The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Murder mysteries have never really been my thing. Back in the days prior to personal computers and the internet when reading popular books, my reading tended more to the international political thrillers of Robert Ludlum than the mysteries of Agatha Christie.

Of course I consumed Sherlock Holmes stories and even had a collection of Hardy Boys books as a kid, and yes, I’ve read most of the books of John Grisham, legal thrillers. Since some of my first experiences as a newspaper reporter involved covering the goings on in a courthouse, the law has also fascinated me, especially the corruption of justice.

The mysteries that interest me these days tend to be more in the realm of science and technology, although politics, government and the law are never far from my mind.

If you have been following the stories I’ve been sharing about the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the technical name given to the novel coronavirus that causes covid-19, the disease that has now killed nearly 4 million people worldwide and more than 600,000 in the United States, you may have noticed that this is a science-health murder mystery that also involves politics.

In the latest opinion column trying to put the whole story together in The New York Times, Dr. Zeynep Tufekci comes perhaps the closest to date. But there are still missing pieces of evidence (see below) so this mystery is far from solved.

Part of the problem is that the Communist Party and scientists in China are not fully cooperating with an international investigation, which only causes another political problem in the U.S., allowing former President Donald Trump — the most anti-science president ever — to say “I told you so” about his statement back when that the virus was launched on the world as a conspiracy from a research lab in Wuhan, China. The longer this mystery drags out, the more political hay his loyal followers can make of the story, claiming their white god-chosen American authoritarian criminal dictator was right all along.

Here’s the summary of the beginnings of the story by Dr. Tufekci

On Dec. 30, 2019, a public email list run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases warned that an “unexplained pneumonia” had appeared in Wuhan, China, and reports connected the first cases to the city’s Huanan seafood market. On Jan. 10, 2020, a Chinese scientist posted the genome of the virus — soon to be named SARS-CoV-2 — on an open internet depository, confirming that it was a coronavirus. The Chinese government denied that the virus was spreading among humans until Jan. 19, 2020; three days later, it announced a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.

About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists published a paper in The Lancet medical journal that identified bats as the likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season and “no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,” so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an intermediary animal.

Outbreaks can occur far from their source. The 2002 SARS outbreak started in Guangdong, about a thousand kilometers from the caves in Yunnan with the horseshoe bats from which SARS is believed to have emerged. Masked palm civets, farmed and traded across China, often in cramped, unsanitary conditions making them prone to outbreaks, were cited as the vehicle that SARS probably used to travel from Yunnan to Guangdong. Since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected at a market where live wild animals may have been sold, the wildlife trade was immediately suspected.

Most of the rest of the story involved a detailed analysis of the problems associated with research labs and their history of bad practices that allowed other deadly viruses to escape, giving even more ink and credence to the lab-leak theory.

Another recent story in The Washington Post, which seemed designed to test the idea of dismissing the lab-leak theory, only seemed to give it even more relevance.

The paper’s reporters interviewed Stanley Perlman, who has been studying coronaviruses for 39 years, and led with a sensational email he received from one of Trump’s supporters being called “Dr. Frankenstein” and being blamed himself for the coronavirus.

Perlman was described as “a mild-mannered, grandfatherly virologist at the University of Iowa,” who had co-signed a letter to The Lancet medical journal in February 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was NOT a bioengineered virus and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

While that remains the consensus of many scientists, according to The Post, they continue to spread the “lab leak” theory by saying it “has never gone away and has become louder than ever. It is not a theory so much as a constellation of scenarios that imagine how the virus may have emanated from a laboratory in China, ranging from the accidental to the sinister.”

One of the problems with the mass circulation daily newspaper is that they still have this 20th century notion that they must give equal weight to both sides. That’s how they make their money.

So I looked up Dr. Perlman’s contact information and emailed him myself with some of my questions involving a theory no one seems to be talking much about, other than a couple of dropped in paragraphs deep down in a couple of news stories in The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine. Keep in mind that I am not a scientist with a Ph.D. in Microbiology. My news organization also does not possess the budget to travel to Wuhan to do an on-the-ground investigation.

But there are two factors here that I do know something about: Evolution and the problems of unsanitary sewers.

While every news story about the “novel coronavirus” — novel meaning weird or “new and not resembling something formerly known,” or “not previously identified” or “original or striking especially in conception or style” — talks about how it mutates. Read any of the research on coronaviruses in bats and you will see how often these biological viruses mutate.

