The late French philosopher Paul Virilio, who wrote extensively on the nature and consequence of technological development, once said that every new technology brings with it into the world a new disaster. Virilio was a believer in “The Accident” as not a bug in the system of technological advancement that could be ironed out as society “progressed,” but as an integral part of that endless process of development. The invention of the ship leads inevitably to a Titanic, the coal shaft to an Aberfan, the aircraft to a Tenerife, the nuclear reactor to a Chernobyl. The nature of The Accident changes in relation to the nature of the new technology, but the two are always inextricably linked.
Virilio was also focused on the pace of that development, and how the parabolic increase in the pace of change made The Accident if anything more likely, and with higher stakes. He observed that with the rise of globalization — with the highly complex and intricate systems created to facilitate the rapid exchange of trade and information and, potentially, conflict — these new disasters don’t really “take place” anymore, insofar as events may occur in and predominantly affect a specific location. In previous eras, the glitches in development could only impact so many people. A bridge collapse in the 1700s may kill dozens, a shipwreck in the 1800s may kill hundreds, and a chemical spill in the 1900s may kill thousands.
But the nature of modern technological disaster is no longer bound by location. An accident here could reach far beyond, to people who don’t even perceive their connection to the place of origination. So a computer malfunction could cut power to an entire country. So a nuclear meltdown could poison an entire continent.
So a mistake at a laboratory could send a synthetic pathogen around the globe.
__________
In January of 2020, the virus that would come to be known as COVID-19 was already circulating within urban populations in China. That month a team of researchers in India published the results of analysis they had done on the novel pathogen, and they reported something that looked very strange — COVID-19 had four spike proteins that were previously unique to the HIV virus. These spike proteins were part of HIV’s especially devious talent for evasion, which allowed it to elude the body’s immune system as it went about destroying T-cells. A FOIA request submitted once the pandemic was in full swing revealed that these findings bounced around the United States’ National Institutes of Health, where it eventually crossed the desk of Dr. Anthony Fauci. The paper came under immediate attack from Fauci and other officials in the medical bureaucracy, and it was quietly withdrawn.
Despite the successful kill of the Indian paper, samples of COVID-19 were already being looked at in laboratories around the world, including that of French virologist Luc Montagnier. Montagnier also noticed that the spike proteins looked suspiciously like those of HIV, and he would be one to recognize them — he had won the Nobel Prize for discovering HIV as the pathogenic cause of AIDS in the 1980s. After taking a close look at the COVID samples from China, in April 2020 he said publicly that the virus showed signs of genetic manipulation, and that he believed it was manmade. A Nobel Prize winner was a bit harder to silence than the team from India, so the NIH and the WHO and the wider public health establishment instead ignored him. Just an outlier observation by a former star who should be enjoying retirement.
In May of 2020, with the pandemic now global, Chinese scientists in Hong Kong published a paper that echoed some of the observations in the now-withdrawn Indian research. They observed that COVID-19 behaved very similar to HIV in the way it evaded the immune system, and noted that this behavior was not seen in any other known coronavirus. HIV is a retrovirus, a class of which only two viruses (HIV and HTLV) are known to affect humans, so such similarity in an uncommon pathogenic behavior raised eyebrows.
At this time the official stance of the WHO and the CDC was that the virus had likely come from the animal “wet market” in Wuhan, but attention was starting to shift toward the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biolab right down the street from the market. The research piling up about the peculiarities of COVID-19 guided this shift in focus, if only in curious and independent researchers and not the leviathan of the global public health bureaucracy. In May of 2020, former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove stated that he believed that COVID-19 had “inserted portions” and that it likely came from the lab in Wuhan. He cited a joint report by British and Norweigian investigators that had reached his desk and which claimed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology produced “chimeric viruses of high potency” as part of its research. The investigators had concluded that COVID-19 had "no credible natural ancestor" and that it was "beyond reasonable doubt" that the virus was created via “laboratory manipulation.” One of the primary contributors to the report, Dr. Birger Sørensen of Norway, was also the chair of a pharmaceutical company, Immunor. He had published 31 peer-reviewed papers and held several patents.
The report would not be made public until May of 2021, after the pandemic had been raging for over a year.
For their part, the global public health bureaucracy circled the wagons in 2020 to defend against accusations that the virus was manmade. The WHO and the NIH and the CDC waved away such claims and labeled them “misinformation,” thus tying them to one side of the political tumult taking place in the United States that year. Public health officials appeared in the media to paint the idea as a Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theory, painting the evidence compiled by skeptical scientists and researchers with the same brush as disreputable Reddit hucksters or MAGA clowns - or even President Trump himself.
This counterattack against the burgeoning “lab leak” theory was notable for its lack of specifics. A few zoological origins were proposed in the early days of the pandemic, bats and pangolins chief among them. But there was no real evidence to back these up, and over time the quest to find the natural origin of COVID-19 seemed to lose steam and just kind of vanished from the media discourse. The prominent members of the medical industrial complex that were trotted out often came with glaring conflicts of interest, especially when questions regarding the source of the virus turned to who had been mucking about with manipulations of deadly pathogens.
