There’s an odd story in The Independent about a forthcoming book by Donald McNeil, a former NYT reporter who was dismissed in 2020 for repeating racist slurs and stereotypes in front of teenagers. He apparently was on the infectious diseases beat for a long time, and writes a bit about his feeling that he was ‘deceived’ by a few virologists who were writing up their thoughts on the possible origins of the virus that causes COVID-19. This is apparently referring to the authors of the “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, who many journalists have decided were keeping secrets because they only shared their conclusions with the public, rather than exposing us to the wild speculations that they shared privately among themselves.
The really odd thing is this excerpt from McNeil’s book:
“It’s one thing to be lied to by a politician and fail to check it out. But on viral evolution, to whom do you go for a second opinion?”, he wrote.
“If Albert Einstein assured you that nuclear fission is harmless, whom would you trust to quote saying, ‘Einstein’s dead wrong?”
I have to wonder what he’s getting at by this. Nobody in this group has the stature of Einstein — none of them have won a Nobel prize, and if I recall correctly, Kristian Andersen didn’t even have tenure at the time (based on a comment he made in the private Slack conversations that House Republicans leaked as part of their harassment campaign). Even if there were an “Einstein” in this group, there were a number of people who could credibly contradict Einstein’s conclusions about nuclear fission — watch the movie Oppenheimer to get a partial list. What’s more, based on the Slack conversations from Feb 6 2020, McNeil was already independently in touch with Richard Ebright, another virologist who has become one of the most fanatical advocates for the idea that SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory (yes, I do mean ‘fanatical’).
As I’ve dug into the research on coronaviruses, I’ve found that there were probably a few dozen other evolutionary biologists and virologists around the world with as much prestige and expertise as Andersen and company. But if McNeil were to interview these experts today, he would find most of them them expressing the same opinion that Andersen and coauthors did in their Proximal Origins paper (see chart on right*).
I also have little idea of how McNeil thinks Anderson and coauthors misled him into dismissing the idea of a laboratory origin. I guess I need to buy his book if I want clear accusations rather than just these laundered accusations in the popular press, but based on the Slack conversation, they told him the following:
“I see nothing in the genome that would make me believe it has been genetically manipulated.”
and…
“I am afraid I might not be the best person to answer…. Mostly, unless the virus was a really obvious recombinant virus, I’m not quite sure what a virus from culture vs. an intermediate host would look like — I think they’d probably be indistinguishable.”
(there may be typos above due to my transcription)
These are completely fair statements. There’s nothing in those sentences suggesting that some infallible authority is declaring that there was no possibility that the virus originated from the laboratory. If McNeil is unaware of the old adage that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, then that’s on him and not on the person who notes the absence of evidence.
* Links: The survey website; the methods for the survey
Edits: added link to the source for the chart and added poll; added asterisk with notes about the survey.