The Covid-19 pandemic: Failure to predict, failure to report. Introduction.

First in a series of posts about the Covid origins debate, which has reached new levels of vitriol these past several days.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology refuses to divulge what research it has done.

If it seems to readers and subscribers to this newsletter that it is partly dormant—or at least, that posting has been infrequent lately—I confess that is true. A combination of conflicting priorities and personal issues have led me to fail to provide the kind of regular posting that anyone wanting to follow this newsletter (let alone pay for a sub) have a right to expect.

I am now planning for that to change. Although this is not meant to be a science blog, obviously a lot of the posts do trend in that direction—probably because I spent so much of my journalism career as a science writer. And, as regular readers know, I am one of those journalists caught up in the often very bitter debate over the origins of Covid-19, that is, whether the pandemic virus derives from a natural “spillover” event between an animal and humans—the origin of many new pathogens—or whether it somehow escaped from a lab, most notably the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Cbina.

The past several days, this dispute has flared up again in major fashion. That’s because a team of researchers last week posted a “preprint”—a paper open to viewing but not yet peer reviewed for publication—that claimed evidence for genetic engineering of the Covid-19 virus, called SARS-CoV-2. Journalists have been scrambling to cover the controversy; first out of the gate was Natasha Loder of The Economist, who wrote what I think was a fair and balanced report on the debate over the preprint, which has been, to say the least, fierce (the story is behind a paywall but I will probably be able to provide a link to it in the following post.)

As readers know from my own previous posts on this subject, I believe the jury is still out on the question. That’s because, in my opinion as a journalist who has followed the debate very closely, there is no direct evidence for either the lab leak or natural origins hypotheses. That statement may come as a surprise to some readers, because the mainstream media has more or less told readers that the debate was resolved in favor of the zoonotic transfer scenario last July, when two papers published in Science concluded that the pandemic’s “epicenter” was the Huanan “seafood” market in Wuhan. Indeed, even before those papers were peer reviewed and published, but were themselves only preprints on a preprint server, the New York Times and other publications pretty much declared the debate over.

Even if that were true—and the past several days clearly shows it is not—there would be many remaining questions. In the posts that follow, I will be pursuing two main questions suggested by the title of this series

First, given the millions of dollars spent by the U.S. government on programs designed to prevent pandemics, how did scientists fail to predict this one, and the millions of deaths it has caused?

Second, how good a job have journalists done in covering the Covid origins story, avoiding the biases inherent in this very heated debate and telling readers what they need to know to either make up their own minds, or at least follow the thinking of ALL scientists involved in the discussion?

I promise to be back very soon with the next installment, a look at the controversy over the new preprint mentioned above, so please watch for it.