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Notes -
Alec Baldwin, the Lab Leak, and punishing maximal negligence
Alec Baldwin has been charged with manslaughter. We don’t know the nitty gritty details yet, but let’s consider the following possibility. Baldwin, as someone who funded and produced the movie, was ultimately responsible for choices in hiring. He hired someone insufficiently skilled at risk management on set. In addition to hiring and retaining someone whom a reasonable producer would consider insufficiently skilled, he acted negligently on set through pressure, which led to the death of an employee.
Whatever the actual details, there’s a plausible avenue by which Baldwin has serious moral blame in regards to manslaughter. The details that come out later will obviously dictate whether this occurred, but we can imagine a case in which a producer possesses moral blame for the system of failsafes failing. Importantly, in cases where the risks are high (a gun misfiring), greater care is morally warranted. Our expected duty to exercise care is proportional to the potential of harm.
Following from this example, I assert that we should develop a legal principle to maximally punish anyone involved in catastrophic lab leaks (those resulting in millions to tens of millions of death). [paragraph edited for clarity] We should do this regardless of the material facts of individual responsibility of a lab leak. This is because the risk of leak is of such significance that it belongs to a new category of risk:care ratio concerns. It is the principle of reasonable care and deterrence but amplified to the amount of harm involved. The amount of harm that a Covid leak created (implying that the lab leak theory is true) is more than what inspired the Nuremberg Trials. Playing with genetically modified coronaviruses, specifically enhanced for virulence, constitutes such a threat against the human race that every single person involved should have been made to underwrite their life as a guarantee in case of leak. Not for a lifetime in jail, or capital punishment — the guarantee should have been that the State would use medieval punishment on you for the rest of your life. The scientists who worked and funded and stamped the research should have been so certain that a leak would never happen that they literally stake endless, limitless torture for the rest of their life if it leaked. Only this level of deterrent punishment would befit the level of care required to deal with the potential harm of COVID. I am suggesting a moral principle that would prevent future leaks, applied to future cases, to stave off the risk of leak catastrophe.
If Baldwin, in acting unreasonably in hiring or setting workplace culture, can be responsible for one death, how much more care should scientists who work with virulent viruses exercise? Viruses that will kill 200 million by the end of the century are inconceivably more risky than anything that can happen in normal everyday business life. The risk to care ratio must be maximal because only this level of deterrence is sufficient to encourage a reasonable level of care. The whole point of Law is that foreseeing punishment deters behavior. It’s not just that Baldwin ought to have practiced sufficient care; it’s that everyone in Baldwin’s place should foresee a punishment from failing to exercise sufficient care. Baldwin deserves a punishment in accordance to his level of negligence, and everyone in Baldwin’s position must foresee a similar punishment for similar negligence.
Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?
You don't need wild hypotheticals about a lab leak that probably didn't happen to find negligence leading to the COVID-19 pandemic. China actively covered it up for weeks (months?); not sure that's really even "negligence" at that point. Although the US's CDC not catching on sooner due to removing the person whose job it was to keep them honest in July 2019 probably does count.
And the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is due to Chinese government negligence. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.
It's hardly a wild hypothetical - we know the closest biological origin was a bat in Laos. We know Wuhan Lab was bringing sick bats from Laos back to Wuhan, where they were interested in putting furin cleavage sites inside bat coronaviruses. The key difference between COVID and its precursor was the introduction of a furin cleavage site. It was also unusually good at infecting humans, almost as though it was bred on humanized mice - another thing Wuhan lab was doing.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/
How does a sick bat from Laos travel 1000 miles to Wuhan market and infect a pangolin or some other animal there, before adeptly spreading to humans? Why not some city in Southern China or Laos itself? Of all the myriad wet markets in China, it has to be the one right next to the primary bat coronavirus-studying BSL-4 biolab? This is a bit too convenient of a theory.
I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long. Furthermore, there's a huge bias from the medical community against a lab leak. If it's a lab leak, they'll endure massive public hatred, crippling regulations and endless legal hearings about who knew what when. They have every incentive to suppress the lab-leak story, that's why Daszak from Ecohealth (at the center of it all) was organizing a letter in the Lancet denouncing it as a 'conspiracy theory'.
BTW, the show notes point to the research papers discussed on the podcast if you would rather see the arguments in that format (providing quote from the internet archive because the TWiV website appears to be down for me at the moment):
The podcast is an interview with the lead author on the papers going over the arguments, although presumably in less detail than the papers themselves.
My understanding is that the first paper shows that the cases show a pattern that strongly suggests the first human cases occurred at the market and not at the lab. And the second paper shows there were multiple spillovers both at the market, which is also inconsistent with the source being the lab.
This link predates the publication of those papers by a few months. I acknowledge that the lab leak theory wasn't a total nonsense conspiracy theory, but the accumulated evidence points pretty strongly against it at the moment. And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.
What does this mean? Nobody here is making policy based on our discussions, what actions should we be taking instead of talking about things we want to talk about? And if lab leak turned out to be true - which you acknowledge is not outside the realm of possibility - why would that not be an important thing to investigate, never mind so unimportant as to be a distraction?
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