Matt Ridley's Blog, page 6

The EU's petty isolationism is wrecking Europe

My article for The Telegraph:

There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. One is as pure a demonstration of spiteful EU protectionism as one could imagine; the other a clear demonstration of mutual gains from freer trade.

Supporting Brexit used to be difficult to explain to foreigners. I remember a Mexican friend flatly refusing to believe I voted for it. “Surely you are joking,” he said, finding it hard to imagine me as a racist, isolationist xenophobe – the only kind of Brexiteer recognised by CNN, the Economist and the New York Times.

Not now, not after the vaccine fiasco; now it is easy to explain Brexit. Britain signed up early to buy the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine and approved it swiftly. The EU’s leaders: first, accused us of cutting corners on safety, thus encouraging anti-vax nonsense; second, found themselves at the back of the queue after incompetently negotiating a bad deal; third, took an age to approve it in a display of astounding bureaucratic lethargy; fourth, castigated AstraZeneca for failing to give in to pressure to allow them to jump the queue; and fifth, tried to impose a hard border in Ireland just to stop the Northern Irish getting vaccines. These are not the actions of an ally and friend.

In part two, despite wanting the vaccine so badly they were prepared to tear up contracts and treaties, in a fit of pique at the fact that it was British, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel started speculating falsely that the Oxford vaccine was ineffective in the elderly, thus putting their population off it so much that millions of doses accumulated unused. And now Mario Draghi stops exports of this supposedly unsafe and ineffective vaccine. Has there ever been a more petty – and contradictory – display of populist isolationism? Donald Trump must be open-mouthed with envy.

The funniest take on this came from the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, who argued that if we had stayed in the EU we would have ensured that it did a better deal on vaccines. This argument managed simultaneously to sound arrogant, make the case for Brexit and exaggerate our past influence in Brussels. When a Dutch friend reprimanded me for Brexit a few years ago, saying that Britain’s influence was much valued by northern Europeans, so it was irresponsible of us to leave, I responded: “Then why did you not try harder to listen to us when we requested reform?”

This is not a cause for rejoicing. It was no fun being locked in a continental cupboard with people who thought in such a Napoleonic way, but it is not much fun being their near neighbours either. Back in December, we recalled Parliament to ratify the trade “and cooperation” agreement with the EU. They have not had the courtesy to ratify it yet, in March.

Here is a beautiful and cultured continent being run as if it was the Ming empire: with mandarins deciding what should be done and how, with the same inflexible rules in every corner, with a distrust of enterprise and innovation, and with a mercantilist, zero-sum approach to trade that beggars both belief and neighbours.

At the time when the early Ming emperors were stifling China’s prosperity with centralised bureaucratic tyranny, backward Europe was transformed into the world’s most innovative and wealthy continent. It did so precisely by not being unified and centralised: by being a quilt of different countries so that entrepreneurs, inventors and artists could shop around for a congenial regime, as David Hume was the first to argue.

China, he wrote in 1742, was one vast empire, governed by one law so “none had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion. And posterity was not bold enough to dispute what had been universally received by their ancestors.” By contrast, Europe was “broken by seas, rivers, and mountains” and so was “naturally divided into several distinct governments” to the benefit of enlightenment.

In harmonisation lies stagnation: innovation comes from variety. Britain must not be afraid to be different: to offer alternative opportunities, smarter regulation, divergent priorities. That is not a hostile act toward the European Union: it would be good for them too. In differentiation lies the chance to experiment and find opportunities for mutual gains, mutual recognition and mutual respect.

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Did the Covid-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?

This is a more detailed version of the long article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February.

The covid-19 pandemic has killed two million people and counting. It has created medical, social, psychological, and economic misery on a scale unprecedented in peacetime. So tracking down the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, is vital to prevent a recurrence.

Begin with a simple question: why Wuhan? As far as scientists can confidently tell, all of the earliest cases in late 2019 were in the city of Wuhan or nearby within the province of Hubei, China. The first officially reported cases in Thailand, Japan, America, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, Italy, Spain, Russia and Sweden had traveled from Wuhan, or been exposed to individuals who had traveled from Wuhan. Persistent attempts by the Chinese government and scientists to play up possible origins in frozen food imports and pre-Wuhan cases in Europe have been unpersuasive so far.

At first, the answer to “why Wuhan?” seemed easy: 27 of the first 41 cases had visited a seafood market selling exotic wildlife. The Chinese government moved quickly to close the market on 1 January 2020. Covid looked like a rerun of the 2002-4 SARS epidemic, which had first infected food handlers. That virus had been quickly traced to infected animals at markets, including, most famously, palm civets. Evidence collected by May 2003 pointed to the considerable exposure of local animal traders to SARS viruses despite being underrepresented among epidemic cases. By mid-2005, scientists had tracked SARS-like viruses to their natural reservoir in horseshoe bats.

So the story that SARS-CoV-2 had similarly spilled over from animals at a Wuhan market was one that sounded familiar. On 22 January 2020, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Dr Gao Fu “confirmed the source of the new coronavirus, saying it was transmitted via wild animals illegally sold at a seafood market in Wuhan.”

Within a month, four different Chinese research groups reported they had found a similar virus in smuggled pangolins confiscated in 2019 in Guangdong, a southern China province, which was also where the 2003 SARS outbreak had started. Pangolins are among the most illegally trafficked animals globally, captured in Africa and south-east Asia and destined largely for China and Vietnam. Needless to say, these reports led the media and public to speculate that pangolins, illegally trafficked into Wuhan, were the culprits that had conveyed SARS-CoV-2 from bats into humans.

But there was another possible answer to “Why Wuhan?”. On 6 February 2020, a short article was released by two Wuhan scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, pointing out that Wuhan laboratories had mounted expeditions across China to collect and study bat viruses, and stating that “in addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”

That paper was withdrawn, but others were already investigating. For some, it was too coincidental that the outbreak began so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s foremost research centre for SARS-like coronaviruses, which hosted a now missing database of more than 20,000 pathogen samples from wild animals across China, mostly bats and rodents. From these, diverse SARS-like coronaviruses had been genetically sequenced, isolated, manipulated, and used in cell or animal infection experiments. 

Yet public statements from some scientists in early 2020 were confident that lab-based scenarios of SARS-CoV-2’s origins could be ruled out. “We stand together to condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” announced 27 prominent scientists in the Lancet on 19 February. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” proclaimed experts in Nature Medicine on 17 March. These statements have continued to appear, portraying an accidental lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory or claiming as late as November last year that “months of genetics research has already concluded that the pandemic started with what’s known as a zoonotic spillover.”

