Sunday morning quarterbacking
I was shocked to learn that the US had no plan to deal with a pandemic, and had not even done basic things like stockpile enough surgical masks or an adequate supply of testing equipment (or at least the ability to produce the testing equipment rapidly.)
Some people say this is “Monday morning quarterbacking”. It’s easy to throw stones after an event that “no one could have foreseen”.
OK, then today I’d like to do some Sunday morning quarterbacking. I’d like to ask you guys whether we are prepared for other black swans. Let’s start with a collapse of the electrical system due to solar flares or electromagnetic pulse attacks.
This 2019 article caught my eye:
In testimony before a Congressional Committee, it has been asserted that a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.
Well that caught my attention. It sounds worse than being cooped up for a few months watching lots of Netflix films.
HV transformers are the weak link in the system, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has identified 30 of these as being critical. The simultaneous loss of just 9, in various combinations, could cripple the network and lead to a cascading failure, resulting in a “coast-to coast blackout”.
If the HV transformers are irreparably damaged it is problematic whether they can be replaced. The great majority of these units are custom built. The lead time between order and delivery for a domestically manufactured HV transformer is between 12 and 24 months, and this is under benign, low demand conditions.
OK, I think I understand what needs to be done—stockpile some of these transformers that cannot be quickly replaced.
Ordered today, delivery of a unit from overseas (responsible for 85% of current American purchasing) would take nearly 3 years. The factory price for an HV transformer can be in excess of $10 million—too expensive to maintain an inventory solely as spares for emergency replacement.
Yes, $300 million dollars for a stockpile of 30 HV transformers is far too expensive to prevent 90% of the public dying and the rest reduced to cannibalism. Too much for a government that spends trillions of dollars with about as much care as a drunken sailor spending his wages in a red light district. Instead, let’s buy another F-22 jet fighter.
And people wonder why I’m so cynical.
Obviously I’m no expert here, and I expect commenters will tell me why I’m wrong. Perhaps the very same commenters who told me that I was foolish to think that surgical masks would provide any protection.
BTW, this isn’t one of those once in 60 million year events like dinosaur-killing asteroids; a huge solar flare hit Earth in 1859.
Update: I forget to mention that I’m far more worried about accidental nuclear war, bioterrorism and AI run amok than I am about solar flares.
Tags:
3. May 2020 at 10:24
Another worry is that we’ve ripped up copperwire landlines. Everyone’s in the cloud, but there’s no robustness in the system. Yes, the 1859 event supposedly set fire to telegraph lines, but a physical phone system with its own dedicated power supply (as was the case with POTS) still saw us through 9/11 in NYC. Today, what would (wouldn’t) happen?
3. May 2020 at 11:39
nice find. for $300m, i wonder if:
1. a nicely written letter/tweet to bill gates would work?
2. someone could take advantage of a “free driver” externality and get 500k people to subscribe to a $10/mo “disaster prevention charity” to finance the purchase of these over the next 5yrs
More generally, if we’ve lost the state capacity to execute plans, do we still have enough to build incentives that result in market capacity solving these? how many people donate monthly to save puppies? is there a way to frame this spending in terms of puppies saved?
particularly for low cost tail hedges (like HV transformers, masks, pcr machines, etc.) maybe we can prevent societal collapse for at least another generation, despite declining state capacity.
3. May 2020 at 11:46
Like a pandemic, this is something people “in the know” have been bringing up for ages. And they’ve mostly been ignored. I would be curious to know how many of the experts keep a stockpile of food.
3. May 2020 at 11:54
This is a much-talked-about concern in the power industry, yet it remains mostly that — much talked about. A number of major power companies have gotten together and put together what they call “a library ” of somewhat generic transformers to share as emergency backups , kind of like the cheap spare tire only meant to get you another 15 miles down the highway. I have no idea how effective this library would be after a real EMP.
3. May 2020 at 11:59
This is a much-talked-about concern in the power industry, yet it remains mostly that — much talked about. A number of major power companies have gotten together and put together what they call “a library ” of somewhat generic transformers to share as emergency backups , kind of like the cheap spare tire only meant to get you another 15 miles down the highway. I have no idea how effective this library would be after a real EMP.
Actually, there is more concern for some reason of a coordinated terrorist attack on transformers than an EMP event, because an EMP could destroy every transformer in the country. It’s too scary for most to contemplate it for long.
3. May 2020 at 12:19
Good article but an EMP knocking out the grid and killing 90% of Americans is rebutted here:https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25883/north-korea-cant-kill-ninety-percent-of-americans/
3. May 2020 at 12:21
The DSCOVR satellite is designed to function as an early warning of solar storms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory
Presumably the idea is that key transformers can be disconnected in a way that protects them.
3. May 2020 at 12:35
Everyone, Thanks for the info.
Robert, I recall reading that there was no guarantee that the satellite data would lead to a fast enough shutdown of the entire grid. Is that incorrect?
3. May 2020 at 12:41
Robert: Good point, this explains why COVID-19 never got really big outside of China, since other countries got alerted by the “internet” early warning system.
3. May 2020 at 13:46
The interesting thing here is to try and understand the possible frequency and therefore the chance of a grid-down solar storm happening.
We never really had the ability to detect CME’s before the telegraph was rolled out in the 1840’s. Then only a few years later in 1859 the Carrington event happened. A second storm, thought now to possibly be stronger than Carrington, occurred in May 1921 (The New York Railroad Storm). So that’s two storms only 62 years apart…..with the first occurring only about 15 years after we had the capability of detection.
3. May 2020 at 13:55
“Good article but an EMP knocking out the grid and killing 90% of Americans is rebutted here:https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25883/north-korea-cant-kill-ninety-percent-of-americans/”
The article actually says that North Korea isn’t a concern in the context of nuclear powered EMPs. And ends with saying the real concern is solar flares.
3. May 2020 at 14:03
Ssumner: “Update: I forget to mention that I’m far more worried about accidental nuclear war, bioterrorism and AI run amok than I am about solar flares.” – and for good reason the good professor is worried: Wikipedia informs us that a Carrington event (solar flare like in 1859) would cost the US today about $0.6T to $2.6T (and one such event narrowly missed the earth by 9 days in July 2012), which is big but no bigger than the 2008 crash and today’s pandemic. Not an extinction event.
By contrast, as B. Cole has pointed out, China and other countries secretly building BSL-4 biotech factories can easily lead to bio-terrorism, which in turn might lead to nuclear war (retaliation). It’s nearly certain that the Wuhan virus (C-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2) is a lab construct (whether test tube DNA replicated or replicated in a live bat is immaterial, and actually almost a trivial difference these days since you can create any combination with DNA test tube cloning), and when this becomes ‘common knowledge’ will it lead to war or retaliation?
How can one prove the C-19 virus was made in a Wuhan lab? Simple: see if an intermediate host animal is ever found. If not, then the C-19 virus is man-made. For every virus to date, they’ve found an intermediate host within weeks or at most 1-2 years after the novel virus was discovered (H1N1-pigs; SARS-civet cats; Ebola/Marburg – bats; MERS-camels), but for C-19 virus? None to date. I predict they will never find the intermediate host for the C-19 virus, since there’s no intermediate host: the Wuhan virus was made in the WIV, a BSL-4 bioweapons/biotech lab led, until early this year, by Dr. Shi (aka Batwomen to her fans), when she was demoted and replaced by a military general who placed a gag order on all talk about C-19 virus origins.
3. May 2020 at 14:29
There is another threat to the electric power grid. Cyber hacking. Last time I explored this topic was several years ago so maybe by now the power companies have isolated their systems from the internet. But if they haven’t then the electric grid could be taken down by cyber hackers.
Bottom line for me, the more resilient you can be the better chance you will have of surviving.
3. May 2020 at 15:38
90% dead seems to be a gross exaggeration. Even 10% dead would be a lot. It seems to be the usual panicky projection that is apparently based on the questionable assumption that humans surrender to their death when such a catastrophe happens instead of adapting.
Nevertheless, one should of course never put all eggs in one basket. That’s why I find the development in recent years questionable: E-Mobility is a nice idea, but it puts even more eggs in one basket.
The electricity and gasoline systems were previously halfway separate, but now they want to bring the two systems more and more together, which makes us much more vulnerable if a disaster happens. Leaving coal, oil, nuclear power leads us into similar problems.
