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When people in the US think of World War II, they think of Pearl Harbor, or Normandy or Hiroshima. What most people don’t realize is that the war had been already going on for two years when Pearl Harbor happened. During that time, the UK stood alone against Germany, and the situation looked grim. Even once the US had entered the war things still mostly went badly for them. They were just barely holding their own in North Africa against Rommel, and on the other side of the world there was the disastrous fall of Singapore. But finally nearly a year after the US had entered the war, and three years after it had started, the British finally got their first decisive win at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein. (AL-a-main)
Shortly after this victory Churchill was giving a speech, and in reference to this battle and the turning point it represented he said:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
I bring this quote up because it feels like a decent description of where we are with COVID. It is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but I think once the omicron surge passes that it will, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. As a consequence I thought it might be time to do a post about the beginning of the pandemic, both because I think we’re at the end of that beginning, but also because it’s an opportunity bring together some insights about the pandemic I recently gleaned from three books:
Nightmare Scenario by: Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta
Viral by: Matt Ridley and Alina Chan
But first, before I forget, back on the 8th I made a prediction about when omicron would peak. I said that it would peak on the 15th, at around 2,500 new daily cases per million people. So how’d I do?
It did in fact peak on the 15th at 2,409 cases per million. How’s that for an accurate prediction?
Hopefully now that I’ve verified my expertise you’re ready to listen to me on all the other things I have to say about COVID. Speaking of other things, I obviously can’t cover everything from three books, or even everything I think is important and interesting. Instead I’ve picked five subjects where I think I have something important and interesting to add. Let’s get started with:
I- Schools
With the latest surge there was a lot of pushback from teachers unions, and even students on the fact that schools were not closing this time around. But it wasn’t just right wing governors that refused to close schools, Biden and democratic politicians were also emphatic that schools should remain open.
For my own part I think going back to remote learning for a week during the very peak of omicron (which, as you may remember, I called) is fine, particularly if it’s a staffing issue rather than overactive risk management. The big question we’re grappling with now is not whether we should continue doing it, but whether we should have ever done it. Increasingly the answer seems to be that, outside of those first few weeks when information was scarce, it was always a mistake, and a huge mistake at that.
Recently shots were fired on this subject by Nate Silver, the noted statistician, who tweeted:
Suppose you think that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. Shouldn’t that merit some further reflection?
He later clarified that this was not merely a hypothetical, he did in fact think it was a mistake on the magnitude of invading Iraq. As you can imagine responses were all over the map, but I think Jonathan Haidt’s summation of the situation was on the money:
It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it. Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace… learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students…a million students functionally dropped out of school…caused a mental health “state of emergency,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage…will be irrecoverable.
It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic…
By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.
What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence. Progressives were instead carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions…
It is always easier to diagnose these pathologies when they are taking place on the other side. You’ve probably seen the raft of papers showing how vaccine uptake correlates with Democratic voting and COVID deaths correlate with Republican voting. Perhaps you have marveled at the spectacle of Republican elites actively harming their own audience. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elderly supporters, progressive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.
For me it mostly boils down to that last bit. If we’re faced with the horrible task of apportioning harm, and unfortunately we are. Then it seems logical to not apportion a greater share of it to the young. And not only is it logical, but viscerally I, and I think most people, recoil from the idea of sacrificing the boundless potential of the young for the limited potential of the old. (Which is harsh to say but ultimately true.)
So how did we end up doing just that?
Here’s where I can add something to the discussion, to do that I need to take you back to 2005. President Bush had just read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry about the Spanish Flu and decided the government needed to pursue pandemic preparedness. This was the first big effort taken by the federal government and they had to develop a lot of stuff from scratch. One of the things they lacked was a good model. The Premonition has a whole cute story about how the best model was developed by a child for a science fair project, which only starts to make sense when you realize her dad worked at Sandia National Labs. I don’t have the space to go into that story, the key point is once they started messing with this model they realized that they could significantly reduce transmission through non-pharmaceutical measures. This was the birth of social distancing. And if distance mattered for transmission, then the first places the model said you needed to shut down were schools. Nobody gets packed in tighter than school children.