“Could they have come from our lab?”

Now rewind the tape to the year 2012. After many years of work, Dr Shi Zhengli of the WIV has tracked down a cave in Yunnan where Chinese horseshoe bats are infected with coronaviruses that resemble SARS. She receives news of an outbreak of unusual, severe pneumonia in Mojiang county, Yunnan.

In April 2012, six men clearing bat droppings in a disused copper mine, fell ill and were hospitalized in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital. Three died. Antibiotics and antifungals did not help and the famous physician who originally figured out how to treat SARS patients, Dr Zhong Nanshan, was consulted in June 2012. He inferred that a SARS-like virus might be responsible and advised identifying the bat species in the mine and testing the patients for SARS. Some of these tests were performed at the WIV.

The doctors treating the miners deduced that their illness was “caused by SARS-like CoV or bat SARS-like coronavirus that has been isolated from the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat.” Over the next few years, Dr Shi sent at least seven expeditions to the Mojiang mine to catch and sample bats. These expeditions reportedly brought back to Wuhan at least nine different SARS-like coronaviruses. Other top Chinese labs also went to sample viruses from this mine.

On 30 December 2019, by her own account, Dr Shi was at a conference in Shanghai when she heard of the outbreak of infectious pneumonia in her home city of Wuhan. She rushed back on an overnight train. Dr Shi told Scientific American, “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” wondering “could they have come from our lab?” She concluded they did not.

Dr Shi found that part of the sequence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) closely resembled a short sequence from a bat virus her lab had collected in Mojiang in 2013. However, in publishing this finding in her first Nature paper on covid-19 in February 2020, Dr Shi made no reference to Mojiang or the miners, and published the bat virus under a different name, RaTG13, from the one used previously. Nor did she mention that her laboratory had sequenced and studied RaTG13 as early as 2017, and not after the outbreak of covid as readers of the Nature paper had understood.

These details were revealed through the diligence of Rossana Segreto of the University of Innsbruck and Yuri Deigin of Youthereum Genetics; a medical thesis from Kunming Medical University unearthed by an anonymous Twitter user, “The Seeker”, who tipped off Monali Rahalkar and Rahul Bahulikar at the Agharkar Research Institute and the Central Research Station, India; and a group of internet sleuths who go by the name of DRASTIC. Their connection of RaTG13 to the Mojiang miners was eventually confirmed by Dr Shi in an addendum to her Nature paper in November 2020, which also revealed the existence of eight other SARS-like viruses collected from the mine. Yet no genetic data for these were provided and the WIV’s virus database had been taken offline at the beginning of 2020, which Dr Shi told the BBC was for “security reasons.”

As these tantalizing details emerged, BBC and Associated Press journalists tried to visit the Mojiang mine but were tailed by police and stopped by impromptu roadblocks. Bloomberg reporters were prevented from speaking with vendors from the Wuhan seafood market. When shown this history of obfuscation, some senior scientists respond to us that, China being under a communist regime, it is hardly surprising that a laboratory has not fully shared what it knows. We do not find this argument reassuring.

“The market is more like a victim”

On 15 January 2021, the US State Department released a statement that “WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins”; “U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses”; and “WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

Scientists are waiting to see if supporting intelligence will be declassified or if we will hear more from the incoming administration. However, the public scientific consensus had been slowly shifting even before the announcement. A growing number of top experts including (ordered alphabetically by last name) Drs Francois Balloux, Ralph S. Baric, Trevor Bedford, Jesse Bloom, Bruno Canard, Etienne Decroly, Richard H. Ebright, Michael B. Eisen, Gareth Jones, Filippa Lentsoz, Michael Z. Lin, Marc Lipsitch, Stuart A. Newman, Rasmus Nielsen, Megan Palmer, Nikolai Petrovsky, Angela Rasmussen, and David A. Relman have stated publicly (several in early 2020) that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated, regardless of how likely or unlikely. We informed and obtained consent from each expert for their inclusion in this list.

Information about what went on in the WIV laboratories remains scarce. Given that, as Dr David Relman of Stanford University points out, it has the world’s largest repository of bat coronaviruses, the lack of transparency and openness about their research, and inconsistencies in the information that has been released are bound to fuel speculation. This now includes whether there are clues to an accident in 2019 or to changes in bio-safety procedures. Meanwhile, in contrast to SARS, the anticipated evidence for the natural origin hypothesis has failed to materialise over an entire year.

On 25 May 2020, the Chinese CDC director announced that none of the animal samples from the Wuhan market had tested positive: “At first, we assumed the seafood market might have the virus, but now the market is more like a victim. The novel coronavirus had existed long before.” This statement followed months of speculation that the market was not the site of spillover. Independent analyses had shown that some of the earliest patients had no links to the market; that an ancestral version of the virus had not passed through the market; and that virus sequences from “environmental” samples at the market (such as sewage) did not point to cross-species spillover of the virus at the market.

It remains possible, Dr Maciej Boni of Pennsylvania State University reminded us, that “there was a positive group of animals in mid or early December 2019 but they were not tested.” He notes that some cities in China and neighbouring countries have hundreds of markets, “and thousands when you count small roadside sellers or temporary stalls.” He argues that “human-animal contact at many different interfaces is very high in many parts of Asia. And lab escapes are much more rare.”

“The pangolin samples are a mess”

The pangolin connection was put to the test when one of us (Chan, alongside a highly skilled collaborator, Dr Shing Hei Zhan of the University of British Columbia) discovered that for the pangolin viruses that most resembled SARS-CoV-2 in the key section of its spike protein, all four studies used the same dataset from a single batch of pangolins intercepted in Guangdong in March 2019. The journal Nature has since attached an editor’s note to one of the papers to alert readers that “concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples.”

Dr Linfa Wang of the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, one of the scientists who discovered that bats were the natural reservoir of SARS viruses, told the Associated Press that “the search for the coronavirus in pangolins did not appear to be ‘scientifically driven.'” Dr Angela Rasmussen, of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, said simply “the pangolin samples are a mess and likely not relevant.”

Furthermore, when one of us (Chan, in collaboration with Zhan) scrutinized the evolution of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of their respective epidemics, the former was observed to have mutated rapidly in early human cases as the virus adapted to its new host, while the latter had not. "The virus was well adapted to human transmission from the moment it was first detected," the World Health Organization's global study on the origins of the virus commented in November. 

