Being sure without data

"On reading," by Simon Wain-Hobson, is a weekly discussion of scientific papers and news articles around gain of function research in virology.

Since January 2024, Dr. Wain-Hobson has written weekly essays for Biosafety Now discussing risky research in virology. You can read his entire series here.

Ile de Levant, South of France.

On reading Why are so many people sure Covid leaked from a lab? By David Wallace-Wells as an Opinion in the New York Times, May 21, 2025.

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This Opinion deals with everything but the nuts and bolts of the origins of the COVID-19 virus - culture wars, politics and the peddling of science way beyond anything reasonable. As the dangerous GOF controversy was deformed by much disinformation, let’s take a look.

We learn that the science remains far more ambiguous and unsettled, with many prominent and unimpeachably pedigreed figures going so far as to call the lab leak theory a dead end and large surveys, though imperfect, showing significant support among virologists and epidemiologists for a natural origin explanation. At their best scientists are schizophrenic. On the one hand they keep a cold eye on the data and don’t overinterpret them. On the other they are bubbling with thoughts and hypotheses some of which can be tested. Scientists make and break most of their hypotheses. Those that can’t be broken either by themselves or by others tend to grow up and become real.

It's best when data and opinions are kept in separate bins.

It doesn’t matter how pedigreed the researcher is nor what surveys show, if the data are insufficient, the jury is out. And the scientific jury demanding hard data that makes sense of SARS-CoV-2 virology, is out. Ambiguous and unsettled are not good words. Nor is the word ‘sure’ in the title for nobody can be sure when the jury is out.

Given this let’s reformulate the title. Why do people take sides on COVID origins when there’s insufficient data to come off the fence?

After an introduction we get to, I think a few observations about the course of the discourse are nevertheless worth staking out. Here are six.

It’s not just in America that the tide of the argument has turned.

We’re reminded that the German foreign intelligence service [BND] had concluded with 80 to 90 percent confidence that the virus had come out of a lab — and that the service did so as far back as 2020. In April the French Academy of Medicine came out in support of a lab origin, too, with 97 percent of its members voting in favor of that theory. How can you come up with such a probability when data is lacking, the jury out? Worse, in 2020 when there was far less data than today. As no data were provided, this no more than an opinion.

The intelligence service will probably answer that their information is available on a need-to-know basis which the public doesn’t have. No consideration is made for the millions who died, whose kin would like very much like to know, some of whom need to know in order to move on.

The BND can’t even throw a few scraps down from on high.

The French Academy members also delivered an opinion. Were they well informed? Have they read the remarkable 478 page analysis by Gilles Demaneuf of the infamous Proximal Origins paper in Nature Medicine? Unlikely; few seem to have done so. Everyone should.

Opinions are stimulating in private and certainly part and parcel of the stuff of science, but on the world’s stage they are unhelpful.

Wallace comes up with a remarkable sentence: perhaps we’re converging on a new consensus for reasons other than hard evidence, surfing waves of reflexive distrust and telling ourselves it’s free thinking. In the absence of hard evidence how can anything converge on a new something or other? Perhaps some ethereal meme conjured up by influencers? From the scientific perspective it is meaningless. Yet it is in the NY Times!

If you are a lab-leak believer, you might not have thought enough about the responsibility of Trump.

Belief is a word that should be rarely used without thinking. It has heavy cultural overtones and should be kept out of scientific discourse. As the origins of the COVID virus is a scientific issue, data trumps beliefs. We are told that the Obama era moratorium on dangerous GOF research was lifted under President Trump’s first mandate, which is true. However, the NIH was itching to get the moratorium lifted and was the driving force behind it. Yes, it occurred on Trump’s watch but setting it at his door is an error.

There was an early effort to control debate, but it didn’t work very well.

Here we encounter the infamous Proximal Origins paper alluded to above. It’s a remarkable text for in the first months of 2020 there were no data whatsoever to permit any discussion of the origins of the virus. Theories, opinions for sure which are fine. But to come off the fence without data in a high-profile scientific journal like Nature Medicine? No, that’s professional failure. Read by millions of non-scientists, it was taken as fact.

