ED ITORIAL
Both/and problem in an either/or world
B
efore the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
pandemic, nuance and candor from govern-
ments were in short supply. Now they are al-
most nonexistent. Protecting the world from se-
vere acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2
(SARS-CoV-2) can’t happen without internation-
al scientific collaboration. Progress on vaccines
in China and the United States should make us optimis-
tic that science will solve this problem, but the actions
of the governments involved are not equally inspiring.
The saber rattling by China and the United States is
unnecessary, as the broad impacts of the pandemic in
both countries are shared. Isn’t that worth curbing na-
tionalistic tendencies? Apparently not to China, which
has rebuffed efforts to understand
the origin of SARS-CoV-2. And not
to the Trump administration either,
which can’t grasp that it’s possible to
question the actions of the Chinese
“The saber
government about the early days of
the pandemic while embracing col-
rattling by
laboration with Chinese science. In a
worldwide pandemic, isn’t it best for
China and the
everyone to cooperate and try to save
all of humanity together?
United States is
We need a both/and approach, but
we are living in an either/or world.
unnecessary…”
The latest setback is the deci-
sion by the U.S. National Institutes
of Health (NIH) to terminate the grant “Understand-
ing the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” to Peter
Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, who, with
NIH approval, shared one in five grant dollars with
Shi Zhengli, a top coronavirologist at China’s Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV). We are asked to believe
that the highly ranked project was killed because even
though it sought to prevent the next bat-originating
human pandemic, it did not “align” with the NIH’s
goals and priorities. This comes while the adminis-
tration is propping up and circulating the unproven
theory that the virus escaped from the Shi lab at the
WIV, when the science is clearly in favor of zoonotic
transfer in nature.
The genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 rules out a
lab-engineered virus. And although escape from a lab
of a naturally occurring virus that was isolated from
bat specimens collected by scientists cannot be com-
pletely eliminated as the origin, the closest laboratory
version of the virus (published by Shi and collabora-
PHOTO: CAMERON DAVIDSON
tors) is separated from SARS-CoV-2 by at least 20 years
of evolutionary time. SARS-CoV-2 would have had to
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
have escaped from the lab decades ago—or, another vi-
rus that was brought into the lab and not documented
somehow escaped. Either way, only a chain of unlikely
events could explain laboratory involvement.
The U.S. administration instructed its intelligence
community to investigate this matter. Last week, these
intelligence agencies ruled out that the virus was lab-
engineered. They have not reached any conclusions H. Holden Thorp
about whether a virus might have escaped from the
Editor-in-Chief,
lab. But in the absence of evidence, the administration
Science journals.
will likely turn uncertainty into “truth”—a lab escape—
hthorp@aaas.org;
that serves its narrative.
Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on June 5, 2020
Even in the face of the intelligence report to the con- @hholdenthorp
trary, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo initially
said that “the best experts so far
seem to think it was man-made.” Ap-
parently, the best experts are neither
scientists nor intelligence experts.
Pompeo claims to have additional
evidence that we are unlikely to see,
if it even exists.
What would we have learned from
the research that got squashed?
Daszak and his colleagues were
working to pinpoint hotspots in
southern China with a high risk of
bat-to-human transfer (most likely
with an intermediary species in-
volved) of coronaviruses. It might
be good to find those hotspots if we don’t want to go
through all of this again. And as important, the bat
coronavirus sequences identified at the WIV were
used in lab tests of the drug remdesivir, currently the
only scientifically supported treatment for COVID-19.
Vanderbilt University’s Mark Denison, who helped ad-
vance the drug, said of the Alliance’s research, “Our
work on remdesivir absolutely would not have moved
forward” without it.
I feel for, and admire, our scientific colleagues in the
U.S. federal government. They are giving all they’ve
got to protect the American public and others under
impossible circumstances. Before the pandemic, the
NIH went overboard to deal with foreign influence in
U.S. research because of the nationalistic pressure it
was under. Now, the agency is trying to dodge political
lunges from an administration that puts political suc-
cess above human life.
The tyranny of either/or is that we only survive on our
own. The promise of both/and is that the world is imper-
fect but we’re all in this together.
–H. Holden Thorp
Published online 8 May 2020; 10.1126/science.abc6859
15 MAY 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6492 681
Published by AAAS
Both/and problem in an either/or world
H. Holden Thorp

Science 368 (6492), 681.

DOI: 10.1126/science.abc6859originally published online May 8, 2020

Downloaded from http://science.sciencemag.org/ on June 5, 2020

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