There are three possible explanations: the virus circulated undetected in people for months while accumulating adaptive mutations; it was already highly adept at human transmission while in bats or another animal; or that it had become adapted in human cells or humanised animals in a laboratory.

That such viruses circulate in Wuhan seems unlikely. Dr Shi and colleagues have been sampling people as well as bats in rural Southern China and used the Wuhan population as a negative control in one of their studies in 2015. Of hundreds of people tested in Wuhan, none had antibodies against SARS-like viruses.

There is still no sign of an original animal source of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan or the rest of Hubei. Dr Shi told Science Magazine in July 2020 that her team had not found bats in Hubei that carry close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, saying “I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.” A WHO global study commented in November: “there is no evidence to demonstrate the possible route of transmission from a bat reservoir to human through one or several intermediary animal species.”

Controversially, right in the middle of the spike gene of SARS-CoV-2 lurks a surprise. Unlike other SARS-like coronaviruses so far described, including RaTG13 and the pangolin viruses, SARS-CoV-2 has an extra 12 digits inserted, creating a “furin cleavage site”. This is a feature found in other pathogenic coronaviruses such as Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and is known to make viruses more capable of infecting different tissues in the body. Yet, this remarkable insertion was not mentioned in either of the WIV’s first covid-19 papers despite a close analysis of the spike gene. It will be near impossible to definitively determine whether this furin cleavage site arose naturally or artificially. However, its omission from key WIV covid-19 papers is curious.

The practices of building chimera coronaviruses (made from parts of multiple viruses), sometimes leaving no trace of manipulation, or inserting a furin cleavage site into the spike protein of SARS virus, are not new. These experiments have been conducted in select laboratories such as at the WIV for the purpose of understanding how novel SARS viruses could spill over into humans. The ultimate goal is to create a universal vaccine for all SARS-like viruses.

The scientists might find it unbearable if they instead caused a pandemic. But they did not find it unthinkable. In a 2015 article co-authored by Dr Shi and Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the heads of two leading SARS coronavirus research groups) these words appear: “scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue… the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.”

Matt Ridley’s book “Viral”, on the origin of the pandemic, will be published in 2021. Alina Chan is a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Stresses and Strains

My article for The Spectator:

In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to grasp about evolution is that it appears purposeful but the mutations on which it feeds are random. How come dolphins evolved to swim if all they had to work with were random changes in genes? Viruses also mutate at random — but most people talk as though the rise and fall of these mutant versions is mainly down to chance or luck. It’s not.

Mutations occur all the time in RNA viruses; what matters is which ones find favour in natural selection. The champions of ‘Darwinian medicine’ have been calling for their colleagues to take evolution and adaptation more into account for years, and one of them, Paul Ewald of the University of Louisville, has something very relevant to say about this pandemic. Years ago, Ewald came up with a theory of why some diseases are lethal and others are mild. He argues it is all about the mode of transmission. Infections that you catch from coughs and sneezes are mostly mild; we get more than 200 different kinds of common cold virus and on the whole none of them puts you in bed, let alone kills you. Yet insect-borne diseases such as malaria, plague and yellow fever, and water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid, seem quite content to kill you.

The reason, says Ewald, is that in direct-contact diseases such as colds, mild strains will do better than nasty ones, because they send you out to work and to parties, coughing and sneezing. Insect-borne or water-borne diseases, meanwhile, may actually spread better if they confine you delirious to a deathbed with a high pathogen load, the better to attract mosquitoes or (sorry) maximise your contribution to local sewers.

There are two other categories of transmission: sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, herpes and Aids, which may or may not kill you in the end but are good at lurking hidden so you have a chance to move to a new partner; and durable, sit-and-wait diseases such as tuberculosis and to some extent smallpox, caught from surfaces, which can afford to be lethal because they can be passed on after you are dead.

Every virus uses mutation and selection to find a compromise between maximising its offspring while killing the host, or moderating its effect and keeping the host active. Yet there was always one epidemic that didn’t seem to fit Ewald’s theory: the 1918 flu, which grew more deadly in the second wave, despite being spread by coughs and sneezes. In 2011, Ewald had a crack at explaining this exception in a way that neatly tests the rule. See if you find it convincing.

The 1918 flu was first noticed in US army training camps in Kansas in early March. Throughout the spring and summer it was about as lethal as most flus: dangerous to the very young and very old but mild in everybody else. It was in August, on the Western Front, that army doctors started noticing that the flu was turning deadly, regularly killing fit young adults. ‘Influenza increasing and becoming more fatal,’ wrote a senior US army surgeon in his diary on 17 August.

Ewald thinks that this was because the lethal strains were spreading better than mild ones. Imagine that a mild case would be sent to a dugout to sleep it off, while a severe case was put on a stretcher and taken down the line to a series of crowded field stations, trains and hospitals. The sicker a soldier was, the more he was moved and the more nurses and doctors he saw. The peculiar conditions of the trenches allowed ‘individuals immobilised by illness to be transported repeatedly from one cluster of susceptible hosts to another, in trenches, tents, hospitals, and trains’, Ewald argued. The flu was essentially being spread by attendants, a bit like malaria is spread by mosquitoes. The deadly strains were now at an advantage. This explains why subsequent flu epidemics have never been as nasty — and, predicted Ewald, never will be.

There is a worrying parallel with Covid-19. In the early wave a lot of cases were spread by attendants in hospitals and care homes. One South African hospital traced how a single outpatient seeded an epidemic that spread from ward to ward, infecting 39 patients and 80 staff. The virus had a means to get from victim to victim even if they stayed put: it was attendant-borne, like the 1918 flu. Did that encourage the virus to be more lethal? An estimate published this week by Public Health England finds that the B117 (Kent) mutant is roughly 65 per cent more fatal than previous strains.

By contrast, because of lockdown, a mild case of Covid kept you isolated at home. Last week the Financial Times carried an article about the huge but surprisingly mild epidemic of Covid that India is suffering. It quoted one doctor as saying that ‘we are seeing a lot less severe disease than the rest of the world, and a lot more asymptomatic infections’ and another that ‘it’s pretty generally accepted that in India, we have a very mild form of the virus’. There are lots of possible explanations, but because lockdowns have been mostly ineffective in India, could it be that mild variants have done well and an attendant-borne evolution to greater virulence has not happened?