I’m not sure how much this model drove school closures in the early days of the pandemic. I assume it had to have had some impact, but I don’t remember it ever getting mentioned. And of course even if the model was used to make this decision, it should have been updated as more information came in. Which is to say even if the model was used to justify closing schools I don’t think it could be used to justify keeping them closed.
As one final point as long as we’re on the subject of what sort of things were recommended in the years before the pandemic. When the group President Bush put together went to the CDC and recommended closing down things as per the model the CDC pushed back and said it would never work, people wouldn’t tolerate it. And to a certain extent that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Also the period the group recommended for shutting things down was relatively short. Which is also something we haven’t exactly done (particularly with schools).
II- Republicans vs. Democrats
I’m already a third of the way through the expected length of this post and I’ve only covered 1 of the 5 items on my list. I guess I’ll need to exercise more brevity going forward.
Like so many things COVID became a tribal issue with the blue tribe on the left and the red tribe on the right. And members of each tribe want to know that their tribe was the righteous one, while the other tribe was the wicked one.
Nightmare Scenario was written with the goal of proving that the Republicans, and particularly Trump were the wicked ones. Having also read Premonition as well as countless blog posts and tweets, I think this fixation blinded the authors of Scenario to the even greater failings of the FDA and CDC, institutions which are supposed to be the ones preparing for and dealing with emergencies like this. Which is to say while it would have been nice to have a President who’s great at handling a global pandemic, it shouldn’t be too surprising when we don’t. The president has countless jobs, the CDC only has a couple and the most important of those is handling a global pandemic, and on this count they were abject failures.
This discussion of tribalism and the CDC takes us to the story of Charity Dean, one of the three stars of The Premonition. In the years leading up to the pandemic, Charity was a public health official, a very talented and dedicated one, exactly the kind of person you wanted in charge during a pandemic. The book relates numerous stories about her, but two are germane here.
First, in the months immediately before the pandemic Charity had risen to be the number two person in the state of California for public health, and when the top position, Director of the California Department of Public Health, opened up in 2019, Charity assumed she would be appointed. She was not, and she discovered later that as a white woman with blond hair she wasn’t even in the running, despite being the number two person. Instead Dr. Sonia Angell was given the job. Her primary qualification appeared to be the fact that she was Latina. In other words it was an affirmative action hire. Had it been a successful example of affirmative action, raising someone with the necessary skills who had previously been overlooked, then we wouldn’t be talking about Dr. Angell, but that was not the case. Lewis described her as being “monstrously incompetent”, so much so that she ended up abruptly resigning in August of 2020.
Republican ideology gave us Trump, and he obviously made some big mistakes (more on that later) but the presidency is not our primary line of defense. The public health bureaucracy is, and Democratic ideology undermined that, and not merely in the case of Dr. Angell. I think one of the biggest hits the public health authorities took was when they backpedaled all their guidance on gatherings when people started to protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
The second reason I wanted to bring up Charity Dean was to highlight her views on the CDC, since you might need further convincing. Lewis describes how Dean, through her connection with other characters in the book, was finally given the opportunity to put together a plan for how to deal with the pandemic. Someone, in an effort to help, added a small role for the CDC in her plan. Charity wrote back:
No…The single most important part of this plan is IT IS NOT RUN BY THE CDC… The entity/agency/figurehead leading this must be a Churchill not a Chamberlain.”
III- The FDA and CDC
So what made the FDA and CDC so bad? What did they do that they shouldn’t have and what should they have done that they didn’t?
To explain that I’ll first need to take you on a brief aside. Back in 2014 Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex decided to take on the effects of marijuana legalization, in a post titled, Marijuana Much More Than You Wanted to Know. As is usual with his “Much More Than You Wanted to Know” posts he went really deep, looking at the issue from every angle you could imagine. But despite pot affecting everything from IQ to organized crime, one consideration overwhelmed everything else: traffic fatalities. Does pot increase the number of traffic fatalities because more people drive under the influence? Or does it decrease the number of traffic fatalities because people substitute pot for alcohol and while driving under the influence of pot is bad, it’s vastly better than driving drunk? In the final analysis death is so bad, and traffic fatalities are such a big cause of death that even changing it by a tiny percentage one way or the other overwhelms every other consequence the legalization of marijuana has on society.