It is not “only” the vulnerable power systems, the sun itself can also fail, which would be so much worse. Many nations want to base nearly their whole energy system on electricity and the sun, but what do we do if the sun is blocked temporarily, for example due to a volcanic eruption or a nuclear winter?
What worries me most about this topic is that the US, with its manned fighter planes and aircraft carriers, seem to rely on technology that is pretty much obsolete, similar to Japan in World War II with its gigantic battleships.
It’s highly questionable that manned fighter planes and aircraft carriers would be as dominant in major wars as in the past, for example because today drone technology is very advanced. And hypersonic weapons exist as well, like the DF-ZF for example, which is built by the CCP, apparently with the ability to kill US aircraft carriers in a matter of minutes.
The US must be very careful that it is not dominated by military benefactors and lobbies that neglect the future. I base this statement of course on the questionable assumption that it’s not already too late. Every F-22 jet fighter that is being built now seems like an absurd waste that lulls us in a false sense of security
3. May 2020 at 15:56
(1) How many Western countries had such plans and stockpiles?
(2) How much do our health departments spend again? …
3. May 2020 at 15:58
nevertheless, 90% won’t die; they will be saved by monetarism and sticky wages.
3. May 2020 at 16:41
Scott,
Maybe….. that’s why your favorite President did this last year….
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/03/29/2019-06325/coordinating-national-resilience-to-electromagnetic-pulses
3. May 2020 at 16:44
This was the perpetual failing of the Bush era. Every year the chicken-hawks insisted that we needed more and more money for war and counter-terrorism. And the military budget grew and grew to ever more absurd proportions. Whenever politicians or citizens suggest that it wasn’t a good use of money, they were smeared as terrorist-loving traitors. And so, we’ll spend $200 billion dollars a year on wars to prevent death from terrorism (not including another ~$500 billion on baseline military spending), while allocating less than $10 billion for the CDC.
In my mind, dying from a hurricane or a disease isn’t somehow less-bad than dying from terrorism. But, unfortunately, most Americans seemed to think dying from terrorism was so much worse.
3. May 2020 at 16:46
1. So now it’s the federal governments job to carry a surplus of stock? Buying stock with tax-payer money, and holding it in a bunker for years and years and years, until a virus one-day presents itself is not a very smart use of resources. Not only would the medical equipment become obsolete (old tech), but almost all medical supplies (including masks) have a shelf life.
2. Many countries also need equipment. In the real-world factories cannot increase production by 1000x simply because demand rises. Tangible costs are involved when scaling up. And a great deal of time is needed. The USA has conducted more tests than any country in the world – and by a very large margin.
3. In 1919, when 100M people died from the flu, they did not write silly blog posts about how the government failed them. People instead choose to accept the Spanish flu for what it really was, and that is a horrible disease that was simply part of the human condition. Life continued, businesses remained open, those that died were mourned, and those who did not kept on moving forward.
4. It is also remarkable how much hypocrisy exists. You say you don’t want a big federal govt, and would rather leave most of the power to state govts, yet whenever there is a crisis you run to Washington and beg for a bailout. We understand you don’t like Trump. But he is doing the best he can given the circumstance. If you think you can do better, then run for office.
Then again, running for office takes tremendous courage. Standing on a debate state in front of 25M people, while having your personal life probed for the last 60 years is not very easy. It is clear that you don’t have that courage, which is why you choose to sit 50 rows in the stands, heckling those who are actually in the game.
“Man in the Arena”, I suggest you read it!
3. May 2020 at 17:06
I am happy to say I agree 100% with Scott Sumner in this matter. I suspect we can find the money in the federal budget to buy the HV Transformers and stockpile. Here is the trick: form a private company responsible for stockpiling the transformers. They will lobby Congress every year and keep the program alive, the same way zinc producers keep the US penny alive. We may end up with several hundred such transformers stockpiled in various congressional districts, but that is better than nothing.
Also, Dr. Ray Lopez speaks the truth. There are 70 bsl-4 virology labs on the planet, each one capable of altering viruses to be more lethal and infectious to humans. The Wuhan lab had published a paper on how it altered a bat virus to be more infectious and lethal to mice.
My fellow humans, we are all mice. There’s simply no way we can tolerate bsl-4 Labs which are not transparent in every regard and internationally inspected.
Beijing’sinexcusable, intolerable reaction to the possible Wuhan lab leak only darkens suspicions.
3. May 2020 at 18:48
Scott,
The biological threat has always worried me the most, because unlike ALL other threats on your list (and mine below), biological threats replicate, multiply, end evolve. They’re also by nature attacking our material bodies, rather than just stuff we build around us or the environment. I gave some thoughts to a pandemic such as this one before, but I personally more feared a CRISPR experiment gone wrong, or something to that effect. That would be a super-recombinator where newly combined capabilities could generate really unique replicating killers, worse than naturally occurring ones. The chimeric virus idea floated here is a real possibility even if this time it seems the virus was natural.
So maybe this pandemic finally can be put to good use: in that it makes the public take other plausible threats more seriously. Solar flares were always high on my list, plus asteroid strikes (doesn’t have to be an extinction event, just a bad one), accidental nuclear war. AI worries me somewhat less. Doesn’t replicate (hardware wise) and can be unplugged by yer good ole plumber’s wetware hands. I know, there’s scenarios where the AI still creates major damage by intelligently networking and blackmailing its creators. But in essence, to create lasting damage you need a “will to live”, which only comes through evolution for survival, which only comes through replication and elimination of those that didn’t survive. To put this into perspective: no natural threat comes from intelligence. The virus doesn’t even have a cell, much less a brain. Asteroids, solar flares, horrible dictators, brutal corporate conglomerates – usually not an IQ thing. And accidental nuclear war likely won’t result from applied intelligence either. What matters is agency, massively amplified by replication. Agency comes from selection towards survival which effectively reduces down to just: replication. So, fear everything that can replicate without your assistance and competes with you for resources. Which is not AI. Software can replicate but AI needs hardware too, which it can neither make, repair, or replicate. Quite the contrary, AI doesn’t compete for resources with humans, AI is helped by humans. It’s in AI’s “natural interest” to foster human well-being.
3. May 2020 at 19:17
Idle speculation: were the “Wuhan lab leak or wet market” stories actually cover for an intentional act of bioterrorism?
Ponder Thailand, a nation of 70 million but with 56 deaths from c-19. Thailand in general is obsequious to Beijing. About 1 million Chinese would visit Thailand every month prior to the lockdowns.
Ponder the US, a nation of 330 million but with nearly 70,000 c-19 deaths. Washington DC is at odds with Beijing.
Part of intelligence operations is first developing a plausible cover story for a covert operation.
Based on the numbers, I would conclude that Beijing agents opened vials of c-19 in various locations in the US.
The Wuhan disinformation stories were planted in advance.
Or you could believe a bat flew 1000 miles from Yunnan to Wuhan, and then infected a pangolin which then infected a human.
3. May 2020 at 19:43
Unfortunately, one of the problems with the federal government’s lamentable response is that did have a plan for a pandemic, but they couldn’t stop at just one. The government wrote dozens of plans, including numerous versions of the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, the National Biodefense Strategy, the National Health Security Strategy, the Biological Incident Annex to the National Response Framework, and on and on and on. I go over some of the unnecessary and overlapping plans in my article here, and how they inhibited the response to the pandemic: https://medium.com/cicero-news/why-two-decades-of-pandemic-planning-failed-a20608d05800
3. May 2020 at 19:46
Larry, Good point.
Christian, Agree about obsolete military weapons and also that the 90% figure is an exaggeration. Of course (as you say) even 10% would be really bad (compared to stockpiling some transformers.)
Lorenzo, Yup.
dtoh, Yeah, they’ve put out lots of these memos over the years, so why hasn’t the problem been addressed?
Bob, Yup.
Nick, You said:
“yet whenever there is a crisis you run to Washington and beg for a bailout.”
Yeah, I’m a big fan of “bailouts”. LOL
As for the wonderful job we’re doing testing, I’m guessing you rely on Fox News.
You said:
“We understand you don’t like Trump. But he is doing the best he can given the circumstance. If you think you can do better, then run for office.”
Here’s a tip for Trumpistas. If you want to convert others to your cause, don’t present arguments that show the emotional maturity of a 3rd grader.
mbka, In the past, when I read these scary stories I sort of thought “there must be some super secret government agency worried about these issues and planning a response. Then Covid-19 happened and I learned we’re all on our own.