Yet for every Mumbai, there is a Manaus — a city in Brazil that had a huge first wave with little or no lockdown and saw a lot of people die. Some thought Manaus had reached the herd immunity threshold, but it is now seeing a bad second wave. Remember, however, that the deadly strain of 1918 flu started in the trenches, but soon spread everywhere. It’s the global average strategy that we use against the virus that counts, not the local one: Manaus’s new strains seem to have arrived in the city from elsewhere.

You might conclude from this logic that we have made a mistake by locking down, ensuring that the virus remains deadly or becomes more so. I hesitate to agree with that, because I have been wrong about a lot during this pandemic. And there is one crucial way in which Covid-19 differs from flu: it spares the young and clobbers the old. That might be enough to ensure that nasty strains remain competitive with mild ones even in the absence of lockdowns. A strain that causes only very mild symptoms in most people, so they go out spreading it, but occasionally kills the vulnerable, might thrive.

I don’t know if Britain would have seen more than 100,000 deaths or fewer if we had pursued a less draconian strategy like India, Sweden or Florida. But I do know that evolution is about more than mutation.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origins of Covid-19

My article for the Wall Street Journal, with Dr. Chan:

In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of Covid-19. The team membership and terms of reference were preapproved by the Chinese government, yet at the last minute Beijing denied entry to the investigators. This prompted WHO to take the rare step of criticizing China, which relented and allowed the group to enter the country this week.

The brief standoff highlights a more serious problem: the inadequacy of WHO’s current investigative framework for exploring all plausible origins of Covid-19. The world needs an inquiry that considers not just natural origins but the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, escaped from a laboratory. The WHO team, however, plans to build on reports by Chinese scientists rather than mount an independent investigation. Given that Chinese authorities have been slow to release information, penalized scientists and doctors who shared clinical and genomic details of the novel coronavirus, and have since demonstrated a keen interest in controlling the narrative of how the virus emerged, this is not a promising foundation for WHO’s investigation.

The WHO team includes experts who traced the origins of Ebola and MERS outbreaks, but critics are concerned that it doesn’t have the expertise for an investigation that would examine possible lab origins. Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, who raised the possibility early on that the virus might have leaked from a lab, told us: “Based on the scant information that has been shared publicly about the WHO investigation, it doesn’t appear that WHO has adequately represented the range of views and perspectives of key stakeholders or incorporated all needed forms of expertise.” Responding to whether the WHO team will investigate lab origins, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the team, told us, “If our studies point to a possible lab accident, then other international mechanisms would be involved to document such an event. It would take time and additional types of expertise.”

Could the virus have escaped from a laboratory? Then-deputy U.S. national security adviser Matthew Pottinger told international leaders late last year that the latest intelligence points to SARS-CoV-2 having originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This intelligence has not been made public, and China has denied that the virus came from a lab. Dr. Shi Zhengli, whose lab at WIV has been a suspected source of the virus, told Scientific American last March that “none of the [early SARS-CoV-2] sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.”

The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab remains controversial. Last March, in the journal Nature Medicine, Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and colleagues asserted that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” They said there was no evidence to support lab-based origins and that the available data was consistent with natural evolution. Dr. David Robertson of the University of Glasgow told us that “SARS-CoV-2 is just too different to the [viruses] we were aware of prior to its emergence.”

In November, however, in the journal PNAS, Dr. Relman wrote that Dr. Andersen’s argument didn’t acknowledge that unpublished viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 could have been studied in a laboratory. For more than a decade, Dr. Shi has been publishing experiments on “chimera” coronaviruses, built by inserting parts of newly found viruses into better known viruses to understand how novel viruses could infect human cells. These were used to assess the risk that such viruses could spill over into humans.

The ability to build coronavirus genomes without leaving traces of manipulation has existed for years. Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a world-leading coronavirus expert and collaborator of Dr. Shi, told an Italian television documentary last June, “In sequence databases there were sequences for a large number of bat coronaviruses that were SARS-like, reported out of China.” He added that “whether the virus existed beforehand, it would only be within the records of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.”

For some scientists, the location of the first detected outbreak is enough to raise suspicions. In the words of Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, “the outbreak occurred on the doorstep of laboratories that conduct the world’s largest research project on horseshoe-bat viruses, that have the world’s largest collection of horseshoe-bat viruses, and that possessed and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus. The laboratories actively searched for new horseshoe-bat viruses in horseshoe-bat colonies in caves in remote rural areas in Yunnan province, brought those new horseshoe-bat viruses to Wuhan, and then mass-produced and studied those new horseshoe-bat viruses, year-round, inside Wuhan.”

Such concerns have gained prominence over the past year and were recently explored in a much-discussed article in New York magazine, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” by Nicholson Baker. 

SARS viruses are known to have escaped previously from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan and twice in Beijing. Dr. Maciej Boni of Pennsylvania State University told us that if the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab (though he thinks this is unlikely), he would expect that “some of the early December cases should be traceable to WIV employees, family members of WIV employees or frequent social contacts of WIV employees. If this evidence is presented, it will be the first ‘positive evidence’ that SARS-CoV-2 may have a lab origin.”

What would it take to properly investigate possible lab origins? Dr. Relman said that “it will be critical to obtain independently verified, time-stamped records of sample inventories, data, lab notebooks and records, internal and external communications, personnel health records and serum samples, and access to personnel so that they can be interviewed in private without fear of repercussions.” Yet the path to such a credible investigation seems nearly impossible in the current geopolitical climate.

Several scientists also told us they were troubled by the presence on the WHO team of Dr. Peter Daszak of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance. Dr. Daszak has been a longtime collaborator of Dr. Shi since they worked together to trace SARS viruses to bats after the 2003 epidemic. His organization has administered more than $100 million in U.S. federal grants to fund overseas fieldwork and laboratory experiments, including those performed by WIV, to find and characterize new viruses in order to predict the next pandemic, according to the EcoHealth Alliance. 

Last February, Dr. Daszak organized a statement in The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, to “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 doesn’t have a natural origin.” The statement was drafted when little was yet known about the virus. Dr. Daszak declined to comment for this piece, but a spokesman for Dr. Daszak told us: “The Lancet letter was written during a time in which Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was intended as a showing of support for them as they were caught between important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online harassment.” Yet, in June, Dr. Daszak wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian headlined, “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab.”