This is the position the FDA and CDC were in. They probably did a lot of things right. There are probably many criticisms which are unjustified. But in the final analysis the consequences of the few bad things they did were so bad they overwhelmed all the rest.
The reason these things were so bad is that when you’re talking about exponential growth, what happens at the very beginning of that curve has a far more dramatic impact than anything that happens later on, after the curve is established. I’ve seen evidence that they did lots of things wrong at pivotal points where speed was essential, but here are the two biggest examples in my opinion, one from each agency:
For the CDC it was obviously creating the initial test. If you haven’t heard this story Buzzfeed actually has a great investigative piece on it. But basically they refused to rely on tests that had already been created in other countries, they refused to let private companies market tests they had developed, the supply of their test was horribly limited and to top it all off it didn’t work! Certainly even with good testing there was no way for the US to avoid the pandemic, but we seeded it far more deeply and more broadly than necessary because in the very earliest days we couldn’t test for it.
For the FDA it was the vaccine, and in some respects this is less forgivable. The CDC might plausibly claim that, early on, it wasn’t really clear how important the test was going to be, the FDA had no such excuse when it came to the vaccine, everyone knew exactly how important it was. And yet the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee seemed almost leisurely in their approval approach. The vaccine was ready for approval by November 20th, but they didn’t meet until December 10th, nearly three weeks later. What possible reason could there be for not meeting on November 21st or the evening of November 20th?
As I said, I think these are the biggest mistakes, but they are by no means the only mistakes made by the FDA and CDC. In fact when it comes to the vaccines there may be an even bigger scandal, but for discussing that, let’s turn to:
IV- Trump and the Vaccine
The same thing I said about the CDC and the FDA could be applied in reverse to Trump, and his team. However many mistakes they may have made, in the final analysis, the speed of vaccine development was going to be the measurement that mattered the most. And in this respect everyone basically agrees that Operation Warp Speed did an amazing job. The obvious objection for those not inclined to give Trump any credit is that he played only a very small part in the operation. That’s a fair point, but in considering it we should remember what Kennedy said after the Bay of Pigs, “Victory has 100 fathers while defeat is an orphan.” Lots of people now want to take credit for starting or managing or having the idea for Operation Warp Speed, but if it had failed everyone would have blamed Trump. This being the case, should he not therefore get some of the credit?
Even Nightmare Scenario which was written specifically to savage Trump, admitted that this sort of “hail mary” approach was something the Trump administration was actually pretty good at. The book’s chief criticism of such efforts was not that they were ineffective, but rather that by routing around the normal procurement process, such efforts wasted money. This complaint about the government wasting money made me laugh, a lot. Other more serious criticisms include duplication and a lack of focus, and there was certainly a lot of that, but in the end we got the vaccine months and months sooner than anyone thought possible. Though we could have gotten it even sooner and therein lies the potential scandal.
There’s lots of evidence of people working to move the announcement of a successful vaccine from October to November, enough that the fact of it happening really isn’t in question, what’s in question is why?
The most benign explanation is these people were worried about anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitancy, and they wanted to make sure the safety data was ironclad.
However, lots of people (including the aforementioned Nate Silver) find the timing to be very suspicious. The fact that moving it from October to November happened to move it from before the election to after the election makes it look like it was largely motivated by a chance to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts.
Other people don’t care about the motivation, they just think that it was a bad trade off, that the delay was never going to have that much of an impact on vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxxers, but it was always going to have a huge effect on the number of people who died. Who cares what the motivation was, the decision to delay ended up killing thousands of people.
The problem with much of the discussion is that it ends up being broken into a binary. Either it was totally reasonable for the FDA to wait 60 days to see about side effects or it was monstrous and politically motivated. And what’s lacking in both the current discussion and the toolkit of bureaucratic capabilities is any capacity for nuance. Could we have authorized it for high risk old people in October? People who felt that the protection from not dying was worth the potential that there might be unknown side effects?