Ben, You said:
“Based on the numbers, I would conclude that Beijing agents opened vials of c-19 in various locations in the US.
The Wuhan disinformation stories were planted in advance.”
Don’t forget to wear that tinfoil hat when you go out into the rice paddy to feed the ox.
3. May 2020 at 19:47
Judge, Interesting. Thanks.
3. May 2020 at 20:23
Another interesting thing to look into: pacific northwest tsunami.
3. May 2020 at 21:45
Curious Cat: there in fact is a possibility of very large and powerful earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest and even the Midwest,
Read up on the New Madrid Quake of 1811.
Scott Sumner:I super-glued on my tinfoil hat when reading the story about a bat that flew a thousand miles from Yunnan to Wuhan and then infected a pangolin which then infected a human.
3. May 2020 at 22:46
Benjamin Cole, Ray Lopez,
you can do a nice Bayesian reasoning on the Wuhan lab theory, on the probabilities of people getting infected naturally vs lab escape. It’s been done in a paper that was linked by Scott earlier (also on MR I think). The tl;dr is that millions of people in the region have antibodies against Coronaviruses and therefore there must have been millions of natural contact points. And that’s just people – other animals incl. pangolins not counted. So the Bayesian on this weighs heavily towards the natural pathway (millions of contact points, with no safety precautions) rather than lab (half a dozen people, with safety precautions).
Now if you’re shifting the goalposts, first chimeric virus (in itself, a scary possibility, if not necessarily likely) from Wuhan, now natural virus, but still somehow Wuhan lab related… then any theory will work for you, as long as it links to the Wuhan lab. Right?
You could of course tell the Wuhan lab story under a benign interpretation, e.g., that the Covid-19 outbreak underlines the necessity of research done in virus labs such as the one at Wuhan, and that the fact that pandemic started there is a supreme irony that only reinforces the necessity of such research. But that wouldn’t fit into your narrative I suppose.
4. May 2020 at 00:12
@mbka – your post was not focused. Started good then went off the rails. Focus, man, focus! Bayesian analysis argues in favor of a lab release, since as Ben says these bats are not found in Wuhan. At best one or two (maybe) sold in the wet market (maybe), but 1000s were in the WIV (Wuhan lab). Also did you understand my post above about intermediate host? Find the intermediate host and I go away, as does Ben. Then you make the classic mistake in that you think a test tube chimeric virus is radically different than one made in vivo in a live organism; it is not. Did you understand my last sentence? Probably not. Let me simplify for you, simpleton. You CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE between a lab made virus and a natural one. Cannot. The Science Medicine article by Kristen G. Andersen tried to imply they could tell, but even they did not stoop so low, they simply said it’s unlikely SARS-CoV-2 is chimeric since a competent gene jockey would have not made it less efficient at infection than the 2015 chimeric SARS-CoV virus Dr. Shi invented (or the supposedly natural bat coronavirus RaTG13 virus she discovered in 2013 or 2016, depending on which strain of the virus you’re counting). Sorry, I probably lost you there, but simply understand that a ‘test tube’ organism looks like, if it’s viable (not crossing a mouse with a plant gene, which has been done btw), just like a ‘natural’ virus created inside a bat. Same same, as they say in Asia.
@Sumner – you don’t need to feed water buffalo in a rice paddy, they find their own food. I would know, we own one.
4. May 2020 at 01:59
mbka:
For whatever reason, whether or not there was a lab leak or not from one of two labs in Wuhan harboring bat viruses, and one which was manipulating bat viruses, is now some sort of PC-acid test.
If you are against Trump, you do not believe the lab leak story, as that favors Trump, and you want Trump to be the villain of the C19 story. And vice-versa.
I am indifferent to Trump, especially given the alternatives.
I found your referenced paper on coronaviruses in SE Asia ridiculous. So…if the contact point was in Yunnan, why not the first outbreak in Kunming, a city of six million in Yunnan? In fact, that city hardly had any cases.
So…you must posit that an individual was infected by a virus that passed through a bat and then morphed inside a pangolin, and then infected a human in Yunnan, and then that human immediately traveled to Wuhan before infecting anyone.
Well, there were people traveling from Yunnan to Wuhan…the lab workers in the labs! They were collecting bat virus samples in Yunnan for years.
Even given your scenario, you end up with a asymptomatic Wuhan lab worker starting off the pandemic.
4. May 2020 at 02:23
mbka,
I cannot put numbers on the probabilities, but neither can the previous studies. You’re probably alluding to the Vox.com article, which is nothing but bad journalism, it is extremely one-sided and doesn’t even try to understand the lab theory.
The antibody study mentioned in the article is a bad joke. These people only did about 100 tests (or even less), in which 3 to 6 people in South China were positive for corona antibodies and in the comparison group, which was ironically in Wuhan, there were 0 people, and from these results they made questionable projections that millions of people were affected.
This is absurd for a number of reasons. First, so few peopple are not enough to make any projections like these. Secondly, you said that you are a biologist, so maybe you know that the antibody tests that we currently have most likely aren’t really that good. We know this from other diseases and antibody tests from the past that needed years of improvement, and even then, there are still many diseases where the tests are quite terrible, a classic example would be Lyme disease.
The only sure thing about the current tests is that we don’t know yet how well these tests really test, and that clinical experience shows that you have to be very sceptical about the first versions of antibody tests for any disease.
On top of that, in the case of SARS-CoV-2 we already have four corona cold viruses out there, that most likely cross-react, there is simply no reason why they would not cross-react.
On top of that, even positive SARS-CoV-2 cases, that I had on my watch, hardly respond with antibodies, if at all. You can’t really distinguish these cases from non-infected people. This is also been reported from Singapore, South Korea, the US, and Germany.
You really have to ask what the scientists in this obscure study have really tested, very probably not what they intented to. It is even worse, it’s a very provisional test, they have built the test for this small study, so in other words they haven’t put any money in this test at all, so it is even worse than the tests that we have now, because at least here the companies put a bit money and time in the development.
In other words, we don’t really have any good figures on how often the contacts are in nature, compared to the laboratories in Wuhan.
It could be the exactly other way around.
An intermediate host does not make lab theory any less likely as well. Quite on the contrary, it indicates an artificially created situation, pangolins and bats do not meet in nature to drink tea, either they live very close together in a laboratory, or very close together in an illegal wildlife market, or both cases together and intertwined.
So far we only have very few unbiased information, and most of this information does make a lab incident look plausbile to say the least. For example we need a good exaplanation why the breakout happended in Wuhan. At least the lab theory does account for that, while the other theory doesn’t.
What???? A lab accident due to a misguided ambitious arrogant research reinforces the necessity of such research? That sounds like the words of a religious cult leader. You surely must be joking. This is madness.
4. May 2020 at 02:48
Mr Sumner: Your first sentence began with “I was shocked to learn that the US had no plan to deal with a pandemic…”. Do you have a source for this?
Because, AFAIK, it’s wrong.
The US had several plans to deal with a pandemic. The question should have been “Why were the pandemic plans all so ineffectual”. I’m afraid if we ask the wrong questions, then we’ll get the wrong answers, and come to the wrong conclusions.
https://medium.com/cicero-news/why-two-decades-of-pandemic-planning-failed-a20608d05800
4. May 2020 at 03:43
The Chinese Supervirus conspiracy theory is as dumb as the 9/11 Inside Job conspiracy theory, and for much the same reasons: 1. there is a much simpler and obvious explanation, 2. the benefit/cost ratio of success versus being exposed is insanely skewed to the costs.
Was it a conspiracy by the Federal Government to plant explosive devices, fake/cause thousands of deaths, and keep the conspiracy hidden forever? Or was George W. Bush just bad at his job?
Is it a Chinese military supervirus? Or is President “Let’s Try Injecting People with Disinfectant” just bad at his job?
4. May 2020 at 04:42
Well, not so much:
“not even done basic things like stockpile enough surgical masks”
I know that CA had such a stockpile. The Feds I’m pretty sure did. And other health care systems did too.
The problem? Government just isn’t very good at maintenance is a general observation. Here, the stockpile was the obvious thing for the next admin to sell off in order to not have to raise taxes/cut spending.
The political process just isn’t good at dealing with long term things like that maintenance.
