Chilly New York times
Chilly New York times
"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.
Questions about whether Covid leaked from a Chinese laboratory have cast a chill over American virus research, drying up funding for scientists who collect or alter dangerous pathogens and intensifying a debate over those practices.
The pullback has transformed one of the most highly charged fields of medical science. While some believe such experiments could fend off the next pandemic, others worry that they are more likely to start one. Not a bad opening gambit. Tension is built using a handful of strong words. The reader must be wondering, especially as it’s from the NYT. Yes, the COVID-19 lab leak was an ostracized conspiracy theory that has since morphed into a credible hypothesis. That said, the establishment opinion is overwhelmingly that the virus was a zoonotic infection. Yet if so, how could Big Science allow itself to be chilled by a minority? It makes no sense.
Collecting and studying pathogens is essential and helps us understand know what is going on. Altering pathogens is vague language but here it is used in the context of DURC (ex-GOF), basically adapting animal pathogens to transmission between humans, aka making novel human viruses, aka making the world a more dangerous place. Not surprisingly this generated a highly charged atmosphere from 2012 onwards. True, the COVID lab leak hypothesis has constituted a quantum jump.
The journalists present both sides of the DURC argument as is their practice, albeit sparsely – they have length restrictions. The problem is that such research could not fend off any pandemic (see numerous essays here). The NYT authors are behind the curve.
Moving on: A proposal to infect ferrets with a mutant bird flu virus passed the federal government’s most rigorous biosafety review only to be rebuffed by the National Institutes of Health. Troy Sutton, the scientist behind the studies, said that health officials referred to the public controversy over the lab leak theory in advising him to pursue different experiments. A little background is necessary. Back in 2014 Dr. Sutton was lead author on a paper that adapted an ostrich H7N1 flu virus to airborne droplet transmission between ferrets. On reading critiqued the paper and so will be brief.
The single most important point was that this airborne transmissible virus killed 60% of ferrets. The Fouchier and Kawaoka studies which dominated the debate by being the first, were child’s play by comparison. This 60% fatality is roughly 30 times more than Spanish flu, on a par with Ebola but less than untreated AIDS – macabre text but there is no point being obtuse or prissy.
And apart from On reading, no dog barked when this paper was published.
Getting back to the ferret experiment mentioned in the NYT piece, given the trauma of COVID, no wonder health officials were elliptical and proffered advice to a researcher whose career nobody wanted to see broken. Loading the decision on the back of the lab leak theory – now credible, but unproven in the rigorous scientific sense, just like the zoonotic theory - was too easy a solution. Anyway, the journalists mention that such work can help prepare vaccines to target pandemic-ready viruses. This vaccine nonsense has been debunked many times. And by the way, what are pandemic-ready viruses? More fuzzy language.
“The next flu pandemic is brewing in nature, but we have very little means of stopping it, very little means of identifying what the most dangerous viruses are,” said Dr. Sutton, the Penn State virologist. “This freight train is coming, and we need to do anything we can do to get ahead of that.” Here we have an admission from another practitioner of DURC (ex-GOF) research as to the difficulties in identifying the next pandemic virus and so, the relevance of the work. And the only thing he can come up with is, in colloquial English, to do anything. Hardly a clarion call for thoughtful research.
Unlike Godot, the freight train arrives from time to time. That said, pandemics are rare, exaggeration unnecessary. And while the world’s current population trajectory is unstainable, it is a far cry from the days when microbes went unchecked. In the long run, virology, immunology and industry have performed well although nobody predicted the COVID pandemic for umpteen reasons as mentioned in multiple essays.
The 2018 project of Dr. Sutton that came under special federal review concerned an avian H7N9 flu virus. The story is clearly explained so there is no need to repeat it here. The project was recommended for funding and nodded on by the DURC/GOF committee even though the US Centers for Disease Control wrote as long as there is no evidence of ongoing, sustained person-to-person spread of H7N9 virus, the public health risk assessment would not change substantially.
Then the COVID pandemic struck and impacted Dr Sutton’s project. It seems he was fobbed off with vague arguments “They just said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of controversy about this kind of work in the news right now,’” Dr. Sutton recalled. “They weren’t comfortable funding it.” So much for scientific clarity, you know.
The NYT journalists recycle more tired and unsupported arguments as to the benefits of Fouchier and Kawaoka like work on bird flu viruses. It’s one thing to interview scientists, it’s another to fact check them. The rub of course is that the journalists don’t have the knowledge to appreciate the two sides. That is understandable and not a criticism. But does that constitute license to repeat arguments that have been debunked in the scientific literature in a top newspaper? Such are the dangers of science reporting. This difficulty has been pointed out by Donald McNeil in his recent book The Wisdom of Plagues.
If ever another outside opinion was needed we learn that Eric S. Lander, then President Biden’s science adviser, publicly doubted scientists’ ability to identify future pandemic viruses. Jason Matheny, then a technology and national security expert at the National Security Council, worried that identifying new viruses would assist bioweapons creators. While Eric Lander is not a virologist, he’s an excellent and capable scientist. As to the bioweapons angle and the malevolent mind, virologists totally ignore it, or say it’s ‘not their responsibility’, even though it is (Do no harm 1). Even though they are the ones uploading to the web recipes to make novel human viruses for all to see. And maybe use one day.
But other scientists said that studies were being stifled even before health officials could assess them, driving research to nations with weaker biosafety practices... As Fouchier and Kawaoka like experiments cannot deliver anything concrete to public health officials, it is not a loss to science. The problem with any paper published in Nature or Science is that they have tremendous impact. The knock-on, me-too, copycat effect of such papers can last 5-6 years. The cat has been out of the bag for more than a decade and has not advanced the field. The sentence opening this paragraph is merely a string of words without meaning.
That the administrative reaction is opaque is not surprising. DURC was always supposed to be decided by a few and even here, when a specialized government committee, which keeps secret its membership as well as details about deliberations, reviewed and approved Dr Sutton’s project, the post-COVID fallout was enough to block it. It seems that Dr. Emily Erbelding, Director of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, didn’t want to disown the specialized committee and came up with an administrative device for declining funding.
The issue isn’t complex. Why finance Fouchier and Kawaoka like projects that cannot answer the questions posed, cannot advance the field, or provide something useful in terms of public health? Competition for funding is so tight that the ‘Why not?’ argument doesn’t work. Unfortunately, rational thoughts were not behind the decision. “They weren’t comfortable funding it” which isn’t an explanation, you know. Opaque indeed, like most of the establishment’s reactions throughout the entire DURC/ex-GOF controversy.
Sunlight, quick!
Aside
Apropos the ostrich H7N1 flu experiment, two additional thoughts:
• Up to 2014, when the paper was published, no H7N1 virus had infected a human. Since then, a handful of H7N1 spillovers to humans have been recorded. Hardly a brewing pandemic or a pandemic-ready virus. Why therefore was it funded in the first place?
• Readers will know that the seasonal flu virus mutates regularly. What use was an experiment published in 2014 on a virus isolated in 2000? It’s out of date, something a little younger would have apposite. At best it was only ever going to yield qualitative information. Fouchier did a little better; his 2012 paper described experiments on a H5N1 virus isolated in 2005. Fourteen years can be a while in influenza biology. The 1957 Asian flu pandemic was followed by the Hong Kong pandemic in 1968. For the afficionados, some context can be found in a paper describing avian H5N1 virus genetic variation over a two-year period.
"the establishment opinion is overwhelmingly that the virus was a zoonotic infection".
That's the narrative they are trying to push. From FOIA, we know many scientists believe a lab origin is possible or even "friggin' likely".