V- The True Beginnings of the Pandemic
Here we arrive at the ultimate example of the “traffic fatality effect”. Despite everything that has been said so far, when it comes to the pandemic all other considerations are secondary to the question of where the virus came from, because if it didn’t happen in the first place every other issue is moot. Thus far I have mostly drawn from The Premonition and Nightmare Scenario. This section is going to draw almost entirely from Viral. With a few other quotes here and there. Speaking of which, here’s Matthew Yglesias to start us off with a quote saying essentially the same thing:
(Or not… I had this quote in my notes I thought it was from Yglesias but it wasn’t, and now I don’t know where I got it… That said I still think it’s 100% true.)
I’m not saying it was definitely a lab leak. I’m saying that answering that question is one of the most important tasks of the post-mortem, and anyone who says it definitely wasn’t a lab leak is not trying to answer it they’re engaged in the culture war.
Before we get to a discussion of the actual evidence, this is a perfect example of what I talk about over and over again in this space. You might think that in a situation where something only has a 5% chance of happening that you should act as if it won’t or if it didn’t. But my argument has always been if the consequences of it happening are bad enough, you should act as if it will or that it did. Applying this the lab leak hypothesis they should have never been conducting coronavirus research in a biosafety level 2 lab (4 is the highest) and going forward we should probably stop such research all together, certainly anything that involves gain of function. But that’s precisely what we’re NOT doing. To quote from Yglesias again:
By contrast, on something like Covid-19’s origins, we’ve had a decent amount of coverage of the lab leak controversy but essentially no coverage of what is being done to prevent future lab leaks (basically nothing) or to prevent future zoonotic crossover events (again, nothing). But the reason these are our two contenders is that as far as we know, these are the routes through which new viruses emerge…either way, we’re not doing anything to counter either route for transmission, and that (shocking! alarming! insane!) fact gets way less attention than the latest round of “who’s yelling at whom about masks?”
We should be taking all of these measures even if the chance is only 5%, but having read Viral I would argue that the chance is far higher than 5%. In fact it might be the inverse of that, I might put the odds at 95% lab leak, 5% zoonotic origin. I’m sure you’re interested in the evidence backing up that assertion. As this post is already running long I’m going to steal Scott Aaronson’s list, and briefly offer my own commentary. And if you’re interested in going deeper you should read his whole review. But this is his list of things Viral proved beyond reasonable doubt, a list I entirely agree with:
Virologists, including at Shi Zhengli’s group at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and at Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, were engaged in unbelievably risky work.
This gets to the point I was making previously. We were already taking risks we shouldn’t have been. Lab leaks happen all the time, and rather than focusing on the huge negative black swan of potentially creating and releasing a viral pandemic, they were focused on the small gains of having a better viral database. The claim was it would help us fight future pandemics, but:
Even if it didn’t cause the pandemic, the massive effort to collect and enhance bat coronaviruses now appears to have been of dubious value. It did not lead to… useful treatments, vaccines, or mitigation measures, all of which came from other sources.
Another point I make all the time, the benefits of technology are almost always oversold while the potential harms are generally entirely invisible. Particularly once we have done all the obviously beneficial things (modern sanitation) and we’re moving on to things of more dubious value (harvesting exotic viruses and studying them).
There are multiple routes by which SARS-CoV2, or its progenitor, could’ve made its way, otherwise undetected, from the remote bat caves of Yunnan province or some other southern location to the city of Wuhan a thousand miles away, as it has to do in any plausible origin theory. Having said that, the regular Yunnan→Wuhan traffic in scientific samples of precisely these kinds of viruses, sustained over a decade, does stand out a bit! On the infamous coincidence of the pandemic starting practically next door to the world’s center for studying SARS-like coronaviruses, rather than near where the horseshoe bats live in the wild, Chan and Ridley memorably quote Humphrey Bogart’s line from Casablanca: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
I had to quote this point in full. It really elegantly encapsulates the whole argument. And what about the wet market?
The seafood market was probably “just” an early superspreader site, rather than the site of the original spillover event. No bats or pangolins at all, and relatively few mammals of any kind, appear to have been sold at that market, and no sign of SARS-CoV2 was ever found in any of the animals despite searching.