4. May 2020 at 06:18
This has been a topic of concern for quite some time. A repeat of what was supposedly a massive electromagnetic solar storm in 1859 would supposedly be a modern day disaster. We have many of these events—most are small and inconsequential. But, we really don’t know much about these. And I have always assumed we have some preparation —-but who knows how damaging they would really be?
We do prepare somewhat for a major asteroid strike—i.e., the most damaging ones give us years and decades to try and push one off course—-but we have no real understanding of what to do. There are hundreds—maybe thousands of smaller but still extremely dangerous ones we do not see fast enough that even if we were well prepared could not prevent if they were on course for earth.
We also know about so-called super volcanoes——one that is basically right under Yellowstone which is believed to “blow” every 750k years—-and would basically destroy civilization.
The Universe is a cauldron of massive and violent energy —-some have proposed that quasars billions of light years away could kill us. The sun will die and the earth will end. We have lived here about 300,000 years or about 1/15000th of the earths “life”. As a some what civilized species—-let’s call it 5000 years—-or about 1/900,000th of the earths “life”. Dinosaurs pulled off a 200 million year run—-amazing—-but having brains the size of walnuts was probably helpful.
These approximate facts make me laugh at climate change worriers—-but make me angry at overly paranoid Covid worriers—-at least the latter is a clear and present thing we see.
Speaking of Covid. Pretend that Pompeo’s statement about the Covid virus being made in a lab were true (he says it is—I obviously have no idea). How much would your own subjective probabilities change that Shanghai’s almost zero death rate per million versus NYC 1700 death rate per million were mere a random result? Versus a purposeful result?
4. May 2020 at 07:05
Scott:
Off topic but what’s your take on Warren Buffet’s comments this weekend? Specifically, he said there was no good opportunity to buy assets at discount and he sees no good opportunity going forward. On the one hand, I take his comment on no good opportunity to buy assets as meaning Fed had prevented a panic like that of 2008. On the other hand, he sees no good opportunity going forward signals muted growth expectations going forward. What do investors need to see for higher expectations of growth?
4. May 2020 at 07:44
Christian List,
I’d agree generally that the antibody research has to be taken with a grain of salt, especially because it’s not just the positivity that matters, it’s also the titer, which no one is talking about. And too many unknowns to say anything for sure here. However, it’s a data point, and the general point about numbers and probabilities holds, for me, for now. As for the lab theory, no, it’s not impossible. But see, it’s also not possible to disprove it – even if we found the exact virus in a pangolin tomorrow, you’d still say this pangolin went to Wuhan lab first. So, that’s not a good theory you have here – it fits too many possibilities and risks being true regardless of observed fact. That’s a Popperian no-no.
And there is more. There’s now at least 3 competing escape theories floating around – there’s the Maryland-Wuhan chimeric virus, there’s the natural-yet-from-lab escapee, and there’s Luc Montagnier claiming there’s bits of HIV and Malaria (!!! – ???) in the virus and it must have been intended as a vaccine-related mock target for testing receptors. To me these theories destroy each other’s legitimacy because they all sound similarly plausible, but can’t all equally be true. Again, overfitting the data, if you will.
On the natural theory: The ubiquity of outbreaks with ordinary animal reservoirs in the wild and intermediate hosts is a well established route for influenza and other coronaviruses. We got the original SARS from there as well. Hosts, yes pangolins, why not, civet cats have also been in the fold, and in influenza everything seems to connect to pigs and fowl. Birds can transport diseases very far very fast. Etc. So this is more of a general feeling here of what’s likely and what not.
On the justification of the research, I feel uncomfortable with gain of function research but I see the rationale as a legitimate, while debatable, and honorably justifiable research into what makes these viruses dangerous. Risk free research (the cautionary principle) is a logical impossibility in life. Yes it is debatable how much risk and under which circumstances one would like to take. But it’s not in and by itself an outrage.
4. May 2020 at 07:54
@Scott H.
That Medium article is excellent. No amount of planning is going to protect us without the organizational structures in place to take effective action or, most importantly, without the commitment and ability to test the plans. Bill Gates pointed out in his 2015 speech we need to conduct pandemic games to test and improve our public health defenses the way we conduct war games to test and improve our military defenses. We’ve learned this same lesson in athletics, in academics, in my industry, software, that people and systems have to be put to the test frequently to reinforce what they have learned and identify what they don’t know or what isn’t working.
4. May 2020 at 08:47
@Judge Glock
I see that you’re actually here roaming the comment section. I hadn’t read all the comments before responding to Scott H. Excellent article.
4. May 2020 at 09:09
Thanks Carl and Scott H., glad you enjoyed it!
4. May 2020 at 09:35
“I was shocked to learn that the US had no plan to deal with a pandemic, and had not even done basic things like stockpile enough surgical masks or an adequate supply of testing equipment (or at least the ability to produce the testing equipment rapidly.)
“Some people say this is ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’. It’s easy to throw stones after an event that ‘no one could have foreseen’.”
Actually, “being shocked” isn’t the MMQing – that’s entirely understandable. It’s the subsequent (after the shock wears off) critique.
My point about this isn’t so much that MMQing is really so wrong, but that it’s fundamentally uninsightful.
And I guess here I confess to being spoiled – on this blog, we usually get a steady stream of high-quality “slightly off center” insights, so getting these down-the-middle ones that simply belabor the obvious is a little surprising.
(Like Neil Young, I think Scott Sumner should always head for the ditch).
What surprises me in particular is that I’ve always this blog had, as a sort of undercurrent or running theme, the failure of the larger “monetary policy bureaucracy” to, in the long run, get its act together in any sort of optimal fashion.
I don’t know why it is then so “shocking” that our “pandemic bureaucracy” – which has had the disadvantage, as it were, of never having really been tested – has come off so badly. This is the USA! We do some things well, but “bureaucracy” is not one of them, is it? If it’s, say, USA vs. Germany in the Efficient Bureaucracy Olympics, I’d say the Vegas line would favor Germany heavily every time.
Anyway, I don’t really understand the gentleness and understanding with which our economic bureaucracy failures are treated, followed by the mindless treatment of the pandemic bureaucracy failures. It’s like one minute we’re reading Conrad, the next minute we’re reading Arthur Hailey. “_Airport_! Why do I even own a copy of this?”
Okay, okay, maybe that’s overstating things. But consider this comment from a few days ago:
“Many countries have done far better than the US. If we do far worse than South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Germany and Austria, I don’t get much consolation from the fact that we are doing better than Italy, Spain, France and the UK. We are supposed to be a global leader in technology and state capacity.”
Well, okay, first of all what metric are we using here? When we compare countries, what things should we take into account? What is “par” for a particular country and what determines that par?
It’s hard not to notice that 6 European countries are mentioned. The European continent is divided up into countries. This continent, mostly one big country.
If we look at death rates, the USA has one region that is doing far worse than any European country – as of a few days ago, the 5 state region NY + NJ + MA + CT + PE, with 52M people, had 39K deaths. On the other hand, the 7 state region west of the continental divide, with 66M people, had 4K deaths. This is better than even Germany (maybe, depending on true deaths).
But is that a good metric? I’m skeptical. Because what is par? I think the true “par” for each country, or each region of the world, is not simple. I would not conclude that the Western USA did “better” than some other part of the world, nor would I conclude that the Boston – NYC corridor did worse, at least not without a lot more information.
Beyond anything else, what is the role of simple luck in determining outcomes? (It seems that this question is finally dawning on some people).
Anyway, I see the above comment as not really making any kind of effort to be insightful. “We are supposed to be a global leader in technology and state capacity.” What is the point there? Obviously we are both of those things. But what does this have to do with the mask error and the testing snafus? With Trump? With how unhealthy we are? With all of the many factors that have determined our “outcome” so far? I have no idea. It just seems like pointless carping.
(I’m not really complaining, there’s nothing really wrong with some pointless carping from time to time. I mean, “pointless carping” may actually be a apt description of my median blog comment, so I can’t truly fault anyone else).
4. May 2020 at 10:53
mbka,
The fact that the theory fits so well cannot be cited as a reason why it is not true. That would be ridiculous.
Furthermore, the falsifiability is completely given. The virus can be tracked quite exactly. It is a stable virus that changes rather little, nevertheless there are small changes that can be traced very well. So if the track from e.g. Hunnan to Wuhan can be traced (in animals or maybe in humans), then the lab theory is disproved.
