Apr 16, 2025 08:48 PM
How virologists lost the gain-of-function debate
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...ion-debate
KEY POINTS: For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As President Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face up to its own failures. [...] How did we get here? Why did the virologists lose the debate over gain-of-function research? And what lessons can we glean from their failure?
INTRO: Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in early 2020, rumors started to circulate that the virus that triggered it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. This story was quickly rejected by expert institutions and mainstream media outlets as an empirically baseless and even racist conspiracy theory — a verdict propagated through social media by fact checkers who deemed such claims to be misinformation.
The scientific community’s “overwhelming” conclusion, declared a now infamous letter in The Lancet in March 2020, was that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and jumped from animals to humans. Yet as the pandemic worsened, it became clear that the alleged scientific consensus around the natural origins of Covid-19 was tenuous at best and disingenuous at worst.
By the spring of 2021, the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis had gone sufficiently mainstream that it was the subject of widespread media coverage and even an official White House investigation. Rather than resolving the issue, that investigation further highlighted the divisions within the expert and intelligence communities.
The ongoing battle over “Covid origins” — a tale of deception and coverup to some, a lesson in politicization and disinformation to others — is by now familiar, if complicated and contested. While mainstream scientific opinion still holds that the virus likely originated with a natural spillover, the lab leak hypothesis is no longer dismissed out of hand and has in fact been endorsed, albeit with “low” or “moderate” confidence, by several federal agencies, including, most recently, the C.I.A.
Revelations about the reckless behavior of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, combined with the uncooperative and duplicitous response of the Chinese government, have offered strong circumstantial evidence of foul play. Meanwhile, the defensive and at times egregious behavior of some within the scientific community here in the United States only exacerbated the concerns of those who suspected them of complicity.
As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.
At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic... (MORE - details)
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...ion-debate
KEY POINTS: For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As President Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face up to its own failures. [...] How did we get here? Why did the virologists lose the debate over gain-of-function research? And what lessons can we glean from their failure?
INTRO: Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in early 2020, rumors started to circulate that the virus that triggered it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. This story was quickly rejected by expert institutions and mainstream media outlets as an empirically baseless and even racist conspiracy theory — a verdict propagated through social media by fact checkers who deemed such claims to be misinformation.
The scientific community’s “overwhelming” conclusion, declared a now infamous letter in The Lancet in March 2020, was that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and jumped from animals to humans. Yet as the pandemic worsened, it became clear that the alleged scientific consensus around the natural origins of Covid-19 was tenuous at best and disingenuous at worst.
By the spring of 2021, the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis had gone sufficiently mainstream that it was the subject of widespread media coverage and even an official White House investigation. Rather than resolving the issue, that investigation further highlighted the divisions within the expert and intelligence communities.
The ongoing battle over “Covid origins” — a tale of deception and coverup to some, a lesson in politicization and disinformation to others — is by now familiar, if complicated and contested. While mainstream scientific opinion still holds that the virus likely originated with a natural spillover, the lab leak hypothesis is no longer dismissed out of hand and has in fact been endorsed, albeit with “low” or “moderate” confidence, by several federal agencies, including, most recently, the C.I.A.
Revelations about the reckless behavior of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, combined with the uncooperative and duplicitous response of the Chinese government, have offered strong circumstantial evidence of foul play. Meanwhile, the defensive and at times egregious behavior of some within the scientific community here in the United States only exacerbated the concerns of those who suspected them of complicity.
As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.
At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic... (MORE - details)