“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.” -Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky in 1865. Also: my current mood.
This is a story about infectious disease, but listen: it could be a story about anything. This could be a story about Roe v. Wade or gender dysphoria or something you care passionately about. When even the experts are lying to themselves, the world is screwed.
As we drift further into our social media algorithms — our outrage and our learned helplessness — as we sink deeper into the cultural belief that “My facts are better than your facts” — as we fail even to distinguish among wishes, opinions, facts, and things we read online — indeed, as we seem to have forgotten how to evaluate information and discuss it with people who disagree with us — we have moved beyond personal ignorance into a collective state of ignorance that threatens humankind.
Early in the pandemic, I relied on the biweekly covid meetings at work to let me know what was happening. Can you remember back to how much we didn’t know? We didn’t know whether to undress in the garage when we came home to loved ones (or whether to come home at all). We didn’t know whether to wash our groceries or disinfect our mail.
Every two weeks, some of the top experts in the world — in infectious disease, in public health, in viruses, in vaccine development — would tell us what was happening locally, regionally, nationally, worldwide. I relied on them as my best source of truth.
Why? Because to a large extent, their information transcended politics, and it was presented with some depth and consistency. Science is what these folks do — and these were top subject-matter experts who were keeping an eye on developments and tasked with explaining it to the rest of us.
In a world where none of us knows everything, we have to rely on experts to figure out new situations and give us good information.
Experts, especially scientists, usually have no problem saying “We don’t know X yet, but here’s our best understanding” — and then next week they might tell you something completely different because they have new information. Ironically, that gives them their credibility.
For example, in mid-2020, no one knew whether it was easy to transmit the virus outdoors. Among the public, a lot of people wished gathering outdoors was OK. Team Republican yelled a lot about “no worse than a cold” and “my freedoms” — Team Democrat yelled a lot about “racism is more dangerous than covid” — and both sides ignored the fact that our hospitals were full and we didn’t know much about how the virus was transmitted.
To some extent, we all engaged in our own motivated reasoning — our own version of lying to ourselves, in which “I’ll believe what I want to believe is true; I’ll believe the same things that people similar to me believe” — and it was only the scientists, the experts, who were saying “Yeah, we really don’t know that yet.”
The point is: When true experts say they don’t know something, or they change their story from week to week, or they ask questions, no one accuses them of lying or promoting an agenda, because they’re typically not. These days, they’re almost the only people who aren’t lying or promoting an agenda. Or are they?
Et Tu, Experts?
As grateful as I was for the knowledge of the experts week after week, and as much as I trusted what they had to say, it bothered me that no one in our meetings ever spoke about “Where did this virus come from, and how do we prevent something like this from happening again?” That’s really an important question to answer, and the answers should be guiding our future policy.
I’m no virus expert, but just being a critical thinker and someone who reads medical journals regularly and evaluates the evidence presented there, when the Lancet letter was published in February 2020 proclaiming a sure natural origin for this virus (in absence of any evidence), and Nature Medicine pronounced in March 2020 that the virus had a zoonotic origin (in absence of any evidence), I knew they were saying things they couldn’t possibly know to be true. That was disorienting. The Lancet is lying? Nature is lying?
No one could have known those things yet, and no evidence was presented. Pronouncing them as certainties was highly suspicious, even to someone like me who’s not a subject matter expert. Typically, if you follow medical research, you’ll notice that the experts proclaim very few things as certain, but when they do, you’d best believe there’s a smoking bat, infected with the virus, in the market — and in this case, there was not.*
On the other hand, the presence of the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan (and many other related discoveries and observations) was dismissed, ignored, or branded as xenophobia or racism, persistently.
Suppose an expert believed, in good faith, that the lab in Wuhan had nothing to do with the virus. The rational approach would be to mention the possibility the lab was involved, and then to clearly explain the evidence that made that possibility unlikely. Scientists are not in the business of dismissing or ignoring the possibilities. The evidence needs to speak for itself. Possibilities are discarded only after the evidence has spoken — not before.
