Day 475: Back to the Lab

The Commonwealth will be following the CDC's guidance to (mostly) return to normal on May 29th. The masking will continue on public transit and rideshares, and in hospitals, care facilities, and schools (of all places). Surprisingly, even Somerville, famed overreactionary city, is going along with the plan. (Yes, they announced it via Twitter.) Massachusetts cases were up a twelfth of a percentage point today.

With the craziness waning, theories are turning to where it all went wrong. Science writer Nicolas Wade wrote up the born-in-a-lab story on Medium this month, complaining that scientists are afraid to risk grants to investigate it and the press has ignored the theory.

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

Then Science published a letter of doubt about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.

The New York Times put their finger in the wind and finally decided it was newsworthy, though they still take the side of a natural origin.

P.S. David Cole derides the purely human transmission angle, though with a sketchy argument that would also prove the discredited wet market origin theory.