Thread by @TomLevenson

Some context on lab leak hype.

Here's the 2017 @Nature news piece on the opening of the Wuhan lab: nature.com/articles/natur…

What I noticed: Richard Ebright, a biochemist focusing on bacterial processes, not viruses, was the sole quoted opponent; he's now talking lab leak... 1/

2/ China's reasons for seeking a BSL4 lab are pretty clear in the piece: China faces both domestic incidences of zoonotic disease, and, as quoted in the piece, is seeing a growing number of its citizens working in other settings that also see such disease...

3/ It's important for reporters & readers to grasp the basics of what BSL 4 means. The Wuhan lab is such a facility; that's the highest level of containment, reserved for studying deadly, readily transmitted, incurable bugs.

A simple CDC explainer: cdc.gov/training/quick…

4/ There aren't many BSL4s across the globe, but they're around. I had dinner a few blocks away from one last night. (bu.edu/articles/2018/…). It hasn't been included on the Freedom Trail yet, but you never know...

All this to say...

5/ To be taken even a little bit seriously, any argument for a lab leak/lab accident origin for #COVID19 has to include an informed, logically consistent mechanism by which the sequence of events needed to break containment in the specific environment of a BSL4 lab could occur...

6/ It's not enough to say "lab accidents happen." Of course they do! BSL4 labs are designed to ensure that when such accidents happen in that setting, they do not have consequences that threaten the public...

7/ Those designs could fail...but again, making the lab leak argument for COVID requires an actual account of how such a failure could, and then did happen, with specific reference to what BSL4 involves. Nicholson Baker's long piece in New York magazine does not offer this...

8/ Nor has any other account, including those scientists Baker (and many others) quote in support of the engineered/accident argument.

There is an ongoing and important discussion to be had about proper ethical and safety protocols in biomedical research. No doubt...

9/ And I'm very prepared to believe that the current system, putting a lot of trust in individual (and often "star") scientists may need substantial reform....

10/ But that issue does not disappear the basic reportorial responsibility to dig into everything that's needed to support what is, after all exactly that kind of extraordinary claim that in science is known to require extraordinary evidence...

11/ If the Wuhan Institute of Virology performed gain-of-function experiments to turn a bat virus into #COVID19, or even if they simply handled an zoonotic virus and then allowed either an engineered or natural pathogen to escape BSL4 confinement, then...

12/...I'll say it one more time: you have to have a plausible failure mode in the machinery of the lab itself to allow such a bug to get out.

One last note...

13: molecular biology; synthetic bio, virology etc. are difficult subjects, & they're hard in a different way than, say, physics is hard. Physics requires mathematical talents & skill at formal logic, combined with simplifying physical intuition (other stuff, too, of course)...

14: the biological sciences involve enormously more complicated phenomena than those of physics, in which mastery of specific details is vital in every corner--from the foundational knowledge of how organisms work to what may be thought of as aristocracy-of-labor craft skills...

15/ By the same token, doing good journalism on the bleeding edge of biology requires a ton of domain knowledge, and a healthy respect for how much there is to learn for each new story. Those advancing the engineered/lab accident argument are not my models of such excellence...

16/ With that...

For those of you who have read to the end of this rant, thanks.

And remember: the scandal we know happened is the failed Trump/GOP response to #COVID19 that left ~600,000 (and counting) Americans dead, along with similar political fails across the globe.

/fin

Hey, @threadreaderapp unroll please