An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust | How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be? | Biden’s Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families, and more

The implications of the new policy are enormous for families, who are some of the most vulnerable groups making the journey to the United States. Advocates warn that it could have dangerous repercussions, making parents more likely to separate from their children or send them alone to the border, because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the new policy.

An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust  (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times)
As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.
Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. At the hearings, it emerged that Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.
I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities.
I hope the pandemic, both as lived experience and now as rewritten history, has proved that paternalistic, infantilizing messaging backfires. Transparency and accountability work.
In the four-plus years since Covid emerged, millions of people died, but so did something harder to quantify: the trust of a great many people in the science of public health. The authorities will have to live with the consequences, and so, unfortunately, will all the rest of us.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conspiracy Theory of Western Decline  (Cathy Youn, Bulwark)
The latest sensation in the “heterodox” media ecosystem is a long essay by celebrated author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali titled “We Have Been Subverted.” Bari Weiss, whose Free Press website published it this week, touted it as “one of the year’s most important essays.” Ali’s husband, British historian Niall Ferguson, called it “essential.” Several tweets linking to the essay went viral.
In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: it represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.
Chinese propaganda, radical Islamism, and homegrown social justice radicalism absolutely deserve criticism and pushback (and they are already getting it: for instance, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, which Ali asserts are “now a requirement at universities across America,” have already been jettisoned by some major institutions including Harvard and MIT). But the Grand Unified Theory of Subversion should be just as resolutely rejected. Like all conspiratorial explanations of complex phenomena, it inhibits rather than promotes understanding.
Many people agree with Ali that “Western” values—“the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism”—are worth preserving and are currently under attack. But the attack is not coming only from the left. And paranoia about left-wing subversion can easily feed right-wing desires for an authoritarian state that crushes pluralism, tolerance, and liberty in the name of crushing the insidious enemy.

MIT Researchers Ordered and Combined Parts of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus. Did They Expose a Security Flaw?  (Matt Field, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Without proper guardrails in place, experts and governments worry, artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier for more people to do harm with biology. Perhaps advanced chatbots could help devise a biological attack plan, or they could de-skill the process of making a pathogen to the point at which many could do it. Maybe an AI could help develop new toxins. One critical chokepoint to preventing this misuse, experts say, is the synthetic gene industry. Numerous companies have emerged in recent years to fulfill orders for synthetic DNA. Once difficult to make, the genetic blueprint for life can now be purchased online. And while synthetic genetic sequences have many uses in medicine, the life sciences, and other fields, they could also be useful in a less desirable area: bioweapons.
But just how susceptible the gene synthesis industry is to misuse remains an open question. Many companies screen customers to judge their suitability for handling the synthetic material as well as orders to determine if they correspond to the genetic sequences of dangerous toxins or pathogens. To help shore up any gaps, the White House issued an executive order on AI last fall that calls for the government to develop ways to stress test these screening systems.
But in the meantime, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted their own “red team” test of industry safety measures, arriving at what they characterize as an alarming conclusion. They were able to order and receive all the genetic material necessary to recreate the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and the toxin ricin. “Our results demonstrate that nearly all DNA synthesis screening practices employed in October of 2023 failed to reject lightly disguised orders that could be assembled to produce viable select agents, including a pandemic virus,” the team wrote.
The team sent in orders for small fragments of the hazardous genetic sequences to many synthesis companies, thereby splitting the orders to evade detection. In some cases, they “camouflaged” sequences by appending unrelated genetic code to concerning fragments. In other cases, they both camouflaged and mutated the fragments to further conceal the ordered sequences. And the team succeeded—receiving orders 88 to 100 percent of the time in various test categories.
On their face, the results of the study appear concerning.