Tag Archives: biological weapons

the lab leak theory that wouldn’t go away

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Speaking of public.substack.com, they say there is evidence that three scientists engaged in “gain of function” lab at the Wuhan institute of virology were the first to be infected by Covid-19. Matt Taibbi also covers this story.

This narrative holds together logically for me. There is still the problem however that I don’t trust U.S.-based reporting about China. I’m not saying everything we hear is an outright lie, I am saying there is a whiff of propaganda in the air that taints every news story so it is hard to tell truth from half-truth.

Even if this is true, there is the question of whether the research was for civilian or military purposes and who funded it (some reporting suggests the U.S. government played a role). It’s hard for me to buy the idea that this was a bio-weapon because it doesn’t seem to have been a very good one. Is a good bioweapon one that initially did not spread all that fast and kills less than 1% of people it infects, skewed towards the elderly? And one that no vaccine was yet available to the party that supposedly created the bioweapon? If there is anything suspicious, it is that the U.S. government pretty much had the vaccine technology developed and just had to figure out how to commercialize and distribute it. Even though this seemed excruciatingly slow when you lived through it, similar processes in the past took decades that this time around were accomplished in a year or so.

Gary Larson, The Far Side

The lab leak hypothesis is dead. Long live the lab leak hypothesis!

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The lab leak hypothesis is back baby! Well, there is no new scientific evidence. But the U.S. “intelligence community” has now reported that it is officially split on the issue, with some agencies favoring the hypothesis. Snopes has a good explainer. The intelligence agencies’ main argument seems to be that…there is no new scientific evidence. So do the scientists and intelligence community even disagree? Or is there a science communication problem here? The scientists may be saying a natural origin is more likely than not, but the evidence is not so strong that they are willing to completely reject other hypotheses. The intelligence agencies meanwhile may have a much lower bar in terms of uncertainty, and they have an axe to grind with China. I haven’t forgotten their “intelligence assessment” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, on which there was unanimous agreement.

It seems to me there are some different flavors of the lab leak hypothesis though. We know the Wuhan lab was working with bat viruses. We know they at least applied for funding at some point for genetic engineering experiments on bat viruses, because a U.S. organization was a party to that and it has been made public. We know their safety standards have been criticized. So…a lab researcher or employee could have been exposed and infected by a naturally occurring virus that was being studied there. Or they could have been exposed and infected by a genetically engineered virus that was being studied there. If the latter happened, that genetically engineered virus could have been under study for legitimate medical and public health reasons, even safety standards were inadequate. Or, maybe this is a biowarfare laboratory run by Dr. Evil. Nobody does bioweapons research by international treaty, and I just assume everybody including the United States does it.

If the problem is not the existence of adequate safety standards, but their implementation and enforcement, there are fairly obvious things that could be done to minimize the risk of a future lab leak. Training, inspections, accountability. Something akin to the IAEA’s nuclear weapons inspection regime could work. It would be in everyone’s best interests to agree and follow this course of action, right?

October 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.

Most hopeful story: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?

what a global pandemic/bioweapon surveillance regime could look like

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It’s pretty clear that the world needs some kind of surveillance or inspection regime to monitor both biological weapons and natural disease outbreaks. This Wired article goes into some of the possibilities.

  • The WHO is an obvious possibility, but requires full cooperation of member states so this limits what it can do, even if it were well funded.
  • Something like the International Atomic Energy Agency is a possibility. It would have to be established by a treaty and would have the ability to swoop in and inspect advanced biological labs (these are called “biosafety level 4” or BSL-4) on short notice.
  • There is an existing treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention which might have the authority to create this body, but the article says it is somewhat ineffective and a new treaty wouldn’t need to have as many parties, just starting with the major players and letting others sign on over time.
  • Another model is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is similar to IAEA.
  • The UN Security Council would also have the authority to establish a new inspection body, kind of like it did for Iraq in the 1990s (which turned out great… and this is the problem, the UN lost a lot of its previous credibility in that debacle.)

