Philip Alcabes discusses myths of health, disease and risk.

Influenza, Epidemics, and Science

Back in March, thinking about the controversy over Gain of Function (GOF) research on influenza viruses, I suggested that the debate isn’t really about science, nor

about morals, no matter what some self-important researchers claim.   The debate is about who will be able to control scientific research and who will benefit from the consequences (including, presumably, vaccines or other marketable preventive agents).  Don’t be misled by assertions that the debate over GOF research is about public health, or ethics.  It’s about the usual:  political power and profit making.

Now that a new flu virus, H7N9, has caused over 130 human flu cases in the far east, with 37 deaths (per WHO’s summary of 29 May 2013), the questions on GOF studies might seem to take on new significance.

The insightful Guenther Stertenbrink brought me up on my assertions about GOF research, saying

I don’t see that connection and motivation, how they  (signatories) might benefit from flu-research reduction politically or financially,  the “marketable agents”…  And don’t you think this should be discussed by hearing both sides,  giving them the opportunity to reply, with links etc. to support the claims  ? Have you contacted them ?
I’m trying to estimate the pandemic risks and I’m in the process of contacting them to see the letter to the ethics commission, how the signatories and 200 nonflu researchers were selected and approached, what their expertise is to judge and weigh and assess and quantify flu-specific benefits and risks.

Stertenbrink is working assiduously to assess both real pandemic risks and the scientific issues involved in the GOF research debate.  He is hosting a useful colloquy  and has also posted a timeline of commentary and findings.

But I’m sticking to my guns.  Guenther is perfectly correct when he intimates that many of the complainants who ask that GOF flu research be controlled or curtailed have nothing financial to gain.  But it’s not true that they have nothing at all to gain.  In science, and especially in science that bears on public health, controlling the narrative is of nonpareil importance.

The only reason why external commissions should be convened to assess the possible dangers of success of GOF  experiments is to make sure that the “right” people get to control the narrative.  Because, really, to claim that the actual danger to humans arising from transfering genes in flu virions is knowable and predictable is to misrepresent the deep uncertainty in assessing risk. 

There are three consequences of indulging in this misapprehended risk assessment.

First, it creates a false voice of authority.  “We know that bad things are likely to happen with probability X if experiment Y succeeds” implies that “we” (the experts?) have knowledge beyond what is actually available.  People who have claimed to have exceptional knowledge have done some very, very bad things to the world.  All claims of extraordinary knowledge of the future are to be rejected, on moral grounds, in a civil society.

Second, the claim to be able to assess the risks of successful experiments works against the inspired tinkering of science.  If our civilization want to have science — and I think it should — we are going to have to live with some unwanted disasters, and with some people (scientists, I mean) doing unseemly things.  We may reasonably regulate what they do, in order to prevent animals from being tortured or people killed for the sake of science.  But we can’t expect that science will always be “well behaved,” in the sense of a well-behaved mathematical function.

Third, claims that GOF experiments are unethical are really assertions that some other kind of science is ethical.  Some other science, in other words, is closer to an imaginary Platonic sort of correctness.  Science, as Paul Feyerabend argued, is anarchic.  Properly so.  But that means there are no hard-and-fast rules of Truth.

As a result, Truth in science is usually the thing that the most vocal and powerful people agree on. If certain kinds of science (GOF research, in this case) are declared off limits because the powerful people, such as those who are doing other kinds of research and think GOF research should stop, deem it to be “unethical,” then it is a sure thing that the truths of the powerful will be the only Truth.  But why shouldn’t everybody  have their chance at Truth?

I stand by my assertion.  The debates over GOF research, just like debates over “ownership” of the MERS coronavirus sequence or the carefully constructed fear  over whether the world is  sufficiently frightened about MERS, aren’t about science, or public health, or ethics.  They are about who controls the narrative.

 

Censoring Science

Crof’s H5N1 blog is the place to watch for coverage of this week’s controversy over censorship of scientific findings.  A few words here about the controversy and the rush to censor science.

As Martin Enserink reports at Science Insider:

Two groups of scientists who carried out highly controversial studies with the avian influenza virus H5N1 have reluctantly agreed to strike certain details from manuscripts describing their work after having been asked to do so by a U.S. biosecurity council. The as-yet unpublished papers, which are under review at Nature and Science, will be changed to minimize the risks that they could be misused by would-be bioterrorists.

The “biosecurity council” in question is the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an arm of the NIH’s Office of Science Policy.   It has recommended censorship of research on genetic alterations of avian (H5N1) flu that might make the virus easily transmissible between humans and pathogenic as well — ingredients for a potentially serious human outbreak.

I attach little public health importance to the experimental work, carried out by Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka in the U.S.  Flu’s behavior in human populations has been notoriously difficult to predict, even with relatively advanced molecular information about viral strains.  Flu forecasters repeatedly predict bad outbreaks and even (as in 2009) devastating pandemics — which fail to materialize.

Even when it comes to the most studied flu outbreak of all, the 1918 pandemic, opinions still differ on why so many millions of people died.

This week, what concerns me is the biosecurity industry.  It seems more than ever eager to terrify people.   The Fouchier and Kawaoka experiments themselves are interesting but hardly recipes for disaster.   And yet, some voices say the research shouldn’t have been carried out in the first place.  Surprisingly, they include the respected D.A. Henderson, here much mistaken.  He editorializes this week with two coauthors for the online publication Biosecurity and Bioterrorism.

It’s not opposition to science — it’s just the biosecurity “experts” making a living.

The move to suppress publication of research results because scientific findings might tip off some chimerical evildoers is ridiculous.  Fouchier, Kawaoka, and their teams were obviously trying to contribute to the search for ways to make people safer.   That’s what most people want science to do.  Instead of urging caution, the many scientists on the NSABB should be standing up for the wide dissemination of scientific findings — not for suppressing them.  Made-up concerns over “bioterrorism” should not trump public access to scientific research.

And the NSABB scientists shouldn’t be cowed by the self-professed biosecurity “experts” at the Center for Biosecurity.

The sole raison-d’etre of the “biosecurity” business is to keep itself in business — by keeping people terrified.   It does that by continually invoking impossible scenarios that are supposed to (a) frighten the public and (b) cause the public to buy products that we don’t need or give up rights that we do need.

After being scared into thinking the 2009 H1N1 outbreak was going to be a reprise of the 1918 flu calamity and finding that it was exceptionally mild instead, surely the public is not going to be taken in by the biosecurity industry much longer.

It’s anybody’s guess as to whether the new findings about H5N1 are at all meaningful in (human) public health terms.  Which is what happens with science.  That’s why the point of suppressing the findings isn’t to make anyone safer – – it’s just to keep the biosecurity experts in business.