US virus hunting grant quietly canceled after influence campaign
Myth and magical thinking is the new pandemic prevention policy
Background:
On September 7th, 2023, investigative journalist David Willman at the biomedical journal BMJ reported about the quiet cancellation of DEEP-VZN — spoken “deep vision”, a scientific program to identify pandemic risk viruses in nature — by USAID. The highly ranked proposal and scientific successor of the PREDICT program was considered critical for pandemic preparedness when approved in 2021.
But this was before the origin of covid media landscape gave way to an influence campaign shifting political winds in Washington.
The PREDICT program
Since 2009, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has funded a scientific program called “PREDICT”. The goal was to identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health in geographic hot spots all over the world, including countries like Thailand, Bangladesh, and China.
The larger idea was to tackle potentially pandemic pathogens at their place of origin; where they spill over into humans at the often complex human-animal interfaces.
PREDICT ended in 2020 offering countless insights about geographic hot spots for spillover and really start thinking about zoonotic spillover risk in a more quantitative and systematic way. Questions about where or how often certain viral families cross the border from their reservoir towards us or our domesticated animals.
With these obvious successes, and at the heel of an escalating pandemic, PREDICT was bound to find a successor project with a sharpened focus on certain viral families of high risks, such as Ebola, Nipah and of course the coronaviruses.
DEEP VZN and the doomsday prophets
When DEEP VZN was announced in October of 2021, it was hailed as an ambitious and necessary project that will strengthen global capacity to detect and understand the risks of viral spillover.
DEEP VZN is a critical next step in the evolution of USAID’s work to understand and address the risks posed by zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans. DEEP VZN will work in targeted countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have both a high risk for viral spillover and the capacity to safely conduct viral discovery. Identifying and understanding unknown viral threats will help these countries — and the world — be better prepared to detect, prevent, and respond to future biological threats
Between April and October of 2021, media and citizens increasingly found themselves susceptible to sensationalist stories about the supposed threats biotechnology posed. Much of that energy was driven by anti-vaccine extremists and the rollout of the mRNA vaccines. But we are all suckers for good stories, and the moment was ripe for the info sphere to deliver them. Well-produced, compelling, and engaging fictions about the dangers of genetic engineering found larger and larger audiences.
During that time, there was a remarkable switch in media coverage about the lableak theory, which went from an underhanded cousin of the Trump administration’s bioweapon myth to mainstream with the help of contrarian scientists, cynical media manipulators, and gullible journalists. Amplifiers could finally deliver what so many audiences craved. A not batshit crazy “man-made” myth driven by lunatics, but a polished version for polite society to air their suspicions and assign blame.
The media’s gatekeepers threw open their doors. On June 3rd, Vanity Fair published a 12,000-word account of “the fight to uncover COVID-19’s origins.” The Week published a 6,000-word essay by a member of the DRASTIC collective in July. A breathless essay appeared in Newsweek setting out the case for a lab accident, followed by a more measured article in the New York Times. On August 22nd, Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast a 47-minute documentary titled “Did COVID Leak from a Lab in China?” (a question to which the implied answer was “probably”). In November, Broad Institute scientist Alina Chan and British science writer Matt Ridley set out the case for a lab accident in their book Viral, and then toured the podcast circuit energetically promoting their conclusions.
— Senior editor Jamie Palmer for Quillette
And while most of the lableak myth occupied itself with supposed gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some of its conspiratorial cottage industry had been focused on the supposed dangers of virus discovery going all the way back to a mine in Yunnan. Suspicion was ripe that virus hunting might not be without risks… because who can really trust those virologists did not bring the virus from a cave to the city?
However, next to the gain-of-function panic, virus hunting lacked in dramatic impact to really capture the attention and imagination of audiences. Until Kevin Esvelt, that is.
Blueprint of civilizational destruction
By December 2021, officials with the White House National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy privately advocated to end DEEP VZN and another USAID program called “STOP Spillover,” a $100 million effort to analyze disease threats from animals and prevent outbreaks or pandemics. — Washington Post
Kevin Esvelt is a media-savvy biotechnologist and assistant professor at MIT’s media lab. His work focuses on biological risk and building safeguards for technology. Kevin Esvelt has been involved with the ideological effective altruism movement ever since his work on gene drives, a controversial and powerful biotechnology currently being tested for mosquito control. During the lableak media craze, he was given ample opportunities to speak about pandemic prevention, despite being unfamiliar with the particular topic and coming in with a strong incentive to elevate the risks of engineering and bioterrorism for his professional standing. Consequently, he argues that identifying new pandemic-threat viruses poses a great risk to society because once the genetic information of this threat is known, it will be abused to create new bioweapons. In the best emotionally manipulative fashion, he calls pandemic-class viruses “accessible nuclear weapons” and that the world has never seen non-state actors capable of killing millions. In his mind, the moment scientists discover a possible pandemic-class virus, that information can never be erased again and will thus be used to create a bioweapon. Consequently, he talks about information hazards and calls things like assessing the growth of an unknown zoonotic virus in a human cell culture system (or the transmissibility or immunogenicity in an animal model) the virological equivalent of nuclear testing.