The only problem is the transparency and the credibility of the CCP, which is very low. Herein lies the real problem. If independent scientists are not allowed to conduct research in China without restriction, then credibility and transparency are of course massively undermined, not to say that mosts results will become intransparent and unreliable.
Pure assumptions about probabilities remain. There are no good studies on this so far, and perhaps there never will be. So far, I see the lab theory at least at the same probability level. It is in the same ballpark. For example, because the first known outbreak is located in the very same place where the CCP bat coronavirus research is concentrated. This is just so odd. Another clue: Wuhan is 1600 kilometres away from the region that was previously considered a reservoir site for this sort of virus.
So a bird has now flown from Hunnan to Wuhan? This is one common problem with the theory of the purely natural process: as soon as you have to be specific, this theory runs into surprisingly huge problems, which is not the case with the lab theory at all.
The lab theory does not need to make wild assumptions about obscure birds that fly non-stop for 1600 kilometres and then start to infect humans after 1600 kilometres. As far as I know, birds aren’t even a natural reservoir so far.
Nor can one claim that accidents involving viruses in laboratories are extremely unlikely, especially in the case of SARS-CoV. We know, for example, that alone between 2003 and 2004 there were four serious accidents in Chinese speaking countries with SARS-CoV-1. Each time the virus managed to escape the lab, even though the researches knew how dangerous the virus was and even though SARS-CoV-1 is so much less contagious than SARS-CoV-2.
It is also not true that gain-of-function research is undisputed among virologists, the opposite is true, it is extremely controversial, and as far as I can see, at least 50% of virologists worldwide are sceptical of it or even openly against it. It is not at all clear what this research is supposed to achieve; my professor of virology was always against it, for good reasons.
Here again, a point becomes apparent that speaks in favor of the lab theory: the virus has allegedly changed in such a way that it is now using exactly the same receptor that was previously attacked in a few gain-of-function studies. This is the next strange coincidence if one knows that there are thousands of potential receptors for viruses in human cells.
In addition, it often takes years to find the receptors used by a virus. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the receptor was supposedly found only a few days after the virus was discovered, and this in a case of a new virus with no established protocol for in vitro models or in in vivo models. I hope these reports were just speculations without real proof, otherwise one has to ask how someone could have carried out lab experiments of this kind so quickly.
Another oddity is that initially there was this massive cover-up attempt by the regional CCP. The first doctors simply ran SARS-CoV-1 tests that came back positive, so they of course thought that this was another serious SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, similar to the ones that had already occurred in CCP China before. But this does not explain why the regional government reacted so strangely. There is nothing to hide about SARS-CoV-1, on the contrary even the CCP was completely aware that in case of SARS-CoV-1 one has to react very quickly and quite openly in order to contain the outbreak — unless of course they knew it was not SARS-CoV-1 they dealt with but something different, something that leaked out of their lab. Then a cover-up attempt makes so much more sense.
4. May 2020 at 11:17
mbka, Very nice response to Ben and Ray, but my sense it that they don’t even process criticism of their obsessions. In one ear, out the other.
Scott, OK, then no effective plan. They were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
Bob, Exactly.
Tim, Good point.
Michael, You said:
“How much would your own subjective probabilities change that Shanghai’s almost zero death rate per million versus NYC 1700 death rate per million were mere a random result? Versus a purposeful result?”
LOL. Micheal, meet Ben.
LC, Yes, I’m also rather pessimistic about the economy for the next year or so. I don’t claim to be able to predict asset prices, however.
anon, OK, start with this:
We know what it would take to repel a military invasion of the US. Most Americans assume the military has a plan to do so. If Canada invades and we find ourselves with no plan to resist the invasion and Canada conquers the US, isn’t the public a bit surprised? Indeed a bit disappointed?
We know what it takes to prevent mass starvation after a huge solar flare. We need 30 transformers. If there’s a huge solar flare and we find the government didn’t stockpile those transformers, isn’t the public a bit disappointed?
The monetary policy analogy is off target. We know 30 transformers solves the problem, but elite macroeconomists disagree as to the appropriate monetary policy. The Fed’s actual policy is not far from the consensus.
On the Covid-19 problem, we kept twiddling our thumbs for 6 weeks EVEN AFTER WE KNEW ABOUT THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC.
Let’s say it’s too much to expect the federal government to plan for solar flares. Is it too much to ask the media to ask the federal government why they aren’t planning for solar flares? So consider this blog post aimed at the media.
4. May 2020 at 11:31
Ssumner: “mbka, Very nice response to Ben and Ray,” – what? Is this ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend”? LOL! mbka doesn’t even realize (and correct me if I’m wrong mbka) that so far no natural host or intermediate host has been found for the Covid-19 virus! (unlike for every other deadly virus, including Ebola, SARS, MERS, H1N1, Marbury/Reston virus, etc etc etc). This argues strongly that C19 virus is chimeric. mbka is as dumb as they come, except for one other person here that I rather not mention…
4. May 2020 at 13:45
For Ben, Ray, Christian, and the rest of you:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-the-novel-coronavirus-developed-naturally-not-in-a-chinese-lab/
Personally I think the probabilities are something like:
Natural virus in the wild: 70%
Natural virus being studied in a lab that escaped by accident: 29%
Man made virus that escaped by accident: 1%
Man made weapon released on purpose: 0%
4. May 2020 at 13:50
You know, after reading that article again and some of the links 29% is too high. Make it 90/9/1/0
4. May 2020 at 14:35
@msgkings – your 538 article is incompetent. The odds are much less than your Shakespearian monkeys. See the Medium article below.
Re your https://fivethirtyeight.com article, “But, Garry said, the tip of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is unlike anything scientists have seen before…” “How SARS-CoV-2 acquired this unusual tip is still a mystery” – quoting Robert Garry of Tulane, who was scarred in Africa with Ebola controversy.
No, Dr. Garry is clearly wrong. Where the spike protein (the four amino acids that are different from previous viruses) came from is not such a mystery, see
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
*quote* “The furin cleavage site “RRAR” in SARS-CoV-2 is unique in its family… The furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have evolved from MERS, HCoV-HKU1, and so on. … So the virologists are puzzled. Where did this 12 nucleotide insert [three nucleotides make an amino acid, so 3×4=12, -RL] come from? Could it be lab-made? Well, virologists have studied furin sites in coronaviruses for decades, and have introduced many artificial ones in a lab. For example, an American team had inserted RRSRR into the spike protein of the first SARS-CoV back in 2006 … And the Japanese have inserted a similar site (RRKR) into the SARS-CoV protein in 2008, though a bit downstream than in CoV2…
In the same year 2008, their Dutch colleagues also studied these protease sites of SARS-CoV and compared them to the murine coronavirus MHV, which also has such a site (SRRAHR | SV), one that is quite similar to the site of CoV2 (SPRRAR | SV):
In 2009, another American group also worked on “improving” SARS-CoV and, continuing the American tradition of not penny-pinching on arginines, they inserted as many as 4 of them (RRSRR)
But the most recent work of this kind that I came across was an October 2019 paper from several Beijing labs, where the new furin site RRKR was inserted into not just some pseudovirus, but into an actual live chicken coronavirus, infectious bronchitis virus (IBV)” *close quote*
So ask yourself msgkings: is the four amino acid sequence RRAR similar to RRKR? Can Shakespeare’s monkey type that? I think so. If so, your 538 quoted expert, Dr. Garry, who was burnt in Africa with Ebola controversy and has an ax to grind, is wrong. Not just wrong but clearly wrong with his bogus statistics. A disgrace to science, really. And btw, not to open another can of worms, how do we know Ebola didn’t escape from Garry’s Sierra Leone biotech lab after all? Viruses (even natural viruses like the Ebola bat virus) escape from labs all the time.
4. May 2020 at 16:22
Of course, the virus did not leak from one of the two virologist labs in Wuhan, including the one that was a couple hundred yards from the infamous wet market.
That is why Beijing has blocked all Western scientists and media from investigating the source of the virus, and demolishd the wet market.
If I wanted to know how the virus was transmitted from the wet market to humans, I would demolish the wet market, block all investigations of the two labs, take down literature from the web, silence lab employees, and censor media.
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: ‘Enormous evidence’ Covid-19 came from Wuhan lab.”