But not one single news story I’ve seen mentions WHY the viruses mutate, or what their genetic mission on this Earth might be. Mutation is in fact one way that species EVOLVE to survive. The human thumb comes from a mutated gene.

It might be useful in trying to understand to think of it in this way. If there is a god, and I’m not saying there is, he or she gave every species a mission. This seems to be true of all species in the absence of a god.

So what is the genetic mission of the coronavirus? Just like the Zika virus and the West Nile virus transmitted by mosquitoes, clearly the mission of SARS-CoV-2 is to kill as many human beings as possible. The latest mutation, the Delta variety, is even more contagious and deadly than all the strains identified before.

It is coming after us, people, and it wants us gone from this planet.

The same can be said of cancer and all the other diseases that have EVOLVED to kill us. We may be a top level predator capable of dominating the known animal world of big cats, bears, wolves and other predators. But there are a host of microscopic bugs that do not like us, and more are emerging from the muck all the time.

Speaking of muck, I’m still putting together information for a science-health news story about how the virus may have emerged from unsanitary sewer conditions in China, which is one of the reasons it is spreading and doing so much damage in India. That research is not yet complete enough to publish.

But think about this. The world is approaching a population of 8 billion people. Even with declining birth rates in developed countries, world population is expected to peak at 9 billion. There are no scenarios in which this does not lead to a massive crises around the world, especially with global warming driving climate change to create one disaster after another for humans, from a terrible drought and out of control wildfires in the American West and even remote places like Australia, to killer tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis from New Orleans and Alabama to Thailand.

Agricultural experts worry about how we are going to feed all these people. Urban planners worry about how we are going to house them.

The solution of the virus is to keep killing us. The sooner we solve this murder mystery the better. The longer this meme of a virus about a lab leak is out there, the more likely the anti-science crowd could continue to build political momentum.

If we want to survive on this planet, with our democratic rights intact, allowing conspiracy theories to be spread by uneducated rednecks in MAGA caps and their chosen ones to lead us can only results in one outcome: The near end of human life on Earth.

For the believers in a god up in the sky who will come down to save us just in time, this is just fine with them. For those who believe in the possibility of an Earth 2.0 on one of those 29 exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy, this may be fine too.

But for the bulk of us who know this Earth is the only Earth we have, solving these murder mysteries will be the most important stories we will ever read.

Here’s a hint: What if the mystery of the origin of the coronavirus is something like the Agatha Christie book that came to be depicted in a movie under the name “Murder on the Orient Express.” It seems apt since it took place on a train wreck in Asia. And instead of one, single killer, it turned out to be more than one.

So as the scientists look for a linear transfer of a near exact virus strain from one species of bat or pangolin to humans, it might be worthwhile for someone to start looking in the jakes of the wet meat market in Wuhan. The problem is the virus does not persist in the environment that long and the market was closed down last January. But it has been found in sewer systems all over the world, much like hook worm was identified for the first time in more than 50 years recently in a raw sewage pond behind a house trailer in the Black Belt of Alabama.

Other Mysteries: Slow Internet

There are a couple of other technological mysteries on my mind today, but I won’t dwell on them except to ask: Why in the fuck is AT&T not able to keep its cell phone tower internet services running at some reasonable speed? Is this really a technical issue or simply a capitalist one?

Why should customers be limited to 30 gigabytes of data a month? And why does the speed have to be turned down to slower than dialup in 1995 if one exceeds that amount?

I have talked to hackers who know you can break open a WiFi router and manipulate it to turn the speed up. When cable TV installers from Comcast or one of the big telecom giants install internet in your homes, they turn the speed down. For 10 years in Birmingham, I experienced what computer magazines called the fastest internet in the country with Charter Communications. What did they do different from Comcast, Verizon, U.S. Cellular (which I had access to this winter in Knoxville, Tennessee), Sprint-T-Mobile, or AT&T?

In the mountains of rural North Carolina last November, I stayed in a tiny cabin with 5G WiFi run all over the mountainside with a federal, rural broadband grant. There was no cell phone tower or access anywhere around, but I had the fastest internet since that connection in Birmingham with Charter.

I am told that free or cheap internet access is easy to find in much of the world now, including all over Europe and Asia. What are the true limits of the broadband spectrum? Are the big companies in the U.S. just holding us back to make a buck?

And what could Congress do about it?

Enquiring minds want to know.