“The terror among academics on the covid origins issue is like nothing we’ve ever seen before”

Michael Weissman sends along this article he wrote with a Bayesian evaluation of Covid origins probabilities. He writes:

It’s a peculiar issue to work on. The terror among academics on the covid origins issue is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

I was surprised he was talking about “terror” . . . People sometimes send me stuff about covid origins and it all seems civil enough. I guess I’m too far out of the loop to have noticed this! That said, there have been times that I’ve been attacked for opposing some aspect of the scientific establishment, so I can believe it.

I asked Weissman to elaborate, and he shared some stories:

A couple of multidisciplinary researchers from prestigious institutions were trying to write up a submittable paper. They were leaning heavily zoonotic, at least before we talked. They said they didn’t publish because they could not get any experts to talk with them. They said they prepared formal legal papers guaranteeing confidentiality but it wasn’t enough. I guess people thought that their zoo-lean was a ruse.

The extraordinarily distinguished computational biologist Nick Patterson tells me that a prospective collaborator cancelled their collaboration because Patterson had blogged that he thought the evidence pointed to a lab leak. It is not normal for a scientist to drop an opportunity to collaborate with someone like Patterson over a disagreement on an unrelated scientific question. You can imagine the effect of that environment on younger, less established scientists.

Physicist Richard Muller at Berkeley tried asking some bio colleague about an origins-related technical issue. The colleague blew him off. Muller asked if a student or postdoc could help. No way- far too risky, would ruin their career. (see around minute 43 here)

Come to think about it, I got attacked (or, at least, misrepresented) for some of my covid-related research too; the story is here. Lots of aggressive people out there in the academic research and policy communities.

Also, to put this in the context of the onset of covid in 2020, whatever terror we have been facing by disagreeing with powerful people in academia and government is nothing compared to the terror faced by people who were exposed to this new lethal disease. Covid is now at the level of a bad flu season, so still pretty bad but much less scary than a few years ago.