Pompeo is the former CIA director and a Harvard Law grad. It speaks poorly of the US government that we cannot really place full faith in Pompeo’s comments, but then they cannot be dismissed either.
4. May 2020 at 17:36
@Ray: credit to you for a detailed rebuttal, but I gotta go with the actual scientists over the internet troll.
One thing’s for sure, the conspiracy crowd has a new thing to talk about to death now that 9/11 truther conspiracies are getting old and boring
4. May 2020 at 17:43
@msgkings
Thank you for the article.
I’m satisfied with 10-30%. That’s scary enough. In fact, it is really scary. I don’t want to play a childish blame game, if humans had their hands in it, it was an accident, for example out of carelessness and arrogance. But I think it is very important that the true origin is determined as accurately as possible so that mankind can draw the right conclusions from this catastrophe. And I’m bothered by people who claim a lab leak is implausible or extremely unlikely. Not you, of course, but others.
@Ray
Wow, you’ve really delved into this topic. I am impressed.
@Benjamin
Yes, Pompeo is surprising. I don’t fully understand the US government’s “strategy”, apparently there is none, at least none that brings us closer to clarifying the origin. It seems likely that they do not have any hard evidence yet, they seem to be bluffing, but then the current “strategy” is unlikely to make the CCP any more transparent, unless the CCP is absolutely certain that it was not a lab leak and/or that the origin cannot be traced anymore.
4. May 2020 at 17:51
Christian List,
I am open to the lab escape idea. But then again I was also open to the 9/11 inside job idea at the time. All the pieces seemed to fit – the PNAC, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s history of statements before 9/11 on how a new Pearl Harbor would be needed to rally Americans together to establish a new supremacy etc. It was eerie, ominous. And yet in the end I abandoned the idea. Too many loose ends to make fit, too many things to conceal forever.
We’ll find out eventually here too (I hope) but basic biases against the CCP etc are no help. Regional governments may or may not conceal things, the pattern of reaction for about a month there seemed to fit more a mix of bureaucracy and incompetence – almost straight out of the “Jaws” story.
I really appreciate your biomedical details, many of which I did not know. But again, circumstantial evidence is just that. It’s fairly easy to find some unexplained detail and declare it “ominous”. Same for political actions. Destroying the Wuhan wet market (Ben keeps bringing this up) would be the first thing any country would do if they thought it was the source, not to conceal evidence but to reduce danger. And about independent research being “blocked by China”, I am 100% confident the US wouldn’t let Chinese experts roam the US either if the tables were reversed. So none of this is particularly unusual. Even to get a second SARS variant to begin with, isn’t actually that mind bendingly hard to imagine. We really get more severe crossover disease outbreaks now than we did 50 years ago. I remember a time when Ebola outbreaks really only killed a village. Ebola was seen as an isolated problem. Now suddenly the outbreaks have pandemic potential – because there is so much more mobility, internal to countries and across borders too.
4. May 2020 at 20:26
Note to all: If you really believe the “Wuhan wet market was the source of COVID-19” story, then you also believe Beijing has committed crimes against humanity and its own citizens. Put on your adult diapers, because—
Beijing had the Wuhan wet market demolished, obliterated, without determining how the virus leapt from market to customers or employees. The infection process was not found, and no one even tried to determine the process.
There are wet markets all over China and Asia. If a wet market was a source once of a global pandemic, then again? You cool with ongoing wet markets in China?
So, should wet markets be closed all over China? No? We are risking another global pandemic?
Seriously: If the wet market was the source of COVID-19, then a thorough investigation of the Wuhan wet market is not only warranted, but absolutely critical, and critical for everyone on the planet. How did the virus spread from the market to people, what wet market procedures are risky? They say bats and pangolins were not sold in the market, but were they sold illegally?
Oh, sorry, the wet market was obliterated.
The ChinApologists are embarrassing themselves….
4. May 2020 at 20:58
Ben,
as above. Simpler explanations for demolishing the wet market exist. Such as, attempts to remove a possible reservoir for “virus” at a time when no one really knew where it all came from. I have a high confidence that a US local government would have done the same thing.
4. May 2020 at 23:02
mbka–
Not sure about that, as we have not had a parallel experience in the US, where a local market resulted in a global pandemic.
After Three Mile Island blew, the site was not obliterated but rather investigated.
The CDC regularly hunts down sources of food poisoning in the US and local officials do not obliterate facilities. In fact since most facilities are privately owned in the US, local officials have no authority to obliterate facilities.
In any event, if you believe the Wuhan wet market was the source of the global pandemic, you must be living in daily fear of a follow-on pandemic, from thousands of wet markets all across Asia.
In fact, this observation is entirely consistent with the theme of Scott Sumner’s present post: “Sunday morning quarterbacking.”
What should the world, and more importantly Scott Sumner and Ray Lopez, do about China’s wet markets? Wait for another pandemic?
5. May 2020 at 00:31
@mbka – you’re not even trying, you’re just trolling. If you’re gonna troll, and I do, raise your game dude, include facts, not just opinions.
@Christian List – danke
@msgkings – “@Ray: credit to you for a detailed rebuttal, but I gotta go with the actual scientists over the internet troll.” – so you calling Medium author Yuri Deigin a troll? Deigin’s pretty factual and clearly skilled in biotech. Deigin also makes the interesting point that the Chinese in 2019 noticed that the four amino acid sequence RRKR will result in a chimeric virus that creates neurological symptoms in a cell, e.g. read: a loss of taste and smell (as the four amino acid sequence RRAR results in the C-19 virus today). Keywords in the Medium article: “October 2019 paper from several Beijing labs”
Finally, by analogy to C-19, review the 2001 anthrax attack case against Dr. Bruce Ivins on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins. Did he do it? I think so, as does the FBI. How to explain the tiny spores and the fact Lawrence Livermore labs could not duplicate these spores in 56 tries? Because when you’re good, like Dr. Shi of WVI is, you’re really good. World class. I have a close relative who invented a lab technique used now worldwide in biotech labs (she dedicated it to the public, not patenting it). Intelligent humans can do amazing things. For Dr. Shi and her team to come up with a chimeric virus using bits and pieces of DNA from three or four known organisms is easy for them to do.
5. May 2020 at 04:24
Would highly recommend a read of Toby Ord’s The Precipice for a host of ideas related to disaster preparation and prevention. Upgrading the electricity grid’s resilience is one he also mentions.
5. May 2020 at 04:31
@Ray:
No, I’m calling you a troll
5. May 2020 at 04:49
A pandemic was known to be inevitable. We in the UK had contingency plans. The version from before the Great Recession was the basis for Singapore’s response to Covid-19. Since then “austerity” has seen the health service and social services fragmented and privatised, and budgets constrained. Stockpiles for remote inevitabilities were cut before items needed immediately. A simulation was run in 2016. The results were too ghastly to be made public, but no remedial action was taken. And our plans were all based on models of flu epidemics. In Asia, coronavirus epidemics were a recent memory, and the authorities acted promptly. In Europe, the authorities acted as if they were dealing with a flu epidemic: they wanted to manage the rate of infection with the ultimate goal of “herd immunity”. They therefore missed the opportunity to use “test, trace, and isolate” to suppress the virus when it first arrived (air passengers still flood into the UK untested).
5. May 2020 at 05:45
mbka
[quote]
And there is more. There’s now at least 3 competing escape theories floating around – there’s the Maryland-Wuhan chimeric virus, there’s the natural-yet-from-lab escapee, and there’s Luc Montagnier claiming there’s bits of HIV and Malaria (!!! – ???) in the virus and it must have been intended as a vaccine-related mock target for testing receptors. To me these theories destroy each other’s legitimacy because they all sound similarly plausible, but can’t all equally be true. Again, overfitting the data, if you will.
[/quote]
Quite pedantic and long odds scenario but one where all the 3 are true:
What if all the 3 scenarios above are true and you have 3 diff strains/virii out in the wild; all start spreading at the same time or each has its own timeline (natural in Nov 19 or even earlier, the other two sometime later and now it is all mixed & matched over this 3rd rock from the Sun). One that came naturally from wet market, ones that escaped from a lab be it chimeric or some kind of other bio-engineering.
Yeah, pretty long odds of that happening for sure, say 1 in billion or trillion or does one dare say quadrillion; rather unimaginable (unimagined) perfect storm.
5. May 2020 at 10:04
@Anon- you’re as ignorant as mbka. The article, which is over your head, to read on conspiracy theory is this one: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Again, you’ll find WIV director Shi cut-and-paste bits and pieces of DNA from no less than three organisms to create the Covid-19 virus. Hence your confusion. I don’t expect btw the ‘average American’ to get it either. But here’s what I think even you, msgkings, mbka, and our host can understand: find the ‘intermediate host’ for Covid-19 virus, i.e. the animal in the wild before humans caught it, like fruit bats for the Ebola virus, and I will “eat crow” (not literally since it has West Nile virus and who knows what else) and conceded defeat. It’s that simple.
For every virus EXCEPT SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19 virus) they’ve quickly found the intermediate host (Ebola took a while but they did find it). So why not for Covid-19? Because it’s lab made and no such intermediate host exists. I think even you and mbka can understand this simple proposition.
5. May 2020 at 10:49
@Ray Lopez
I see you’re going all in with Yuri Deigin. He seems a bright guy who has picked up a lot of Biology to go with his MBA, but his credentials aren’t strong enough for you to win a pure argument from authority using him.
So, I’ll make a counter-argument from authority bringing in Bill Gallaher, Professor Emeritus Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Parasitology at LSU. Deigin’s argument hinges on an identical region of amino acids between RaTG13 and SARS-COV2. But Bill Gallaher claims that if you dig deeper into those “identical” amino acids you find that their RNA differs by about 70 years worth of mutations: http://virological.org/t/analysis-of-wuhan-coronavirus-deja-vu/357/4.
I’m not sure what the rules of tinfoil hat theorizing using arguments from authority are. Do you get to throw out Bill Gallaher’s testimony because he has collaborated with Bob Garry, because you’ve implicated Garry in another tinfoil hat theory? Or, can I still use Gallaher even with his association with Garry if I can come up with a counter tinfoil hat theory implicating Yuri Deigin?
5. May 2020 at 11:55
@Carl
Can’t you just give the specific page where you think your argument is written down? I can’t find it at all and it’s really hard to read a paper that says that the 2019/2020 influenza virus is the far greater danger to Americans and that a corona vaccine can be expected in May 2020??? WTF.
How can you read something like this? If this is your argument from authority, then how would your argument from an idiot look like? I’m just curious.
5. May 2020 at 12:51
@Christian List
Sorry for the confusion. The information is in the linked PDF entitled “Wuhan Coronavirus 020720…”. Here is that link: http://virological.org/uploads/short-url/z0cOhZzme3C6HtlcOcE61uMwJmU.pdf. Here are some excerpts from that document:
You can also find the discussion here: http://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-origin-of-ncov2019/384
As I always say, you can’t be sure until you’ve checked the wobble base of the codons for mutations.
5. May 2020 at 15:59
Carl,
thank you, that’s very nice of you. It doesn’t disprove my theory that it was a natural virus, with a connection to the lab, but in the discussion below there is at least a theory for once, that tries to address the Wuhan origin issue: someone ate a bat in Yunnan, and then got on a high-speed train to Wuhan relatively quickly.
I’m not saying that’s it, we solved it, but it is at least a better theory than the previous “natural theories” I read, for example, about a pangolin that met a bat for tea, got infected, and was then transported 1600 kilometers to Wuhan to the local wet market, without infecting anyone else one the way.
Alright, only bats, no more pangolins. And then a rich businessman who ate the bat in Yunnan, and then took the train to Wuhan. But why does the businessman get sick, does he eat the bat raw? And what about the hunter, the trader, or the cook?
This theory can be tested to some extent. There must be occurrences of the virus in Yunnan, with some intermediate stages that can be traced. And then the jump to Wuhan, which still remains the difficult part, but the CCP could at least try it. If the virus had broken out in North America or in Europe, there would be a press conference every day, where such questions, and many others, could be addressed. But from the CCP there is mostly this ridiculous secrecy. We really need to understand the origin story of the virus in order to understand what we need to change most urgently.
@mbka
The 9-11 theories were never plausible, what are you talking about?
I also believe at the moment that you’re fighting a mock battle with Ben over nothing. You claim the CCP obviously demolished the wet market, that’s what any government would do, but this doesn’t make much sense. Why would they do that?
Not to mention that I can’t find any evidence right now that the wet market was demolished. Okay I didn’t google long, but there is even a large page about this market on wikipedia now. I think they would mention it when the market was demolished, don’t you think? But it is interesting to see what answers you come up with, just to counter Ben’s fake news for the sake of countering. Do you even care about the actual issue? I could be wrong but that is my impression right now.
5. May 2020 at 16:34
Further down in that virology.org discussion, http://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-origin-of-ncov2019/384/12, Professor Gallaher makes a couple of observations that sound wise to me:
5. May 2020 at 17:22
Carl-
What you are describing is exactly consistent with the theme that a Wuhan lab worker studying bats, which they were for years, acquired the virus in Yunnan, returned to Wuhan and infected the local population.
A second second sensible deduction is that out of the thousands of bat virus samples collected in Wuhan, one got into the local population through a lab leak.
But of course, since Beijing has demolished the Wuhan wet market and demolished any investigation into the source of the Wuhan virus, we will never know.
And there are thousands of wet markets in operation in China, and many virology labs.
5. May 2020 at 17:58
Christian,
you are right, I did not care enough about Ben’s demolished wet market theory to look up whether it’s still there. It absolutely crossed my mind that it hadn’t even been demolished. It would fit Ben’s obsession with putting belief first, evidence later. I seldom even argue with him, no point. Here, I was doing it to point out (as with you before) that a lot of actions can be seen through a more reasonable lens than “evil CCP intentionally mocks up stuff because it is guilty”. It didn’t matter to me whether the action had even happened.
Carl (and Christian),
great to see more specific science emerge on these “suspect” sequences. A critique of Montagnier’s HIV/Malaria theory had also quickly pointed out that the sequences similarities there are too generic to ascribe them to those two sources even if they have an overlap. Not to mention that Montagnier lately likes to take contrarian stances, e.g. finding DNA fingerprints in water in homeopathic dilutions (10^-18 I believe). Christian, of all things, the path of the virus from Yunnan to Wuhan is the least mysterious to me. Millions of migrant workers travel across China every month. To have one farmer visit family somewhere else and to return sick likely happens millions of times each year. They didn’t need to eat a bat. Or, could have been a businessman doing speleology in Yunnan – Wuhan is wealthy enough for such pastimes. Or again, any of the animal reservoirs. SARS (1) was originally attributed to Civet cats and it took years before published research identified the bat origin conclusively. Intermediate hosts for both SARS viruses include raccoon dogs and domestic cats, plenty of opportunities for crossing and transport. Technically that wet market is the first documented _cluster_ and I would not be so sure that it is the actual origin of the true case zero. Especially now that we find early cases in other countries much earlier than previously assumed.
I tend to not discuss too much bio detail because my PhD goes back to the mid 90s and since the early 2000s I haven’t done any bench research. And while I worked with rRNA I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist etc. which are all specialist disciplines where detailed knowledge will always out-nerd a generalist like me. I’m more interested in ecology and the behavior of systems, and evolutionary mechanism, all of these can make things more or less plausible / probable. But in the end, every case is different.
5. May 2020 at 20:08
@Carl – “I see you’re going all in with Yuri Deigin. He seems a bright guy who has picked up a lot of Biology to go with his MBA, but his credentials aren’t strong enough for you to win a pure argument from authority using him. [NOT TRUE, I’M NOT USING HIM AS AUTHORITY, JUST HIS FACTS; YOUR PROJECTION NOTED] So, I’ll make a counter-argument from authority bringing in Bill Gallaher, Professor Emeritus Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Parasitology at LSU. Deigin’s argument hinges on an identical region of amino acids between RaTG13 and SARS-COV2. But Bill Gallaher claims that if you dig deeper into those “identical” amino acids you find that their RNA differs by about 70 years worth of mutations: http://virological.org/t/analysis-of-wuhan-coronavirus-deja-vu/357/4.”