His ideas would prove influential, soon cascading through the effective altruism movement (backed by libertarian billionaires), the podcast sphere and eventually, mainstream media.
On July 5, 2022, Forbes is running an influential op-ed by a long-term anti-virus hunting advocate with the sensationalist title “The US Is Funding A Massive Virus Hunt That Might Cause Another Pandemic. Great Idea!”
The media ecosystem was primed, but what it really needed was a charismatic villain with name recognition they could point their fingers at to really make the “virus hunting” unease stick with the public.
It would not take long. On a field trip in Thailand, the now controversial zoologist Peter Daszak from the non-profit EcoHealth alliance would upload some pictures from routine field work with collaborators in Thailand to Twitter. It was an opportunity many media manipulators were waiting for. Within 24 hours, his pictures ended up on the front page of both the NY Post and Daily Mail tabloid newspapers, fully packaged with reactionary quotes from GOP senators. The tabloids’ non-stories were about how Peter Daszak dared to post “brazen photos of himself” in the bat cave after doing work that allegedly started the pandemic.
And that was it when it came to substance. These articles were basically what digital natives would call “outrage bait”. A good opportunity for the newspapers to rehash a bunch of common engaging conspiratorial talking points, provoke some outrage and make sure the attention does not drop on the topic. That is what the attention economy rewarded, after all. An effortless story that one can copy and paste together quickly and reap in clicks and engagements. What a waste of everyone’s time, and a poor reflection on the ‘journalists’ involved. Ironic is of course that the Daily Mail and New York posts have spend years arguing for an “engineered” origin of the pandemic, a scenario decidedly different for the type of sampling work they suddenly claim could have caused the pandemic.
But that is anyway common for many “man-made” myths in the media, while they might be mutually exclusive scientifically, they are all used interchangably to fit the news cycle of the day.
“Republican senate staffers have long looked for a reason to shut down virus hunting”, Alice Hughes shared with me what she gathered from her exchanges with them directly. It is possibly quite difficult to explain the risks and benefits of virus hunting to people who do not even believe in evolution, but I will leave this as a side note.
By the beginning of 2023, after the house switched hands and anti-science COVID oversight committees were formed, standing up for programs like DEEP VZN would become politically inconvenient. A new wave of manipulative stories, fringe opinions and conspiratorial energy would fuel the news cycle. The writing for virus discovery was on the wall.
The continued political and media pressure on virus discovery as a cause of the next pandemic, or a blueprint for bioweapons, has eventually soured institutional decision-makers on the topic and equipped opponents with ammunition. The program was canceled quietly because there was no good scientific rationale to do so. Just political convenience and an unwillingness to stand up and stick one’s neck out against popular sentiment.
This is not a contest now, in the public domain, between bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “This is a contest between stories.”
It seems to me, as science writer David Quammen aptly noticed in his article for New York Times magazine, that the dispute about the pandemic’s origin (and with it our approach to pandemic prevention) was no longer a story about scientific evidence. It was about who wins hearts and minds by telling the better story.
And on that, the science was losing.
US scientific leadership in infectious disease is rapidly evaporating
The quiet cancellation of DEEP-VZN comes right after new NIH regulations that would attach spy clauses to research funds, practically undermining trust in international collaboration and threatening global health.
Public health experts all over the world are shaking their head at the direction of multiple decisions made recently.
In the media, the announcement of the DEEP VZN cancellation was rather positively received, with outlets like the Bulletin recycling the old myth that “the government could inadvertently offer up the recipes for potential bioweapons to terrorists or other bad actors.”
The US has been a major driver of viral discovery efforts globally and the abrupt turnaround is reminiscent of the federal funding ban of embryonic stem cell research during the Bush administration. While lab safety activists and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists applaud the decision to defund DEEP VZN with glee, one has to wonder whether they have thought through the logical implications.
“It creates a vacuum, and there are certainly other nations that are less committed to data transparency that are more than happy to fill that gap.”
— Prof. Guy H Palmer, University of Washington in an interview with Jon Cohen from Science Magazine
“While some viral discovery research funded by the EU will continue”, Alice Hughes tells me, it will be “smaller, more fragmented, more likely to miss vital data”, thus be less likely to identify and manage risk effectively. The walkout of the US from scientific leadership will also direct former collaborators and partners toward geopolitical competitors.
Two of those emerging leaders in infectious disease, Brazil and China, have been working on deepening ties, knowledge and technology transfer in infectious diseases in recent years. “We are also progressing towards establishing two Brazil-China “Infectious Diseases Research and Prevention Centers” (IDRPC), one in Brazil, at Fiocruz, the other in an Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences”, Dr. Carlos Morel from the Centre for Technological Development in Health disclosed to me.
If these efforts will be able to fully balance the loss of US expertise is however questionable, with some experts being quite pessimistic.
“Infectious disease research in the US is in a whole different league than the rest of the world, so nothing will really compensate — it’ll just be fully lost.”
— Prof. Kristian Andersen, Scripps Research Institute
While the world of science is much larger than the US, this unforced gap in capacity and political will could hardly come at a worse time, I am afraid.
