House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.”
The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.
The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”
When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.
I understand how WIV could have caused a pandemic, but I don’t understand the other direction — how WIV doing gain-of-function would help the situation in which there was a zoonotic origin, eg at the wet market.
The person I was replying to said that our opinion on gain-of-function should depend on the origin — but I don’t understand how gain-of-function would have helped at all. Only how it poses a risk, whether or not this particular virus was such an example.
The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal populations now.
The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.
I’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this.
The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)
> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO.
And the best solution is to research this... in China?
If you want to research a cure from engineered virus from one hostile country, paying another hostile country to do virus engineering research for you is surely great logic.
I am not in the sector but AFAIK there has been no direct benefit from GoF. There is huge potential which some experts believe outweigh the risks, which is why it is controversial, and that is why it has been politicized.
Protecting the funding and ability to continue the research would explain why scientists have a preference for spillover as opposed to leak. Then there are the politicians...
How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?
Edit:
Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.