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Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
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23 Jun, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This @washingtonpost story is a) mostly a nothing burger & b) a problem.

Why is the lead writer a politics reporter? (The other two are science/health writers, tho not virology/ID focused.) I get this is news-but what it means is not a political q.

washingtonpost.com/health/coronav…
2/ This isn't to say that the politics reporter in question is bad journalist. I don't follow his byline so I've no view on that. My presumption: he's fine until proven otherwise.

But virology, like any technical subject, takes time to grasp; work on the bleeding edge more so...
3/ And there's no way for him to judge who's bullshitting here, and to what extent. And that's key even in a scientific dispute with no political dimension. It's that much more so when the issue is being weaponized to assign blame (and maybe even start a war)...
4/ Which is to say I'd love to see politics and natsec writers work on the implications behind the lab escape "theory." [Narr: it's not a theory.] But the hard science stuff has to be understood and then clearly communicated first. And this story doesn't do a great job at that...
5/ Though I'll concede I've seen much worse.

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More from @TomLevenson

Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
15 Jun
1/ I may teach this @nytimes article in my science journalism class next year as a model of how to do it wrong. nytimes.com/2021/06/14/wor…

@amyyqin and @ChuBailiang are expert and knowledgable China reporters. They seem in this piece out of their depth on the science...
2/ I don't have time right now (deadlines of my own) to fisk the problems in this piece fully...so I'll just point to two problems very quickly. They are clearly drawing on others' work to describe each of the alleged scenarios for a lab escape origin for the COVID pandemic...
3/ There account follows closely the arguments from Nicholas Wade, who lost his connection to @NYTScience because of his commitment to motivated reasoning on race and genetics, and the novelist/essayist Nicholas Wade. In repeating very similar claims without scrutiny...
Read 16 tweets
Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
15 Jun
@RadioFreeTom @JVLast @MJGerson I went to sleep before this & sequels went up, but 2 quick thoughts.

1: you're right that you and yours have a unique perspective on the GOP and the pathologies that led to our current misery. But unique doesn't mean complete, or the whole of the story...
@RadioFreeTom @JVLast @MJGerson 2/ A literary reference: you may be in the position of the hero of Abbott's classic mathematical tale, Flatland:* utterly immersed in an environment that the protagonist at once know intimately and could not fully perceive.
@RadioFreeTom @JVLast @MJGerson 2.5/

*Culturally I'd say that you more closely resemble the star of Norman Juster's eternally wonderful fairy tale, "The Dot and the Line," which concludes, as it must, "To the vector belong the spoils"...
Read 11 tweets
Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
4 Jun
Some more thread on BSL & journalism.

Several folks on this thread have pointed out, correctly, that SARS-COV2 research in Wuhan happened in BSL2 and 3 labs, not in the BSL4 one.

This fact has a couple of implications for the lab leak argument and the journalism covering it. 1/
2/ The basic questions remain. First, what was done at BSL2 vs. 3? The question is vital to the claim of a lab leak, as BSL2 facilities are not particularly secure. (Walk down the hall of a bio building at any R1 university and you'll likely see a BSL2 placard or two)...
3/ BSL3 labs, by contrast, are heavily defended. Not to the ultimate example of biomedicine's supermax BSL4 facilities but still...they handle some very scary viruses indeed. Extensive list of viruses (see other tables for other agents), pp 308-328: cdc.gov/labs/pdf/SF__1…
Read 21 tweets
Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
4 Jun
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…
Read 17 tweets
Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
19 Mar
This is a reminder that Donald Trump spent over a year demonizing a "China" virus, along with other even more vicious terms.

The GOP leadership in Congress and the states let that stand--and in many cases amplified the hate....1/
2/ Last March I wrote in The Atlantic that such rhetoric has a long, fatal history. I was thinking of public health measures: historically labeling a disease as Chinese (or Jewish, or whatever) leads often to taking the wrong actions, or none at all, to respond to an outbreak...
3/ I didn't stop to consider the immediate threat of anti-Asian hate, though my historical example, early 1900s outbreaks in Honolulu and then San Francisco of the global bubonic plague pandemic, certainly provide plenty of examples of exactly that...
Read 7 tweets
Thomas Levenson, Zṓiarchos Profile picture
21 Jan
I'm here to say that the last four years diminished me. I've spent that time in a defensive crouch, fight or flight too much of the time, with COVID over the last year shrinking social connection; I'm less kind, I fear, and narrower in my thinking....1/
2/ I'd hoped, knowing that hope was foolish, that all that would discernibly fall away at noon yesterday. And, yeah, stuff changed; I could feel that change myself.

But four years of fear and anger and, lately, loneliness don't just evaporate...
3/ So the joy I want to feel in the real change, the real hope that I did see beginning to unfold yesterday ain't there yet, and isn't, ISTM, likely to blossom fully for a while.

I want to be happier for my wife and kid, dammit...and it ain't close to all there yet...
Read 5 tweets

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