JustOneMinute

Another One Boards The Bus

Donald McNeil, also a former NY Times science writer, grumpily acknowledges that the Wuhan lab leak theory has legs. Its an extended essay illustrating a tough lesson for libs: some things can be true even though Trump said they are.

He defends Fauci in the Fauci/ Rand disputer about whether we funded "gain of function" research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

Also, Dr. Shi was trained by Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina in building “chimera” viruses — taking, for example, the spike protein from a new virus and splicing it to the backbone of a known one like SARS. He invented “no-see-um” techniques that left no trace of the splice.

(Interestingly, Dr. Baric is one of the signers of the letter to Science demanding a more thorough investigation of all Wuhan labs.)

Then, to see if the new chimeras could infect people, they were tested against human airway cells and “humanized” mice — mice bred to have human ACE-2 receptors on their organs.

There is debate over whether this is truly “gain of function” research. Some argue that gain of function strictly involves taking a virus already known to endanger humans and trying to make it more lethal or more transmissible.

So Dr. Fauci was answering truthfully in his bitter exchange with Senator Rand Paul on May 11.

But many other scientists feel this is a distinction without a difference. They feel that building any new virus from suspect parts and then seeing if it infects humans is just as risky.

His "some argue" argument - its not a gain of function experiment unless you know in advance a dangerous pathogen will gain function - is at best off-brand hair-splitting for Fauci. I am not at all convinced his framing squares with the US definition at a link he provided:

New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.

The chimera experiments described in the 2015 and 2017 papers took place (I've read elsewhere) just before the 2014 pause or after the 2017 re-boot. As to "some argue" they are not gain of function experiments, well, other experts (Ebright, Esvelt) argue the opposite and say they are "gain of function" experiments.

As to what the researchers "reasonably anticipated" when they spliced specific combinations together, I find it hard to believe they weren't testing their concern that certain re-combinations could be dangerous. Identifying prospective danger is the point of these gain of function experiments, yes? Surely they didn't let a genomic randomizer just kick out possible combos which happened to include, for example, the human-endangering ACE attack point?

Well - the notion that the lab leak theory needs to be carefully examined is clearly the emerging CW.

I'll Take "Keep Bringin' The Cray-Cray" For $200

The Captain provides commentary as Ben Smith of the NY Times blasts some lib lunacy. Its a bipartisan dash for the tinfoil.

Saturday Morning

Here we go again.

Flooding The Zone

Israel's 'Iron Dome' has always been vulnerable to a high-volume attack. This has become a problem.

BIG IF TRUE: This reads like an IDF press release but still... 

The gist: The IDF positioned troops for a ground assault, then tweeted the assault had begun. The plan was to prompt Hamas to put their troops into their defensive tunnels and bunkers, and then bomb them. Still assessing whether it worked.

Its PolitiFact vs. PolitiFact and Dr. Fauci vs. Reality

Dr. Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul had a contentious exchange at a Senate hearing yesterday. The gist - Sen. Paul said the NIH funded 'gain of function' research (say what!) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Dr. Fauci emphatically denied it.

PolitiFact then ran a non-fact check interview with Dr. Fauci in which he denied it again.

But - awkward moment - in a Feb 2021 Fact Check, PolitiFact noted as an aside that, per MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt, the NIH had funded gain of function research at the WIV. In that article they exonerated Dr. Fauci of a broader claim, that he had funded research that directly led to the COVID-19 virus.

The Team Fauci spinners will be earning their paychecks today. Let's dive in.

First, Dr. Fauci's denial to PolitiFact:

Fauci told Paul at the hearing that the senator was "entirely and completely incorrect" as the NIH has never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Fauci reiterated his stance Tuesday afternoon during a conversation with PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders as part of the United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking.

"That’s actually preposterous," Fauci said. "It was just unfortunate that he said that. It was said in an accusatory way that just made no sense and was not based on any fact at all."

Now, watch Dr. Fauci try to shift the goalposts:

"In a very minor collaboration, as part of a subcontract of a grant, we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists," Fauci said. "He conflated that … therefore we were involved in creating the virus, which is the most ridiculous, majestic leap I’ve ever heard of."

Well, no. Unlike the February dust-up, Sen. Paul wasn't accusing Dr. Fauci of funding development of the COVID-19 virus. Axios has a good excerpt:

• PAUL: "For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create superviruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. ... Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH lab in Wuhan?"
• FAUCI: "With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Here is the PolitiFact piece from February which explained that yes, the NIH funded gain of function research at the WIV but no, there is no proof they funded COVID-19 research or that COVID-19 emerged from a lab. Different issues:

MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt reviewed a paper that appears to have been published with financial assistance from the grant. According to Esvelt, certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function research. But he told PolitiFact that "the work reported in this specific paper definitely did NOT lead to the creation of SARS-CoV-2" because the genetic sequences of the virus studied in the paper differ from that of the new coronavirus. 

...

