Asking Hard Questions
Keystone report on AI, FEMA assisting at the border, and asking a key question about the origins of COVID-19.
It’s Monday, March 15th.
On this day in 1968, the U.S. Mint stopped buying and selling gold in the private market. The Mint would go onto replace gold with a two-tier pricing system and would eliminate the gold-backing of Federal Reserve Notes. Little did they know that Bitcoin would come and make all of their work useless one day anyway…
Headlines You May Have Missed
Commission on AI
Last Friday, the House Subcommittee on National Security and the Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems held a hearing on a 750 page special report released by the National Security Commission on Article Intelligence. The hearing was designed to review and discuss the report’s findings that 1) America is largely loosing the race to militarize AI and 2) strategic investments are needed to secure America’s prospects on an emerging battlefield.
Analysis: This report is the culmination of 2+ years of work and is unbelievably extensive (what great book doesn’t crack 700 pages). Three key recommendations from the commission are to 1) create a Technology Competitiveness Council to build a national strategy for AI, 2) create a Digital Service Academy (similar to a military academy) to improve our talent pipeline and 3) increase funding to secure the domestic production of sophisticated chips that power AI technologies. These recommendations all seem laudable but are certainly not inexpensive. Look to see if Congress or The White House heeds the report’s warnings and takes action or if the work is put on a shelf to collect dust in the Library of Congress.
FEMA at the Border
The Biden Administration announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA will start assisting in the effort to divert unaccompanied minors from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) holding facilities designed for adults. NBC news estimates that more than 3,200 unaccompanied children are currently being held at these facilities after surges of border crossings in the last number of weeks.
Analysis: This current border situation is in part a continuation of the child-separation scandal during the Trump administration. As a reminder, the Trump administration was charging those crossing the border illegally with a crime which then necessitated separating them from their children. Once separated, the children were held in facilities just like those that are being used for 3,000+ children today. The Biden administration is facing an immigration situation which has seen encounters with CBP more than double in the last few weeks. Their response and the policy paths they choose will likely not only be a sticking point for both parties in the 2022 midterms but will also inform any upcoming policy debates on immigration.
Today’s feature story looks at a question about COVID-19 that was all the rage in 2020 and then surreptitiously fell off of the map.
An Origin Story
In late 2019 / early 2020, the Hunan Seafood Market was the most famous place to buy food in the world. Scientists and news organizations were all pointing to the market as the most likely place where the COVID-19 outbreak started. There were no nefarious intentions in making that declaration as there was a large concentration of cases linked to the market.
However, over time we have learned new information, scientists have refined their theories, and new questions have started to emerge about exactly how and where the COVID-19 pandemic started. Despite those questions, the public scrutiny has largely waned as the virus ravaged the world for more than a year and now the introduction of multiple effective vaccines marks the beginning of the end for the virus.
Even still this answering this question still matters. Below, I’ll set the stakes, briefly discuss the various origin theories, and predict the path forward.
This isn’t an epidemiology newsletter
No it isn’t. But imagine if with a political science degree I decided to take that leap. At the very least I’d be… bold.
At it’s core this is a science question but taking even a half-step back from the issue reveals a number of critical policy questions.
How can we effectively plan for (and hopefully prevent) future pandemics if we can’t assess how previous viruses were introduced to the human population?
Is the trade of exotic animals truly a dangerous vector for disease transmission? (This is linked to the wet market theory)
Against the backdrop of a contentious U.S. - China relationship, how can we build effective global health partnerships built on sharing factual information?
Those first two questions have relatively straightforward answers; 1) yes, we need to track previous virus outbreaks to be effectively prepared for future occurrences and 2) exotic animals are a significant vector of disease (regardless of the specific cause of the COVID-19 outbreak). The third question I posed likely has no singular answer, just a lot more questions that if navigated correctly could get us one step closer to a strategic public-health partnership.
Now that we understand why this origin story has policy implications, let’s take a quick survey of a few of the most popular theories for how COVID-19 started to spread.
