Bad science, bad journalism on the Covid-19 origins debate, published by a leading journal.

In a fact-free, fact-distorted editorial last week, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, the world's leading scientific journal, muddies and muddles a legitimate scientific debate.

H. Holden Thorp/ Steve Exum/ Science

As readers know, I have opined on the debate over the origins of Covid-19 a number of times in “Words for the Wise.” But none of my posts have focused primarily on the arguments for and against the two main competing hypotheses, often called the “natural origins” and “lab leak” theories. Instead, my main interest has been on the way that scientists and journalists have handled the debate. In my opinion, the discussion and the coverage have often suffered from obvious biases, including political biases related to the US’s relationship with China and the clear disinformation campaign launched at the beginning of the pandemic by former president Donald Trump and his followers.

When I have expressed an opinion on the merits of the arguments, it has always been to state that neither side has any kind of “smoking gun” evidence to support its position; indeed, to me it is clear that there is not sufficient evidence to even speculate on the matter. As the columnist Zeynep Tufekci has repeatedly pointed out, even to comment on the “likelihood” or “probability” that one or the other hypothesis is correct is unscientific and illogical, since we know we are missing critical data necessary to make even those judgments.

Thus I was absolutely astonished to read an editorial in Science last week by its Editor-in-Chief, H. Holden Thorp, on what he called “Self-Inflicted Wounds” recently made by scientists and officials, supposed “missteps” and “miscues” that had supposedly unnecessarily increased suspicions that some had something to hide about where this pandemic came from. My astonishment was not at the idea that mistakes in communication had been made, but that in chalking up the current controversies to such errors Holden made a number of factually incorrect and clearly biased statements.

In the first of these, Thorp writes:

None of these miscues say anything substantive about the science and the conclusion that the virus is almost certainly of zoonotic origin…

Thorp goes on to characterize the recent revelation (not by the mainstream media, but by the group of internet activists known as DRASTIC) that Peter Daszak and his virus research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, together with colleagues at the University of North Carolina and in China, had asked the U.S. military agency DARPA for funds to perform key genetic manipulations on SARS-related viruses as a similar “oops” moment (I will quote this passage in full):

The latest round of foibles on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 began with the release of an unfunded grant proposal that was submitted in 2018 to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The proposal featured EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, as the principal investigator, and several coronavirus researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School. It described experiments to introduce proteolytic cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses. Such a site in SARS-CoV-2 (cleaved by furin) enables the virus to efficiently infect human cells. How the furin cleavage site wound up in the virus is a focus of debate over the origins of the pandemic. Never mind that the experiments, which hardly posed a threat, were not conducted and were proposed by UNC scientists. The researchers failed to get ahead of the story. They should have known that the proposal would arouse interest, especially because the collaborators included scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and US scientists. When the rejected proposal was “leaked,” it looked like the scientists were hiding something. This misstep has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2’s origin, but it nevertheless looked suspicious.

Here Thorp makes some remarkable assertions that have no basis in fact:

—The experiments “hardly posed a threat.” Not only is this a matter of active debate among scientists, but it is something that Thorp himself does not have the knowledge to make statements about. Indeed, discussion of whether such “gain of function” (the furin cleavage site demonstrably makes it easier for the virus to get into human cells and replicate) is currently at the center of the Covid-19 debate.

—The experiments “were not conducted.” Again, Thorp has no knowledge whether this is true, nor any means of gaining such knowledge. There seems to be an assumption on the part of some scientists and journalists that if the research was not specifically funded by NIH it could not have been done, and likewise, if it was not done at the University of North Carolina it could not have been done anywhere else (eg, at the Wuhan labs.)

For the editor of a major journal to himself engage in misinformation or, even worse, disinformation, poisons a scientific issue that everyone involved claims is legitimate and worthy of international investigation (that even includes those, like Daszak, who previously insisted the lab leak hypothesis was nothing but a “conspiracy theory.”)

Even worse, Science has assigned a number of its reporters to cover the Covid-19 pandemic. As a journalist who previously worked for Science for 25 years, all of those reporters are friends and colleagues of mine. How are they supposed to do a thorough and fair job of investigating Covid-19 origins when the editor of their publication is dismissing one side of the argument with a wave of the hand?

As a scientifically trained journalist with more than 40 years of experience, I have long known that scientists are often capable of being unscientific in their thinking. But when so many lives are at stake, one would expect them to do their best, and not to muddy the waters with clearly biased statements.

I hope that Thorp will clarify his editorial, and that Science will publish some of the many letters they are sure to get in response to such a poor job by its editor.

Afterthought: Some of the most important recent revelations in the Covid-19 origins story have been published by alternative sources such as DRASTIC and The Intercept, which has done a number of stories. Few have been done by Science, Nature, the New York Times or the Washington Post. Perhaps these prestigious, mainstream publications are simply not asking the right questions. That’s one of the main ways that bias gets in the way of good journalism.