Dec 12, 2024 05:45 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 12, 2024 05:53 PM by C C.)
Congressional Republicans conclude SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab leak
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/12/...-lab-leak/
INTRO: Recently, Congress' Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report. The basic gist is about what you'd expect from a Republican-run committee, in that it trashes a lot of Biden-era policies and state-level responses while praising a number of Trump's decisions. But what's perhaps most striking is how it tackles a variety of scientific topics, including many where there's a large, complicated body of evidence.
Notably, this includes conclusions about the origin of the pandemic, which the report describes as "most likely" emerging from a lab rather than being the product of the zoonotic transfer between an animal species and humans. The latter explanation is favored by many scientists.
The conclusions themselves aren't especially interesting; they're expected from a report with partisan aims. But the method used to reach those conclusions is often striking: The Republican majority engages in a process of systematically changing the standard of evidence needed for it to reach a conclusion. For a conclusion the report's authors favor, they'll happily accept evidence from computer models or arguments from an editorial in the popular press; for conclusions they disfavor, they demand double-blind controlled clinical trials.
This approach, which I'll term "shifting the evidentiary baseline," shows up in many arguments regarding scientific evidence. But it has rarely been employed quite this pervasively. So let's take a look at it in some detail and examine a few of the other approaches the report uses to muddy the waters regarding science. We're likely to see many of them put to use in the near future... (MORE - details)
The long, contentious battle to regulate gain-of-function work
https://undark.org/2024/12/11/unleashed-...egulation/
EXCERPTS: . . . Concerns about Covid-19’s origins have brought calls for additional oversight of U.S. labs. That effort seems misplaced to some researchers, effectively hamstringing U.S. science in response to alleged biosafety lapses thousands of miles away. If additional rules are not carefully calibrated, they say, the country could wind up less prepared to fight future pandemics. Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, characterized the backlash as a situation of muddled priorities: policymakers, she argued, are fretting about research that poses far less danger than the viruses evolving all around us in “nature’s gigantic lab.”
Still, other experts remain deeply skeptical of the status quo... [...] Such efforts have brought new public attention to some of the basic questions Imperiale and his colleagues agonized over in that conference room 12 years ago: How should society weigh the costs of engineering pathogens in the pursuit of public health goals?
[...] To prevent the spread of microbes, researchers in U.S. laboratories follow extensive biosafety protocols. ... Despite those protocols, some scientists remained uneasy. Lone Simonsen, director of the PandemiX Center in Denmark, was working in the U.S. when news about the gain-of-function studies started to spread. She was immediately concerned. Scientists like to think of themselves as the good guys, she said. “But are we really?” she wondered. “What’s our field exactly producing out of all this?”
Around the same time, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, began to question whether the risks of such research outweighed the benefits. He was preparing a lecture on a drug-resistant flu virus that had swept across the globe a few years prior. As it happened, said Lipsitch, that fast-spreading flu virus contained a mutation that virologists had previously studied in the lab. When the virologists inserted that mutation into a common flu strain, the mutation crippled the virus. But as that common flu strain continued to evolve out in the world, the single mutation that had weakened the lab virus came to confer an advantage in nature.
There’s no guarantee that a mutation that behaves one way in one flu strain will behave the same way in a different flu strain, said Lipsitch. And because influenza viruses evolve quickly, any laboratory findings may be obsolete, or even misleading, by the time they are published.
In his view, this had implications for gain-of-function studies. Not only did they risk sparking a devastating pandemic — their purported benefits were uncertain... (MORE - missing details)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/12/...-lab-leak/
INTRO: Recently, Congress' Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report. The basic gist is about what you'd expect from a Republican-run committee, in that it trashes a lot of Biden-era policies and state-level responses while praising a number of Trump's decisions. But what's perhaps most striking is how it tackles a variety of scientific topics, including many where there's a large, complicated body of evidence.
Notably, this includes conclusions about the origin of the pandemic, which the report describes as "most likely" emerging from a lab rather than being the product of the zoonotic transfer between an animal species and humans. The latter explanation is favored by many scientists.
The conclusions themselves aren't especially interesting; they're expected from a report with partisan aims. But the method used to reach those conclusions is often striking: The Republican majority engages in a process of systematically changing the standard of evidence needed for it to reach a conclusion. For a conclusion the report's authors favor, they'll happily accept evidence from computer models or arguments from an editorial in the popular press; for conclusions they disfavor, they demand double-blind controlled clinical trials.
This approach, which I'll term "shifting the evidentiary baseline," shows up in many arguments regarding scientific evidence. But it has rarely been employed quite this pervasively. So let's take a look at it in some detail and examine a few of the other approaches the report uses to muddy the waters regarding science. We're likely to see many of them put to use in the near future... (MORE - details)
The long, contentious battle to regulate gain-of-function work
https://undark.org/2024/12/11/unleashed-...egulation/
EXCERPTS: . . . Concerns about Covid-19’s origins have brought calls for additional oversight of U.S. labs. That effort seems misplaced to some researchers, effectively hamstringing U.S. science in response to alleged biosafety lapses thousands of miles away. If additional rules are not carefully calibrated, they say, the country could wind up less prepared to fight future pandemics. Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, characterized the backlash as a situation of muddled priorities: policymakers, she argued, are fretting about research that poses far less danger than the viruses evolving all around us in “nature’s gigantic lab.”
Still, other experts remain deeply skeptical of the status quo... [...] Such efforts have brought new public attention to some of the basic questions Imperiale and his colleagues agonized over in that conference room 12 years ago: How should society weigh the costs of engineering pathogens in the pursuit of public health goals?
[...] To prevent the spread of microbes, researchers in U.S. laboratories follow extensive biosafety protocols. ... Despite those protocols, some scientists remained uneasy. Lone Simonsen, director of the PandemiX Center in Denmark, was working in the U.S. when news about the gain-of-function studies started to spread. She was immediately concerned. Scientists like to think of themselves as the good guys, she said. “But are we really?” she wondered. “What’s our field exactly producing out of all this?”
Around the same time, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, began to question whether the risks of such research outweighed the benefits. He was preparing a lecture on a drug-resistant flu virus that had swept across the globe a few years prior. As it happened, said Lipsitch, that fast-spreading flu virus contained a mutation that virologists had previously studied in the lab. When the virologists inserted that mutation into a common flu strain, the mutation crippled the virus. But as that common flu strain continued to evolve out in the world, the single mutation that had weakened the lab virus came to confer an advantage in nature.
There’s no guarantee that a mutation that behaves one way in one flu strain will behave the same way in a different flu strain, said Lipsitch. And because influenza viruses evolve quickly, any laboratory findings may be obsolete, or even misleading, by the time they are published.
In his view, this had implications for gain-of-function studies. Not only did they risk sparking a devastating pandemic — their purported benefits were uncertain... (MORE - missing details)