Both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have denied that a grant to the Wuhan lab funded gain-of-function research, though a scientist told us that one paper published with assistance from the grant seems to describe techniques similar to gain-of-function. 

Well, then. The NIH denied it so we're all good?

Here is the paper in question, which acknowledges funding from the NIH. The bit on recombining genes and testing the lab creations for infectivity is excerpted below.

Does Team Fauci wants to insist this is not gain of function research? Given the partisan divide emerging on this, maybe hair-splitting will suffice. But I am pretty sure the no-GMO crowd, many of which live on the left, would consider this sort of gene manipulation to be of great concern.

And do note: Nicholas Wade, formerly of the NY Times, Science and Nature points an accusing finger at Dr. Fauci and the NIH funding process. As does Nicholson Baker in NY Magazine.

ERRATA:

C-SPAN has tape and transcript of the Paul/ Fauci exchange. A snippet:

 

Nicholas Wade on Dr. Fauci and the NIH / NiAID:

 

Enough for now.

UPDATE: This Newsweek fact check explains a 2015 paper with Dr. Ralph Baric of UNC - says the gain of function work was done in North Carolina. Seems overly legalistic and ignores the 2017 paper.

Origin Stories

Nicholas Wade, formerly of Nature, Science and the NY Times, takes a long look at the origin stories for the COVID virus. Lots of interesting science points to a lab leak rather than a direct jump from nature. 

One of many intriguing factoids - whatever folks may have thought a year ago, its weird that evidence supporting natural origin has not yet been found:

Doubts about natural emergence

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

Mr. Wade also notes (as did Nicholson Baker of New York Magazine) that the global community of virologists has a stake in continued funding and research grants. A lowering of the Cone of Silence may have guided their pooh-poohing of the lab leak notion. Dr. Fauci gets dragged as well, since the NIH helped fund coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab in question.

4. The US Role in Funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology

From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to unsafe foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. Why didn’t the two agencies therefore halt the Federal funding as apparently required to do so by law? Because someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium.

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research.

Troubling. We know the Chinese government would desperately want to cover up a lab leak. But the global virology community AND the esteemed Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases? Let's put it this way - instead of asking who benefits from a cover-up of the COVID origin, it might save time to ask "Who doesn't?".

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day!

OK, Back To Zoom Calls Everyone

The Biden Recovery hits a wall. Clearly the gloomy jobs report is due to fear of out-of-control Federal spending. Unless its due to a failure by Biden to propose free child care, pick up the tab on student debt, push for DC statehood, pack the Supreme Court and pound the table for the Green New Deal.

Or maybe this sort of recovery takes time? Nahh... crazy talk.

Go long candles. And start brushing up on your cave art.

Lock 'Em Up

Facebook continues its suspension of Trump. Trump has as much media access as anyone in the world, so I just can't get exercised about a 'free speech' issue here.

Banning lunatic fringe anti-vax groups gets closer to a danger zone. I generally think the anti-vaxxers are doing the public a disservice, but plenty of libs (and Facebook employees) would say the same about gun rights enthusiasts.

Now, if Facebook wants to ban their own highly lucrative practice of selling micro-targeted ads, we'd be getting somewhere. With their micro-targeting, good speech can't counter bad speech because (unlike radio, TV or print) most of those ads never hit the mainstream radar. Can't rebut what you haven't heard!

But yes, pigs will fly to the board meeting where FB changes their ad policies.

MORE: Trump has launched "From The Desk of Donald J. Trump". His latest missive suggests he has not yet Moved On:

Have You Herd?

'Herd immunity' for COVID probably won't happen, per the NY Times. Variants plus vaccine hesitancy mean we'll have COVID as background noise for a while:

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

FWIW, its not just us. Circulating disease anywhere creates opportunities for new variants, and the developing world won't have a chance to get vaccinated (or not) for quite a while now.

Groan. Annual booster shots, like with the flu. Experts will study emerging variants and guess at the appropriate booster for the next season. I'll guess COVID season will overlap with flu season, since more of us are indoors breathing each others deadly air. 

And do keep in mind:

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

“Disease transmission is local,” Dr. Lipsitch noted.

“If the coverage is 95 percent in the United States as a whole, but 70 percent in some small town, the virus doesn’t care,” he explained. “It will make its way around the small town.”

Or vice versa. The Times presents a cool but sort of unreadable graphic showing poll results about vaccine hesitancy across the US. Northeasterners have a good shot at wanting a shot. Down South, less so.

Squint and see!

 

Saturday Afternoon

Away we go.

Energy Weapons Used Near White House?!?

This is the biggest story ever to be totally overlooked. From CNN:

Washington (CNN)Federal agencies are investigating at least two possible incidents on US soil, including one near the White House in November of last year, that appear similar to mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms for dozens of US personnel abroad.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that while the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions on what happened, the fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming.

