interesting discussion... but kinda/slightly misses the point re bioweapon... I I mean, in the psyop world there's all sorts of different "bioweapons"
On the ‘lab leak’ side,
Yuri Deigin: the Russian biomedical entrepreneur and leader of DRASTIC, the decentralised research collective whose dogged research brought the possibility of a lab leak to mainstream consideration. Arguing for zoonosis,
Dr. Stuart Neil of King’s College, London: a virologist who bills himself as the “zoonati to the lab leak glitterati”.
We hope the conversation will break some ground - and we’re thankful for Yuri and Stuart for taking the gloves off and agreeing to talk. Even putting polarisation aside, though, the lab leak debate in itself presents a difficult sensemaking challenge. It’s difficult, dense, and outsourcing our trust to some kind of outside authority is unavoidable.
Rebel Wisdom has updated its briefing book summation of both sides, which you can see
here.
Whether or not you find either Yuri or Stuart’s arguments convincing, we hope you see that both are both trying their best to make sense of a complex picture, with solid reasoning on both sides. In a debate that is rife with accusations of ‘shill’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and other
ad hominem accusations, even the fact of the dialogue itself looks like progress.
On the ‘lab leak’ side,
Yuri Deigin: the Russian biomedical entrepreneur and leader of DRASTIC, the decentralised research collective whose dogged research brought the possibility of a lab leak to mainstream consideration. Arguing for zoonosis,
Dr. Stuart Neil of King’s College, London: a virologist who bills himself as the “zoonati to the lab leak glitterati”.
We hope the conversation will break some ground - and we’re thankful for Yuri and Stuart for taking the gloves off and agreeing to talk. Even putting polarisation aside, though, the lab leak debate in itself presents a difficult sensemaking challenge. It’s difficult, dense, and outsourcing our trust to some kind of outside authority is unavoidable.
Rebel Wisdom has updated its briefing book summation of both sides, which you can see
here.
Whether or not you find either Yuri or Stuart’s arguments convincing, we hope you see that both are both trying their best to make sense of a complex picture, with solid reasoning on both sides. In a debate that is rife with accusations of ‘shill’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and other
ad hominem accusations, even the fact of the dialogue itself looks like progress.
Crucially, however, both agreed on some foundational points. “It makes absolutely zero sense to me to make coronavirus into a bioweapon”, Neil said.
“Yeah, that much, I think we agree upon”, Yuri added, while also acknowledging that bioengineering - that lab workers purposefully manufactured a deadly virus - is far from certain as a scenario for lab leak. “I don't know. I think there's just so many different scenarios that are possible within the lab leak hypothesis - starting from yes, engineering”, to vaccine development or a culture experiment gone-wrong.
In the debate’s first phase,
Rebel Wisdom asked both to outline the core reasons behind their case. For Deigin, the geographic origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, seems insurmountable. “What are the chances of a complete freak accident of this virus that is not normally found in this geography to pop up next door to a lab that's been collecting and modifying these viruses for years?”, he asked Neil.
As Deigin’s DRASTIC uncovered, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been experimenting with bat coronaviruses for gain-of-function research, which involves the use of deliberate techniques to raise the transmissibility and infectivity of viruses. Gain-of-function research has been considered by some as risky, and was even banned by President Obama (before being
re-commenced under President Trump). The Wuhan Lab specifically
fell foul of regulators in a 2018 review that questioned its health and safety practice. Included in the Lab’s viral database was RaTG13, a virus with 96% structural similarity to SARS-CoV-2, which had been
renamed and subsequently taken offline in September 2019 as part of a
public database the Lab deleted (and claimed was hacked). Other signs of a cover-up can be seen: the
destruction of viral samples on government orders,
the blocking of BBC journalists, the
reported silencing of Lab personnel,
low cooperation from staff in the WHO investigation. In September,
Xi Jinping ordered new schemes of safety review for labs.
For Neil, the cover-ups of the CCP may look like red flags, but they’re more like red herrings: dictatorships run on a delicate game of legitimacy with their populations, and they’re likely to try and silence
everything - including areas that weren’t involved in real trouble. And what of the possible (if not also likely) cover-up of the role of animal markets in and around Wuhan, which the scientific consensus deems the
most probable origin site?
While tests of 80,000 animal samples found no link with SARS-CoV-2, Neil suggests that “none of these [were] relevant”, but rather included a range of implausible zoonotic vectors like chickens and pigs. “The only relevant things that were ever tested were a few frozen carcases in the Yuannan Market. Everything else was cleared out. No one found a damn thing.”
Another worry for Deigin, however, is a specific feature of SARS-CoV-2, which may suggest the handiwork of gain-of-function research: its ‘furin cleavage site’, an asset of the virus not seen in any counterpart in its immediate family, which raises infectivity. These concerns came to a head in September, when
DRASTIC leaked a rejected 2018 application (by a team including Shi Zhengli, the head of the Wuhan Lab, and Peter Daszak, one of the Lab’s benefactors) to DARPA for $14.2 million to fund dedicated gain-of-function work with bat coronaviruses. For lab leak proponents, part of the application - on whose fine-print Deigin and Neil disagree - involves work with manipulating the furin cleavage site: the signature of SARS-CoV-2.
The application was rejected, though. And even if it were financed, Neil points out, it was to take place specifically on campus in Carolina, not the Wuhan Lab - though Alina Chan and Nicholson Baker of the lab leak side think this doesn’t rule out Wuhan taking the reins and the blueprint themselves. Yet, more importantly, what if the furin site isn’t special? While not found in SARS-CoV-2’s closest family, it
is found in respiratory coronaviruses of many kinds, Neil says. We don’t know, either, if the supposed effect of this feature - the virus’ elevated transmissibility and infectivity - was borne out in the controlled environments of the first infections.
“The reason [SARS-CoV-2] comes on the radar is when it rocks up in the big city and you get so much sustained transmission that the more e rare and more serious effects of infection get easily seen”, he says. “You wouldn't have necessarily seen this in a rural population”, like those on the border of Wuhan - which may, as it happens, explain how the virus ended up in the same city as the Lab, too.
So, where do Neil and Deigin agree? Three key points. First, that one creative hypothesis made around RaTG13 - that the counterpart virus mutated into SARS-CoV-2 in miners’ lungs - is short of evidence.
Second: However COVID-19 came to be, it was probably not a bioweapon - let alone one intentionally-released. Not only would SARS-CoV-2 and coronaviruses more generally make for an odd - or “inconsistent”, as the
US intelligence services put it - choice of bioweapon, but the claim stems from a single unreviewed Hong Kong virologist, who made several technical errors in his presentation. Claiming a malicious release also assumes an additional layer of explanation that, short of facts, we should be wary of crossing.
Third: We will likely never know the true story of its origins.
“Ultimately, we need to know. We need to know exactly what was in the freezer”, Neil says. “I mean, the trouble is that the well has been poisoned so much… It’s so intensely political.” Imagine if the CCP and the Wuhan Lab changed its course, opened up, and came out with a deep government review, Neil asks - and concluded a lab leak couldn’t have happened.
How would lab leak proponents react? They wouldn’t trust the findings, of course.
Conversely, imagine if the White House and the Intelligence services, or the WHO, say, emerged with an in-depth report that suggested a natural origin. It’d be viewed as a compromise to Chinese interests. Or if they concluded a lab leak was likely, it’d be viewed as a club against China in global geopolitics.
No one gets out of culture war alive. Not least real sensemaking.