The Wet Market
The Theory: COVID-19 was a pathogen originally hosted by an animal (maybe a bat or pangolin) sold in the Hunan wet market which then made the jump to a human vendor or customer and spread from there.
There are two reasons why the wet market theory was so popular at the start of the pandemic. First, a high concentration of the earliest cases (at least those officially recorded and acknowledged by the Chinese government) were from people with ties (i.e., shoppers, vendors, or suppliers) to the Hunan Seafood Market. Second, the wet market did have ten vendors who sold exotic wildlife.
In the year since the outbreak, new information has made the wet market theory significantly less likely. First, a significant portion of the meat at the market was sold frozen and the U.S. CDC has said that is an unlikely vector for disease transmission. Second, tissue samples taken from the animals sold in the market found no trace of the pathogen. Third, there were early cases of the virus reported elsewhere in Wuhan and the genetic diversity of the disease in initial samples taken at the market suggests that what we saw at the market was a super-spreader event and not a likely patient zero (i.e., virus origination) event.
The Animal Spillover
The Theory: Somewhere in Wuhan, the virus spilled over from animals either directly or through an intermediary host species where it mutated and was able to more easily spread to humans.
Think of this as an extension of the wet market theory except without a specificity of location. This theory is certainly more likely if only because it is relatively non-specific. Accepting this theory does not mean making any determination as to the initial animal host (i.e., bat, pangolin, or other species), whether or not there was an intermediary host (i.e., a virus middle-man), or how exactly the jump to humans happened.
Part of the evidence that complicates this theory is that researchers haven’t yet found an identical virus in an animal host. They have found a 96% match from a species of horseshoe bat. However, that particular species is native to a province in Southern China whereas Wuhan is a central Chinese city.
The Lab Accident
The Theory: Improper lab procedures at the WIV caused a viral leak which precipitated the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wuhan is host to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) laboratory which is a bio-safety level 4 facility (a classification that denotes the lab is working with “highly dangerous and exotic microbes”). The lab has published research about coronaviruses and has been somewhat covertly conducting “gain-of function” research which involves deliberately increasing the transmissibility of a disease to predict how natural mutations could occur.
U.S. officials also previously noted during a 2017 trip to tour the lab that there appeared to a shortage of trained technicians to safely operate such a dangerous lab.
However, there is also no evidence that the virus existed in the lab before the outbreak and no one at the lab initially tested positive for COVID-19.***
What’s Next?
The three asterisks apply not just to that last statement but to all of the theories. Make no mistake about it, China has an agenda for how they want the world to perceive the origins of COVID-19.
The government’s preferred theory is that the virus originally came to the country through imported frozen foods (i.e., not our fault!) even though there doesn’t seem to be anything verging on a scientific consensus about the likelihood of that vector of transmission.
Of course if the lab theory was true, the government would likely be extremely reticent to admit that improper safety procedures spurred an international crisis which has claimed at least 2.6 M lives.
The interests of the Chinese government in this case are going to significantly limit the size and scope of both current and future investigations into the origins of the disease. China has already displayed a pattern of hostile behavior towards the World Health Organization during the investigation. This issue is also laid atop a contentious U.S. - China relationship which is fraught on everything from trade and cyber-warfare to North Korean aggression and intellectual property theft.
The Biden administration and the international community are going to be forced to make a series of decisions in the coming months about how seriously they want to pursue the evidence that could unlock the key to understanding the origins of this pandemic. Everyone will likely be walking a very fine line in trying to get the truth from China while balancing a host of other policy priorities.
This origin story is probably just getting started.
Wonk Wrap
Sprint Read: 5 minute read about upcoming trips to Asia by senior Biden administration officials to reassure our regional allies and continue raising issues with both China and North Korea.
Marathon Read: 20 minutes to read how and why ProPublica sued the government for PPP loan data and then to explore the 6 million+ loans issued by the Small Business Administration.
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With Gratitude,
- Sam