For instance, in February of 2020 a letter appeared in the pages of the Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. It included the following fusillade:
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”
The Lancet letter was signed by twenty-seven scientists and researchers — a “task force” of experts that had been organized by a man named Peter Daszak, the head of a New York-based nonprofit innocuously called EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance, it turns out, had been conducting “gain of function” research in Wuhan, China, for years in a quest for a “vaccine platform,” the holy grail of vaccine science that in theory would produce a treatment that could be tweaked for new pathogens as they came on the scene. This meant splicing together viruses in a lab environment to see how they behaved — the kind of splicing that Luc Montagnier and the Indian team had noticed in the early strains of COVID-19. Daszak was renowned as a specialist in bat-borne viruses, and bat experiments were known to take place at the Wuhan lab. Moderna, the previously obscure and tiny biotech company that just so happened to have the first ready vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020, also had been conducting research in China, with funding sources that stretched across the Pacific back to the United States.
In 2021, sleuths at an info-gathering internet hive calling itself DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) dug up an EcoHealth Alliance application for DARPA funding to support their gain of function research. Most of the members of DRASTIC are anonymous, but not all, and identified members include serious figures from the fields of biology, neuroscience, and data science. The DARPA application they found lays out pretty much the steps one would need to create a virus like COVID-19, with an eye toward the development of novel vaccine technology. DARPA, to its credit, essentially told Daszak to kick rocks, seeings as such research is extraordinarily dangerous even for military industrial complex funds, especially in foreign non-military labs. Daszak was still able to secure funding from other sources, some of which may touch high levels of the American public health establishment.
To my eye, Daszak and his collaborators remain Suspect #1 in the COVID mystery, but it’s still early in an investigators that may take decades. In 2022 the protests against the lab leak theory got very quiet, and in the summer a Congressional committee released a statement that it was indeed likely that the virus originated in a laboratory. That statement made it through a single media cycle, then was gone. Many just wanted to move on from COVID-19, and after all that had transpired over those two years, it’s hard to blame them.
We may never know exactly where COVID-19 came from, but the preponderance of evidence suggests — to me at least — that the base assumption at this point should be that it’s manmade. The parties involved may come to light as the years drag on, and may very well include funding and institutional support from American sources up to and including Dr. Anthony Fauci and the NIH. But this piece isn’t about those as-yet-unknown specifics, nor about the political reverberations from the whole ordeal. This is about the nature of The Accident, and while there are many theories about the intentionality of COVID-19’s release, the most likely answer is there is that it got out by mistake — possibly by means of a materials leak or an exhausted technician who didn’t follow proper protocols. The Wuhan lab had been plagued by process errors, after all.
And so what we can safely say at this point is that some kind of lab accident created a disaster that spanned the globe and killed millions of people, threw global supply lines into disarray, and crashed the world economic system, making Covid-19 the most catastrophic technological accident in history. Its existence would not be possible without genetic manipulation, meaning that this particular accident could not have occurred prior to the last half century or so. It was made possible by “progress,” in the way the technology to split the atom gave us the power to blow up the world.
There is a theory about what’s known at the “Integral Accident.” This concept maintains, like Virilio, that all technical progress has its price, but also suggests a compounding effect regarding risk and damage — that each stage of technical progress raises more and greater problems than it solves. This is because of the rise in complexity that accompanies technological development. Systems are built from so many interconnecting elements that they actually become fragile, since the breakdown of one part can cascade and bring the whole thing down to rubble. You can see this idea in warnings about “catabolic collapse,” which contend that the risk of general societal collapse today is actually increasing due to overly complex systems that are too hard to maintain and which can crash into each other like toppling skyscrapers.
It’s unfortunate, then, that we live under a global technocracy. The elites of today and the societies they control are quite committed to finding material technical solutions to all of our problems, which in turn means that they are creating more and greater problems by means of their attempts. It’s at the core of this kind of progressive thinking — that the system can in theory be perfected, if you just fix enough glitches and add enough patches. But the world and we as humans are too messy for that — our grasp of our own knowledge and tools too fundamentally and always incomplete — and you cannot reach a place of nirvana where you have eliminated all technical problems through the introduction of technical solutions. The ability to crack the genome, for instance, could give us more horrors than miracles.
COVID-19 isn’t a doomsday bug, but those are being created and housed in other laboratories. Scientists at Boston University recently created a version of the highly contagious Omicron variant that has an 80% kill rate. That’s a known synthetic bug that, if released, would end human civilization. And one can only speculate about the potential nightmares of the bugs we don’t know about. We don’t even know the long-terms effects of COVID-19.
All is tradeoffs in the end. There are so many problems, and it would be nihilistic not to seek improvements, or at least better balances. But in this, perhaps one of the most “progressive” assets one could have is humility.
Comments