The golden age for emerging viruses
“The world does not disappear when we close our eyes. The fact that we are no longer looking for these pathogens does not mean that they disappear. It just means that we are not going to be prepared.”
— Prof. Alice Hughes, University of HK
Conspiracy myths about COVID-19’s origin, credentialed doomsday mongers, fears of the unknown and a broken information ecosystem have created a layer of falsehoods surrounding the utility of virus discovery.
Even USAID, NIH and other institutions tasked with pandemic prevention have now joined scientific opponents of virus discovery to argue that it is better to focus resources on early outbreak detection. While early surveillance is undoubtedly important, I find the idea of only monitoring viruses once they cause outbreaks in humans or livestock shortsighted. The moment an outbreak happens, a merciless clock starts ticking. Can we detect, track, understand, and handle the new, unknown pathogen fast enough to stop it? Or will it explode first into a globalized world that is better connected every year and run away before we can mount any type of response?
For some pathogens, stopping them before they become a pandemic is possible and within our reach, certainly. We have historical success stories to tell. But history might also be a problem here.
I believe that the times when an epidemic raged for months and months in some remote places before it became a pandemic are mostly over.
Our world has changed in too many fundamental ways. Population growth, transportation, urbanization, tourism, industrialization, deforestation, climate change, and habitat invasion are all factors that make us more susceptible to encountering zoonotic viruses and facilitate their rapid global distribution. Our civilization is built to hypercharge viral spread, to increase the frequency and intensity of new epidemics (Marani et al., PNAS, 2021). We have entered the pandemicene, the age of pandemics.
How can we ever hope to monitor a global population of 8 billion, in a world where novel viruses can reasonably strike hundreds of millions of different targets any day? Without falling into a totalitarian dystopia?
Is virus discovery in animals really not the smarter approach? One thing we have to be aware of is that viruses are just biological algorithms that optimize for cells infected. We humans, and our livestock, are their checkpot. 98% of all mammalian cells on land are found in us, and only 2% in all the other bat, rodent, ungulate, canine etc… species of our world. This is a gradual development of the last few thousand years, but especially the last 100 years.
Our dominance over the planet, our relentless pursuit to shape our world into the very last corner and dominate our environment, somewhat define our future with viral pathogens. Our supremacy necessitates that every virus in existence that can cross the species barrier into us will eventually have the opportunity to do so. The question is not if, but when.
Kevin Esvelt might be worried about the hypothetical biological bombs he believes bad actors might build once scientists discover them, but he is surprisingly incurious about the armed-and-ready warheads plastering our landscape.
Virus discovery today is the only method we have to anticipate, study, and prepare for our countless, faceless, and sinister viral invaders before that merciless outbreak clock starts ticking.
Are we really okay to throw away that tactical advantage? For what?
A dangerous myth
The foolish idea that we can embark on a better future by closing our eyes and wishing troubles away has taken hold in society and with political leaders. This magical thinking of people in power, of leaders tasked to anticipate, prepare for, and prevent the next pandemic will likely backfire.
For years, a small subset of virologists had warned about the imminent risk of a coronavirus pandemic. They have been largely ignored by society, with devastating consequences. Fighting through the pandemic, the importance of virological research, and the knowledge it can generate, should be indesputible.
Yet today, we observe influencers, political leaders and popular narratives rather ignore, shout over and discredit those who argue for knowledge over ignorance. Many of those seek to retrospectively blame the very virologists for a pandemic they fought to prevent before it even started. We are moving backward, not forward.
Understanding what viruses are circulating at our often complex animal-human interfaces is essential. The true power and heritage of programs such as PREDICT and DEEP VZN, or the unfunded but proposed Global Virome Project, never relied on the supposition that we could predict pandemics like a viral weather report. Some experts argue that might be impossible.
Much rather, these programs created critical data showing the many drivers of spillovers, phylogeographic models that inform our risk assessment, and most importantly, they trained thousands of brilliant young minds in developing countries to be our first line of defense. In a hyperconnected world where speed matters more than anything else, having boots on the ground is the one thing every virologist agrees is essential for pandemic prevention.
This capacity we painfully build up is now being lost, despite emerging evidence that these researchers have already prevented outbreaks (more to share on that another time). Unfortunately, given these trends, those who dedicated their lives to study viral threats now all tend to tell me the same thing:
“I would be surprised to not see another zoonotic pandemic within the decade”
It is the one bitter realization against which a whole information ecosystem has formed its vehement opposition to acknowledge. A large part of society finds itself at odds with unwelcome reality. This is the conflict we see play out today on multiple fronts.
But sleeping at the wheel can be deadly. While we are being lulled into a false sense of safety by media manipulators promising the end of risky research, our boots on the ground are being abandoned. Our expert voices are being targeted, our scientific collaborations get politically sabotaged, scientific funding for preserving our well-being is quietly canceled and virological research increasingly shut down.
I am once again asking: What future are we building for ourselves?
We all would do well to remember that the sobering reality of our present conundrums does not change if science is shut up.
Given the current information ecosystems we build for ourselves, it is not only unclear if enough people learned the right lessons to stop the next outbreak from turning into a pandemic.
It has become questionable whether there is any political will left to even try to do so.