We’re told that US opinion quickly shifted towards a lab leak as time went by which is hardly surprising given that President Trump and his Secretary of State said there was good evidence. Plus, they used Twitter.

We learn that, In general… the country’s liberal institutions — scientific, political and media — lined up against the lab leak theory, engaging in some good-faith argumentation and some bad-faith suppression. It seems that as President Trump said x, y and z, that was enough for US liberal institutions to go the other way.

Amazingly irrational. Too many in the so-called free press took sides rather than quiz both the President and the very institutions they are supposed to keep tabs.

Reference is made to Jon Stewart’s take on the origins of the COVID virus, perhaps to appear user friendly to the liberals. Indeed, the epicenter of the pandemic and the home of the world biggest bat coronavirus lab – Wuhan – are the same. For many that was enough, but in the hard world of scientific proof you mustn’t mix up cause and correlation.

There is something called Titius-Bode’s law concerning the orbits of planets in the Solar System. It goes back to the 18^th century. No solid theoretical explanation underlies the Titius–Bode law… Since it may be a mathematical coincidence rather than a "law of nature", it is sometimes referred to as a rule instead of "law".

Jon Stewart made the simple error of mixing up cause and correlation. He can be forgiven as he’s not a scientist. Most importantly, he can make fun of himself.

Some will say the horse has bolted from the stable, that proof is no longer possible. Certainly, without cooperation from the Chinese, that is a reasonable analysis.

Yet the HIV/AIDS community built up a solid and coherent body of data concerning HIV’s origins without ever finding the bolted horse. There is a consensus. The nagging point for virologists is that, until they find a few coronaviruses that are much closer to SARS-CoV-2, there is always going to be doubt. What is striking is that five years on, with significant support among virologists and epidemiologists for a natural origin explanation, their case is far from satisfactory. And this from a virologist who was involved in origins of HIV.

The bad behavior, while not all that effective, also wasn’t trivial.

Do read this section. The effect of the Proximal Origins paper stoked bad behavior from the outset. Eventually, there would be what were, in my mind, other examples of regrettable behavior from scientists and public officials: haphazard research that got overhyped in the press, stonewalled FOIA requests and congressionally mandated intelligence reports that did not satisfy the transparency requirements of the law, squirrelly Senate testimony that was at least evasive and, some believe, tiptoed up to the line of perjury. If scientists cease to be schizophrenic, why should they be funded? Remember the trilogy? First, do no harm. Second, get your facts straight. Third, shut up if you can’t master them.

If the lab leak believers had won the debate sooner, it almost certainly would have meant a different pandemic response.

We read that if you were trying to take account of partisan divergence about Covid, you’d probably say that those raising the loudest alarm about the novel coronavirus were conservatives, while the liberal establishment — up to and including Anthony Fauci — were trying to reassure the country that the threat was minuscule. Here both sides got it wrong. The epicenter was Wuhan where, as was/is common knowledge, there was/is a very active lab working on bat coronaviruses. The liberal establishment bought into the knee-jerk reaction coming from the NIH, that the threat was minimal which was silly as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was exploding. Even if there had been a lab leak, the world was beyond contemplating probabilities based on pre-COVID findings.

Nobody knew back in early 2020 as data was lacking. The Chinese didn’t share readily what they knew. Lack of data didn’t stop the elites – the author’s word – from talking.

Would things have played out differently if the pandemic origin discourse had played out differently, too, with a more open discussion leading… It’s always seemed to me intuitive that it would have, and always seemed strange to me how many people were arguing in 2020 and 2021 that the question of origin was immaterial. This is the historian’s what if question that allows him to go beyond the facts. In science it’s called speculation and referees and editors usually purge it from manuscripts. Apart from Proximal Origins that is.