The official story remained “natural origin,” though, even as anyone who was paying attention noticed a bigger and bigger accumulation of evidence implicating the lab: the master’s thesis about the miners who got sick with a virus that was collected and brought to Wuhan and is closely related to SARS-2; the inexplicably deleted database of viruses from Wuhan; the large order of bat cages, for a facility that supposedly doesn’t keep bats; the grant proposal in which researchers were planning to add a furin cleavage site to coronaviruses (something that was unknown to happen in nature, in those particular viruses, but is present in SARS-2); the leaked emails in which some of the people who publicly promoted a natural origin were thought to believe it came from a lab; and on and on.
No need to rehash it all here: Entire books have been written about this. I’ve written about it a couple times too, here and here.
What was the difference between the people who were behind the zoonosis hypothesis and the lab leak hypothesis? People who were pushing the natural origin had their entire careers at stake. If gain-of-function research stops, their funding stops. Their entire careers stop. So…they had every reason to lie to themselves that the origin wasn’t all that important, anyway.
As much as I appreciated those practical briefings from the experts at work, and as much as I valued their expertise and their ability to explain things, it was also the case that I was disappointed that the very important topic of the origin of the virus was avoided.
In a functioning society, the evidence for the lab origin would be discussed openly, the gain-of-function research programs (bioweapons research, essentially) would be discussed openly, and the people of the world would collectively decide whether we want these programs to exist.
But we don’t have a functioning society. We have a society in which the experts lie, apparently even to themselves: They think they know better than us. Their careers are more important to them than the danger their research poses to everyone else. Their research funding is worth more to them than the lives of the many millions of people who have already died.
In our society, we pretend it’s not happening. By pretending this virus just originated naturally and them’s the breaks (“Sorry, 6.4 million dead people”), we ensure that mysterious viruses with no good explanation behind them will continue to appear. So now we’ve got monkeypox too.
It’s Like Deja Vu All Over Again
What do we know about monkeypox? It’s a DNA virus, and it mutates very slowly. Typically in the US, you might see a couple cases a year, usually linked to travel to certain parts of Africa, and it typically doesn’t spread effectively person-to-person.
What else do we know about monkeypox? We know that the FDA approved a monkeypox vaccine in 2019 and their press release said it “will be …part of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), the nation’s largest supply of potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency.”
Why did we need a monkeypox vaccine in our SNS for a disease that causes two cases a year? What kind of “public health emergency” might our leaders have been anticipating in 2019?
Back in 1998, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article dismissing the capability of monkeypox (in its natural form) to pose a broad threat, but now we’ve got a vaccine stockpiled — and three years after that, we’ve got a highly mutated form of monkeypox, which does seem to transmit easily person-to-person, and which does seem to pose a threat.
Is this just coincidence? Or was the monkeypox vaccine developed in response to fears of a weaponized form of the monkeypox virus? And now that seems to be what we’ve got, right? We’re not seeing what looks like a naturally evolved virus that changed in the expected timeframe. No. We’re seeing a virus which in the opinion of Richard Neher, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel, has about 50 years’ worth of mutations from its closest ancestor of 4 years ago.
How does a virus gain 50 years’ worth of function in the span of 4 years? One answer is gain-of-function research. Bioweapons research.
How does a virus that is very difficult to transmit person-to-person suddenly gain that function? One answer is gain-of-function research. Bioweapons research.
How does a highly mutated virus appear seemingly out of nowhere? How does it suddenly infect people worldwide, when we’ve never seen any “intermediate versions” out in the world — versions with 10 mutations, 20 mutations, 30 mutations? (This is one of the same questions I asked about the omicron variant of SARS-2. The scientific community still hasn’t provided a compelling answer that doesn’t fall apart on closer inspection.) One answer is that monkeypox was manipulated under controlled conditions in a lab, specifically to create a weaponized virus that transmits better person-to-person, and then it got out of the lab somehow. It was contained and now it’s not. That’s one way you see a highly mutated virus without the normal intermediate forms.
Notice what I’m not saying. I’m not saying I know that this monkeypox virus was created in a lab as part of bioweapons research, got out (accidentally or intentionally), and our government knew this was a possibility because it approved and stockpiled a vaccine in 2019 for an extremely rare virus, which, in all its natural forms, was known to be extremely unlikely to cause widespread human-to-human outbreaks. Nope.
