Viral
Article
Viral is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 23, 2022 and February 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: … Viral”; “Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic”; “As a non-fiction book on current events, an unavoidable weakness of Viral is that it does not include recent developments”. It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: May 23, 2022
- Last seen: February 10, 2024
Appears In
- Open Thread 225
- Your Book Review: Viral
- Open Thread 239
- Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
- ACX Grants Results 2024
Related Pages
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- Consciousness and the Brain (3 shared issues)
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- Making Nature (3 shared issues)
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- The Anti-Politics Machine (3 shared issues)
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- The Castrato (3 shared issues)
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- The Dawn Of Everything (3 shared issues)
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- The Internationalists (3 shared issues)
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- The Outlier (3 shared issues)
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- The Righteous Mind (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- Australia (2 shared issues)
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- Canada (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.
Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven’t been following, there’s been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. Well-known, respected scientists began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from “definitely natural origin” to “both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated.”
Inline links: Well-known, respected scientists
Viral is a deep dive into this issue from all angles, covering the basics of virology, the history and epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of scientific and governmental institutions, and various pieces of evidence for both hypotheses. It doesn’t contain any new, bombshell revelations, but it’s a neat, accessible summary of the scattered bits of information that have been uncovered since the start of the pandemic. In this review I’ll try to distill some of the most important information and discuss my own interpretation of it.
As a non-fiction book on current events, an unavoidable weakness of Viral is that it does not include recent developments that have come out after the book’s publication. At least one of these developments is important enough for me to mention in this review. In February 2022, three scientific pre-prints [1, 2, 3] were released, related to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Huanan seafood market in the early stage of the pandemic. The Huanan seafood market, located in Wuhan, is thought by natural origins proponents to have been the source of the first zoonotic spillover (or possibly, two separate spillovers) into humans. Advocates of this hypothesis have taken these pre-prints as further confirmation of a zoonotic origin in the market. However, proponents of the lab leak hypothesis have pointed out that they never denied that an early superspreader event occurred in the market – they just think the virus was brought there by an infected human, and spread to others in the crowded and enclosed space. They point to the fact that all of the market animals that were tested for COVID came up negative. Fence-sitters, like Chan, say that the pre-print findings appear to be consistent with both hypotheses.
Viral, reviewed by Mike Saint-Antoine. Mike is finishing up a PhD in computational biology and looking for a job. You can reach him at mikest@udel.edu.
Inline links: Viral, mikest@udel.edu
Mike Saint-Antoine, $1,000, for biology tutorial videos. You might remember Mike from his review of Viral, which was a finalist in the ACX Book Review contest, or from his excellent blog on (mostly) prediction markets. But in his day job, he’s a computational biologist, and his other other hobby is making videos teaching people to do computational biology with Python, R, Matlab, etc. I’m usually skeptical of video-related grant proposals. But our bio evaluators were very impressed with his work, and I’m happy to make this token grant to help him get some better technology and give him a signal-boost. Check out his YouTube channel here.