The spokesman for Dr. Daszak told us that any questions about his potential conflict of interest should be referred to WHO. Dr. Ben Embarek said that he sees no problem in having Dr. Daszak on his investigative team: “Of course the WHO team will have discussion with the scientists and researchers in Wuhan. And therefore it is good to have on the team someone who knows the area well.”

Miles Pomper, a co-author of an expert guide to investigating outbreak origins published in October by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said that “The independence of the WHO investigation may be seriously compromised by the process used to choose investigators…. In particular, the choice of Dr. Daszak, who has a personal stake in ensuring current Chinese practices continue and who is a longtime collaborator of a scientist at the center of the investigation, is likely to taint its results.”

Another co-author of the guide, Dr. Filippa Lentzos, said, “We also need to take a hard look in the mirror. It is our own virologists, funders and publishers who are driving and endorsing the practice of actively hunting for viruses and the high-risk research of deliberately making viruses more dangerous to humans. We need to be more open about the heavily vested interests of some of the scientists given prominent platforms to make claims about the pandemic’s origins.”

As a scientist and a science writer, we believe that both natural and lab-based scenarios of Covid-19’s origins must be rigorously investigated, not only to avert future pandemics but for the sake of science’s reputation. The formal investigation launched by WHO is only taking steps to look into natural origins. That needs to change.

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Britain will thrive if we side with innovators

My article for The Times:

Tomorrow Britain starts to set its own rules, free of the directives of imperial Brussels. Boris Johnson said recently that his government kept deliberately quiet in 2020 about how it would unleash the British tiger lest it scare Michel Barnier during the free-trade negotiations. Perhaps that is true but it is alarming how much more time this government has spent talking about banning things (gas boilers, petrol cars, trophy hunting, live animal exports, junk-food advertising, beer consumed without Scotch eggs) than liberating them. I can think of no example of a ministerial speech this year that urged less regulation of anything.

At the moment we look like a country that is more Euro-dirigiste than the EU itself, ready to enter into trade disputes with the Commission about their disgraceful failure to be sufficiently bossy to the consumer, while demanding the freedom to give in to industries that refuse to grow unless they get generous “state aid”. That would be a shame. If Britain is to have a roaring Twenties, accelerating economic growth through innovation as a science superpower, then we need a government relentlessly committed to removing obstacles faced by entrepreneurs and to resisting the demands for subsidy from corporatists. Enterprise is sometimes the opposite of capitalism.

Virtually all economic growth comes from innovation. New technologies, new habits, new ideas are what drive up living standards. Innovation is the parent of prosperity but it is the child of freedom. History shows that innovation happened where people were free to experiment, fail, try again, change their minds and back themselves. Again and again innovation came from an unexpected source and went in an unexpected direction. A vaccine made from molecular messenger RNA was Katalin Kariko’s futile dream for several decades till this year. Sir Alec Jeffreys’ work on repetitive DNA sequences was an esoteric irrelevance till he invented DNA fingerprinting and transformed forensics. Who are the equivalents today? The mandarin in Whitehall does not know.

Everybody is in favour of innovation in theory but many are against it in practice. King Charles II tried to ban coffee. Hansom cab drivers demanded the abolition of the umbrella. Headlines in 1907 said the new craze for teddy bears “destroys motherly instinct and leads to race suicide”. Bicycles were accused of causing insanity. As Sir William Petty put it in 1662: “Pity the poor inventor. He runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.” Big business, being bad at innovation, lobbies government to raise barriers to entry against entrepreneurs. Big pressure groups make hay with people’s fears of the new. Big government loves banning things to justify bigger budgets enforcing the bans.

The prime minister should tell his cabinet to discover their radical instincts and take the side of the innovator against big companies, big NGOs and big regulators. This is all the more crucial in the wake of a devastating pandemic that will leave us poorer, more indebted and at far greater risk of unemployment. Business as usual is not an option. Here are four policies that could unleash the British tiger.

An innovation principle is needed in law to require government to consider each new law’s effect on innovation. This would balance the precautionary principle, which has been wrongly twisted within the European Union as meaning that governments should consider the hazards of a new technology but not the benefits — even if those include reducing the hazards of an existing technology.

Faster decisions by government are vital. By far the biggest problem for entrepreneurs is not that regulators say no but that they take ages to say yes. Setting deadlines for responding does not work, because planners and other bureaucrats treat them as targets not long-stops. Instead, cut the budgets of those who make slow decisions and reward those who make fast ones. As Trevor Mundel, the head of infectious diseases at the Gates Foundation, put it to me recently, the big difference in the pandemic has been that medical regulators return your calls about approving new vaccines at once, rather than saying they might fit in a meeting in three months. He adds: “We must not go back to the old way.” The rapid approval of vaccines in the UK, contrasted with the EU’s lethargic approach, shows what can be done.

Simpler taxes would be a huge boon to entrepreneurs. Britain’s tax code is 15 times the length of War and Peace, which leads to entrepreneurs spending time ensconced with their tax advisers instead of innovating. If Rishi Sunak were to strip away all the tax breaks and loopholes that favour the rich and politically well connected, he could cut tax rates without cutting revenue, as Nigel Lawson did.

Energy prices must fall. Energy is not just another sector of the economy, it is the thermodynamic lifeblood of prosperity. We have some of the highest electricity prices for business in the world and the effect is to drive innovators such as Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe to manufacture abroad. Current government policy is pushing energy prices up in order to virtue-signal at a climate summit in November that we are on course to meet the commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050. No other country will take a blind bit of notice.

Give the entrepreneurs of Britain cheaper energy, simpler taxes, swifter planning decisions, no subsidies and fewer rules and within a decade we’ll be swimming in revenues for a more generous NHS.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

The Folly of Renewable Energy

My article for National Review:

If you judge by the images used to illustrate reports about energy, the world now runs mainly on wind and solar power. It comes as a shock to look up the numbers. In 2019 wind and solar between them supplied just 1.5 percent of the world’s energy consumption. Hydro supplied 2.6 percent, nuclear 1.7 percent, and all the rest — 94 percent — came from burning things: coal, oil, gas, wood, and biofuels.

As Mark Twain might say, reports of an energy transition away from combustion as a source of energy are greatly exaggerated. True, carbon-dioxide emissions are rising more slowly than energy consumption, but that is mainly because gas is displacing coal. The rise of renewables has so far not even compensated for the recent decline of nuclear — a decline renewables have contributed to causing because intermittent renewable energy hits the profitability of nuclear power hardest. Nuclear cannot be easily switched on and off.

