Attention to the Unseen

Natalie Shure writes: Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved Aduhelm—the first new Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years—an event that, at first blush, heralds the amazing news of a medical advance. Perhaps it might have been, had the whole process leading up to the agency giving its nod to the medication played out in a functional health care system. But that’s not what happened. Far from hailing the advent of a transformative breakthrough for the six million Americans suffering…

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David Wallace-Wells writes: Nothing has changed but the narrative. A majority of Americans now believe that the coronavirus emerged from a lab, not nature, and in recent weeks a new openness to the lab-leak theory has taken over “nearly all mainstream media,” as my colleague Jonathan Chait put it. But the material case for the hypothesis remains essentially unchanged from the version advanced by Nicholson Baker, in this magazine, in January — indeed more or less unchanged from the version…

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The New York Times reports: To a growing chorus of American politicians and scientists, she is the key to whether the world will ever learn if the virus behind the devastating Covid-19 pandemic escaped from a Chinese lab. To the Chinese government and public, she is a hero of the country’s success in curbing the epidemic and a victim of malicious conspiracy theories. Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist, is once again at the center of clashing narratives about her…

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The Financial Times reports that President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has called on China to release the medical records of nine people whose illnesses might provide vital clues into whether Covid-19 first emerged as the result of a lab leak. He told the FT that the records could help resolve the debate over the origins of a disease that has killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide. The records concern three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of…

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Katherine Eban writes: Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says. Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease….

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: If world leaders don’t act now, the end of the Covid pandemic may come with a horrible form of herd immunity, as more transmissible variants that are taking hold around the world kill millions. There’s troubling new evidence that the B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, could be far more transmissible than even the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in Britain, which contributed to some of the deadliest surges around the world. In countries with widespread vaccination, like…

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Daniel Engber writes: Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise…

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