I have not read Bill Gate’s new book. There are likely lessons in it about pandemic preparedness that should be seriously considered.
But we also need to be careful that the virus hunting to predict & prepare for pandemics does not itself cause pandemics. ecohealthalliance.org/2017/01/1-mill…
I’d like to repurpose a quote from the director of the global virome project:
“What we’re doing today is the same thing we were doing a decade ago… If we keep pursuing that approach, we will ultimately have a global catastrophe.”
Our pandemic prevention and response strategies have to be updated - some lessons from pandemics in the 1900s might need to be unlearnt - based on today’s reality and what will become possible and likely in the near future.
For example, if a massive forest fire might’ve started from a highly funded research program where scientists try to understand the best ways for fires to start in forests, the answer cannot be to accelerate and pour more funding into that same research. usaid.gov/news-informati…
I think it is difficult to objectively judge the wisdom of pre-covid funding of virus discovery programs. It seemed well intentioned at least - to predict pandemics.
However, a post-covid decision to push for more of this work without stronger safeguards lacks foresight.
The expert(s) who told Bill Gates it is clear the pandemic virus came from animals need to do a better job explaining that there are both natural & lab-related ways in which this could happen - and each requires a tailored pandemic prevention and response strategy #OriginOfCovid
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Many virologists, even natural #OriginOfCovid proponents, agree it is unsafe to study new SARS-like viruses at BL2 - which was the case in Wuhan for several years.
Has new policy been put in place to restrict work on novel airborne mammal pathogens to higher biosafety levels?
The level of biosafety and containment of viruses was a key concern (privately) expressed by top experts on biosafety/virology. See email from James Le Duc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory, which collaborated with and trained WIV staff. usrtk.org/wp-content/upl…
“That’s screwed up... It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
- Ian Lipkin, Columbia Professor, expertise in diagnostics, microbial discovery and outbreak response. donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-…
"the deputy consular chief in the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan, wrote that by mid-October, the consulate team “knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season. The disease worsened in November.”" washingtonpost.com/opinions/inter…
Yet, some of the most outspoken virologists on #OriginOfCovid would have us believe that the Wuhan outbreak only started in late Nov/Dec 2019 in order to support a (multiple animal-to-human spillover) Huanan market origin hypothesis.
Actually, depending on whether the journalists carefully read the preprints they depicted as front-page breaking news, the @nytimes now also endorses the late Nov/Dec 2019 start date of the Covid-19 outbreak. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
For years, some scientists studied pathogens that they described as poised to cause a pandemic at low biosafety BL2.
My guess is that they didn't believe their own hype and assumed that novel viruses found in nature were not actually pandemic-level.
But post-pandemic, many scientists, especially those who think a natural #OriginOfCovid near certain, now say that these novel viruses found in nature are primed to cause human outbreaks.
So how can it be rational to be studying all these pandemic pathogens at BL2?
One thing that continues to surprise people I talk to today is that the live SARS-like virus research in Wuhan had been conducted at BL2 & 3, and not at their BL4 highest biosafety lab (which is oddly what the WHO team were given a tour of during the 2021 joint study with China).
Top coronavirus expert Ralph Baric told @techreview these SARS-like viruses should be studied at higher biosafety than BL2.
“If you study a hundred different bat viruses, your luck may run out.”
@techreview I think most scientists who work/worked at BL2 should now be properly terrified of handling novel pathogens with pandemic potential at BL2.
Can you imagine working with SARS2 at BL2 before the pandemic and how likely it would've been for an outbreak to start from your lab?
Lab: Outbreak started next to low biosafety lab studying & engineering diverse SARS-like viruses from caves & markets across China & SE Asia.
Market: Early Covid-19 cluster was at market that sold animals that can carry SARS-like viruses.
Circ. evidence that moved the 🪡 for me was 2021 revelation that the Wuhan-US scientists had a 2018 roadmap for inserting novel cleavage sites in unspecified SARS-like viruses👩🔬
For me, it would be a colossal coincidence (but not implausible) for a virus like SARS2 to naturally emerge in the only city in the world where scientists had years of access to SARS2-like viruses and the plans+ability to insert novel cleavage sites (a feature unique to SARS2).
If I'm looking at this EcoHealth Alliance graphic correctly, in 2017, Wuhan city was predicted to have less pandemic-potential viruses than West Coast cities of the US. science.org/content/articl…
"Supaporn counters that the goal of wildlife surveillance isn’t to characterize every potential viral threat, but rather to learn how viruses evolve."
Can we all cut to the chase here?
If we learn how to accurately predict pandemic pathogens, that means we will also have mastered how to create pandemic pathogens.