So the thermodynamic explanation of the world economy remains the same as it has since the industrial revolution liberated us from reliance mainly on the (renewable) muscles of people, horses, and oxen or the vagaries of (renewable) trade winds. We use the heat of flames to do useful things, such as move stuff around, light and heat our homes, manufacture goods, grow crops with tractors, power the Internet.

The main change in recent years has been that energy is increasingly centrally planned. Instead of a market deciding between fuels, the government picks favorites to subsidize, and then subsidizes the old ones, too, when it finds it has poisoned the market against them. Throughout the Western world energy markets are coerced. The development pipeline, corporate rhetoric, and fuel-market shares are all determined by policy.

This has some perverse consequences. Lobbied by firms such as General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips, governments all over the world forced consumers to give up incandescent light bulbs in favor of expensive compact fluorescent bulbs, ostensibly to save energy. All this achieved was a delay in the voluntary replacement of both by a much more efficient, safe, and reliable form of lighting: LEDs.

The world needs energy innovation if it is to reduce the use of fossil fuels, as almost every politician now demands. But things such as electric cars merely displace the flame from engine to power station. Whether that reduces emissions at all depends on how much of the electricity comes from coal, gas or other sources, on how much energy is used to make the battery, and how long the battery lasts. Under even the most optimistic assumptions, the emissions reductions are small. And although the efficiency of energy consumption is improving, it cannot solve the problem. First, many people in developing countries are still without electricity or transport fuel. Energy demand will increase as their incomes grow. Second, as the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out in 1865, if you make coal (or light or flight) cheaper, people use more of it. Efficiency gains increase demand.

It is in the generation, not the consumption, of energy that innovation is needed. Here there is another obstacle. History shows that you cannot demand a particular innovation and expect it to turn up, however generous the incentives you offer. If you could, then the supersonic planes, routine space travel, and personal jetpacks we were promised in the 1950s would have long since arrived. Instead we have been using 747s for 50 years: We ran out of big innovations in transport.

For almost as long we have been asking inventors to find a way of generating cheap, reliable, and safe energy without producing carbon-dioxide. Frankly, it is now clear that renewables cannot do it. They tap low-density energy sources, so they need a lot of space. No amount of innovation will alter that constraint. There are not enough rivers to dam, tidal basins to barrage, or hills to festoon with wind turbines, at least not without destroying too much nature. It takes 150 tons of coal to make a wind turbine, and two tons of rare-earth metals. (Governments and market hucksters insist that wind energy is now cheap. Audited accounts of the firms that build wind farms reveal that this is untrue.)

There is enough desert space for the solar panels we would need — in the Sahara mainly — but the cost of getting it to where the energy is used, and storing it for use during the night or turning it into jet fuel, remains astronomical, however fast the cost of solar panels themselves falls. As for waves, or ground-source heat pumps, or geo­thermal energy, they remain niche opportunities with little prospect of denting demand for oil and gas.

Nuclear power could supply all our needs from a comparatively tiny footprint of land and steel, but we have made innovation in nuclear all but impossible by massively increasing the cost and time required to license a new design. So we stick with an old and inefficient design that uses water coolant and solid fuel, while distorted energy markets leave the nuclear industry begging for subsidies equivalent to those received by the renewables industry. Molten-salt reactors will one day be more efficient, safer, and cheaper, but only if there is a revolution in regulation as much as one in technology. Keep your eye on Canada, which is trying to achieve this.

Fusion energy is another innovation we promised but failed to deliver. In theory a small quantity of heavy water (containing deuterium) and lithium (to make tritium) could power a town, if the atoms could be induced to fuse. It works in H-bombs. But doing this in a controlled way has proved elusive for half a century. There is renewed hope, however, that low-temperature superconductors and “spherical tokamak” designs may yet crack the problem of controlled fusion and that by 2040 we will have abundant, cheap, reliable energy on tap.

If that were to happen, through molten-salt fission or through fusion, imagine what we could do. We could synthesize fuel for transport, dismantle wind turbines and oil pipelines, stop burning trees in power stations, desalinate enough water to supply the human race without touching wild rivers, and suck carbon-dioxide out of the air. Above all, we could raise the standard of living of the poorest on the planet. It is surely worth a try.

Meanwhile, here is a worrying trend. Energy consumption in the West is stalling and in some sectors, such as electricity, falling sharply. No one really believes that efficiency accounts for all of that. What is going on?

In effect, the West has outsourced its energy consumption to China. Xi Jinping’s announcement in September that China will be carbon-neutral by 2060 was merely a cheap headline-grabber. In the same speech he announced that China’s emissions will rise until 2030 and, implicitly, remain high for quite some time thereafter. It’s 30 years from 2030 to 2060. That was news.

China will hoover up and employ as much of the world’s fossil fuels as possible in the next few decades. Naïve divestment campaigns will simply play into Chinese hands. If Harvard sells its fossil investments, someone will buy them. Who?

With the wealth created from cheap coal, oil, and gas, China will then head for nuclear. Along with Russia, China has been involved in two-thirds of global nuclear development in the last 20 years. The future of energy thus depends on whether the West wakes up to the need to do the same or persists in its renewables folly until it is too late to change course.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Bio-Britain is leading the world in the science of Covid

My latest article, for The Telegraph:

Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic a lot has been done badly here – the modelling, testing and lockdown policies have been harmful, clumsy, and chaotic – but it’s worth reflecting on what we have done well, especially in science.

Last week the New York Times, which has made a habit of sneering at Britain, noticed that we have sequenced far more viral genomes than any other country. About half the world’s covid viral sequences were done here. That enabled us to identify the new contagious variant early and gave researchers a huge wealth of information about the virus and its mutations, buried in which will be insights into how to beat it.

We did that with two policies. First, a national obsession with genome sequencing going back decades that left us with a rich infrastructure. Fred Sanger invented DNA sequencing in Cambridge; the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Centre made the biggest single contribution to the Human Genome Project; Biobank is the world’s most ambitious population DNA database; Genomics England has led the world in honing the techniques of genomics and tracking down the mutations that cause rare diseases and some cancers.

Second, there was a smart injection of a relatively small sum at an early stage in the pandemic. In March the government spent £20 million to set up the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) pulling together centres of clinical and sequencing expertise all over the country. It’s this that has enabled us to out-sequence the rest of the world, map the mutations in the virus and trace its evolution and spread. Many countries are scrambling to imitate it.