But I ask you for an alternative hypothesis that explains the facts just as well or better, because I’m interested in hearing it. These facts are weird, these facts are unexpected, and weird unexpected facts require possible explanations: they need to be adequately accounted for —which brings me to yesterday’s covid meeting.
In yesterday’s covid meeting, there was a guest speaker who was going to update us on the monkeypox situation locally. Great. I figured an amazing research university’s “Monkeypox Guy” would have some interesting things to say.
Indeed he did — sort of. He talked about local cases. He talked about what we know about transmission and who’s currently at highest risk. He talked about the availability of the stockpiled vaccines and how and when they were being deployed. He talked about what we know so far about the immunity (if any) conferred by the smallpox vaccine.
Our Monkeypox Guy talked like a regular expert. In many ways, with monkeypox we’re back to a situation reminiscent of the early days of SARS-2, where there’s a lot we don’t know, but our expert spoke clearly about what he did know.
Except when he glossed over “where it came from.”
Suddenly our clear and convincing expert was just talking in vague and incoherent phrases about “evolution” and “changing weather patterns.” Changing weather patterns did not bring this newly highly transmissible virus to Europe and North America. Changing weather patterns did not cause 50 years of evolution in 4 years and then suddenly cause a 50-years’-worth mutated virus to appear out of nowhere with no intermediates anywhere in sight. You’ve got to do better than that.
He didn’t mention how mutated it was, nor did he offer an explanation.
He didn’t mention how unexpected it was that it transmits very effectively person-to-person.
He didn’t speak to the coincidence that we’ve got a million vaccines stockpiled and ready to go.
Look. I didn’t expect him to have all the answers yesterday. Really, I didn’t. Who in the world might be expected to have these answers? Very few people, and I doubt they’re talking, just as the people in the Wuhan lab aren’t talking.
But I expect him, as the Monkeypox Guy at an institution world-renowned for medical research, to mention these as some of the most interesting and important questions related to this outbreak.
If a dummy like me knows that the mutations and the new patterns of transmission are highly relevant, why didn’t our Monkeypox Guy mention those things?
If a dummy like me is asking the obvious question about why we had a vaccine approved and stockpiled 3 years ago for a disease that’s never caused us significant trouble (and according to that 1998 NEJM article mentioned above, never would), why didn’t our Monkeypox Guy speak to that?
Anyone who does any science at all — and I appeal to you to confirm this in the comments — knows that you might not know the answers, but if you’re any good at all, you’re able to identify interesting and important questions.
These are interesting and important questions, and they were completely ignored in our work meeting.
Having seen this happen in response to two different disease outbreaks now, my best guess is that people are so afraid of torpedoing their own careers that they won’t even raise the questions. My best guess is that people are trying to convince themselves that their silence, their failure to ask these questions, is not really all that consequential.
But I think they’re very wrong. They’re lying to themselves. It is consequential. If no one is going to ask the obvious questions, we’re going to see more and more “mystery viruses” leaking out and causing havoc. Is this how our species ends? Are we resigned to waiting for “the big one” to wipe us out so the octopuses can rule the earth? Where are the experts willing to put their careers on the line to speak honestly and try to stop this research?
I think what makes it hard is the fact that we’re doing this to ourselves.
If it were some natural event like a (real) plague or a meteor hitting the earth and making it impossible for humans to live, somehow in my mind such an event would be easier to deal with?
“Well, that’s an indifferent universe for ya.”
The fact that we’re doing this to ourselves, and we could choose not to, but we’re not choosing not to, is actually driving me crazy.
So there's COVID, the youth transgender stuff, the p-hacking/replication crises, and then the humanities-are-weird now that deBoer has written about (see: Writing Studies, the Field that Hates Itself). I'm sure we're only a few years away from someone generating this sort of academic writing with an AI.
I wonder what the long-run equilibrium on all this is. I think universities will see some cuts going forward. We will also probably put more faith in people with hard math and science backgrounds.
I think it was profoundly fucked up for experts to try to mix their normative politics with their descriptive science. It just makes me take them less seriously on both.