In the face of a pandemic bearing down on the world most virologists would say that the origins question should be put on hold. Concentrate on stopping the beast. Later on, the origins question would be legitimate scientifically – it’s an inevitable piece in the jigsaw. Given the harrowing loss of life and economic impact - everybody has their stories - the origin of the virus also has cultural urgency. People simply wanted and still want to know. That’s not a big ask. It behooved scientists to do a good job and not behave in the puerile way that has marked, no, dogged the issue ever since.

Which is to say: One glossed-over aspect of the origins discourse today is that if the lab leak theory had spread more widely and more quickly in 2020 than it did, it is not hard to imagine that the result would have been harsher mitigation measures, justified by right-wing concerns as much as left-wing ones. Really? What different measures would public health teams the world over have done differently knowing it escaped from a lab? It is far from obvious. Cut the unhelpful right-wing, left-wing stuff and concentrate on the data.

But it is the geopolitical stakes that loom even larger.

This is another what if section. We read that ...almost certainly, a more pervasive conviction that Covid-19 began in a Wuhan lab would have bolstered the position of China hawks in the national security establishment and pushed the country even deeper into great-power conflict. Is this reason enough not to talk up the lab leak? If the nuts and bolts of scientific data are subordinated to geopolitical agendas, we’re fried.

Note that China is heavily investing in hard core science that requires rigor with groups publishing in the top scientific journals. At the same time, they’re not cooperating on the origins of the COVID virus.

Yet step back a second. If the COVID pandemic epicenter had been in Kawaoka territory (Madison, Wisconsin) or Fouchier lands (Rotterdam in the Netherlands) and resulted from a lab accident, do you really think the US or Dutch governments would not have pushed back on such a grotesque lapsus? The only difference with China would have been the greater chance of a whistleblower speaking out.

That said, many whistleblowers in US science have been shafted over the past 30 years. Just look at the effect of Pax NIH on discussion of dangerous GOF research (Chilled virology).

Nothing is said about the shock to science and virology that proof of a lab leak would entail. We’re paid to contain these viruses as best we can. Not to make more. We had to wait for a new NIH Director under a President the liberal elite loath to stop the folly of dangerous GOF research. First, do no harm. Let that sink in.

Back to the reformulated question, why do people take sides on COVID origins when there’s insufficient data to come off the fence?

Jon Stewart in his sincere tirade says scientists don’t know when to stop. He mentioned the resurrection of the Spanish flu virus (1918 and all that) thus: What if we just, I don’t know, woke it up. And nobody in the room was, like, no, let’s not do that. But they did that.

Readers will know this is now an experiment explicitly prohibited by the recent Executive Order on dangerous GOF research (Sun goes down on Gain of Folly research).

Stewart went on: The world ends, the last words man utters are somewhere in a lab, a guy goes, huh huh, it worked! He’s clearly in phase with Terry Pratchett before him: Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

Human curiosity and stupidity are boundless. From HIV/AIDS on, virologists have had a wonderful run. However, they simply didn’t know when to stop faced with resurrection of the Spanish flu virus followed by dangerous GOF research. Under scrutiny, they fudged and aligned with Pax NIH. No matter what the data said.

On the otherside there’s China bashing and ‘certainty’ in the lab leak. At least they are reining in Dangerous GOF research.

Conclusions

Wallis-Wells speculated using the NYT megaphone. Could do better.

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Aside 1

Outside of the intelligence communities, investigating the lab leak possibility fell to a heterogenous crowd of scientists and non-scientists. The DRASTIC consortium was particularly efficient. US Right to Know (USRTK) was very good at getting information via freedom of information act requests. The Paris Group discussed the lab leak hypothesis openly and dispassionately for years.

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Aside 2

The easternmost tip of the Ile de Levant (left in photo) was the first part of Provence liberated from the Nazis in August 1944.

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Simon Wain-Hobson is an emeritus professor at the Institute Pasteur, Paris, from which he retired in 2021. He and his colleagues were the first to sequence the genome of HIV, and Wain-Hobson has published more than 230 papers on virology and cancer.