appeal for an open scientific debate about the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2". But we resubmitted a version (this time with 16 co-authors) in July (or perhaps early August) 2021, and it was finally published in Lancet in September, 2021. You can read it here.  This letter was in response to the now rather infamous Lancet letter (Calisher et al) [February, 2020] co-ordinated by Dr Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). This letter wseemed to characterise anyone suggesting SARS-2 could be lab leak as supporting "conspiracy" thinking.

We now know (as of a few days ago, via this broadcast by a committee of the British parliament, that Dr Richard Horton (@richardhorton1) - the Lancet editor - had to "extract" a conflict of interest concession from Dr Daszak, regarding his role in Calisher et al. This took 16 months.  Several other co-authors (of 27) also had links with the EcoHealth Alliance; yet they also failed to declare any conflict of interest. (Perhaps a topic for a future twitter thread?)

We also now know, as of October 2021, that Prof Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffDSachs) queried Dr Daszak's transparency, as discussed in an article in Science.

 

Summing Up

 

In short, this story is a mess, involving conflicts of interest, overly trusting editors (but in asymmetric direction - away from a lab leak as a viable hypothesis) and sleepy science journalists, with a few exceptions eg Paul Thacker @thackerpd and Ian Birrell @Ianbirrell.

 

In his public interview by the British parliamentarians, Richard Horton implied that publication of our response to Calisher et al was made possible because Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus (WHO Director) gave some credibility to the lab leak possibility (eg here). If so, Tedros does, in part, because of three open letters written by the "Paris group" (of which I am a member, along with many of my Lancet and Cell co-authors.) You can read the first open letter, published in the Wall St Journal, here. The first two of our three open letters (and perhaps the third, which was to the WHO) preceded a letter in Science by Bloom et al.  This letter made very similar arguments to our open letters, and also to our then unpublished letter to Lancet.

 

Some of the authors involved with this letter in Science mentioned (though not in their letter) their preference for publication in a journal rather than open letters. I agree, but as mentioned, we chose to self-publish primarily as our letter to Lancet (January 2021) was at that stage rejected, just as our more recent letter to Cell was.

8 points concerning the conversation between Peter Doherty and Norman Swan (i.e. The Health Report)

 

1. Norman needs to interview an expert (eg Prof Richard Ebright or Prof Simon Wain-Hobson) to balance Peter Doherty's view (as mentioned above). 

 

2. Publication in high impact journals (eg Cell, Lancet) does not necessarily mean the full story, nor absence of bias. 

 

3. The possibility of a lab leak need not be "evil"; it could be human error.

 

4. Peter uses the term "crazy" to describe the events in 1977 that led to the H1N1 pandemic. He also says is was a "million years ago". However, I am not so sanguine as to to think human error has since been eradicated. For example, in December 2021 a lab leak of SARS-2 occurred in Taiwan.  

5. Peter mentions the 1977 event may have been deliberate, from "old USSR". Maybe that's right (I don't think it's proven) but we now know a part of the US military, called DARPA, rejected  a proposal involving Gain of Function and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on ethical grounds. For example, Emily Craig reported (based on whistle-blown material) that "experts wanted to genetically enhance coronaviruses" for release among Yunnan bats to "stop new viruses jumping from bats to humans"; rejected over concerns it could put 'local communities at risk'. That is, in this case, DARPA had more concern for ethics than the grant proposer, which included the EcoHealth Alliance.

 

6. Peter defends Gain of Function work to Norman Swan, using beneficial examples such as the vacines for measles, mumps and rubella and also yellow fever. However, not all Gain of Function work is benign or safe; as DARPA understands.

 

7. Peter stated "people like Eddie Holmes .. looked very hard at sequences .. they couldn't see anything that suggested that it was "an engineered strain in any sense whatsoever". 

However, many others have pointed out that engineered viruses can now be extremely hard to detect. 

When Ian Birrell (@Ianbirrell) reviewed Dr Jeremy Farrar's book on the pandemic he stated that it said "Holmes was, at first, 80% sure this thing had come out of a lab". Dr Farrar is the head of the Wellcome Trust, and a co-signatory of Calisher et al; he certainly warrants an interview by the UK parliament, as Richard Horton was.

 

Conclusion 

 

Mistakes can occur, even in 2021. There is a "fog of war" about the origin of SARS-2. Its cause matters because SARS-3 could be from a lab leak.

 

We need more respectful listening, debate & rigour.

 

Finally, I would like to acknowledge citizen scientists, such as the many involved in DRASTIC, including Billy Bostickson. Their work did a great deal to convince me that a lab leak was plausible, something I mentioned in an editorial I published in the Journal of Human Security in December 2020, before I was aware of the Paris group.

PS. The issue of gain of function and lab leaks is also relevant to "novel entities" and to "planetary health". The journal Lancet Planetary Health has (also this month) rejected a co-authored letter ("Laboratory-constructed pathogens: a new risk to planetary health?") making that point.  Its editor (Dr. Alastair Brown) stated, in the rejection letter, in part: 

"While we certainly appreciate the importance of the points raised, in the present case, we do not feel that your comment would be likely to pique the immediate interest of the broader planetary health and sustainable development communities such that we can find space for it in our comment section."

We are now trying for another journal .. it's a sadly repetitive story.

Science, also recently, rejected a letter I wrote in response to their editorial by their new (and youngish) editor - H. Holden Thorp. I hope you can soon read about it here - Science even rejected my e-letter, publishing a single one, in support.