My sense is that those who hold on to the zoonotic origin idea, imagine that the wet market was this crazy lawless area where anything could have happened. Actually it was closely monitored, and because of other diseases they were carefully tracking what was sold and when, and as Aaronsson says, none of the potential carriers were even sold at that market.
Most remarkably, Shi and Daszak have increasingly stonewalled, refusing to answer 100% reasonable questions from fellow virologists… They’ve refused to make available a key database of all the viruses WIV had collected, which WIV inexplicably took offline in September 2019.
If that database had been taken offline in November of 2019, this would be the smoking gun, but even September seems very, very strange. But of course the most inexplicable thing is why it has never been made available since the pandemic started. The whole point of the database was to assist people in fighting pandemics, and when an actual pandemic comes along it’s permanently made unavailable. The list of other strange oversights and evasions is nearly as baffling. And of course on top of it all:
The Chinese regime has been every bit as obstructionist as you might expect: destroying samples, blocking credible investigations, censoring researchers, and preventing journalists from accessing the Mojiang mine.
Sometimes people imagine coverups where there probably aren’t any. Or there is a coverup, but they’re covering for something different than what you imagine. Consequently I try to be somewhat skeptical when an organization or a person is accused of acting in bad faith. The world is complicated, and incompetence is ubiquitious, but for this particular issue there are so many obvious good faiths steps would could be taken but haven’t been:
- WIV could restore access to the database.
- China could allow an international team to investigate the cave.
- Daszak could confirm and explain facts that are already out there.
- They could stop any remotely dangerous viral research now that it’s been shown that it may have caused significant harm, and it didn’t provide any significant help.
Of course this lack of good faith engagement illustrates the entire problem, not just with finding the actual source of the pandemic, but with everything about the pandemic, and indeed everything about the modern world. We have turned everything into tribal warfare, and the only thing that’s important is that our tribe wins.
Speaking of fracturing into tribes, sometimes I feel like Treebeard, from the Lord of the Rings, when he was asked by Pippin whose side he was on, “Side? I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side…” If you’d like to be on my side with things like the pandemic, and the fragility of modernity more broadly. Consider donating.
“But first, before I forget, back on the 8th I made a prediction about when omicron would peak. I said that it would peak on the 15th, at around 2,500 new daily cases per million people. So how’d I do?”
Well, you made a prediction in December for January so OK. Is this, however, your only prediction about the pandemic? I feel like there might have been a few before, do we have the blogosphere version of p-hacking going on? Anyway, hate to say the rest is not so good IMO.
Schools – Well here we run into a problem. We have well over 800K dead and a higher death rate than other developed nations. We have that despite having good vaccines first (I’m not quite counting Russia’s vaccine since they announced it but didn’t vaccinate anyone it seems (vaporware?) nor China as they developed an ok vaccine but had ZeroCovid at the time). So, if schools had not closed, more would be dead, a lot more. We didn’t sacrifice the young to save the old. There old made out pretty badly and having schools open *before* the vaccine would have added to that.
A note on this, 140,000 kids lost at least one parent or primary caregiver to Covid. Don’t tell me that psychological blow isn’t much more than not having a prom or fun with friends at lunch for a year. That number obviously would have been higher. Hospitalization of kids has been going up all this year because even with many kids vaccinated, they are going indoors to school everywhere in the nation. Even blue areas are only temporarily closing schools when there are surges. Locally we just lost a bus driver (he was older, wouldn’t vaccinate or mask. Darwin moves quickly sometimes).
Just imagine pre-vaccine how you would run the schools while staff get killed? It’s not a crazy concern. After the holiday break Chicago schools had up to 50% of staff absent. You can fairly gripe about teacher’s unions but you should try to understand their position even if you don’t have to agree with all of it (I, for example, don’t care about arguments against vaccine mandates for teachers). Regardless the position against school closing does not deserve much respect unless the person making it is willing to explain how many hundreds of thousands of additional deaths he would have accepted.
