Maybe COVID was a lab leak, after all

Frankenstein COVID

Humans worry about messing with Mother Nature. 

Dr. Frankenstein's creation

There is partisan consequence to the origins of the COVID. Where it came from matters because it changes the focus of blame. 

Democrats focused on how American dealt with a problem that arrived on our doorstep--people getting sick with an infectious disease. Without strong evidence they planted a stake in the ground: COVID happened "naturally," in a transfer from bats to some unknown intermediate host animal to humans. Since it was an accident of nature, the focus can be on whether Trump handled it correctly. Trump, Fox, and Republicans generally, said it was the "China-virus," and therefore Americans should focus blame for any problems on them. 

Evidence that it was created in a Wuhan biological lab is a multiple victory for Republicans. Democrats had scoffed at that idea, and they would be wrong. News media hostile to Trump had dismissed a Wuhan laboratory genesis, so they would be wrong. Politically correct people who accused Trump of racism would be wrong. Mis-informed President Biden is playing catch-up to Trump. Win-win-win-win.

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed yesterday by a physician Steven Quay, and physicist Richard Muller, arguing that science points to laboratory tinkering with the virus, pointing to a genetic "fingerprint," in the part that increased the overall lethality of the virus--the so-called "gain of function." 

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. 

They conclude by calling this "the damning fact."

There is a whole other way to look at this. It is neither damning, nor surprising. It was just a mistake of the kind that happens all the time in science. 

BSL-3 and BSL-4 Labs

There are two dozen labs around the world like the one in Wuhan. There are four Level-4 Biological Safety Labs in the U.S.: A CDC one in Atlanta, a military one in Maryland, and university-based ones in Galveston and San Antonio, Texas. Scientists know that manipulating viruses is dangerous, which is why they are done in facilities with special filters, hazard suits, and positive air pressure. 

The U.S. government actively defends the need for labs. A NIH web page titled "The Need for Biosafety Labs" the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease reads:

New threats to health continually emerge naturally, however, as bacteria and viruses evolve, are transported to new environments, or develop resistance to drugs and vaccines. . . .To control epidemics and protect the public health, medical researchers must quickly identify naturally occurring microbes and then develop diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines for them. Preparing for bioterrorism--the deliberate release of a microbe into a community in which it is not a current health concern--calls for the identical scientific skills and strategies.

Here is the full text:  Click: NIH Biosafety Labs Needed

Humans have been writing about the hazards of tinkering with Mother Nature for all recorded history. Adam and Eve ate from a forbidden tree. Pandora opened a box. Prometheus gave fire to humanity--and received eternal punishment for it. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, describing the monster created by a scientist. It was her submission in a competition to write the most terrifying of horror stories.

Voters in Jackson County, Oregon voted to disallow genetically modified crops to be grown here. People pay extra to buy organic food. People worry about herbicides, pesticides, lead paint, asbestos.

There is good reason for worry. Modern science sometimes goes wrong. Nuclear weapons testing at Hanford during World War II released radioactive iodine that damaged the thyroids of children downwind. The supposed wonder-drug Thalidomide, intended to reduce risks of miscarriage, caused an estimated 100,000 deaths and 10,000 babies born with birth defects. 

Democrats are in a Catch-22 with the Wuhan lab leak theory. Normally the right approach to deal politically with this potential is to say "So What?" What is the difference if the virus mutated in a bat or in a laboratory? Either way, the real issue is whether China played down the hazard--effectively doing exactly what Trump did. The blame settles on the response. 

The catch is that the Wuhan lab theory points back to the hazards of science. Democrats are fully invested in the notion that the COVID vaccine is safe, that scientists know enough and are careful enough to create--at "warp speed" and under emergency authorization--a vaccine safe enough to put into the arm of nearly everyone, including people who are very unlikely themselves to get seriously ill from the virus.

Democrats want science to seem benevolent and trustworthy. They are fully committed to widespread vaccination. They are betting the farm on the notion that people of science know what they are doing and can see the downstream consequences. I hope they are right. I am vaccinated. But sometimes they mess up, even when their intentions are good.

Supposedly good. Wuhan is in China, after all, and Americans may presume bad motives. Just why would anyone investigate increasing  the "gain of function"? Many Americans, on both left and right, would be suspicious if the outbreak came out of Galveston, Texas, wondering what the CIA is up to. They are doubly so if it comes out of Wuhan.

It would be better for Democrats if there were clear evidence that bats are to blame.