The BSL-4 labs are proliferating around the world according to the article, and this seems like a scary situation to me.

My modest proposal would be to fund the WHO fully right away and have it investigate natural disease outbreaks with member state cooperation. Then have the Security Council establish the heavy-duty biological weapons inspection program with the heavies right away. Like it or not, we also need surveillance to find the hidden labs or even just people messing around with dangerous stuff in their garages and basements. This will be much easier for the little guy to do than, say, getting your hands on some enriched uranium or Novachok.

This is an existential risk – we may not get many chances to make mistakes and learn from them. The risk will keep increasing and under any kind of moral or responsible government framework it has to be dealt with right away.

more on mRNA technology for vaccines and beyond

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There are several interesting nuggets in this MIT Technology Review article:

  • A lot of the technology was developed by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which I have mixed feelings about – it’s essentially a giant evil greedy corporation in most ways, but it does provide a lot of jobs locally – much like any giant inefficient Soviety industry, and obviously it created this technology for greedy purposes which now has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives while making a few greedy people extraordinarily rich.)
  • The technology essentially gets your body to make its own medicine, “turning a human body into a bioreactor”. However, doesn’t work well (so far) for medicines that need to be taken repeatedly, which is most medicines except vaccines. So vaccines are the most obvious candidate for now. Combining it with gene editing technology holds the promise of permanent protection against disease, even handed down the generations, but there are also some scary risks here.
  • It may work for herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer and HIV. For flu and coronavirus, there is a possibility of “universal vaccines” that would protect against thousands of strains with a single shot.
  • The vaccine was designed within 48 hours of the scientists receiving its DNA sequence, and ready for animal trials in less than six weeks. (This is exciting, because it suggests the possibility of responding to new threats quickly in the future, whether natural or manmade.)
  • “vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average.” (sounds like an obvious, clear textbook market failure to me and an obvious moral requirement for government to step in)
  • The researchers are advocating for the government to create “megafactories” for producing mRNA that could be leased to companies in normal times, but taken over by the government to pump out vaccines quickly in times of crisis. They liken this to how governments “governments spend billions on nuclear weapons they hope to never use”. (They have this one wrong – it’s trillions! And if we need a military reason to do this, we need this to protect against biowarfare and bioterrorism in addition to naturally arising pandemics. It’s an existential threat and like I said, an absolute moral imperative for government to make this happen.)
  • The article also mentions an experimental gene therapy cure for blindness. Exciting but costs about a million dollars right now for two eyes.

December 2020 in Review

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2020 is officially in the books!

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful story: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

U.S. Army biological weapons testing

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It is documented that the U.S. Army intentionally tested biological weapons on American civilians, mostly in the 50s and 60s. From The New York Times archive in a 1994 article:

The Army released an organism called Aspergillus fumigatus at the Norfolk Naval Supply Center because most workers were black; for some reason, the testers imagined an enemy might target the blacks at military bases. “Since Negroes are more susceptible to coccidioides than are whites,” a report said, “this fungus disease was simulated by using Aspergillus fumigatus.” Aspergillus, further, was known to cause lethal infections.

In 1949, and for 20 years afterward, the Army released bacteria among millions of unsuspecting people. At hearings in 1977, Pentagon witnesses acknowledged that bacteria and chemical particles were sprayed over San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis and 236 other populated locations.

The Army conceded that it had released microorganisms at Washington National Airport in 1965 and into the New York City subway system in 1966 during peak travel hours. The purpose was to see how the bacteria spread and survived as people went about their routine activities.

New York Times

The article goes on to say that the Army still (as of 1994) intentionally tests microorganisms at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Chemical weapons were also once tested in the same area, with devastating results for nearby sheep.

North Korea and biological weapons

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Harvard Kennedy School has a new report on North Korea and biological weapons. It is not as alarming as it maybe could be. They almost certainly have the ability to produce them, as does any country, company, or institution with modern agricultural technology. There is no clear evidence that they have made a large-scale attempt to weaponize or deploy them.