The harm to kids is overblown. If kids are so behind in learning, how come you don’t hear about any ‘catchup’ programs anywhere? During the pandemic I remember AOC promoting a volunteer tutoring program to match at home office workers with kids to tutor. I suggested we explore that in my community and got crickets. Actually, in my community the feedback I got was that the pure online learning kids did fine. Those that suffered were the ones doing hybrid one day in person at reduced hours one day online. The online only schooling had consistent teachers and lesson plans. The on-off schooling had different teachers each day and was rough on kids who don’t ‘transition well’. But the on-off schooling was pushed because the ‘think of the children’ types were insistent and loud that kids were suffering without in person school. It’s also a bit of a stretch to hear people tell us online schooling harmed kids, while they are gleefully moving everything they can for their jobs to online meetings from their homes. Does the damage disappear the moment one turns 18 and become a good?
To me it is pretty clear online schooling worked for many, didn’t work for many more. Given it was thrown together in a matter of a few weeks, that’s actually a pretty good outcome. Why not work on increasing its strength? Ensure classrooms are all online so kids who are at home can watch the actual class rather than have a different teacher who’s unlikely to be aligned with the course? Most of the criticism I’ve heard of online classes were either limited to very small kids, poor coordination and trying to figure out what the rules should be. But then you know the weapons we had at the start of WWII were pretty pathetic compared to the weapons we had at the end. This is the way of things.
During my numerous discussions online about this, a person tossed out a hypothetical harm of shutdown to me. He said “suppose I gained ten pounds and 25 years later that extra weight causes x,y,z health problems”. That’s a good point on how to think about things like this. Is that not a gain of 10 lbs in year 1 of the pandemic, and a decision for 24 years after to not make an effort to lose the weight? I mean the person who gained 10 lbs but then lost it after, he will probably have no detectable health issues even out over a quarter century. The problem here is the dead don’t get to course correct, the living do.
Another example of course correction was the UK domestic abuse hotline. People worried with everyone stuck at home, abuse would skyrocket. First week or so there was a spike in calls. Then it oddly returned to normal. Nate Silver would be perplexed because rates of abuse do not change on a dime like that and doubling, tripling the hours people spend at home together should generate more cases. But obviously what happens is course correction. A person who would beat his wife if he was stuck with her all day, who finds escape in work and the pub to avoid that would be confronted with a problem when this pandemic started. The response to the problem would either be to address his problems or leave the home. Same for the wife who previously tolerated an abusive spouse because he would be gone most of the day who now has to confront him all day long. Sometimes when a problem can no longer be avoided that is when people take the opportunity to fix it.
On this topic I’m a bit more optimistic. All the flaws will be visible early but they do tend to hide the strengths that are built up. For example, if families with high risk of domestic abuse addressed at least to some degree their problems, that type of benefit will be small in the short term (wife beaters do not typically beat their wives most days after all) but will accrue quite a bit over the long term. The need to suddenly course correct can be very stressful but over the long run is likely to produce strength.
CW:I was going to try to do one comment per section, but instead I think I’m going to try to condense my view as much as possible…
Omega Problem: The US has had more death than it should. Any set of ideas that amount to doing less means our failure would be worse, not better. Unless one is proposing doing less in one spot compensated by doing something else in another.
What doesn’t explain the O.P.:
– Earlier vaccines. The US still got vaccines before anyone else and got more people vaccinated than others. Leaving aside the quibbles over approval, our poor performance can’t be excused with vaccines coming 4 weeks later than they should have. (Again they should have come 1-2 years after going by past history!).
– Messaging. What messages did anyone hear from our CDC/FDA/FoxNews/Fauci/Trump/Biden/Rogan that, say, Canada didn’t hear as well?
-Lab Leaks: China doesn’t care and there’s nothing anyone will do from here that will change that. We’re not going to war to get the lab notebooks and databases at Wuhan. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Does anyone think we can police every lab in the world? If the pandemic wasn’t caused by a lab leak, well the next one could be and if this one wasn’t, the next one could come from somewhere else. Going forward think intelligently about things like gain of function research (which is a challenge because I think there’s 500 people talking about it and 450 of them had no idea what this was before 2020) but ultimately either the whole world will follow best practices or it won’t. If it won’t we’ll still have to be ready for another pandemic in the future and if it does, well pandemics still happen without labs.
