Thread by @tgof137

We don't actually know the prior odds on how likely natural or unnatural pandemics are.

Here's a graph of excess deaths over 100+ years. The only things that stand out are Spanish flu and Covid:

https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1492179265223282692

If Covid was a 1 in 100 year natural event, we could basically just forget about this, we won't have to live through another bad pandemic.

But there are also more people alive than ever, there's more farming, there's more interaction with wildlife, there's new forms of habitat destruction.

Zoonotic spillover rates are going up for many diseases.

So maybe we live in a world where the new normal is a bad natural pandemic every 20 years, or even every 10 years. In that case, I'd have to live through several more years like 2020.

On the lab side, we've had either 0 or 1 gain of function pandemics in history. We've been doing stuff that you might call GoF for... somewhere around 20 years? So that could also be a 1 in 20 year risk, or it could be an even be a higher risk if the amount of research goes up.

Knowing how Covid started would help establish what we know about those rates.

So it is really important to figure out the answer.

And it's also worth working to reduce both those rates.

The other reason that this topic is still important is because the people that spread Covid conspiracy theories, during the pandemic, are now the people in charge of public health in America.

Guys like RFK Jr or Robert Malone were just criticizing Covid vaccines, in 2021, but now they're going to set our policies on vaccination.

That could have really big effects.

Suppose that we get a spillover of H5N1 bird flu, which would probably cause a pandemic worse than Covid.

We would respond by vaccinating people for that.

We already have a stockpile of H5N1 vaccines, but only enough for about 5 million people in the US.

We grow flu vaccines in chicken eggs, and H5N1 is highly lethal to chickens.

In a human H5N1 pandemic, it would be easy for a person to accidentally infect the birds we use to make vaccines, and then take out our ability to make more vaccine doses.

One easy way to have insurance against this would be to also have an mRNA vaccine against H5N1.

But RFK Jr cancelled the H5N1 contract with Moderna, because he's scared of mRNA vaccines.
apnews.com/article/modern…

RFK also prefers to ban a preservative called thimerosal, and some of our H5N1 stockpile uses that.

So maybe we wouldn't even be able to use the stockpiled doses!

Some of the people who helped spread the lab leak theory are also now involved in health policy.

Our new policy for H5N1 appears to be "stop testing for it and hope it goes away":
rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/where-has-al…

As well as "let's try to give the chickens herd immunity":

https://x.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1940860642950558031

So if they ignore natural pandemic risks in favor of lab risks (which are much lower, in my estimation, and in the view of most experts), then we're at a net higher risk of another pandemic.

And it's not even clear to me how well any of the GOP proposals will reduce lab risks, because to actually reduce pandemic risks, you need international collaboration with countries like China and we now have less collaboration with China than before.

Robert Wright and I talked about that problem: