at creates that danger. If, on the other hand, Covid-19 is Mother Nature’s handiwork, then logically we are condemned to a sequence of pandemics; some natural, others accidental, some better and others far more deadly. Not a happy scenario by any stretch….
For ultimately, in order to create a human pandemic, an animal virus has to accomplish two very difficult things. First, it has to successfully infect a person, and then it needs to jump from one person to the next rapidly enough to get ahead of the rate at which sufferers recover or die. SARS2 is a master of this trick, but the closest wild relatives seem to be neutralised, with spike proteins built to invade horseshoe bat cells, not human cells. To trigger a pandemic in people they need substantial evolutionary retooling.
SARS2 did, of course, get that retooling. The question now is where did that rewiring happen? Is it more likely that it occurred in a lab, with researchers altering the spike protein to make a human pathogen, and then passaging that modified virus through ferrets or “humanised mice” with the aim of creating a vaccine or a model for pandemic research? Or did it infect some wild animal or remote human population, circulate for a while, eventually evolving into a more infectious virus?
Either is possible. Yet despite incredible pressure for the Chinese government to find it, so far there is no evidence of a plausible ancestor virus having circulated in an intermediate population. When SARS2 first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019, it was, from the very first moment, pre-adapted to spread through the human body and from one person to another. That’s all but impossible — a major evolutionary mystery. […]
This failure of the scientific community would be easier to fathom if it were built on actual lies. But I don’t believe that is the case. In order to win at the funding and prestige game — in order to deliver a really great pitch – -you have to be a true believer. Indeed, I suspect the “Gain of Function” research community really thought they were racing against the clock to save the world; experimenting in a reckless manner was a risk they were willing to take. But they were like drunks behind the wheel, with the rest of the world unwittingly along for the ride. […]
But the biggest danger exposed by Covid-19 comes from our universally corrupted institutions. If SARS2 emerged from the lab, then the failure of our institutions is the root cause, and fixing them should be our top priority.
That will no doubt be a Herculean task. Our virologists, the press, the international regulatory bodies and all the major social media platforms are already dragging their feet, doing everything in their power to avoid learning the lesson the virus’s likely origin. And in doing so, they are preventing us from learning it, too. In the coming years, if the world needs saving from anything, it is surely that.
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