Omega Cause: Frankly our inability to apply any patience.
When you have a fire you fight it until it is out. We fought it until it died down a bit, then we got bored and distracted and asserted/assumed/wishfully thought it was over. Then it came back and we did it again, and again and again. Probably the rest of the world except for China, New Zealand and Australia suffered the same flaw, but we were worse at it. If you look at it from this framework, you can probably find that 40% of your podcasts have all been warning about some variation of that issue. A lack of seriousness, patience, etc. is a flaw but the challenge that exposes the flaw is unpredictable. It could have been a zombie rising, a comet, a UFO invasion but it was a pandemic.
Everything else is nitpicking, which I can do very well and probably will here. Like saying “you should have used more water” or “baking soda, should have put baking soda on the fire”….quite possibly right but ultimately once the actual flame wasn’t visible anymore, we walked away to argue about video games.
The O.P. assumes that the only metric we’re concerned with is deaths from COVID. When in reality there’s all manner of things we’re worried about. Certainly if teenage suicides exceeded deaths from COVID we would consider that a bad deal. I don’t think that’s the case, but certainly the best information we have is that they have increased. See for example this article from Pro Publica:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-lost-year-what-the-pandemic-cost-teenagers
What about the increase in overdose deaths? Which also appears to be undergoing a pandemic related increase:
https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/issue-brief-increases-in-opioid-related-overdose.pdf
Sure, if some measure kept 1000 people from dying from COVID and had zero downsides, then we would be dumb not to do it, but that’s not the case. There’s tradeoffs for everything, and the other side of those tradeoffs become more important as various ways are created for avoiding deaths, like the vaccine.
These tradeoffs again become important when you’re talking about fighting the fire till it’s out. Teenage suicide, and the opioid crisis are other fires. You can’t ignore the conflagration over the ridge while you wait for the embers to be completely cold on the fire you’re working on.
As far as the lab leak, it does matter, and knowing that it was a lab leak will be more effective at stopping certain kinds of research than not knowing. But you may have a point that such research is so easy to do that we can’t stop it. But the consequences are so potentially apocalyptic, that unless you want to just throw your hands up we have to try.
A good move against Omega, but it only works if you can go to the countries that did better on Covid deaths and show me they did even worse on teenage suicides, overdoses, murders, choas, and whatever else you want to pile on. If they did then great, you can say “yes the US took on more Covid deaths, but other nations paid for it with teenage suicides, drug overdoses, mayham etc. We made a choice to save our future by sacrificing those who represented the past. We honor them but it was the right call when presented with a bad choice.”
But you can’t really write that, can you? As I typed it, a mental image of Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye dripping down his face appeared in my head. Not directly related but, hmm, interesting. We still got him with us, he enjoyed a billion dollars of work on monoclonal antibodies to ensure his chair wasn’t left empty to be filled by some younger person.
Before I click your links, are they talking about other countries? If not then you’ve shown me that the US took on more Covid deaths and more overdoses and your solution is to…errr…add more Covid deaths? Sorry we need to kill more people because we got so many people who are going beat their wives, or start doing harder drugs, or just off themselves….. It sounds like you’re saying the US, in particular, has been held hostage by the very fragile. Yet the wrong lesson to pull from this is to say our mistake was we failed to indulge the very fragile even more in their fragility.
My perspective is that both are probably a symptom of my Omega Cause.
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“As far as the lab leak, it does matter, and knowing that it was a lab leak will be more effective at stopping certain kinds of research than not knowing.”
Well let’s say it is a lab leak. We have then SARSI not a lab leak and SARSII is a lab leak. So a Bayesian prior would be pandemics are 50-50 natural-lab leak. So what? Sure make labs more secure and scrutinize what they do. I think the last person who should be allowed within 1000 miles of that is Rand Paul. And regardless, this will have no impact on China, India, Russia and the rest of the world. Get smart people who work in labs as a living (not pundits, not even Fauci) to think about best practices. But I suspect that is already happening regardless. Yet the reality is pandemics are part of our ‘normal’…not a black swan but a grey rhino. A bit like a forest fire, yes remind people not to smoke in a dry forest and follow best practices when dealing with camp fires. Yes try to figure out if the most recent fire from hell was caused by someone tossing a cigarette or by a natural lightening strike. But at best you will just decrease the number of fires if you control the controllable side of the equation….(not a perfect analogy, forests have a ‘fire debt’ that builds up over time so if you avoid a manmade fire this year, next year you may end up with a natural fire twice as big).