Defense officials briefed lawmakers on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the matter earlier this month, including on the incident near the White House. That incident, which occurred near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, sickened one National Security Council official, according to multiple current and former US officials and sources familiar with the matter.

In a separate 2019 episode, a White House official reported a similar attack while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington, GQ reported last year.

 

Those sickened reported similar symptoms to CIA and State Department personnel impacted overseas, and officials quickly began to investigate the incident as a possible "Havana syndrome" attack. That name refers to unexplained symptoms that US personnel in Cuba began experiencing in late 2016 -- a varying set of complaints that includes ear popping, vertigo, pounding headaches and nausea, sometimes accompanied by an unidentified "piercing directional noise."

 

Apparently lawmakers have been briefed bit not Joe Biden. From Jim Geraghty:

 

Q    Mr. President, what do you know about this supposed direct energy attack on the Ellipse and the person who was injured?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t know anything about it.

Q    So you have not been briefed on it?

THE PRESIDENT:  I have not been briefed on it.

Like Obama, Biden gets the bad news by watching the news.

Now To Be Fair, I am mildly sympathetic to the decision to not brief the President. That would be a heck of a brief:

"Mr. President, we aren't sure what, if anything happened. We don't know who did it and we don't have any decisions to be made about how to respond. We've been investigating seemingly similar incidents for years and don't have many answers."

This is not actionable intel at this point and the intelligence services probably don't need to hear Biden rant at them to get to the bottom of this. On the other hand, the media went wild over the idea that Trump was giving a pass to Russians paying bounties for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan. Yes, Trump said it was Fake News and it remains unconfirmed, but still - we expect a but more energy from our Media Lapdogs Watchdogs.

Oh, Yeah, A Speech

Last night Joe Biden gave his big speech on his vision for this and that. Per CDC guidelines I maintained proper social distancing by watching the Yankees trounce the Orioles. WaPo coverage here. When its big news that both the VP and the House Speaker are women, well, we have known that for months.

I am more intrigued by this WSJ story describing bipartisan opposition to Biden's proposed capital gains tax hikes. Menendez, Manchin and Mark Warner and others are fretting out loud. I'd guess those rates go up, but by how much?

Gun Up!

After years of ducking Second Amendment cases the Supreme Court takes up a New York case about concealed carry permitting.

We all know what side they're on, but the NY Times provides useful coverage:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would review a New York law that imposes strict limits on carrying guns outside the home, setting the stage for its first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade.

...

The Supreme Court has turned down countless Second Amendment appeals since it established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Since then, lower courts have generally sustained gun control laws. But they are divided on the fundamental and open question posed by the new case: whether states can stop law-abiding citizens from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense unless they can satisfy the authorities that they have a good reason for doing so.

...

The new case is a challenge to a New York law that requires people seeking a license to carry a gun outside their homes to show a “proper cause.” Two men denied licenses, along with the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, sued, saying “the state makes it virtually impossible for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to obtain a license.”

California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, according to gun rights groups.

Showing "Proper cause" for a permit is required in the NY State law (NY Penal Law 400). But what does it mean? Ahh!  Various NY courts have concluded that it means the applicant must demonstrate (Klenosky v. N.Y. City Police Dep’t)

'a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.’ 

So "Its a dangerous world out there and I want to be ready for it" is not acceptable - its a dangerous world for all of us!

[Stray aside - as my years advance I'm wondering if I could go with a Tired Old Man permit application - the 'general public' has to be more agile, mobile and hostile than me, amirite? I need an Equalizer!]

Well. The 2008 Heller decision established a right (at the Federal level) to have a gun in the home as a means of self-defense, subject to reasonable regulation. That was expanded to a state-level right by the 2010 McDonald v. City of Chicago, and here we have sat for a decade.

The Times recaps some relevant cases. Some restrictive laws similar to NY have been upheld, most recently in Hawaii (last year the SC ducked a New Jersey case similar to this one.)

On the other hand, a restrictive Illinois law was struck down at the appeals level in 2012 Moore v. Madigan. Judge Posner wrote the decision and it is a likely roadmap for the current Supreme Court. Another case to consider as a possible roadmap is the 2017 Wrenn v. District of Columbia, which struck down restrictive concealed permitting there.

OK, lots of homework! My current guess is that everyone will hate the court's decision, whatever it is. I'll guess NY State will howl because the result will be a requirement of a more permissive process; gun enthusiasts will howl that the result does not go far enough.

Here is an exceprt from Posner, and I'll say it first - "Indians?!?". C'mon, man - 'Native Americans'!

We should be able to find plenty of thoughtful, sober evaluations of the Illinois experience post-Posner. No reason to think any of the research is politicized!

And do let me add: The Heller and McDonald decisions were a big deal establishing an individual right to bear arms but asking states to allow guns within the home didn't change much in most states (I'll guess a few cities were rocked.) Obliging states to lighten up on concealed carry laws is a MUCH bigger deal. The Court has a bit of a political and legitimacy crisis, so we'll see how Roberts navigates that.