True, this knowledge has not stopped the virus, but Britain has done well in treatment too. The Recovery trial, also set up in March, has proved invaluable in assessing what works and more importantly what does not work in treating patients. While other countries threw everything at dying patients and learned little, Recovery made it easy for harassed doctors to enrol every patient in a controlled, continually evolving trial in which treatments are added and dropped.

Recovery is what told us dexamethasone helps in patients on ventilators and hydroxychloroquine does not. A similar trial led by Imperial College and Utrecht University has now shown that the immune-suppressive drug tocilizumab also saves the lives of those in intensive care.

The most life-saving British contribution is in vaccines. Sarah Gilbert’s Oxford University team pioneered the idea of vaccines that stimulate a T-cell response to develop a universal flu vaccine before collaborating with AstraZeneca to pull off a covid vaccine in record time. Then, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency did something it has been itching to do: test a medication for safety in parallel not sequence and get a result in record time, leaving the European Medicines Agency floundering in its wake.

Much can still go wrong, and these successes have yet to prevent the spread of the virus. Others are now catching up, and in some cases are ahead. Britain has played little part in some big recent bioscience breakthroughs, including gene editing and messenger-RNAvaccines.

But the government cannot be faulted for its ambition in bioscience. In September it launched a new Genomics UK strategy, with a plan to use this pandemic’s demonstration of what we can do well in bioscience to apply the knowledge in treating patients, as well as to attract biotech innovators to the UK. The strategy aims to begin delivering the long-promised goal of personalised treatments, as well as predicting individuals’ risks of chronic diseases.

There is an interesting wrinkle here. For decades Britain has been unable to solve the problem that it is better at discovering things than applying them. More Nobel prizes than any other country bar America but no Google, Sony or Siemens to show for it. But in bioscience the gap between discovery and application is smaller here than elsewhere, and we have just shown we can leap it with elan. Most genomic data sets in the world are entirely research based. Ours are better coupled to clinical care. If the next 50 years is going to be dominated by innovation in biotech as the last 50 were dominated by IT, then Britain is well placed.

If there were league tables of culture, Britain would be mid table at best when it comes to philosophy, music, literature, art, physics and chemistry. But it is the Man U or Liverpool of biology and always has been: the circulation of the blood, evolution by natural selection, the structure of DNA, genome sequencing, in-vitro fertilisation, DNA fingerprinting, cloning: the list is extraordinary for a country with 1 per cent of the world’s population. Go Bio-Britain.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease

My article for The Telegraph:

Boris Johnson's fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we had earned a Christmas break, the virus has ambushed us with a strain that seems more contagious, and which is rapidly coming to dominate the epidemic in south-east England.

It is now a race between the virus and the vaccine as to which can get into your bloodstream first.

Lockdown sceptics are suspicious. Nervtag, the sinister-sounding "new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group", is dominated by people on public salaries holding the extreme view that all Covid risks must be considered and most economic, social, mental and physical effects of lockdown pretty well ignored, and they have clearly been itching to call off Christmas.

But that does not mean the new B117 strain is a myth or its danger is exaggerated. Britain does 50 times more genome sequencing of viruses than most other countries which means that we are cursed with knowing more about these mutations but not necessarily being able to do anything about them. Most mutations, thankfully, make little difference.

This one, however, is different because an unprecedented 14 sense-changing substitutions and three deletions in the virus's genomic recipe, rather than accumulating gradually, appeared all together for the first time in a patient in Kent on Sept 20.

The explosive growth of this strain, and the fact that eight of the mutations are in the spike gene (the key that opens the locks on a cell) implies that they make the virus more contagious.

This number of changes would normally take months to emerge at the rate the virus typically evolves: it is less prone to random mutation than an influenza virus. What caused such a burst of evolution within perhaps a single body?

Here the story gets alarming. According to analysis by Andrew Rambaut at Edinburgh University and colleagues for the Covid-19 Genomics Consortium UK, such high rates of mutation have happened in people with suppressed immune systems who get a Covid infection that persists for months and are treated with "convalescent plasma" - essentially blood extracted from those who have recovered from Covid.

In a person with a deficient immune system, a large population of viruses can proliferate, mutate and diversify, and then the treatment selects a new strain from among this diversity.

Essentially, the virus has a crash course in evolution. If so, this casts doubt on the wisdom of convalescent-plasma treatment, pitting the possibility that it might save a life against the possibility that it might help the virus become more infectious or lethal.

There is fortunately no evidence the B117 strain is more virulent, immune to one of the vaccines or can re-infect people who have recovered, though the last of these cannot be ruled out.

Viruses will always evolve to be more contagious if they can, but respiratory viruses also often evolve towards being less virulent. Each virus is striving to grab market share for its descendants. The best way of achieving this is to print as many copies of itself as possible while in a human body, yet not make that person so ill that they meet fewer people.

Where the sceptics have a point is that it is a worrying possibility that lockdowns could prevent this natural attenuation of the virus. They keep the virus spreading mainly in hospitals and care homes among the very ill, preventing the eclipse of lethal strains at the hands of milder ones.

If so, and it's only a possibility, then not only do lockdowns fail to wipe out the disease, they may be prolonging our agony.

We need that vaccine cavalry, and soon.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

Why mRNA vaccines could revolutionise medicine

My article for Spectator:

Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machines called ribosomes where they are translated into proteins. ‘Sydney got most of the credit, but I don’t mind,’ Watson sighed last week when I asked him about it. They had solved a puzzle that had held up genetics for almost a decade. The short-lived copies came to be called messenger RNAs — mRNAs – and suddenly they now promise a spectacular revolution in medicine.

The first Covid-19 vaccine given to British people this month is not just a welcome breakthrough against a grim little enemy that has defied every other weapon we have tried, from handwashing to remdesivir and lockdowns. It is also the harbinger of a new approach to medicine altogether. Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.

Katalin Karikó — the Hungarian-born scientist who doggedly pursued the idea behind this kind of medication for decades at the University of Pennsylvania before joining BioNTech — and her collaborator Drew Weissman may be the Watson and Brenner of this story. They figured out 15 years ago how to send a message in a bubble into a cell and have it read. For years they had tried putting in normal RNA and found it did not work; the body spotted it was an alien and destroyed it.