I’ve seen profbillg messages before, nothing new, don’t like his tone, note he is ’emeretus’ which means past his prime, stuck in his old ways. Deigin’s arguments are mischaracterized by you and profbillg both, if indeed he makes the claims you say he makes. In fact, Deigin’s arguments are that C19 virus is possibly chimeric from bits and pieces of DNA from at least three and possibly four pieces of DNA, from 3 or 4 organisms, stitched together in a lab. Question: do you deny this can be done? Simple question, answer yes or no, answer it please. Can a lab create a chimeric virus from bits and pieces of natural and other chimeric viruses or not? Answer for the record (I already know the answer). Genetic drift is irrelevant to this issue. Completely irrelevant. The relevant passage in Deigin’s argument is this one, from the Medium article: (Deigin, note he is NOT ruling out a natural chimera): “And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not necessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. ”
Got it? Keywords “not necessarily”, “ancestral bat strain”, “a small but very special stretch” (the spike protein creating a furin cleavage site for passage into a cell).
I briefly thought about giving you my email here so we could correspond better but I don’t think it would be fruitful, since you seem to have an axe to grind. Sorry if I’m mistaken.
PS–the Los Alamos group yesterday found the spike protein has mutated on C19, in Europe, creating a even more effective furin cleavage site (more infectious C19 virus). So the reason for Italy’s and the USA’s problems was not ‘Italian old folks homes’ after all, but a more infectious strain of C19 virus. To be expected if C19 is an AIDs/HIV vaccine candidate (see Deigins’ Medium article among many others).
5. May 2020 at 20:10
Carl just OWNS this thread. Really great posts Carl, thank you.
5. May 2020 at 20:11
Also mbka, co-owner. Thank you as well.
5. May 2020 at 22:33
Note.. Nassim Taleb is very irritated folks call this very White Swan virus event a Black one
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system
6. May 2020 at 02:08
I get the impression that the Chinapologists are moving away from Plan A, the “Wuhan wet market was the source of the global pandemic” to Plan B, “Where the transmission of COVID-19 from bat to human happened is impossible to know, and likely happened in SE Asia somewhere.”
I guess the “wet market” story started to look pretty bad, what with the market shut off to investigation (if it still exists) and the realization that there are thousands of wet markets across China—indeed there are other wet markets in Wuhan.
Perhaps a recreational spelunker brought the virus back to Wuhan, offers one.
Not the researchers from Wuhan who spent years collecting bat virus samples in Yunnan.
6. May 2020 at 08:51
Thanks @msgkings. To be honest, I always think of myself in the comment section as being like one of the guys in the “blessed are the cheesemakers” scene in the Life of Brian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLUEMj6cwA.
@Benjamin Cole
I didn’t claim to disprove the laboratory accident theory. My main goal was to provide counter-evidence to the man-made virus theory. I think I did so. I cannot rule out a lab accident or an accident involving a lab worker transporting a bat; I can merely state my opinion that I believe it is a lower probability event than something that didn’t involve a lab worker.
@Ray Lopez
I have no axe to grind. I think, however, you should own up to having stated that SARS-COV2 is a man-made virus. Let me quote you from earlier in this thread:
6. May 2020 at 09:02
Thanks mskings. Truth is I don’t know a lot but at least I’m aware of that.
6. May 2020 at 09:52
I now realize I am stuck in my own private Idaho——-for some reason it bothers me that China/Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Thailand/Singapore/Hong Kong/ Malaysia/Vietnam/ have fewer deaths per million than out lowest state in America—-and no one explains the various ways this can be true—given the explosion happened in Wuhan—I must be missing something as I am the only person who seems to think this matters.
6. May 2020 at 10:02
Carl, Thanks for the useful info.
msgkings, You said:
“You know, after reading that article again and some of the links 29% is too high. Make it 90/9/1/0”
That seems reasonable.
Christian, You do know that by advocating a lab release theory you are actually defending China, don’t you? What a CCP apologist you are!!
https://www.econlib.org/remember-remember-the-maine/
Ben, You said:
“The ChinApologists are embarrassing themselves….”
It’s you and Christian who are the CCP apologists. The lab theory is pro-China, the wet market is anti-China.
Ewan, Yes, the problem was that the NHS was “privatized”. LOL.
Everyone, (Or at least you conspiracy nuts), Keep amusing yourselves with this, I’m actually not very interested in how the virus got into humans, it was only a matter of time. Bats to lab, bats to market, who cares?
6. May 2020 at 10:03
Michael, I’ve been making this point for a while, and certainly think it matters. I just don’t gravitate toward bizarre conspiracy theories like some people.
6. May 2020 at 11:16
Scott–yes–understood—but since the fact that this is true is presumably caused by a reason—although I have to be open to “no reason”—although that seems wrong. whatever the reason, on the surface, at least, it makes zero sense. Are the West massively over counting–are the east so behaviorally precise they understand how to stop the spread? the difference is so great—to not try to understand why seems crazy. Yet, no one in science land seems to want to discuss this.
6. May 2020 at 14:32
Scott, you got me. I’m completely pro-China. I always was. You are right, this is one more good reason for the lab theory.
Your statements prove, once again and for all readers to see, that you are completely unable to distinguish between China and the CCP. To you, they are quasi synonyms. It’s incredible sad and ridiculous at the same time.
It is boring to argue against you, you shoot all your balls into your own goal, it feels like Germany against Brazil in the World Cup semi-final 2014. Wake me up when you score that one goal to 1-7. You do know where the goal is placed, right?
6. May 2020 at 17:12
Ben, You said:
“The ChinApologists are embarrassing themselves….”
It’s you and Christian who are the CCP apologists. The lab theory is pro-China, the wet market is anti-China.—Scott Sumner
I thought I was pro-China (and pro-everybody), but anti-CCP.
7. May 2020 at 09:11
Micahel, Keep in mind that New Zealand, Australia and Iceland are among the successful. So it’s not just Asian countries.
Ben, Then why push so hard for a theory that makes the CCP look good? It would be far worse for the CCP if the virus came from an animal market. Labs are respectable organizations, which occasionally make mistakes. Wet markets? Yuck!
7. May 2020 at 21:44
Scott, ‘Labs are respectable organizations’ is pure bromide. Not all labs are respectable. A BSL4 lab in US could be agenda driven and a BSL4 in Uganda could be just fact driven.
Nothing against the Wuhan lab scientists who may all be the best, just so people don’t froth at their mouth
A lab (or org) is respectable iff the funders/managers/workers are all fact driven. Even if one is not that respectability is out. And CCP runs/controls that lab, and no doubts on that right?
https://wapo.st/3fwGIyk – is CDC respectable? Is WaPo?
8. May 2020 at 03:44
Ewan, Yes, the problem was that the NHS was “privatized”. LOL.
LOL. That may do for a high school debating society.
Pretending to “defend the NHS” while privatising it piecemeal (only 30% of those employed are now in the public sector), and likewise social services, while constraining the budget of the bit that is still public, has produced a threadbare service (see the latest information about our epidemic stockpile), and problems of coordination.
But, no – if we can speak of “the” problem, it is that government did not plan for a coronavirus pandemic, it planned for flu; and it persisted with its flu plan until the only option was a lockdown expensive in lives and money; and it is still faffing about with its plans for “test, trace and isolate” to get us out of the lockdown.
So, “the” problem is not privatisation, but our government (Labour and Tory) these last twenty years, the worst being the current.
8. May 2020 at 04:43
@Ewan
No one had specific plans for SARS-CoV-2. How are you supposed to plan for a pandemic disease, which wasn’t known before.
Your theory is not good. Germany, for example, also had pandemic exercises that exposed severe deficiencies. The results were then simply ignored, as in the UK. Such preparations are expensive, and after swine flu, bird flu, etc., many Western governments understandably thought it was not necessary.
The peculiarity of the UK was that its government has long opposed the majority of scientists and followed obscure individual opinions. Add to this the poor condition of the NHS and you get the result the UK achieved, quite comparable to the US btw, and maybe for the same reasons.
8. May 2020 at 08:40
Haven’t had time to read thru all the comments, but want to say the transformers thing was fascinating and despite my small fisc leanings, this kind of systemic, spillover-heavy risk is precisely the thing I want to write huge tax checks for.
8. May 2020 at 10:21
Anon, Yes, the Wuhan lab, the CDC and the WaPo are all respectable organizations (despite their flaws) compared to wet markets. Take off your ideological blinders.
Ewan, The claim that the NHS has been privatized is silly, and I don’t waste time with silly arguments. The NHS is one of the most socialistic health care regimes in the entire world–perhaps next to Cuba.