By Jim Geraghty
Monday, December
13, 2021
Remember when so many of our leaders
thought greater interaction with China was going to make them more like us? And
yet the reverse seems to have occurred. Just take for example the NBA
banning pro-Tibet, pro-Hong Kong, and pro-Uyghur banners in its arenas. Instead of American values taking root in China, the values of the
Chinese Communist Party started taking root in the United States.
Well, now the White House is cutting video
feeds at a “Democracy Summit,” lest the
Taiwanese representative’s map irk the Chinese:
A video
feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit
for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in
a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.
Sources
familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday’s slide show by Taiwanese
Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after
the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.
The sources,
who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter,
said the video feed showing Tang was cut during a panel discussion and replaced with
audio only — at the behest of the White House.
Our leaders are such damnable wimps. We
say we want to stand up for democracy and that we won’t get bullied by
authoritarians. And then we bend over backwards to avoid offending the
far-reaching and ever-changing sensitivities of the brutes in Beijing. There’s
no need for China to censor what our leaders can say to us. Our leaders are now
preemptively censoring themselves.
If you’re afraid of the Taiwanese
representative showing a map that indicates Taiwan is a separate country at your
much-touted “Democracy Summit,” why did you invite her? And if you’re afraid to
have a Taiwanese representative speaking her mind in a way that might irk the
Chinese government — keeping in mind that Taiwanese representatives irk the
Chinese government by existing — why are you hosting a much-touted “Democracy
Summit”?
Oh Look, Another Lab Leak!
One of the dumbest arguments against the
lab-leak theory in early 2020 was the argument that the scientists working at
the Wuhan Institute of Virology were just too careful and professional to ever
have a lab leak. To this day, WIV deputy director Yuan Zhiming contends that
his institution’s biosafety-level-4 labs has never seen any laboratory
leaks or human infections since it began operating in 2018.
There is a long, long list of accidental leaks
and releases of pathogens from labs. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists summarized in 2014 that, “SARS has not
re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from
virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at
the same laboratory in Beijing.”
Speaking of Taiwan, the Taiwanese just
announced an accidental SARS-CoV-2
infection in a research lab either
from mice bites or contamination in areas where technicians remove their
personal protective equipment:
Taiwan’s
latest local COVID-19 case had likely contracted the virus at work at an
Academia Sinica laboratory, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said
yesterday.
The woman,
who is in her 20s, worked as a research assistant at the Genomics Research
Center in Taipei’s Nangang District until Friday last week, where tests on mice
using the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 are conducted, the center said.
The genome
of virus samples taken from her and the genome of the virus tested at the lab
were found to correspond, it said.
Her genome
sequencing results showed that she was infected with the virus used for testing
at the lab, Chen said.
Her virus’
genome differed from that of Delta cases reported between June and September,
he added.
“We can
determine that the case’s source of infection is the laboratory, not the local
community,” Chen said.
Academia
Sinica Department of Academic Affairs and Instrument Service Director-General
Chen Chien-Chang said the woman in October reported to her supervisor that she
had been bitten by a lab mouse.
However, the
incident was not reported to the institution’s dedicated department as required
by its standard operating procedure of disaster response, he said.
Last
month, the woman was again bitten by a lab mouse infected with the Alpha
variant, he said.
The fact that this poor woman was
bitten twice by lab mice raises the question of how often lab
technicians get bitten by mice being used in experiments and how often those
bites spread pathogens. The article continues:
Chen
Shih-chung said that it is unlikely that she contracted the virus from mouse
bites, but added that she might have contracted the virus in a contaminated
laboratory environment, for example the area where workers remove personal
protective equipment.
He said
environmental surface testing was yesterday performed in the building that
houses the lab, and preliminary results showed that COVID-19 was detected in a
few spots in the laboratory, including on doorknobs and desktops, but the virus
was not detected anywhere outside the lab.
And lest you think American
laboratories don’t have accidents worth our attention, this past summer, a Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium facility
accidentally spilled 200 gallons of contaminated, “mildly radioactive” water.
Thankfully, the subsequent safety report concluded that, “There was no risk to
employees, public health and safety, or the environment. The majority of
cleanup is complete, and the laboratory is conducting a fact-finding mission to
determine the cause of the incident and will develop appropriate corrective
actions.”
The answer to this is not to never conduct
scientific research, although I think you have to look far and wide to find
someone who wants to shut down all biological-research labs, national energy
labs, etcetera. Virologist Michael Worobey complains that, “Loud voices
with little sense of proportion but a high degree of certainty that a lab error
led to the pandemic are being given undeserved credibility. Their predictable calls to burn the virology house down risk hobbling
our ability to fight future pandemics.”
When those anti-science luddites in the,
er, Obama administration placed a
nationwide halt on gain-of-function research from 2014 to 2017, was that “burning the virology house down”? Or is it that different
researchers have different thresholds of acceptable risk, and those who are
willing to accept a higher level of risk prefer to paint their critics as
anti-science?
I suspect that Worobey and his colleagues
probably run a tight ship in their labs. But that doesn’t mean I have the same
faith in the 59
biosafety-level-4 labs all around the world.
Last month, The New York Times
Magazine ran a lengthy
article contending that whether or not the
Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from a leak at the Wuhan labs, nothing has changed to
reduce the risk of another leak from some other lab:
When I
asked Rocco Casagrande, the study’s lead author and a former United Nations
weapons inspector, what we don’t know about the global risks of
high-containment labs, he ticked off a long list. “Well, it’s still almost
everything,” he said. “We don’t know how often incidents happen, or how often
those incidents lead to exposures. We don’t know what factors are driving those
exposures and incidents. We don’t know what features, like training or extra
containment equipment or engineering controls, are effective at mitigating
those incidents. So we have no idea if we’re spending way too much on biosafety
or way too little or just the right amount. And if we should spend more, what
should we spend it on?”
No comments:
Post a Comment