But by subtly modifying one of the four letters in the message (replacing uridine with pseudouridine, a chemical found in some RNAs in the body anyway), they made a version that escaped the attention of the cell’s MI5 agents. Further refinements five years ago produced a recipe that worked reliably when delivered to cells inside a tiny oily bubble. The pandemic is the first time the technique has been tried in anger, and it worked: the first two Covid vaccines, BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, rely on these messengers.

The message tells the cell to make part of one of the virus’s proteins which then alerts the body’s immune system. Once invented, the thing is like a general-purpose vaccine. You simply rewrite the message between the same opening and closing sequences, put it in the same kind of bubble, and fire it off — almost as easy for genetic engineers these days as writing a text is for teenagers. It is faster, cheaper, safer and simpler than the old ways of making vaccines.

More conventional vaccine designs may still make a vital contribution to defeating the pandemic, Oxford’s included. And the messenger method has its drawbacks, such as the need for extreme cold storage. But in the long run, messengers probably represent the future of vaccines. Now the principle has been approved by regulators, there may be no need to go through the same laborious and expensive three-phase clinical trials every time. Faced with a truly lethal pandemic — with a 10 per cent mortality rate, say — the vanishingly small likelihood that a new messenger vaccine would be unsafe pales into insignificance. You could deploy it in weeks or days.

What is more, at the cost of a few billion dollars, the world may now be able to build a library of messenger vaccines for every plausible coronavirus and influenza virus with pandemic potential we can find, test them in animals and store the recipes on a hard disk, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Moderna’s vaccine was first synthesised in mid-January, before we even knew the coronavirus was coming out of China.

There are already improved variations on the messenger theme too: self-replicating messengers, for example. Vaccine development has long been the Cinderella of pharmaceuticals, and this would not have happened without the pandemic. But nor would it have happened without the 30-year scientific slog Dr Karikó undertook.

A fast, adaptable vaccine platform has long been the dream. Let’s try it against hepatitis, Zika and several kinds of common cold. We may begin to do to viruses what we have already done to most intestinal worms, many blood parasites and not a few bacteria: abolish them from the human experience. If the message is the recipe for a protein characteristic of particular tumours, the immune system may learn to mount a devastating attack on a cancer. How about Alzheimer’s?

There will be setbacks, side effects and unintended consequences. There always are with innovation. There will be scares based on false fears spread by unscrupulous cranks. Already some worry that these vaccines might cause infertility. It’s nonsense, but with just enough plausibility to alarm some people. Pregnancy depends on a gene called syncytin that causes cells to fuse in the placenta. Syncytin bizarrely appears to be derived from a virus our ancestors caught millions of years ago. The spike protein, target of the Pfizer vaccine, also causes cells to fuse in a similar way. It shares with syncytin a few short sequences of letters in its gene. But so do scores of other harmless proteins in our bodies, so the worry is baseless.

One problem we will probably face if this RNA dream comes true is a rise in allergies, asthmas and autoimmune problems. These are caused by the loss of parasites which used to suppress our immune systems. The more infections we get rid of, the more likely we are to have intolerant reactions to things like pollen and gluten. But then messenger vaccines may also be a way to tackle these, and teach the immune system to behave.

What if 2020 went down in history as the year synthetic biology dealt a mortal blow to future viruses and illnesses in general, rather than the year a virus ruined our health, wellbeing and livelihoods?

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

The power of science has delivered the best possible news in a ghastly year

My article for The Telegraph:

Happy Christmas! The BioNtech/Pfizer vaccine’s approval, with others to come, is the best possible news at the end of a ghastly year. Vaccination is humankind’s most life-saving innovation, banishing scourge after scourge from the face of the earth. It is a technology that is so counterintuitive as to seem magical, but when it works it is unbeatable. The extinction of smallpox in 1977 was probably science’s greatest achievement.

Britain has been among the most incompetent countries at managing the pandemic, taking far too top-down and centralised an approach, but it will be the first to get vaccinating, weeks before America and a month before the lumbering bureaucratic dinosaur across the channel. We can thank Kate Bingham, our brilliant biologists and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. I recall being told by somebody with insider experience long before this that the European Medicines Agency added very little to what we do domestically, except duplication and delay. 

I shall join the queue for a vaccine with enthusiasm when my turn comes. The chances of a harmful side-effect are small, for three reasons: the trials were actually longer and had more participants than normal; we know more about how to avoid damaging side effects than we did in the past when mistakes were more common; and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are neither alive nor contain any proteins, just RNA (DNA’s slightly heavier cousin), so there is less to go wrong.

In fact, these messenger-RNA vaccines are probably the future of vaccines. They can be developed and tested more quickly than the old approach using whole viruses or proteins. And speed is what has been lacking in vaccine development for too long. Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, gave a prescient warning in 2019, before anybody had coughed in Wuhan: “Vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 per cent rate of success … There is clearly an urgent need to determine ways to improve not just the effectiveness of the vaccines themselves but also the very processes by which they are developed.”

It is frankly a bit of a disgrace that we had failed to speed up the development of vaccines before this. The private sector found them unprofitable, the public-health establishment preferred to lecture us on eating junk food and the World Health Organisation announced in 2015 that the greatest threat in the 21st century to human health – health, mind you! – was climate change. Which suggests that it was not focused on its day job. So we ambled into the path of a new and highly contagious virus without sufficient preparation. Let’s hope we have learned that lesson.

Thus it is a technical fix that should bring the Covid nightmare to an end, where hand washing, modelling, behavioural science, social distancing, non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdowns have so disappointingly underperformed. If it understands anything about human psychology, the Government should stop talking about “not letting our guard down” and instead set out a plan to lift its restrictions step by step as the vaccine rolls out. Tell those who have been vaccinated, and those who have had the virus, to start getting back to normal life, and not by showing passports at checkpoints, but by using their common sense. List the dates on which it expects to abolish rules.

Ideally, to slow the pandemic, you might start by vaccinating the working age population, both to help them back to work and because they are the more likely spreaders of the virus. But understandably, in order to save lives, governments everywhere are going to vaccinate the most vulnerable first. That means it may take slightly longer to achieve herd immunity through vaccination (which is the goal) but it will at least bring down the fatality rate, now well below one per cent and falling fast as we learn how to treat people.

All of which means we do not have to wait till everybody has had the vaccine before lifting the restrictions on travel and social mixing. There will be setbacks, maybe even scandals for the media to feast upon. But there really is light at the end of the tunnel.

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My new book  How Innovation Works  is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.