But we should understand something here, no progress is being made on the lab leak question. We only have experts who are flocking back and forth between different hunches that fall in and out of favor like the waves in a water park’s pool.
There’s an analogy here. The question of whether Shakespeare wrote all his plays or if someone else wrote all or some of them. This is a topic that ‘experts’ (loosely defined as those who go deep enough on the topic to write a book and get it published by a house with at least a modest reptuation) have swayed back and forth on with hunches. Very rarely there’s a little bit of new information (say computer analysis of word/phrase frequency) that might offer a tidbit more insight. But that’s it, the consensus here can go back and forth forever because the information is more or less locked down. Unless some new document emerges, a lost play or diaries of people who knew Shakespeare or Shakespeare himself…it is just an intellectual treadmill. Feel free to jog on it if you think the exercise is helpful to your mind but if you think you’re getting anywhere, you’re under a misconception.
Now I will say this, the evidence IMO has gotten weaker on lab leaks. We have two strains of the virus early on in Wuhan. This is a virus that seems to need a lot of reproductions before it splits into new major variants. A lab leak would mean maybe a few dozen people at most would get it from the lab and then start spreading it? When did this happen before the outbreak at the food market? If variants take millions of infections to emerge, then when was there time for this to happen without being very noticeable? I suppose maybe, like the Big Bang, there was a ‘variant inflation’ that happened early on with the virus but then we’re adding explanations here to make the theory fit.
Another major problem is the animals. Something like 40% of Northeastern deer in the US have been infected. So have minks (and minks have been shown to go two ways, they can give the virus back to humans). Dogs, cats, and dozens of other animals have been shown to be able to at least get the virus for a while. If that’s the case, then there’s a massive number of possible paths the virus could have taken.
Team Lab Leak I feel understimates the huge number of paths. They construct an argument along the lines of “either lab, or bats at the market people were handling for totally non-lab related reasons. OK not market bats therefore must be lab”. Remember, the hospitalization rate with this is maybe 2% to be generous. Before the first identifiable person showed up at the hospital, there were probably 50-98 cases that came and went without anyone noticing anything.
Regardless, if you view this as something akin to WWII or WWI, and I think at this point its close enough, then I guess the lab leak obsession is a bit of a distraction. It’s a bit like coming up with a 10,000 page report on how to avoid this all again…but the report concentrates on how to avoid assassination of monarchs by Serbs.
Yes if a deranged Serb in NYC decides he wants to go to Canada and kill Prince Harry, I think the police and FBI should stop him before he does. No I don’t think it would cause WWIII and you could quibble that Harry is now outside the monarchy but probably best to avoid taking the risk regardless, plus right thing to do and all.
I’m also fine with having a discussion on whether virus research was useless and dangerous. At least in terms of just going to bats, collecting viruses from them and putting their genetic code in a database (although you’re making a big deal of just such a database that China pulled offline so that must have some use). Although is flying blind really the better option? I mean the deer in the northeast was discovered just because of a fluke….there was some type of preexisting research going on with deer. Most deer populations around the world are not being periodically checked, let alone bat populations, let alone even human populations.
It seems to me it would be good to know how many bat viruses are there, how often do new ones pop up? How often do they show up in other animals like deer? If we had that information it might even shed a little bit of light on just how unusual Covid really is.
I mean its like saying the anguish over whether or not Shakespeare wrote the plays would be less if we had less documents from his era rather than more. And that’s true, few people write books alleging Homer stole his work from someone else because we literally don’t even have the name of anyone else from his time. We aren’t even sure we have his name! But I’m sure we’d be better off if a treasure trove of documents was found from Shakespeare’s time or better yet Homer’s…even though that might just increase the list of ‘suspects’ for conspiracy minded people to work with.