Articles written during the heat of "pandemic" mania now sound totally ridiculous...

But are worth reading to try to work out how and why the world went mad.

It can be instructive to go back over articles published during the heat of “pandemic mania”.

Some of the things people claimed are completely bonkers.

Take this piece, for example - spotted by a

PANDA

colleague - published in the popular science magazine Science.

The text - interspersed with a few comments of mine - reads as follows:

Scientists worried about China's lack of transparency about a month-old outbreak of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan breathed a sigh of relief today, after a consortium of researchers published a draft genome of the newly discovered coronavirus suspected of causing the outbreak.

The scientists breathing a sigh of relief are naive fools, or lying.

"Potentially really important moment in global public health-must be celebrated, everyone involved in Wuhan, in China & beyond acknowledged, thanked & get all the credit," Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust in London, wrote in a tweet. "Sharing of data good for public health, great for those who did the work. Just needs those incentives & trust."

For Farrar, I tend towards the lying.

Also this morning, Wuhan health authorities reported the first death from the new disease. The patient was a 61-year-old man who frequently visited the live market in Wuhan that most cases have been linked to. He also suffered from abdominal tumors and chronic liver disease and died on Thursday.

It’s incredible how early in this shitshow “died with” was being conflated with “died from”.

The Wuhan Health Commission said 41 people so far have been confirmed to have been infected with the new virus; no new patients have been identified since 3 January.

News about the sequence came from Edward Holmes, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, who tweeted the first notice about the availability of what he referred to as an "initial" sequence of the virus early this morning. Holmes is a member of a consortium led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center & School of Public Health that posted the sequence on an open-access site, virological.org. The consortium said it had also deposited the sequence in GenBank. In a brief note, the group said researchers were free to analyze and share the data, but asked that groups "communicate with us if you wish to publish results that use these data in a journal."

But, it looks like Holmes - the only Western scientist on the Fan Wu paper identifying the “new coronavirus” didn’t actually have anything to do with the sequencing.

Meanwhile, he appears to have deleted his account…

The analyzing began immediately. Evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh calculated that the virus has a 89% similarity to a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-related member of the Sarbecoviruses, a subgenus within the Betacoronavirus genus.

Strange that these brilliant scientists worked out that it was so similar to other members of the same family of viruses but never spoke out when WHO and political leaders decided to characterise it as entirely novel. See my piece here on how virus naming may have been subject to politic interference, and this recent one by

Jessica Hockett

for more detailed analysis, especially of the timeline involved.

The genomic similarity was always going to mean that - in immunological terms at least (the only relevant meaning of “novelty” in respect of pandemic potential) - this was not novel to humans at all.

Meanwhile, Andrew Rambaut has deleted his twitter account as well, and the tweet above no longer exists:

Kevin Olival, vice-president for research of the EcoHealth Alliance, published a phylogenetic tree on Twitter and concurred that the new virus "definitely clusters" with the SARS-related coronaviruses. (Later in the day, Rambaut criticized the fact that Olival did not credit the researchers who isolated the virus and sequenced it. "This is one of the reasons why people are reticent to share data," Rambaut wrote on Twitter. "No acknowledgement of where the data comes from or who generated it. The [phylogenetic tree] is even branded with a logo.")

Ralph Baric, a coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, notes that of the four known SARS-related bat viruses capable of infecting humans, this one is the most distant from SARS itself.

After downloading the sequence last night, his lab immediately began to try to reverse-engineer a live virus from the sequence, which can be helpful to develop antibody tests and to start experiments in animal models. "If you want to have a strong public health response, you have to do this quickly," says Baric, who leads one of the few labs in the world that can re-create coronaviruses just from their sequences. (Bureaucratic hurdles would make it difficult for China to ship the actual virus quickly to other countries, he says.)

Baric claims to be able to recreate a live virus just from its sequence? Really? Methinks he’s been watching too much Jurassic Park.

Even if some reverse-engineering might be possible, there’s a huge difference between creating something which appears to “infect” one animal, and something which can then spread to other animals from the index animal¹.

Martin Neil

and I touched on the differences between laboratory science and the real-world in this article:

Virus Origins and Gain (Claim) of Function research

Baric hopes this virus's discovery and the response to it illustrate the speed at which scientists can move by working together. "One of the things that's sad is that the public doesn't realize how incredibly competent the public health and the basic science community are at going from a newly discovered virus to a tremendous amount of capacity to trace and try to control its spread," Baric says.

Not much to say about this, other than:

1. I asked perplexity.ai about this and the chat was interesting.